Employee since 2007

May 27, 2010May 27, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

The next time you’re in CostCo, check out the employees’ badges. Right under the employee’s name, the badge say “Employee since _______”. Subtle, but powerful.

From what I know about CostCo, this is the real deal – they care about employee longevity, about treating people right, and about setting themselves apart from their peers. Barron’s called them the “anti Wal-Mart”, and with average 2007 pay of $17/hour – 42% higher than Sam’s club – there seems to be real truth to the story.

And then in the perfect twist, analysts like Emme Kozloff of Sanford Bernstein calls CostCo’s CEO Jim Senegal “too benevolent” and analysts at Deutche Bank complain that “it’s better to be an employee than a customer or a shareholder.”

(Now I’m supposed to drop in the chart of CostCo’s 10-year stock performance and show how it’s drastically outperformed the Dow and Walmart – each of which have offered a 0% 10-year return versus 80% for CostCo. So here’s the chart if you’re curious. But that’s not what’s on my mind.)

What’s on my mind is that, while I recognize that Jim Senegal has to do the dance of saying he pays employees well and treats them right because it’s good for the bottom line – because employee retention is higher, “shrinkage” (aka theft) is lower, and CostCo’s more affluent customers value interacting with happy employees – at some point we have to get to the heart of the matter.

When did it become accepted that actions that are right and moral – like paying employees a decent wage – have to be explained away and justified? When did we accept the notion that people should be moral in their lives but that the moment they show up for work their morality is subsumed by their obligation to maximize profits (whatever that means)?

All great companies exist to change their industries, to change the world, so the starting point is a sense of purpose and a willingness to play by a different set of rules. The question is: how far are we willing to go? Of course great companies should do great things for their shareholders and make lots of money for (all!) their employees, but the notion that it is better for management to be amoral rather than moral undercuts the foundation of our society, our values, what makes us human being.

It may sound naïve, but I find it ironic that in a country (the U.S.) where values, morality, and religiosity have such a central place in our culture, in the corporate mainstream – which is itself populated mostly by values-driven, moral, religious people – it is verboten to talk in any serious way about acting in a moral way because it is the right thing to do. Instead there’s this Texas Two Step, nudge-nudge wink-wink from CEOs to Wall Street to say “honest, guys, I’m just doing it to make more money!”

And then all of a sudden, a company that wins the Global Renewable Energy Award and that plasters magazines and billboards and tradeshows telling the world that “BP” stands for “Beyond Petroleum” is responsible for a 60-mile oil spill that will wreak unknown and unmitigated havoc on the environment, on wetlands, on marine life, and on us.

When will we as a society get to the point where we see that this is all connected?

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Which chorus?

March 10, 2010March 9, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

You’re probably hearing one of two choruses right now:

“Slow down! You’re not being practical. That’s not possible. I don’t get it and don’t see how we’ll get there. You need to make things smaller, more clear, more well-defined, more actionable!!”
*chirp* *chirp* *chirp* *chirp* (the quiet, soothing, pleasant, cricket-like background noise where no one’s telling you you’re crazy)

Number two feels so much better, is so much easier and cleaner, and the people you like and respect (your Board, your boss, your co-workers, your team) give you their stamp of approval. But hearing nothing but good, approving things most of the time is very dangerous indeed.

You get to decide: is the most important thing hearing from those closest to you that they approve? Or do you care more about breaking through? Because breaking through means doing something that they (even the “they” who love and support you) have never done before.

Even though they don’t mean to, those closest to you may be holding you back.

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Who works for you?

March 9, 2010March 8, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Revolutionary question of the day – which I was asked, and am passing on: do I work for my boss, or does she work for me?

And, as a corollary, does my team work for me or do I work for my team?

What’s the difference? Here’s one example:

If the person who owns all the data and metrics on my team works for me, then I tell her: “you need to take ownership of operations, of making sure everyone is doing what they need to do.”

But if I work for her, then I say to her, “OK, you’re the boss. That means you’re THE person responsible for us reaching our goals. I work for you, and all of us work for you. Tell us what to do. Go.”

Different conversation. Different outcome.

(p.s. nothing special about “data and metrics.” I could have said “website” or “PR” or “brand manager” or just about anything short of the person we all pretend is in charge.)

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Permission

September 29, 2009September 28, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I’m not much of a glass-breaker, usually. My natural tendency is to build consensus, get buy-in. And I’ve kind of had it with this approach.

I’m not planning to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I’m realizing that sometimes I need to get the heck out of my own way.

Before you say to someone, “I thought you might want to know that I’m planning to…” make sure you know why you’re saying it. Do you need input and approval, or are you really just saying “I’m telling you this because this way you have a chance to say ‘no,’ and if you don’t, it means that you’ve OKed what I’m about to do.”

Nice to have the approval but what happens when:

Folks say no; or
They weigh in with a different opinion, and you need to do something with their advice?

One way to tell why you’re asking: if someone were to say, “no way,” would you do it anyway? If so, then what are you gaining by asking?

Go ahead, break something.

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The power of belief

September 9, 2009September 9, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

The other day, while I watched my kids frolic in the sprinklers in a recently-revived Central Park playground in New York City, I couldn’t help but wonder where belief comes in when we think about measuring social outcomes.

My son, who wouldn’t change into his bathing suit (“it’s too cold to play in the sprinklers”), was pulled in, splash by splash, until he was soaked head to toe, fully dressed. Around us were gaggles of proud parents who reminded me why I love New York: Mexicans and Swedes and Spaniards and Hasidic Jews fussing as happily and with as much ease as the Upper East Side moms with their fancy strollers.

How do you calculate whether or not to revitalize a playground? To turn an expansive but drooping block of concrete and sand into something that glows with the smiles of exuberant children? Can you calculate all the ancillary effects – the extra ice creams purchased, the carousel rides, the trips on the Circle Line and the trip that another family will take across the Atlantic because New York has beautiful public spaces again – and all the hotel rooms filled and show tickets sold and extra restaurant diners?

Somewhere, belief comes into play. Someone believed that public spaces matter, and then they assembled the constituency and the funds and the power to change these spaces for the better. I’m sure that they figured out – by benchmarking and studying and analyzing – the best WAY to refurbish and expand a playground, but none of this analysis told them WHETHER to refurbish a playground, to do something else, or to do nothing.

The world is a complex place, and you never capture the full complexity of a problem nor the nuances of the impact of an intervention. Which means that belief that something’s missing, combined with the guts, determination and gumption to build that new thing, is where real change begins. This is very different from “finding the right answer.”

We in the social sector aspire to better measurement, bemoaning the fact that we lack the clarity of the for-profit world, where a single metric (profits) ostensibly provides as a scorecard of who wins and loses, of what works and what doesn’t (while all the while the big players in the private sector are realizing how poor a yardstick profitability is to measure their own long-term value to customers, employees, communities, and their stakeholders around the world…would that we all converge someday soon). Measurement will allow us to compare one program to another – will allow us to figure out whether the playground we rebuilt was completed cost-effectively than others; in a way that brought in more or fewer kids than others. But we’ll never win at comparing playgrounds to soup kitchens to preschool programs to job training, unless we go all the way back to first principles.

Once we’ve decided what we’re going to do, the numbers can tell us how well we’re doing it. But they’ll never tell us what to do in the first place.

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Be a Sawgot (SWGTD)

September 2, 2009September 1, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Are you a “sawgot,” Someone Who Gets Things Done?

If you’re not now, what would it take?

With an ever-shifting economy, and all of the challenges in the job market, I can think of few skills more universal than being a sawgot. Because when it’s crunch time and something absolutely needs to happen, the people in charge look at each other and say, “OK, we need our ace right now. The game’s on the line.” And you want to be that ace.

Being a sawgot is about a mindset and an outlook: having the humility not to ask “why am I doing something that’s not in my job description?” and the wisdom to know that moment you’ve become the kind of person who reliably makes problems go away, you’ve become indispensable.

This is particularly valuable early in your career, when you’re looking to stand out. If you work in the kind of organization that creates opportunities and moves quickly, the sawgot’s ability to move a project forward, on time and without (visibly) breaking a sweat is the kind of thing that gets you noticed (and if it doesn’t get you noticed, go work somewhere where it does).

Speed, accuracy, an ability to ask the right questions to get enough clarity to do what is being asked of you…these are the starting point. There is also a trove of really basic skills that you just need to have – and which there’s no excuse not to have mastered by now. You:

Create clean, attractive, simple slides in Powerpoint: few words, great images, tell a story (this implies some facility with Photoshop).
Generally “do stuff” with ease in Excel (this includes formulas and pivot tables and some data analysis and text-to-columns and Lookups).
Write clearly, concisely, quickly, and at the right level of detail
Manage projects against deadlines, and get things done early
Never let things fall through the cracks
Know how to create content for the web (including poking into the code here and there if you need to) – and are comfortable creating and sharing multimedia quickly and easily
Reliably create narratives from a set of inchoate inputs / sources
Know just a little bit more than your boss about what’s new and useful in the world, including but not limited to the online world

The skills allow you to dance at the party, but the sawgot’s ATTITUDE gets you in the door. You don’t want to jump into so many things that you cannot do your day job, but if, right now, you’re not working on one or two things that you’d describe as, “this is outside of the scope of what I do, but it really matters that our team/group/organization/company gets this right,” then it’s time to put up your hand and say, “how can I help?” or “why haven’t you asked me to help?”

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First to 100

August 25, 2009August 24, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been trying to teach my 5 ½ year old son to play tennis. Our typical session has been short – usually less than 10 minutes – so progress has come in fits and starts. Last week, I could tell he was starting to lose interest in our standard drill: me standing 5 feet away from him, bouncing the ball to him for him to hit.

So we invented a new game: I moved across the net, stood at the service line, and hit balls to him at the other service line. Each time he connected with the ball he got a point. Each time he missed entirely, I got a point. Then we spiced things up: each time he hit the ball over the net and hit it in the court, he got two points.

This was a big deal. Suddenly, his waning attention transformed into pointed questions about the rules and the point system. He decided he wanted to get to 100 points and he began angling for a lot of things to count for 2 points – a ball that first bounced on his side or a ball that landed in the doubles alley, for example.

Interesting. I had created an arbitrary system with an arbitrary set of rules (which I made up as I went along). But in his eyes, it was my job to define the rules of the game, and he’d decided he wanted to win at this game. I had suddenly become judge and jury on allocating something that was free for me to give out and mattered a lot to him. Needless to say, he got a lot of free two-pointers (final score of game 1: he trounced me 137-37).

Seem like a far flung example? It strikes me that this tennis court parable is an awful lot like work environments, where managers create (inadvertently or not) point systems that are no less arbitrary than the one I created on the tennis court. These points aren’t just about money, they’re about attention and opportunities and consultation and respect. What’s valued and sought after will vary depending on the culture of your organization. But you can be sure that, to anyone who values the work they do, the currency your culture trades in matters to them.

It was unbelievably easy for me to be generous with my son in giving out points. What about at work? If you have the respect of your colleagues and peers, then they’re watching you just as closely, and once the rules of the game are defined, you have the option of being generous or stingy in giving “points,” not just to people who work for you, but for peers and even for supervisors. It’s something everybody values, and cultivating your own genuineness and generosity here is one of the easiest ways to motivate, energize and inspire those you hope to lead.

(P.S. Still reading? Please think about helping me fulfill my birthday wish by giving to Acumen Fund.)

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The answer-outcome paradox

August 11, 2009November 13, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the gap between finding the right answers and getting to the right outcomes.

A few years ago, a close friend of mine was working for a think tank that was hired to consult for the Ministry of Education of a small country. The team, which was made up mostly of PhDs who specialize in education, was asked to create the blueprint, design, and launch of the country’s higher education system. I was petrified to imagine a group of researchers being asked to create a living system that would consistently deliver high-quality educational outcomes.

The premise was that the people who knew most (analytically) about higher education would be the best people to solve this problem.

I’m a problem-solving kind of guy, so it’s taken a combination of observation, deduction, and advice from peers and mentors for me to come around to the idea that the analytical skills I’d been trained to develop all my life – from school grades to the SATs and GMATs to the whole system of admission to college and graduate school – aren’t the end game, they’re the starting point.

You’d never guess this was the case by looking at our institutions of higher education, which by and large are run by professors who are mostly in the answer-finding business. It’s true that there is an occasional nod to things like team-building, communication and influencing skills, coaching, self-reflection, etc., but these inevitably are billed as “soft” skills somehow different and apart from the hard (read: real) skills that matter.

If you’re an “answers” kind of person, it a cop-out to blame poor outcomes on others’ inability to see the solution you saw all along. If a path not taken – one that you believed in – was the right one, then the first question to ask was what you could have done differently to get your team, or your organization, to that outcome.

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“We need your help” (caveat emptor)

July 14, 2009July 14, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

It’s so flattering to be called in to save the day. This happened to me once – being hired to “take a team to a new level.” (not my words, the words of the person I went to work for). I wish I’d asked a lot more times, “Why are things not yet at that level? Is what I’m able to bring to this job going to change that? Will it be enough?”

The job ended up being a failure for me and for the organization. What was missing wasn’t something that I (or anyone from the outside) could bring in. The problems were internal and cut to the core.

This experience taught me once and for all that a job title, its formal authority, the job description, salary, what I’m officially being asked to do…all of these masquerade as things that really matter. Give me an “A” team that’s part of an “A” organization, and give me any set of goals that are important to the organization – that’s all I need to know. All you need is the people and the runway to make great things happen – and the willingness to work damn hard to get there.

What about an “A” title, job description, title, rank, authority…but a B team in a B organization? Man, I’d be skeptical and ask a lot of questions about what the organization is willing to change to support the change they say they’d like to make. This is why I’m skeptical of most job descriptions and am very careful when I hear from headhunters – the risk is that they (the headhunters, the job descriptions) convey lots of information that’s essentially unimportant.

It gratifies the ego to be told that you are going to come in and save the day. It’s possible, but working alone against the current (and against culture and entrenched interests) is a big job with a long time horizon and an uncertain payoff. Great things happen if you can pull it off (for example, Steve Jobs) but it’s harder than it looks.

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The finish line mirage

June 19, 2009June 19, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

A friend shared Paul Hawken’s moving, challenging commencement address and it got me thinking: we are constantly confusing starting lines with finish lines.

Getting married is a starting line, not a finish line.

Landing your dream job? Starting line.

Getting VC funding? Starting line.

Graduating college? Easy. Starting line. (It’s even called “commencement.”)

Having a child? Definitely a starting line.

Promotion? Starting line.

Joining a nonprofit board? Starting line.

Landing your dream recruit for a job? Starting line.

Getting elected? You guessed it. Starting line.

Our work is never done, which is why there is no brass ring and you never arrive. You are there now, doing the work, making change.

Now more than ever, you don’t need anything (credential, title, authority, salary) other than what you already have to do what you were put on earth to do.

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Tag: leadership

Which chorus?

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Who works for you?

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Permission

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The power of belief

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Be a Sawgot (SWGTD)

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First to 100

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The answer-outcome paradox

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“We need your help” (caveat emptor)

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The finish line mirage

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