“When They Win, You Win”: Russ Laraway unpacks his new guide for the modern manager

 Russ. Thanks for coming back on the podcast. I'm excited for this.

 So we have a lot of topics to explore. I thought maybe, you could tell us a little bit about why you wanted to write this book at this point in your career.

 yeah, I, um, I think the summary point is I just think people deserve to be led well, and through my work, going back about probably five years now, very formally. And then, you know, over the previous 15 years in tech, I think it's pretty safe To say people are systematically being led poorly and. I also have this opinion though that the world absolutely doesn't need another person's opinion about what it takes to be a great manager.

Uh, I think what we need instead is a leadership approach that measurably and predictably delivers more engaged employees or work happiness and better business results. And I'm not even talking about retention or attrition, I'm talking about like quota attainment or something like that. And, you know, or said differently.

I think everybody just wants to do great work and be totally psyched while doing it. And so I thought a book like that, uh, was needed and I wouldn't have written it if I hadn't developed evidence to suggest that the leadership behaviors or the leadership approach put forth in the book, measurably and predictably deliver more engaged in place and better business results.

 To build on that. You start the book out by more pointedly saying managers are failing everywhere. And no one is helping. w what's the why behind that? I mean, we're, we're now many, many, many decades into research content and best practices about management. And so what are people screwing up or, or, or maybe don't, don't quite understand about the topic.

 Yeah, I look, I think best practice, best practices, um, who says their best, you know, I, I think my experience with most of the Corpus out there around how to be a great manager, how to be great leader, by the way, I don't care to distinguish the two. Um, I, I don't know that any of that's held to any rigor, any rigorous standard.

I don't know. I'm not aware of a single leadership approach or practice that claims to measure blink predictably. Uh, work happiness and results. So, so I'm not sure who's saying what is best out there. And when someone says something works, uh, I don't think we're asking the question, which is by what standard and I'll accept another standard, but there needs to be a standard.

And So I think a few things contribute to managers failing. And by the way, I, I, I, you know, cause you've seen the book, but I defend, I defend pretty heavily with some math that managers are in fact failing. Um, and I think it starts first with selecting managers. So we tend to, select managers based on either their tenure.

So in like food services, just for example, in an out of context example for us, um, the way you get to be the manager at like a fast food restaurant is, you know, the last manager quit and you're the person with the most tenure. Now that might be the right choice in that context. That doesn't mean you're going to be a good manager.

Um, in fact, not by a long shot. Um, but by far the most common, the most nefarious contributor to poor selection is we make a person, a manager because they were the best individual contributor. And I don't know a clearer way to say this, but this is what I got. Um, the activities that make you successful as a manager look, nothing like the activities that make you successful as an individual contributor.

Um, and so it starts with poor selection. We're not selecting people for their leadership experience or their leadership instincts if they, if they have no experience and it is possible to do that. Um, and I think maybe over the course of this interview, we might kind of get there. I think the next biggest factor then in what's contributing to this sort of management crisis.

So if training exists and we both know it frequently, doesn't, you know, the idea of quote, how managers should lead it's it's, to me, it's highly susceptible to like executive flavor of the month bias, you know, like the CEO loves situational leadership. And so that's what we're doing and, um, or something like that.

And so somewhere between the leadership development folks and the senior folks, um, what is taught is almost certainly, again, not held up to any rigor, just, just usually isn't right. all of this to come around to a simple point, which is when we train people, we're trading out a bunch of leaderships.

That we say works, but we don't have any sort of backing to prove that it works. And so we're teaching managers all kinds of stuff that may or may not, uh, help them actually become better managers.

 So what's been your approach to bring more data and rigor to these topics.

 but that's a, that's a media question. So it turns out that there's a few things that are measurable, that we may not believe, or, or immediately realize are measurable. And so the first thing I'll start with is actually business results. So for example, you can measure quota attainment, right?

 That's something most of our listeners care about. you know, if you're in a B2B SAS company, for example, you can measure, um, uh, contract renewal rate. if you're in an engineering group, you can measure lines of code committed. I mean, there's all these results that we're accustomed to thinking about that can easily be measured.

So that's kind of the first idea. So. Uh, it turns out that there's a mountain of third-party research and I found this on my own first party research that in the workplace, there's this 30 year old ish IO psychological measure called employee engagement. That itself is measurable. It's usually about five questions.

They're pretty well known. It's employee satisfaction. Overall, how satisfied are you to work here, employee net promoter score? How likely are you to recommend this place? Discretionary effort? Are you willing to go above and beyond? You know, there's a couple others and we asked these questions on a five point scale and we can measure how engaged a group of employees are.

um, engagement is strongly correlated with business results. And so just a for instance, this is straight from Gallup.

 They found that. Companies in the top core tile and employee engagement, um, have about 90 plus percent better earnings per share than their competitive set. Right. So I can't think of a more precious sort of business result than earnings per share, particularly for a publicly held company. 

And so then the next question then is, okay, so let's lead through engagement by the way, engaged employees. They're generally gonna be a little happier at work when we rather, our employees are engaged, just conceptually, even sort of irrespective of results. Of course we would. So the question is what affects engagement?

Well, it's the manager more than any other factor and by the way, there's not even a close second place. Um, and so I'll just stick with Gallup, but I promise that. Other evidence there in the book and Gallup found that the manager explained 70% of engagement. So in large data sets, if there's a positive variance from the average and employee engagement, um, when they go back and sort of statistically regress the source of the difference, it's 70% of that difference is the manager, uh, both in positive, a positive variance as well as in a negative variance.

And so managers really are holding the keys by the way, if you buy that stat, that means everything else you're doing to affect engagement is worth less than half of whatever you're doing to make your managers great. So there's only one more question to ask then, which is what are the behaviors managers exhibit that leads to better engagement?

That's a really hard question to answer, but I thought it was important to answer it. And you can also measure that. And so I'll tell you how we did that. Um, every single. When we would ask our employees about their engagement levels, we would also ask them 12 questions about their manager, specifically, whether they'd observed specific behaviors that we believed at first, it was what we believed was a theory led to better engagement.

 And then we could measure how frequently managers were showing these behaviors were actually exhibiting these behaviors. Um, and so, and we asked employees only because those are the people doing the real.

 Those are the people we're fighting to attract, develop and retain, and the results or the performance of a company is nothing more, nothing less than the sum of the results of all the employees. Right? And so I want to know how the employee views their manager, because managers they're always hiding from their boss, right?

It's real hard to hide from your team. You just can't. And so now we're measuring three things. We're measuring basically the frequency with which a specific set of leadership behaviors are being exhibited. We're measuring how engaged people are and we're measuring the results of the various teams in the company.

 Um, we found that. Plus, or minus two points in that manager effectiveness index or the leadership behaviors we expected was worth plus or minus one point of employee engagement. Um, the second one that I think is kind of cool. Let's go over to the relationship between engagement results. We found that plus five in employee engagement, get on average in the whole sales organization. Plus five employee engagement is where 30 points of quota attainment.

 We found plus five and employee engagements worth five points, a contractor note, which by the way, at a place like Qualtrics is extraordinary because contract renewal rates are already at 90%. So there's not a ton of room, you know, at large in the organization that deals with you know, customer success and so on, you know, in a SAS company, those are the two most important measurements, um, for growth.

 So Russ, I wanted to loop back to something you shared a few minutes ago, which is how broken this process of identifying and selecting managers is to begin with. And I'm curious, what does great look like or in all the work that you've done, if, if you've done it at Qualtrics and at other companies, w w what, what is the right model to identify and select potential managers?

 Yeah. I think there's probably two. Two big ideas that, um, should get mixed into your particular approach to hiring your managers. First is a leadership assessment, and second is a values assessment. Uh, both of them are easily converted into rubrics and by the way, um, I put On my website at www dot. When they, when you in.com/tools, I actually put a leadership assessment, scorecard, a rubric for hiring managers, whether internal or external.

Um, I recommend that we use a rubric like this. It's got questions. It's got what a good answer looks like, what a weekend's looks like. And, um, it's there just for free if somebody wants to use it. And so, uh, I'd say the first, the first one then is you want to get very clear about the leadership behaviors.

You expect, the ones that you believe work, you know, and I strongly encourage you to get rigorous about what you mean by work. Um, and then it's real easy to go and hunt. People who kind of have that mindset or have those skills in a particularly inexperienced manager, you're looking more for instincts.

And our rubric, for example, allows for, you know, a little bit more risk-taking and more experienced managers, usually more senior. Um, we ha we allow a lot less leeway for risk taking because the blast radius on those people is enormous for better or for worse. The blast radius is enormous. And so I think if you just.

Stopped the practice of unconsciously putting the best individual contributor into the management job and started to evaluate your candidates for their leadership chops. Even if you're not that great at that, I actually think that's a step function difference in being good at hiring managers. And then I think you can become more sophisticated and more precise.

Um, this rubric that we came up with is tried and true over several years, relates directly to the leadership standards, set forth in the book. And again, that's just available on my website. I mentioned the second thing, which is a values assessment, And so, um, I I've done a talk called scaling culture. And you know, the basic point that I make is your culture really is your value.

It's probably mission and values. It's how you do things, right? And I make the argument that culture is not something between. It's something within each of us. I mean, otherwise it actually be kind of impossible to hire a culture fit. And so, um, if culture is something within each of us, not necessarily something between us, that it becomes possible to hire people that are perfect cultural exemplars on day one.

Um, I've seen this at Google. I've seen it at Twitter. We carefully defined the things we value. And then we went out and we selected for them in pretty like pretty rigorous way in both cases. But again, this is something that easily can be developed into a rubric. Um, and you can go out and find people that are better culture exemplars than the incumbents.

Most incumbents hate that idea. What you're going to go find someone from the outside. That's a better culture fit than me. Um, but again, instead of doing this nonsense, like elevator pitch, or do I want to get a beer with them or all this other stuff, that's just like, Totally susceptible to bias. You know, you develop a rubric and you have a better chance of finding people that sort of, uh, you know, abide by or value the same things that your employees do.

And so when they show up on day one, uh, they kind of fit like a glove. So, so, and I think your managers need to be evaluated for their values fit, or culture set as well. And again, Being careful not to use that the way most people use it and say, I'm talking about a carefully developed rubric about what we value in, how we work together.

Um, and so I think those are probably the top two things you could do. you've got to have a rubric based approach to hiring managers and you've, and you should really have a rubric based approach to assessing whether someone's a culture fit given. Do they value the same things we do?

 On the leadership assessment, I guess, kind of two questions popped in mind. Can you, can you give a little brief explainer of, of what that actually looks like just to give folks a taste of it, and to, when you think about those different dimensions, do you find that it tends to be quite deeply encoded in people and thus kind of, they either have the instincts and the raw ingredients to develop into a great manager or not, or there's actually a lot of plasticity or flexibility and maybe somebody can develop those instincts over time.

 yeah, let me, I'll take that second part first. Um, which is people can definitely develop the instincts slash skills over time, almost everybody. Um, I, in fact, I'd say with very few exceptions, so this is a really important point to me. I, um, there kind of a couple of myths out there. About management that I can't stand one is, you know, the natural leader.

That's not a real person. I understand what people think a natural leader is. Um, maybe it was the kid who was the one shouting orders on the playground, or maybe it's, you know, a person that sort of likable, there's all these 

 Uh, charisma, I think, I think is a really interesting trap in many ways. When you get into leadership and

 you stole, you stole my thunder. It was my second and related myth, which is the value of charisma. Um, I think we, you know, we can be adults and say maybe someone who's a little Caribbean. Enjoys a little advantage on day one, you know, with a new employee or day one with a team, the team feels a little more settled because the person that is leading them or managing them is kind of likable and charismatic.

Um, the successful managers that I've seen though, they brush and floss, you know, the charisma people, they they're the teeth, whiteners the successful managers brush and floss. They are the people who do the little things every day that leads to the employee being more successful. And this is like sort of a key idea, I think, which is the only thing we all have in common at work is that we want to be successful.

I feel pretty comfortable in that We're not all there to make buddies. We're not all there to go to happy hours, you know, and all, all these other things we do, there is only one thing. Every single one of us has in common at work and that's that we want to be successful. So let me ask you a person who is charismatic or not charismatic, who engages in the activities every day and every week to help make their team members successful.

Um, charisma is irrelevant in that context. It's the person. Whether they have charisma or not, that engages in the activities that help their team be successful, that people ultimately want to work for. And that people ultimately want to follow, and those behaviors are trainable. Now they tend to be hard for people to Intuit or deduce.

Cause most people aren't going through sort of a rigorous process by which they uncover those behaviors. Um, but everybody can learn. And so that's why actually it's a great question, but that's why when, you know, if we're interviewing a very junior manager, we're more risk loving because we know they're going to know less.

Um, whereas with a very senior manager, we're more risk averse because they should know better. They're less likely to change. And not that we want group think, but we also can't have a salmon swimming upstream because the blast radius on a senior person is so substantial. Um, and we've all seen it. I think everyone's seen it.

We brought in a senior person, they weren't a fit. Like we had to clean it up for months after that person was gone. And. And so that's kind of how I think about it, but I'm, I'm still convinced anybody can be come a really good manager because it's just, it's brushing and flossing it's practice. Um, back to the first part of the question, can you give us a flavor?

Um, I could read to you a couple of the questions. so one of the questions that we ask, um, I'm going to try to pick a good one here for you here.

 here's one, um, walk me through the most significant change you've made as a manager in response to feedback you've received about your leadership. Okay. And then we've carefully defined a weekend. Um, a meet standard answer and an exceed standard answer, you know, and the reason why we asked this question is because responding to your team's and ideas and concerns, it turns out that asking for feedback from your teams, specifically inviting challenge to, you know, whatever's happening on the team, inviting criticism.

 Let's say it turns out that of the 12 behaviors we've evaluated. That one is second most correlated with employee engagement. Just think about it. The people that we're hiring, they want to be heard. And if you have a manager who doesn't go out of their way to make sure everybody's heard, um, people just to be less engaged, right?

 they want to have some skin in the game. And so what we're looking for in this question is a manager that more than once in fact, what we're really looking for is as a matter of. Has listened to their team, heard criticism about the way that they are leading the team and then was humble enough to make actual adjustments about the way they were leading that team, given what they heard from the people on the team.

so that's just an example and that that's a interview question that directly ties back to a leadership behavior.

 We know strongly correlates with, um, uh, high employee engagement. I guess sort of building on there. It might be a good time to jump into the most important behaviors that you've learned through this work and, and talk through them.

Yeah, I just, I just mentioned probably the second most important behavior. Um, the first one is, um, you know, we'll ask the employee some version of a question. How often does your manager give you specific praise for good work? And that question is actually where to, uh, quite carefully, um, specific is actually really important modifiers.

We're not cheerleaders. We're coaches and so good job. Isn't good praise for good work. That's what you say to your dog. And that's just not useful. Um, you know what I really loved about the way you held that customer presentation and then to offer the specific things that you believe worked. That's good coaching.

That's helped someone know what to repeat, and that's the high leverage idea behind praise. If I may tell a fun story, um, I was a little weak. And, um, I was impelled to go to a seminar by the positive coaching Alliance. 

And I had to go because basically, you know, a lot of the parents that get involved in youth coaching, they don't always behave well. Uh, it's, it's pretty well-documented. The most important thing that I learned that day, the positive coaching Alliance, they prescribe five to one praise criticism, and they're really careful to say it's not five to zero.

Like everyone gets a trophy. And they're also careful to say it's also not infinity to one. It's just five to one. Right. And I thought about this in a work context. And it occurred to me, you know, we're not walking around fire and everybody all the time, which means people are doing quite a bit more well than they're doing poorly. And it just almost has to be the case. And so carrying on with the season, we had a young team in that division.

 um, our kids were amazing. And our primary that my coaching partner, I coached with him a bunch. His name was drew. Um, we did something called the book. I put this into practice and what I did was I wrote. What the kids did well. what this practice forced drew and I to do is actually be very clear about every standard of everything we did on the team.

 And so fielding a ground ball is a rather technical process, right? Of centering the ball in your stance, get the glove in the dirt, cover it with your throwing hand, pick it up at a direct line to your throwing shoulder while your back foot is stepping toward your target front foot, moving toward target.

And then finally the throw and follow through straight to your target. To praise the kids. Well, we had to be able to say those things, what I loved about the way you feel to that ground ball was the way you Senator in your stance and didn't just reach for it, right? This is exactly applicable in the workplace I feel.

And actually it's the big missed opportunity and coaching. I think a lot of people, when they, they, they sort of are reluctant to give praise. It's usually, well, first of all, it's unconscious usually, but when they're consciously reluctant, um, it's because they don't understand the power of forcing themselves to be Arctic, be able to articulate sort of the team standards or the things that lead to success and look the summer and all that Brett.

I realized that little kid kids there, they're just small people there. They're not some mysterious different thing than the rest of us. They're just small. And so, um, it, wasn't the biggest surprise in the world, uh, . Uncovered the data and saw that specific praise for good work was the leadership behavior that had the most powerful relationship with engagement.

And I'm sure a part of that is also inherent in you giving people that kind of coaching is also recognition. And so you get both of those things with this one simple practice, and it is the most powerful behavior as it relates to employee engagement, in the context of the great resignation, we have kind of a fun, a fun finding.

 Cool. So one of the questions that we ask all the time and a lot of engagement surveys, you know, if you get them out of the box, this question will be available to you, which is called intent to leave or intent to stay. And the question might be worded something like this.

 how strongly do you agree with the following statement? I am strongly considering leaving this company. And what we found, um, was that 75% of time, when an employee left, they told us within the last six months, they were seriously considering leaving 67% of the time when they said they're seriously considering leaving, they did then leave.

 And those, you know, those are just a little different, but the point of all of that is. This question I think would be surprising to a lot of people actually had quite strong predictive capability and whether people would have Trent, and I think a lot of times people think, oh, everybody lies on those surveys, but, but in this case they did.

And they told us like maybe one of the scariest things they could tell us, which is, yeah, I'm thinking about leaving. And so we didn't know who said what you can't do that. You'll lose trust, but we could kind of, we could kind of look at that after someone left. And that's how we could understand that that question was predictive.

So if we know that question is predictive, we started to look at what predicts that answer. Yes, I'm seriously considering leaving. And there's one question that stands above them all. And in fact of the 12 questions, this is the only one that had any kind of relationship with attrition. And the question is, um, some version of how much you agree with the following sentence.

My manager cares about me as a human being.  I just said that and I actually kinda got chills. I'm sure you did too. And so this idea that, um, people want to feel cared for at work, and that is something that is highly predictive of whether they're going to stay or go.

I think it's a pretty fascinating insight because think of all the fancy things we try to do to address our quote unquote retention problems. Um, and the answer might be just as simple as someone knows for sure their manager cares about them. I think a really interesting follow on question is what does it look like to care about someone in the workplace?

And I actually think that's a question we're thinking about, um, over the years when I used to do the radical candor. Um, there, you know, that model, if you recall, is challenged directly care personally. And I noticed that people would drop the care personally frequently. They always talked about Russ. I went into his office, I kicked door in.

I told him he was a beep and man, I was radically candid. It's like, no, no, you weren't. That's not it at all. I can't detect any care personally there. And so I put people through an exercise where I had them tell me about a time they got some radical candor, some hard feedback at work, and then I'd have them come four of them.

So I did this about 150 times, times four people. So 600 repetitions where I then asked them, oh, I heard the direct challenge in your story, but I missed the care personally. Where was that? And after they'd say, oh, we had a relationship or, oh, you know, he asked about my soccer weekends with my kids. I'd say, well, I want to know what was it about the act of giving you this feedback that led you to believe this person cares about you personally?

And they think about it in three words. Um, there's a word cloud over 600 repetitions, but three words jumped to the front time, help success. And the sentence that goes with those is that person took the time to help me have more success. And if we go back a little bit in our interview, you remember I mentioned, there's only one thing everybody has in common at work and that's that they want to be successful.

And so it seems actually to make a lot of sense that the most persistent idea, the most persistent behavior that led them to feel cared for at work was that their manager, or maybe in other cases, someone else, but their manager was constantly taking time to help them be more successful. And it turns out coaching, um, making sure the team has clear direction, um, looking out for their careers.

In other words, their longterm success. It turns out that those three groupings of behavior, you know, act directly on that.

 I'm sure you know, or, or maybe you can disagree with me, but I would think that you sort of mentioned these critical behaviors and you get a lot of head nods when you're teaching or explaining this to managers. And what sort of jumps to mind for me is why is it so hard for managers to behave in this way?

 yeah, yeah. That's well, that's a really good question. Um, So, so I do get some head nods. so a couple of things, one is you might've just very been played politely, say, man, this is so simple. And it is, and I I'm very comfortable that I actually think simple is what is called for here. I think the world has conspired to confuse the average manager.

And so why would I be excited about an approach that does that further? So first, I'm kinda cool with the idea that this is all fairly simple. I mean, I think you know how to do it and the book ends up being fairly prescriptive on some how tos. Um, I think that's where, you know, there's a lot of work to do, but I think this is simple.

So, so why not? I, first of all, I think people have become far too focused on, um, the, all these things that need to be different. So I'm in a different context. I'm in a fast growing company, I'm in a slower growing company. I'm in a big company, I'm in tech, Aman food services, I'm in manufacturing. Um, and as we try to focus on those things, we allow ourselves to then try to identify the things in our leadership approach that should be different and, and therefore match those contexts.

I think, I think that's the exact opposite, like the exact wrong instinct. I think sort of the second thing is, um, that we are concerned with the concepts of leadership style. Um, I thought about that a lot when writing the book, I think we're trying so hard to focus on the cool sounding style instead of focusing on observable behaviors. And we're also too focused on the big, fancy different things we need to do because we're in this really cool, different environment, you know?

And so it's a perfectly stems from my point about managers being confused at perfectly stems from the proliferation of content around being great management. And in the end, Brett, like. Th the head nods are great, but my question right back to the head nodders well, why aren't you doing this?

And usually I think ultimately two things probably going on there. If I had to guess one, is it, maybe some of these things seem so simple, how can they matter? And the second is no one has ever showed them. This is the thing you should pay attention to because these behaviors, measurably and predictably lead to more engaged employees and better business results.

Like if you're not telling people, these are the behaviors that actually matter. Yeah. This stuff really works. You know, they're just, I think they're in class.

 To ignore it in some capacity or not pay hard enough attention to it, you know? here's a good example. People love at cocktail parties. They love to say, I think leadership is different than management and then everyone nods their head and takes a sip out of their shard, Anais, and they all feel so smart and.

Like I, this doesn't matter. we've allowed ourselves to sort of fall victim to this sort of culture of grandiosity leadership is better than management.

And therefore I'm going to look for the complex ideas that make me a leader, and we don't even take the time to focus on the things that just make it good. And by the way, nobody ever applies for a job. The jobs manager, right? We have to restore dignity to the office of the manager. Do you need to do some of the quote unquote leadership stuff?

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Russ Laraway is a seasoned leader who's been at Google, Twitter, Candor Inc, Qualtrics, and recently joined as the Chief People Officer for Goodwater Capital. Russ unpacks the management frameworks from his new book: “When They Win, You Win” and why he believes we’re in a manager crisis.  

"When They Win, You Win": The new guide for the modern manager

Russ Laraway is a seasoned leader who's been at Google, Twitter, Candor Inc, Qualtrics, and recently joined as the Chief People Officer for Goodwater Capital. Russ unpacks the management frameworks from his new book: “When They Win, You Win” and why he believes we’re in a manager crisis.