Letter 006 - My balanced organizational management model

I outline my current thinking on how to build a culture that simultaneously maintains high output performance and employee wellbeing in a hyper competitive world.

I’m not going to even pretend this is going to be a perfect entry because it won’t be. It’s my attempt to put into words this concept that has been circling around in my brain for the last year. This is definitely going to be one I come back to later and refine, so consider this a DRAFT entry. For now I’m just going to call it Balanced Management.

The basic idea here is that I strongly believe there is a management middle-ground where kindness can exist at scale without creating a passive, low-performance-accepting environments.

I would greatly appreciate your feedback + things you think I missed + any examples you have from either of the eight characterizations. Please leave them as a comment here on Substack or as a reply to this e-mail.

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Why am I thinking about this today? Two reasons.

• Reason one: it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I grew up in a family that has extremely strong ties to the civil rights movement… Strong enough that one of my most formative experiences was sitting next to and getting advice from Coretta Scott King for over an hour when I was around 10 years old. The main takeaway from my conversation with her was that people deserve deep kindness, and that changing the world is possible with enough conviction and a bias towards action. More on this later, but one immediate thought re: kidnness is that you don’t have to be an asshole to achieve big things. Shout out to Michael Dell for writing a book largely oriented around this concept, “Play Nice But Win…”

• Reason two: I was just listening to the 20VC interview with Frank Slootman (CEO of Snowflake), and there was a brief part of the conversation where the host Harry and Frank talked about how about a concern they both had, and how it was potentially counter to “getting shit done.” I encourage you to listen to the interview yourself (around 17:45) to come to your own opinion, but here’s the main quote from Harry (asked in the form of a question): “…I’m worried that we’re getting into this kind of too-fluffy culture, where everything is too nice…”

  • There is a middle-ground here. I’d like to start sharing my ideas around said middle-ground…

Balanced Management is my in-development management system for running high-tempo, high-output organizations that have are laser-focused on victory both in the market and with employees. These environments are characterized by: (1) extremely high values orientation, (2) warmth, (3) trust, (4) autonomy + accountability, (5) near-radical transparency and candor. They are underpinned by: (6) true partnership with HR teams (I prefer the term “People & Culture), (7) consistent employee surveying, and (8) constant values reinforcement by leadership.

Ugh, the above definition is wayyyy too dense and I’m already finding holes in it, but you know: Progress over Perfection.

Here’s my rough roadmap to get to this sort of Balanced Management state:

1. FIRST. Obsess over your company’s values. These should not be an afterthought. You should not have more than 6 values, because if your employees can’t remember your values then how the hell are they supposed to live them? With my client’s permission, I may come back and share more about a project I’ve been working on over the last month or so to redefine the values for a very high-growth business… But the main takeaway here is that your values set your cultural foundation. It’s the behavioral north star that your employees will anchor to, and if you reinforce and protect your values, you just might realize the culture you’ve asked for. One day if I decide to go start a company, the values might include things like:

   1. Competitive spirit — We are here to win. We are not here to be 2nd. This landscape we’ve entered is a competitive field, and we need to move quickly in a highly-iterative way to make sure that we outmaneuver our competition match after match, quarter after quarter, year after year, and yes: decade after decade.

   2. Treating every team member and customer with deep respect / assume positive intent

   3. Be candid. And if you can’t handle candid feedback or you aren’t willing to learn how to give it in an empathetic way, then you should not be working at the organization in question.

      • Only hire people who you would be willing to work for

      • When you’re interviewing or being interviewed, make sure critical feedback is given in both directions, and make sure you are comfortable with how the feedback was received

   4. Inclusive environments make sure the best hearts and minds will want to be on your team

   5. Ownership mentality. You care deeply about outcomes, and you’re willing to take ownership when things go poorly. You’re willing to share when things go poorly, because you see setbacks as an opportunity for everyone to learn. You quite literally have some sort of stake in the success of the business.

   6. Plenty of other things I’ll add on later

2. SECOND: Warmth. Hire people who have a bias towards kindness. Yes, these people need to be smart… ideally they have demonstrated leadership and aptitude in some way, shape, or form in their past, but they must also be kind. Do not hire assholes, because they will hire other assholes, and then you’ll have a culture full of…. buttholes.

3. THIRD: Trust is essential to high-functioning teams. I’ll likely write an entire issue just on the topic of trust, but it is absolutely essential. You need to know that you can be super candid with your team members and that they’ll take it well (and vice versa). You need to know they have your best interest at heart, and if you do not have conviction that your own team members don’t have your best interest at heart, then good luck achieving sustainable, high performance over time. The weight of ongoing pressure to achieve will crack on a shoddy foundation of mediocre trust.

   1. What happens if you don’t have trust? I strongly recommend bringing on an outside party or coach to help your team get everything on the table and work through challenges, much like a couple might work through in couple’s counseling. Even better if you do this at the very beginning of a new team’s foundation, instead of waiting until problems arise. If you need a recommendation, I’ve worked with several and can strongly recommend one or two :-).

4. FOUR: High autonomy + high expectation environments create leaders that will in turn grow other leaders. There are some days when I wake up missing the big consulting firm life, but I absolutely do not miss the micro managers who needed multiple check-ins every day to see how my module/team was progressing. This is a recipe to quash creativity and to lose your highest performers. High performers crave autonomy, but they should also be held accountable.

   1. When you’re holding people accountable, focus on learning over judgement (more on this in a future issue)

5. FIVE: Near-Radical Transparency & Candor. Ray Dalio’s hedge fund Bridewater Associates is biz-world famous for “Radical Transparency” About 4 years ago, I was interviewing there for a chief of staff-esque role, and I was struck by the utter intensity of the interview process. After every interview I was provided both affirmative and critical feedback, and was also given the opportunity to provide feedback to the interviewer. This type of culture is NOT for everyone, and I’m not going to pretend that it was easy getting such feedback as, “you showed a slight veneer of inauthenticity… I don’t know if it’s because you’re actually this really kind, energetic person or if you’re just faking something…” but it was so enlightening to get real, quality feedback like that. To have to process it… To come to terms with how you might be perceived by others —> something I find very important to supporting your ability to self love.

   1. One additional counter point here. Getting feedback can feel like shit… even for someone like me who truly does try to actively seek it out. Over time, I found out that I needed warmth and the belief that the person delivering feedback had my best interest at heart to really properly process this … velocity and intensity of feedback on a regular basis, which is why my above point about Warmth and a bias towards kindness is so important. It’s hard to really transform feedback into something healthy and empowering if it feels like an insult

6. SIX: You have to partner with People & Culture / HR from the early days. Marc Lore (founder of Jet.com and recently Wonder) once spoke about the need to hire a People leader very early in the corporate lifecycle. I love this. I adore the idea that your “people foundation” is what enables everything else your company is trying to do. In practice this looks like true partnership with your People & Culture teams. You should have a two-way dialogue to discuss everything related to your employees’ well-being + ability to grow more “here” than “there” (another company…). They also need feedback from you too, so that their communications to the rest of your organization reflect the nuanced reality “on the ground.”

7. SEVEN: Survey your employees regularly. It does not need to be every week, but it should be done on a consistent basis. And your employee feedback surveys should be paired up with qualitative feedback from every layer of your organization. You should also assemble groups of different people from across your organization and regularly get their thoughts (I launched a group to do this at Deloitte called the JET (Junior Executive Team). We met quarterly and gave candid feedback to Deloitte’s management team about what was going well, what wasn’t, and how to solve certain challenges. This is a specific example of how to round-out more quantitative surveying mechanisms

8. EIGHT: Leadership must constantly reinforce values to the organization both with words and actions. One of the very very very best examples of great leadership I have seen is from our CEO, who regularly gets on a company all-hands meeting and 1000% owns up to something he didn’t accomplish, and THEN dives into exactly what he learned. He does this in front of the entire company. Think about that for a second… Look away from this screen, and think about the last time you saw a leader anywhere in your organization not only own a shortcoming, but spend time explaining what they learned about the shortcoming. This is a real example of values reinforcement. Doing this is living a value around ownership or candor or competitive spirit. It’s just like when you see an athlete in a post-game interview saying, “we just didn’t do it today… I didn’t throw the ball as well as I usually have…”

Producing a culture of high-performance and kindness, and sustaining that culture over time goes far beyond bullet points on a page (like above). However, I do believe incorporating the above into your organizational management model is a really great way to at least increase the chance of success in this pursuit. I think management is one of the most noble professions, because it gives you the chance to impact the lives and livelihoods of many other people around you. We owe it to ourselves to be thinking actively about how we manage our organizations. The employee and customer experience is a human experience, and you (as a leader of anything) should be thinking about how to create the best possible human experience for those around you, working on your team, or supporting your team with their business.