Can you teach an old dog new tricks?
My CEO and I were talking today about how to manage “medium-drive” employees in a company that requires a high-performance mindset. He and I come from environments where moving fast, being proactive and having a bias for action are par for the course (let’s call us Group A).
This is fairly common DNA to find in high-growth, (typically VC backed) tech businesses. While the infamously coined Facebook adage, “Move fast and break things,” has lost it’s charm in favor of more pragmatic approaches to scale and profitability, there is an underlying mindset of hunger, drive and ambition that I still very much believe in.
But, what do you do when you are working with a group of people who haven’t thought beyond plan A, expend just enough energy to hit their targets or settle for the “way it’s always been done?” (let’s call this Group B).
We have been wrestling with two questions:
How do you motivate personalities who don’t move with a constant and insatiable sense of urgency?
How much can you actually change the underlying forces that influence how a person operates in a professional environment?
Before jumping to a solution - why does this even matter?
Misaligned ways of working creates frustration and slows the pace of progress.
On the one hand, Group A feels like they are chasing, micromanaging and constantly cross-checking logic, process and outcome to ensure every possible stone was turned in search of X goal (eg. category creation, revenue, new customers, better retention, market leading product, etc…).
Outcome: erosion of trust
On the other hand, Group B feels like they are being …. wait for it… chased, micromanaged and constantly cross-checked on their work.
Outcome: demotivation & indifference
Taking a first principles approach, we tried to understand why certain people don’t have the same level of urgency or motivational triggers. Here are some of our theses:
Compensation incentives: if your income is tied to revenue, you will only care about items that directly move the needle for you on cash…no more, no less
Disbelief in the company mission and/or value: usually a result of a lack of clarity from the leadership team or a misalignment with that person’s goals and values
Poor management: the relationship you have with your manager can make or break your experience at a company and the way in which you operate in that team. Managers who don’t cascade information correctly, blame the executive team for top-down decisions, do not provide a rationale for why decisions are made, are unclear in direction or take credit/remove visibility of team output can all contribute to employees losing (a) sight of what priorities matter most to the business (b) the motivation to go above and beyond
Personal motives: on the one extreme, there are people whose self-worth is inextricably tied to their job and the success they yield in that arena. On the other, you have people who work to live. There is no right answer and there is no ‘right’ way to measure professional drive. The key is to know what level of intensity you, your team and your company need and optimize for that type of DNA.
You can influence 1, 2 and 3. 4, on the other hand, is not something you can, should or have the right to change.
As the saying goes “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” While I actually disagree with this message, the general belief that old habits die hard is a true one. As a leader, it’s not your job to force change in people. You can and will force change in company strategy, direction, speed of execution and talent. But it’s not your job or your prerogative to change the people that make up that environment.
The conclusion my CEO and I reached was: humans are incredibly skilled at self-selection.
Our job as leaders is to:
Set clear expectations and standards (timelines & roadmaps, product quality, KPIs, targets & OKRs)
Apply consistent rigor to measuring progress and accountability against those targets
Create an operating cadence that drives clear ownership across all teams
Build an organization that has the correct balance of senior leaders, middle management and talented, coachable doers
Relentlessly look for cross-functional blockers that can be removed
Identify your MVPs
Set a high bar and be ruthless about achieving that standard every day
Once this is done, get out of the way and let your people run fast...
Those who identify with that same modus operandi will follow. The others will not.
As a good friend of mine, Nick Kim, used to tell me, creme always rises to the top.
