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

Russ Laraway:

The successful managers that I've seen, they brush and floss. The charisma people, they're the teeth whiteners. The successful managers brush and floss. They are the people who do the little things every day that lead to the employee being more successful. This is a key idea, I think, which is, there is only one thing every single one of us has in common at work, and that's that we want to be successful. 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 the people ultimately want to follow. Those behaviors are trainable. Everybody can learn.

Brett Berson:

Welcome to In Depth, a show that surfaces tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, companies, and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, and we're a venture capital firm that helps startups like Notion, Roblox, Uber, and Square tackle company building firsts. On the In Depth podcast, we share weekly conversations with startup leaders that skip the talking points and go deeper into not just what to do, but how to do it. Learn more and subscribe today at firstround.com.

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For today's episode of In Depth, I'm thrilled to be joined by Russ Laraway. If you're a longtime In Depth listener, you'll remember that Russ was on the podcast back in early 2021, where he talked at length about employee engagement based on his experience at Google, Twitter, Qualtrics, and teaming up with Kim Scott to found Candor Inc. Since we last had Russ on the show, he's written a new book titled, "When They Win, You Win."

On today's episode, we dive deep into the management frameworks and original research that Russ discusses in his book. He starts by pointing out how broken our process for selecting managers is to begin with, where we often default to just promoting the highest performer on a team rather than looking for folks who explicitly demonstrate leadership chops. He explains the raw ingredients that point to whether someone's ready to take on a management role even if they weren't the best individual contributor in the bunch. If you're looking to hire a manager from outside the company, he's got plenty of interview questions to suss out the right hire.

Next, we explore the heaps of research that Russ did in writing this book and how that led to him pulling together a few specific frameworks for managers to lean on. This includes a list of the behaviors of highly-engaged managers and how you can put these into practice. As Russ discusses in today's interview, there are countless resources out there on how to be a better manager often with tons of conflicting advice. Russ distills all of this down to an essential research back guide for the modern manager that cuts through the noise. Be sure to pre-order his book, "When They Win, You Win", which comes out on June 7. I hope you enjoy this episode and now my conversation with Russ. Russ, thanks for coming back on the podcast. I'm excited for this.

Russ Laraway:

Yeah, absolutely my pleasure.

Brett Berson:

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.

Russ Laraway:

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 over the previous 15 years in tech. I think it's pretty safe to say people are systematically being led poorly. 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. 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. I'm not even talking about retention or attrition, I'm talking about quota attainment or something like that. Said differently, I think everybody just wants to do great work and be totally psyched while doing it, so I thought a book like that 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 employees and better business results.

Brett Berson:

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

Russ Laraway:

Look, I think, first, best practices, who says they're best? My experience with most of the corpus out there around how to be a great manager or how to be a great leader, by the way, I don't care to distinguish the two, I don't know that any of it's held to any rigor, any rigorous standard. I'm not aware of a single leadership approach or practice that claims to measurably and predictably improve work happiness and results. I'm not sure who's saying what is best out there. When someone says something works, I don't think we're asking the question which is by what standard. I'll accept another standard, but there needs to be a standard. I think a few things contribute to managers failing. By the way, you know because you've seen the book, but I defend pretty heavily with some math that managers are in fact failing, and I think it starts first with selecting managers.

We tend to select managers based on either their tenure, in food services, just for example, an out of context example for us. The way you get to be the manager at a fast food restaurant is the last manager quit and you're the person with the most tenure. Now, that might be the right choice in that context. It doesn't mean you're going to be a good manager. In fact, not by a long shot. 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. I don't know a clearer way to say this, but this is what I got. The activities that make you successful as a manager look nothing like the activities that make you successful as an individual contributor.

It starts with poor selection. We're not selecting people for their leadership experience or their leadership instincts if they have no experience. It is possible to do that and I think maybe over the course of this interview we might get there. I think the next biggest factor then in what's contributing to this management crisis is training. If training exists, and we both know it frequently doesn't, the idea of how managers should lead, to me, it's highly susceptible to executive flavor of the month bias. The CEO loves situational leadership, and so that's what we're doing. Somewhere between the leadership development folks and the senior folks, what is taught is almost certainly, again, not held up to any rigor, just usually isn't. All this to come around to a simple point which is, when we train people, we're trotting out a bunch of leadership stuff that we say works, but we don't have any backing to prove that it works, and so we're teaching managers all kinds of stuff that may or may not help them actually become better managers.

Brett Berson:

What's been your approach to bring more data and rigor to these topics?

Russ Laraway:

That's a meaty question. It turns out that there's a few things that are measurable that we may not believe or immediately realize are measurable. The first thing I'll start with is actually business results. For example, you can measure quota attainment. That's something most of our listeners care about. If you're in a B2B SaaS company, for example, you can measure contract renewal rate. Well, if you're in an engineering group, you can measure lines of code committed. There's all these results that we're accustomed to thinking about that can easily be measured. That's the first idea, so results. It turns out that there's a mountain of third party research, and I've found this in my own first party research, that in the workplace there's this 30-year-old-ish I/O 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, there's a couple of others.

We ask these questions on a 5-point scale and we can measure how engaged a group of employees are. Engagement is strongly correlated with business results. For instance, this is straight from Gallup, they found that companies in the top quartile in employee engagement have about 90+% better earnings per share than their competitive set. I can't think of a more precious business result than earnings per share, particularly for a publicly-held company. The next question then is, let's lead through engagement. By the way, engaged employees, they're generally going to be a little happier at work. Wouldn't we rather our employees are engaged just conceptually even irrespective of results? Of course, we would. The question is, what affects engagement? Well, it's the manager more than any other factor. By the way, there's not even a close second place.

I'll just stick with Gallup, but I promise I have other evidence there in the book. Gallup found that the manager explains 70% of engagement. In large datasets, if there's a positive variance from the average in employee engagement, when they go back and statistically regress, the source of the difference, it's 70% of that difference is the manager both in a positive variance as well as in a negative variance. 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.

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. I'll tell you how we did that. Every single quarter, 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, the theory, led to better engagement, and then we could measure how frequently managers were showing these behaviors, we're actually exhibiting these behaviors. We asked employees only because those are the people doing the real work, 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.

I want to know how the employee views their manager, because managers, they're always hiding from their boss. It's real hard to hide from your team, you just can't. 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. 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.

The second one that I think is cool, let's go over to the relationship between engagement and results. We found that +5 in employee engagement, again, on average in the wholesale organization, +5 employee engagement is worth 30 points of quota attainment. We found +5 in employee engagement is worth five points of contract renewal, 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 at large in the organization that deals with customer success and so on. In a SaaS company, those are the two most important measurements for growth.

Brett Berson:

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. I'm curious, what is great look like? Or, in all the work that you've done, if you've done it at Qualtrics and at other companies, what is the right model to identify and select potential managers?

Russ Laraway:

Yeah, I think there's probably two big ideas that should get mixed into your particular approach to hiring your managers. First is a leadership assessment and second is a values assessment. Both of them are easily converted into rubrics. By the way, I put on my website at www.whentheywinyouwin.com/tools. I actually put a leadership assessment scorecard, a rubric for hiring managers, whether internal, external, I recommend that we use a rubric like this. It's got questions, it's got what a good answer looks like, what a weak answer looks like, it's there just for free if somebody wants to use it.

The first one then is, you want to get very clear about the leadership behaviors you expect, the ones that you believe work and I strongly encourage you to get rigorous about what you mean by work. Then, it's real easy to go and hunt for people who 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 a little bit more risk-taking. In more experienced managers, usually more senior, 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.

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 jobs, even if you're not that great at that, I actually think that's a step function difference in being good at hiring managers. I think you can become more sophisticated and more precise. This rubric that we came up with is tried and true over several years relates directly to the leadership standardized set forth in the book. Again, that's just available on my website.

I mentioned the second thing, which is a values assessment. I've done a talk called "Scaling Culture", and the basic point that I make is your culture really is your values. It's probably mission and values, it's how you do things. I make the argument that culture is not something between us, it's something within each of us. Otherwise, it'd actually be impossible to hire a culture fit. If culture is something within each of us, not necessarily something between us, then it becomes possible to hire people that are perfect cultural exemplars on day one. 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 a pretty rigorous way in both cases. But again, this is something that easily can be developed into a rubric and you can go out and find people that are better cultural 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?" But again, instead of doing this nonsense elevator pitch or do I want to get a beer with them or all this other stuff that's just totally susceptible to bias, you develop a rubric and you have a better chance of finding people that abide by it or value the same things that your employees do, and so when they show up on day one, they fit like a glove. I think your managers need to be evaluated for their values fit or culture fit as well. 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 and how we work together. I think those are probably the top two things you could do and you've got to have a rubric-based approach to hiring managers 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?

Brett Berson:

On the leadership assessment, two questions pop to mind. Can you give a little brief explainer of what that actually looks like just to give folks a taste of it? Two, when you think about those different dimensions, do you find that it tends to be quite deeply encoded in people and thus 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?

Russ Laraway:

Yeah. I'll take that second part first, which is people can definitely develop the instincts/skills over time, almost everybody. In fact, I'd say with very few exceptions. This is a really important point to me. There are a couple of myths out there about management that I can't stand. One is the natural leader. That's not a real person. I understand what people think a natural leader is. Maybe it was the kid who was the one shouting orders on the playground or maybe it's a person that's likable.

Brett Berson:

Charisma, I think, is a really interesting trap in many ways when you get into leadership and management.

Russ Laraway:

You stole my thunder. It was my second and related myth, which is the value of charisma. We can be adults and say, "Maybe someone who's a little charismatic, enjoys a little advantage on day one 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 likable and charismatic." The successful managers that I've seen though, they brush and floss. The charisma people, they're the teeth whiteners. The successful managers brush and floss. They are the people who do the little things every day that lead to the employee being more successful. This is 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. 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.

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, 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, those behaviors are trainable. Now, they tend to be hard for people to intuit or deduce because most people aren't going through a rigorous process by which they uncover those behaviors, but everybody can learn. That's why, actually it's a great question, Brett. That's why if we're interviewing a very junior manager, we're more risk-loving because we know they're going to know less. 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 groupthink, but we also can't have a salmon swimming upstream, because the blast radius on a senior person is so substantial.

We've all seen it. I think everyone's seen it. We brought in a senior person, they weren't a fit, we had to clean it up for months after that person was gone. That's how I think about it, but I'm still convinced anybody can become a really good manager because it's just brushing and flossing, it's practice. Back to the first part of the question, can you give us a flavor? I could read to you a couple of the questions. One of the questions that we ask, I'm going to try to pick a good one here for you. Here's one, walk me through the most significant change you've made as a manager in response to feedback you've received about your leadership. Then, we've carefully defined a weak answer, a meet standard answer and an exceed standard answer. The reason why we ask this question is because responding to your team's ideas and concerns, it turns out that asking for feedback from your team, specifically inviting challenge to whatever's happening on the team, inviting criticism, let's say, it turns out 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. If you have a manager who doesn't go out of their way to make sure everybody's heard, people is going to be less engaged, they want to have some skin in the game. 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 course, 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 people on the team. That's just an example and that's an interview question that directly ties back to a leadership behavior we know strongly correlates with high employee engagement.

Brett Berson:

I guess building on there, it might be a good time to jump into the most important behaviors that you've learned through this work and talk through them.

Russ Laraway:

I just mentioned probably the second most important behavior. The first one is, we'll ask the employee some version of a question. How often does your manager give you specific praise for good work? That question is actually worded quite carefully. Specific is actually a really important modifier. 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. 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 helps someone know what to repeat and that's the high leverage idea behind praise.

If I may tell a fun story, I was a little league coach and I was impelled to go to a seminar by the Positive Coaching Alliance. I had to go because basically a lot of the parents that get involved in youth coaching, they don't always behave well. That's pretty well-documented. The most important thing that I learned that day, the Positive Coaching Alliance, they prescribe 5:1 praise criticism. They're really careful to say, "It's not 5 to 0, everyone gets a trophy," and they're also careful to say, "It's also not infinity to one, it's just 5:1. I thought about this in a work context, and it occurred to me we're not walking around firing everybody all the time, which means people are doing quite a bit more well than they're doing poorly. That just almost has to be the case.

Carrying on with the season, we had a young team in that division, our kids were amazing. My coaching partner, I coached with him a bunch, his name was Drew, we did something called The Book that put this into practice. What I did was I wrote down 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. Fielding a ground ball is a rather technical process 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.

We had to be able to praise the kids well, we had to be able to say those things. What I loved about the way you fielded that ground ball was the way you center your stance and didn't just reach for it. This is exactly applicable in the workplace, I feel, and actually, it's the big missed opportunity in coaching. I think a lot of people, when they are reluctant to give praise, it's usually ... well, first of all, it's unconscious usually, but when they're consciously reluctant it's because they don't understand the power of forcing themselves to be able to articulate the team standards or the things that lead to success.

The summary in all that, Brett, is I realized that kids, they're just small people. They're not some mysterious different thing than the rest of us, they're just small. It wasn't the biggest surprise in the world when we uncovered the data and saw that specific praise for good work was the leadership behavior that had the most powerful relationship with engagement. I'm sure a part of that is also inherent in you giving people that kind of coaching is also recognition. 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 a fun finding, if you'd like me to share that, I could share that.

Brett Berson:

Yeah, sounds great.

Russ Laraway:

One of the questions that we ask all the time in a lot of engagement surveys, 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. The question might be worded something like this, "How strongly do you agree with the following statement? I'm strongly considering leaving this company." What we found was that 75% of the time when an employee left, they told us within the last six months they were seriously considering leaving. Sixty-seven percent of the time, when they said they're seriously considering leaving, they did then leave. 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 on whether people would attract.

I think a lot of times people think, "Oh, everybody lies on those surveys." But in this case, they told us, "Maybe one of the scariest things they could tell us, which is yeah, I'm thinking about leaving." We didn't know who said what, you can't do that, you'll lose trust, but we could kind of look at that after someone left and that's how we could understand that that question was predictive. 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. The question is, how much do you agree at the following sentence? My manager cares about me as a human being. I just said that and I actually got chills, I'm sure you did too.

This idea that 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, is a pretty fascinating insight, because think of all the fancy things we try to do to address our "retention problems", 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? I actually think that's a question where thinking about. Over the years, when I used to do the radical Candor stuff, 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 the 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." I put people through an exercise where I had them tell me about a time they got some radical candor or some hard feedback at work. 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?" After they'd say, "Oh, we had a relationship," or, "Oh, 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?" They'd think about it and three words emerged. There's a word cloud over 600 repetitions, but three words jumped to the front, time help success.

The sentence that goes with those is, that person took the time to help me have more success. 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. It seems actually to make a lot of sense that the most persistent idea or 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. It turns out coaching, making sure the team has clear direction, looking out for their careers, in other words, their long-term success, it turns out that those three groupings of behavior act directly on that idea.

Brett Berson:

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

Russ Laraway:

Boy, that's a really good question. I do get some head nods. A couple of things. One is, you might have just been politely saying, "Man, this is so simple," and it is. I am very comfortable that I actually think simple is what is called poor here. I think the world has conspired to confuse the average manager. "Why would I be excited about an approach that does that further?" First, I'm cool with the idea that this is all fairly simple. I think how to do it and the book ends up being fairly prescriptive on some how-tos. I think that's where there's a lot of work to do, but I think this is simple, so why not?

First of all, I think people have become far too focused on all these things that need to be different. 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, I'm in food services, I'm in manufacture. 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 therefore match those contexts. I think that's the exact opposite, like the exact wrong instinct.

The second thing is that we are concerned with a concept of leadership style. 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. We're also too focused on the big, fancy, different things we need to do because we're in this really cool different environment. It perfectly stems from my point about managers being confused. It perfectly stems from the proliferation of content around being great management. In the end, Brett, the head nods are great, but my question right back to the head nodders is, "Well, why aren't you doing this?"

Usually, I think ultimately, two things probably going on there, if I had to guess. One is maybe some of these things seem so simple, how can they matter? 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. If you're not telling people, "These are the behaviors that actually matter. Yeah, this stuff really works," I think they're inclined to ignore it in some capacity or not pay hard enough attention to it.

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 chardonnay and they all feel so smart. This doesn't matter. We've allowed ourselves to fall victim to this culture of grandiosity that, "Leadership is better than management, and therefore, I'm going to look for the complex ideas that make me a leader." We don't even take the time to focus on the things that just make you a good management. By the way, nobody ever applies for a job called leader. The job is manager. We have to restore dignity to the office of the manager. "Do you need to do some of the "leadership" stuff sometime?" Yeah, you do, and it turns out you have to do some of the manager stuff sometime. It turns out the 12 behaviors we uncovered are both, and I just think a lot of times we're just too focused on finding the really complicated cool things that'll help us be better in our super-different environment instead of just focusing on the stuff that works pretty much everywhere.

Brett Berson:

Why does context and environment actually not matter that much? I think it's a really, really interesting point. One would imagine that actually would matter, fast-growing company, Fortune 1000, agriculture company, tech company, engineering team, sales team, one would think that great management or these management behaviors might look different in these contexts. What's the why behind, in many ways, it just doesn't matter in your experience?

Russ Laraway:

I would say that because there's one common ingredient across all those contexts and that's you're leading people, and we're not all that different. Look, if I want to be very cynical, I've been in three major tech companies, each of them absolutely convinced they have the most unique culture. Buddy, I'm telling you they're not that different. One team is a core value of both Twitter and Qualtrics for example. Even in tech, I think we do a lot to allow ourselves to believe these cultures are very, very different and the reality is that actually, if you get underneath the surface, they're not usually that different. Companies hate to hear that, but they're not usually that different. I even am not sure that the degree to which we've convinced ourselves these contexts are different, I'm not even sure they're that different, I think is my point.

Brett Berson:

Russ, on that point, can we talk a little bit about the how-tos? You have a manager, maybe they're two years into their career, you're spending time with him or her and they're like, "Totally get it, totally agree, I want to move in this direction. I really want to be excellent." Are there tips that you have or things that increase the odds that they will change their behavior and move in this direction?

Russ Laraway:

Yeah. For everyone's context, I call them the big three, they're direction, coaching and career. Direction, it's a four-part direction framework going from longest in duration, a company's mission or a team's mission or purpose. Second longest is vision. Third longest is quarterly goals, quarterly targets. Then, the least persistent or least longest-lasting are daily and weekly priorities.

Then coaching, it gets underneath what is performance actually, have you ever just stopped to think what is performance? Then, coaching people to either continue or improve. Then, last is career. Career is, that's my own career conversations model. It's a really different way to engage people in their long-term career. The basic idea is the slingshot, gravity assist idea. If you've ever seen a space movie, the mission goes awry, they're low on fuel, but they've got to go farther into the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and so what do they do? Well, they do a slingshot, a gravity-assist slingshot, where they use a planet's gravity to slingshot them out to the far reaches and have success on their mission.

The idea is that the mistake managers make because they think about that person sitting across from them as an employee only with them for a very small period. Two years, three years, can vary a bit, but instead of thinking about this person who's on a much longer trajectory before they got to you manager and long after you're gone, and part of your job is explicitly to be that gravity-assist that helps slingshot them out into the far reaches of their, not galaxy in this case, but career. That's high-level on each.

The model that I installed that is pretty robust is called select-teach-assess-coach, STAC. We're going to stack up a bunch of great managers. I think if a company doesn't do all four of these, I don't think they should expect their managers to get better. I think, as we go through this, you'll see the pieces where managers, if managers pay attention to specific parts, they themselves will get better. First is select, you and I already talked about this, selecting four leadership chops rather than say individual contributor capabilities and doing that in a high quality way, we talked about a rubric, we talked about many ways.

Brett Berson:

Russ, one quick question on that that just came to mind. Do you often find that an exceptional manager could have been a mediocre performer in an IC capacity or no, meaning very simple example would be of a sales manager, he or she has a group of seven reps that sits underneath them. Does it not matter how exceptional that person was at being an IC salesperson?

Russ Laraway:

I won't quite say doesn't matter, but I'm telling you, you're talking to a guy who, because of a few actual learning disabilities, significantly better manager than I would ever be as an individual contributor in any context. By the way, the more senior the management job is, the better I am. Without deep diving too hard on that stuff, I'm exhibit A, where almost any context I'll be a better manager than an individual contributor. By the way, just to use my own experience a little bit more, I was a manager on day one. I was an infantry officer in the Marines. I didn't spend one second as an individual contributor. I would argue given a very acute case of ADHD plus a little bit of an audio processing disorder to pretty substantial learning disabilities actually, I'll argue I might never have been able to fight through individual contributor jobs to ever get a shot at being a manager.

I'm not sure, it's all speculation, but I've thought about it a ton. I'm not going to quite say it won't matter, but I will say this. Let's take those seven reps and STAC rank them by quota attainment. The manager of the team's leaving and that person's boss needs to select a new manager and they want to select from within the team. I'm okay with all this, by the way, I love it. Let's try to promote from within if we can. That person is far more likely than not to pick the person is crushed quota for eight straight quarters, because by the way, for a couple of reasons. First is that's all they got to make their choice. Second is if that quota attainer, the top performer wants the job, if you don't give it to them, they're going to leave, and so it takes a lot of courage, it takes a lot of gumption to, let's say, pick the worst quota attainer and make them the manager.

Because let's say you had the ability to determine, they would, in fact, this doesn't exist, but in fact, be a better manager. I like that you chose sales because look, sometimes, not everybody, sometimes to be great at attaining quota, you're focused on your self-interest. You're helping your customers, but a lot of times the main idea there to become great at achieving quota is just to focus a little bit more on self-interest. I'm going to argue that if you take self-interest into your job as a manager, that is the fastest path to fail. You have to put everything you have into making other people successful specifically to people on your team. We didn't quite get here, but if I'm a guy that's going to go out and say the world is confusing the average manager, I'm also a guy that has to say what's the simplest version of this job?

I came up with a job description that fits whether you're the CEO of IBM or whether you're the running the sandwich line over at Tony Luke's or something. That is, your job is to deliver an aligned results and to enable the success of the people on your teams, both short-term success, being good at their jobs, and long-term success, meaning they're taking care of their careers. If you think about it by the way, direction, coaching and career fit perfectly over top of those, aligned result. The word aligned is doing a ton of work there. The four-part direction framework is all about making certain, and I'm not using that word arbitrarily, making certain that everyone on the team knows exactly what is expected of them in an aligned way. Then, coaching and career are about coaching towards short-term success and working on someone's career is about thinking about helping them have long-term success.

All of that is completely and utterly unselfish, focused on other people. I'm not saying your high quota attainers can't do that. I'm saying they're coming to the table with maybe a little bit of a disposition towards self-interest, whereas being a manager on day one, your interest has to be about literally everybody else. You can't be successful till they are. You can't win until your teammates win, and that's ultimately how we arrived at the title of the book, "When They Win, You Win."

I won't ever say it doesn't matter because maybe the quota attainer hustles and maybe the one who's not attaining quota doesn't. Well, that probably is going to, it's not an activity, but it's an attribute, and that might come in useful as a manager. Maybe the quota attainer is a very, very clear communicator and maybe the one who's not attaining quota isn't. That's probably going to matter, so I won't say that certain attributes might not be correlated from being a successful IC to being a successful manager. What I am saying is the activities. The activities you take on as a manager look nothing like the activities that make you successful as an individual contributor.

Brett Berson:

But it also sounds like, and Russ, feel free to tell me I'm wrong or thinking about this incorrectly, that you're also not saying it's necessary but not sufficient. You're not saying you need to be an exceptional IC and have these other behaviors. What I'm hearing you say is that, in general, it's less important than we would imagine.

Russ Laraway:

Yeah.

Brett Berson:

Broadly.

Russ Laraway:

Yep. That's it.

Brett Berson:

I guess what pops to mind is, I think the reason, aside from what you just said, it's easier to hand the management baton to the top engineer, top salesperson. I also think intuitively, as humans, we have this feeling that we want the direct report needs to admire the competency of the manager. The line cook needs to look at the executive chef and have seen them have an exceptional career as a chef themselves before they're willing to take that person's feedback or coaching or what have you. I assume what you're saying is that that intuition is just wrong. Is that a fair way to think about it?

Russ Laraway:

I won't say wrong. I'll say I think that there is some value in the very short run to what you're describing. The person who gets selected to be the manager, if they are admired on day one after having done zero leadership stuff because they were such a strong individual contributor, there's some benefit to that. There just is. The team will feel just a bit more settled with the change perhaps. I think the more important point is that, what happens from day two through 180+ is what will determine the team's success, will determine whether the team sticks around and that initial ephemeral bump of admiration that came because they were the top individual contributor has virtually no explanatory power even probably two weeks in. Maybe, let's call it, 30 days in, you're no longer benefiting from that initial shine. Now, you have to do the activities, you have to do the stuff that makes people successful.

By the way, you may not know every single way to coach somebody to be a great rep. This is one of the things I want to set all managers free. You don't need to have every answer, you just need to know where to go find them. Believe me, there are people all around that can help with coaching a specific person on a specific set of skills. I promise you, even if you took the top individual contributor, they themselves need to do the exact same thing. They can't and won't ever have all the answers and they don't have to. They just need to know it's their job to go find them and then know where to go get them.

I don't want to be hyperbolic about this stuff. I just think it's a big ego thing. We think that that very short run admiration, I love that word, admiration, because he was one of the top performers on the team. There might even be the sense around that they deserved it. There's all these things that might contribute to this short-term, good feeling on the team because we picked the top individual contributor. I'm saying it's possible to know or to at least get close to knowing that they wouldn't be the best choice for manager, and when that happens, we should make the choice for the person we think will be the best manager because they have the best leadership instincts or leadership chops.

Brett Berson:

Okay. I took us down this path, I appreciated that thinking. I want to rotate back to where you were a few minutes ago as we were talking about the how-tos, how to operationalize these behaviors as a manager and maybe you could kind of pick up that thread if you remember where we left off.

Russ Laraway:

I do, yeah. I was talking about STAC. We're going to STAC up a bunch of great managers, and STAC stands for select-teach-assess-coach. We've already talked about selection, now, Brett, we've talked about it a lot. Then, the second is teach. The summary message I want to make here is, a lot of companies know they should teach their leadership standard. I've already mentioned throughout the podcast that we should hold what we're teaching and selecting for, by the way, same standard. We should hold that to measurable account and we should teach those things. That's the obvious part.

The less obvious part is, we should fight hell to keep out all the other nonsense that everybody else wants to drop in. Because guess what we're doing? We're distracting managers, we're giving them more things to pay attention to. By the way, they have real jobs. They're trying to lead their teams and deliver a quarter in most cases or a product or whatever it is, and so let's have the discipline to say we have a simple system that gets us 90% there or maybe more, maybe less, but something like that, and we're going to be very careful about what other things we allow to be taught to our managers because it just takes time and we should expect a high return on that time every single time.

The reason I say is because, again, leadership stuff, highly-susceptible, flavor-of-the-month from the executive, like, "Oh, I love situational leadership." I'm not picking on situational leadership, it's high quality stuff, but suddenly, CEO loves that, and so that's what we're doing, and now we've given the managers a new thing to focus on that may or may not deliver more engaged employees and better business results. That's select-teach.

The most important one though is assess. I talked about this a bit earlier, this is something that I mentioned called the manager effectiveness score, where we ask employees only if their managers are demonstrating the behaviors that we know work, the same behaviors we selected for, the same behaviors that we taught, now every quarter, we're going to ask employees if they're seeing these behaviors from their managers. Look, when people go to training, a very small number of people are capable of a very small number of behavior changes coming out of that. We all know that. We know it about ourselves, we know it about others. If you're just selecting and teaching, your managers won't get better, I promise. If you as a manager got selected and got taught, you're probably not going to get better. You're probably just going to revert back to old habits or get distracted by some fancy new set of ideas.

You have to assess your managers and you have to give them the results. Then, once you see that managers have gaps, which they always do, then you coach them, select-teach-assess-coach. Coach them to close the gaps. It turns out select-teach-assess are real easy to scale. Coaching is significantly more difficult to scale, but it needs to be scaled nonetheless. That's how you can do this at scale. If you're a manager trying to get better, you should go to your training, you should ask for and want to be assessed by your employees by your employees. They're the ones doing the real work, the ones we're fighting to attract, develop and retain. They're the ones who see you for real every day as a leader. Then, be open to the coaching when your employees, people on your team tell you there's gaps. Then, you repeat that. When person goes into a manager job, you select, so that's a one-time thing. Teach one time, assess quarterly, coach very regularly around what was the gaps that the assessment showed. That's how you do it.

Brett Berson:

At the manager level, you touched on this a little bit, but when you think about the key behaviors of specific feedback, soliciting, giving specific positive feedback, soliciting feedback, and this idea of my manager cares about me as a human being, are there any rituals or tools that you might be able to share at the manager level that he or she can start working on on their own in these three buckets?

Russ Laraway:

Yeah. Actually, I love that. Actually, just for fun in the book, I have a little section at the end called "Where to Start" and I offer three ideas, one in direction, one in coaching and one in career. I'll choose direction in this case because it's that one that I think most people just, they feel like, "Oh, I got this. Everybody knows what's expected of me." I've run teams through exercises, we do a bunch of training and they don't. They Usually don't. It's usually shocking to people. If I take a contiguous team and put them through a exercise, for example, to develop the team's vision, 3-year vision or 5-year vision, they usually walk out of their alarm, the gap between how much they thought the team was on the same page versus how much they actually were.

But I actually want to focus on a different ritual. I want to pull from Agile and I want to talk about the standup meeting. Let me remind folks that there's a four-part direction framework, purpose being the longest lasting, it barely changes, and that's, for me, synonymous with mission. Then there's vision, which doesn't usually last as long, that usually has a deadline and it's usually measurable or binary. You can tell whether you've achieved your vision or not. Then, there's quarterly goals, which OKRs I think are great as described in the book, "Measure What Matters." Then, there's this last piece in the book I call, "Ruthless Prioritization." Prioritization or priorities is a word that is misused almost as much in tech as the word strategic. I can't decide which of those two words is misused more. I say this about priorities because people say their task list is their priorities wrong.

Prioritization is an exercise in subtraction, not an exercise in addition. If you have more than three priorities for a day, you have none. That's not focused, that's not prioritization, that's a task list. Then also, I've chosen to define priorities as weekly or daily expressions of work. Now, are quarterly goals priorities? Yes, they are, and we have a word for that, it's called OKRs. Is our vision a priority? Yes, it is, and we have a word for it. It's called vision. Is achieving our purpose every day a priority? Yes it is. And we have a word for that, it's called purpose. I just went in and took the word priority to help it get misused less, and I went ahead and said, "Let's use that. Let's make that daily and weekly expressions of work."

Now, purpose, vision, quarterly goals, priorities, there's a through line, they're all connected, they are all related. There is a parent-child relationship among all of those. As you get into organizations and you have two different, you've got the company purpose then you've got your boss' purpose and then you've got your team's purpose and then maybe's another team's purpose, all these things are linked up and down. There should be a relationship between quarterly goals and your long-term vision. There should be, period.

Following that through, your daily and weekly expressions of work or your priorities should be a function of your quarterly goals, your OKRs. By the way, nearly exclusively. Best you can. Things change, but I'm trying to give a bit of a clear prescription. It turns out that the act of prioritization, which is selecting the most important things to work on that day or that week in support of your quarterly goals. It turns out that act is a very prefrontal cortex intensive act. It's hard for our little tiny neonatal cortex, so we avoid it. We just do. By the way, I am drawing from Brain at Work by David Rock, and if you think I'm just making up stuff about the brain, I'm not. You can just go check this book out and summarize this stuff incredibly well.

Actually, he came up with this saying, as a result, "You have to prioritize prioritizing," because often left to their own devices, most people won't do this. You should be prioritizing going into each week. I'm A big Sunday night prioritizer and then I also will do a refresh each day, and it doesn't take me very long. The reason I like the standup meeting, and I like it a lot as a Monday morning practice. Again, I'm not just talking about [inaudible 00:50:07], I'm talking about all the functions.

[inaudible 00:50:10], Monday morning might look more like 11:00 AM but I like it because what we've done now as a leader is we forced each person to articulate what their priorities are for the week. Again, let's have the rule, no arms race. The second Tommy over there does four instead of three. Then guess what, Sheila, she's like, "I got to have five, if he has four." The next thing you know, Fred over there is doing seven, so he beats them all. Let's just keep it to three. There might be other things people are working on, but this isn't about the visibility of your work, this is about doing the hard thinking about what is the most important thing I need to get done today and this week to support my quarterly goals. I don't care as much about the review of the past stuff, I just don't think there's a lot of leverage there, although I know a lot of people like that. It's fine. Some people want it for recognition and to just check on folks. All that stuff's fine, up to you.

The leverage here is in forcing yourself and your folks. By the way, leadership by example never goes out of style, so you should be manager, the first one to talk about your priorities for the day or week. If you're expecting this of your team, you've got to do it yourself. I think, we start to get a ton of leverage and help people think very critically about the most important things they should do at any moment in time. That's a place I would start is just get a standup meeting. If you don't how to do a standup, I think Googling how to do a standup meeting, you'll have like 90% of it in under five minutes. It's not that hard.

I wanted people to understand why I think it's such a powerful thing to do. Ask the question, which quarterly goal does that work stream support? If you keep finding that the work that should be done isn't reflected in quarterly goals, then we just got to rethink how we're doing our quarterly goals or get them right the next time. None of this is catastrophic, but let's realize those should always be linked. Our goals and our work, the goals we set for a quarter and the work we do every day should be linked every time, literally every time, and if they're not, there's a process breakdown somewhere.

Brett Berson:

In terms of getting better at giving specific positive feedback, any advice there other than just do it?

Russ Laraway:

It is mindset. It's deciding it's important. It's committing to trying to do it much more frequently. Then, you have to pay attention. People, when they get ready to give hard feedback, they do a lot of preparing. They maybe write a script, they maybe do a rehearsal with a friend, there's a lot of work that goes into that because, well, we all know why. Think about on average how much work people put into a praise, they don't put any. They walk up, they say, "Good job", and then they walk away. Think about it from the other perspective. Have you ever been recognized by your boss, your boss' boss, or maybe a rockstar executive, and they said some nice words, but you walked away feeling that they really didn't quite know what you do or what you did, and they think they're doing it right. "I told people great job, and woo, I'm just knocking it out of the park."

Then, you walk away like, "Boy, does anybody here know what I actually do?" Do you want to be that? Do you want to be that manager? Do you want to be the person that your team isn't really even sure you know what they're doing? Well, one shorter way to be that person is not to recognize them in specific and sincere terms. That's Kim Scott's language, but specific and sincere, that's her phrase. You are now forcing yourself to be very clear about the combination of what was expected and what was delivered. What was expected usually is defined by our quarterly goals or our daily and weekly priorities, expressions of work, daily and weekly expressions of work, that's what was expected versus what was delivered, how it was delivered, the behaviors we expect. You're holding yourself as a leader to a much higher standard when you praise in specific terms, because to do that in specific terms, you have to reflect the standards. Now, you are not a person in any way, shape or form at risk of seeming like you don't know what your team's doing.

By the way, it scales beautifully. If you're a very senior person and you think it's important to recognize some junior people, let's say, two or three levels down, you're going to have a process where you make sure that you know exactly what was done and why it mattered and then you're going to give good specific and sincere praise to those people, and you're going to continue to not be the person who looks out of touch with their team. By the way, this is one of the most serious illnesses among senior people. They think, because they're senior, they walk up, they say some nice words, they give "Attaboy or attagirl," and pat them on the back and they walk away and they think that's sufficient. It feels good at first to those employees. It does.

You were there, you took a little time, said some nice stuff, but then it's fairly inevitable, the employees will wonder if you really know what they're doing. You don't want to be the person that seems out of touch. It doesn't ultimately lead to a fully engaged team. That's how maybe I'd ask people to get going. By the way, that's the second Where to Start is to start praising people actually. You decoded the book or just remembered when you read it, but it's absolutely the second one that I recommend after the direction one of standup meetings.

Brett Berson:

To wrap things up, I'm curious, as you've gone from following your own curiosity and instincts around management to this much more quantitative and rigorous approach to get to what great looks like and what's important in management. Have there been moments along the way as you've gone deeper and deeper that have surprised you the most?

Russ Laraway:

Yeah, there have. One thing I should probably say is, the book isn't a research paper. I am a 28-year operating manager, like 15 in tech at Google and Twitter and Qualtrics and now at Good Water Capital. I use a lot of my experience to tell stories and to illustrate points. I was a marine officer at the very beginning of my career. There's a lot of anecdotal stuff that I do bring to bare. But, as I've said a bunch of times, if I hadn't developed the evidence, I wouldn't have written the book. Anecdotal is opinion, and like I said in the beginning, I don't think we need another person's opinion. I just want to make sure that folks, anybody listening understands, I didn't write a research paper. It's actually mostly prose and stories and fun stuff with the evidence backing up a bunch of the thinking.

Anyway, that aside, to answer your question, the first thing is the notion that there might be a leadership formula. That was pretty big idea for me to wrap my head around. I've had success as a manager. I don't want to sound braggy, but it's just important context. I'd won an award at Google for being a great manager and that's a pretty big deal there. If you would've told me five years ago, actually ... actually, the first book I pitched was five years ago and I got told to go pound sand. If you would've told me that there might be an actual leadership formula out there, I would've told you you were nuts.

Brett Berson:

Maybe we could wrap up by having you share who's one of the best managers that you've ever reported to and maybe what was the story behind that person. Is there a thing that they did or a moment that stood out to you that makes you recognize why they were so impactful for you?

Russ Laraway:

The best manager I've ever had, I've had some good ones, I've had some bad ones, and the best manager I've ever had is Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor. She did a lot of interesting things. She loved to tinker, she was always trying something new and I really appreciated that. But there's this one thing she did and she, to this day, she's done better than every manager I've ever had, and that is she was great at pulling out of us what we really think.

Remember this behavior of soliciting feedback in a way that invites criticism to the way things are or invites a challenge to the current state. The first thing she did, she took over this group at Google before I got there. It wasn't doing so hot, and so she took it over and she started to refresh the management team first. She brought in Russ, the ex-Marine, Tom, the ex-fighter pilot, Scott Scheffer, the ex-McKinzie consultant. She brought in people with a perspective or who were capable of developing diverse perspectives.

The culture there between the four of us was dialectic, not debate because none of us was ever trying to win, but we brought a set of diverse perspectives. This is why I learned to value that and I mean that in every way, diverse perspectives, and we engage in a culture of dialectic, which brought us to the best answers. Not Scott's answer, not Tom's, not mine or Kim's, but the best answer the four of us could come up with collectively. Like I always say, from my employees, I want the version of things that they go home and say to their spouse or to their partner. Like "You won't believe what happened at work today." That's the version I want to get and it takes a lot of work to get your employees to trust you to do that, but it's doable. That's the environment where the ideas are flowing and people aren't nervous about your sort of seniority over them and the power that that implies.

She assaulted the power differential that existed between her and us to get herself as close to appear with us even though she had managerial responsibility. She's ultimately responsible for everything the organization did or failed to do. None of us was confused, but she recognized the best way to get the best results was to tap into the collective wisdom of the team. To do that, she assaulted that power differential. But as if that weren't all enough, Brett, to this day, 15 years later, she remains squarely in my corner and she's my head trainer in my corner. She's the first one I see when the round ends and the bell rings. IN everything I'm teaching, service of your team, long-term relationships, thinking about careers not just in the little tiny window where someone reports to you, in so many ways, Kim does all that stuff even if I overlay the thinking in the book on top of Kim, she spikes pretty hard across all 300 pages. Yeah, it's Kim.

Brett Berson:

Great, great place to end. Russ, thanks as always. It was a blast having you on.

Russ Laraway:

Yeah, thank you very much for having me again. Anytime you need me to come on, just power and I'll be there.

Brett Berson:

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