David Cummings on Startups

Category: Leadership

  • Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

    Christina Wodtke recently published a great book called Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results. As expected, the author takes the reader through a fable of a young startup that is ambling along making progress in certain areas while struggling with alignment and focus. After a mentor introduces OKRs to the team, they are slowly infused into the organization and the company takes off.

    Here’s how the author describes the system:

    1. Set inspiring and measurable goals.
    2. Make sure you and your team are always making progress toward that desired end state no matter how many other things are on your plate.
    3. Set a cadence that makes sure the group both remembers what they are trying to accomplish and holds each other accountable.

    While it sounds simple in theory, in practice it takes a good deal of time and discipline. I’m a proponent of setting goals and using a system to help manage the goal process.

    What else? What are some more thoughts on the book Radical Focus and the idea of goals based on OKRs?

  • Simplified One Page Strategic Plan for Every Team

    While the Simplified One Page Strategic Plan is great for the entire company, it’s also a tremendous leadership tool for departments and teams. In fact, every team should have one. The strategic plan has purpose, values, goals, metrics, and projects — everything you’d expect from a team that’s aligned and high functioning.

    Here are a few thoughts on one simple one page strategic plan per team:

    • Make it simple and use a Google Doc for each team that’s copied quarterly
    • Develop a coaching and mentoring process where senior managers spend time each quarter helping other managers refine their strategic plan
    • Include the team when building out the plan and get buy-in throughout the process
    • Keep it a living strategic plan that’s referenced and updated weekly (e.g. the metrics and project progress should be kept current)

    Every team should have a plan yet most startups struggle with this. Start with the simplified one page strategic plan and ensure everyone is aligned. 

    What else? What are some more thoughts on every team having a simplified one page strategic plan?

  • Traction: Visionary and Integrator Leaders are Required

    Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business has a chapter titled The People Component. In it, the author Gino Wickman, talks about the Visionary and Integrator role. Here’s how he describes them:

    Integrators (pg. 92)

    The integrator is the person who harmoniously integrates the major functions of the business. When those major functions are strong and you have strong people accountable for each, great healthy friction and tension will occur between them. The integrator blends that friction into greater energy for the company as a whole.

    Visionaries (pg. 94)

    The visionary typically has 10 new ideas a week. Nine of them might not be so great, but one usually is, and it’s that one idea each week that keeps the organization growing. For this reason, visionaries are invaluable. They’re typically very creative. They’re great solvers of big ugly problems, and fantastic with important clients, vendors, suppliers, and banking relationships. The culture of the organization is very important to them, because they usually operate more on emotion and therefore have a better barometer of how people are feeling.

    Put another way, entrepreneurs need to know that they aren’t expected to be both the visionary and the integrator. The strongest leadership teams have both a visionary leader and an integrator leader, and they need to work well together.

    What else? What are some more thoughts on visionary and integrator leaders?

  • An Accountability Hack for Teams

    Following up with yesterday’s post 6 Steps to Build a Culture of Accountability, and the common response that it requires too much effort, there’s a simple accountability hack team managers should employ: run the weekly team meeting with a Google Sheet or project management system like Trello, Basecamp, or Asana. I know one entrepreneur that runs each leadership meeting with Asana open, every key project on display, and a general “Management” project where any action items that come up from the meeting are recorded as tasks. This level of accountability seems so simple yet few managers do it.

    As a starting point, make a Google Worksheet with two sheets:

    • Projects
      • Name
      • Description
      • Owner
      • Status
      • Done? Y/N
      • Due Date
    • Action Items
      • Name
      • Owner
      • Done? Y/N

    The “Done? Y/N” columns in each sheet make it easy to sort that column alphabetically and see what’s open and what’s complete.

    Managers would do well to follow this simple accountability hack and do a better job of holding each team member accountable. Remember the old adage: what gets measured gets done.

    What else? What are some more thoughts on this simple accountability hack for teams?

  • 6 Steps to Build a Culture of Accountability

    One of the challenges most entrepreneurs face is building a culture of accountability. As much as we want everyone to own their results, most employees can’t answer the three basic questions (who’s my boss, what’s my job, how do I know if I’m doing well). After many years of trial and error, here are the six steps I’ve learned to build a culture of accountability:

    1. Start by answering the three basic questions for every employee
    2. Decide on 3-5 operational metrics with goals that each employee owns and reports on weekly (e.g. story points, calls made, appointments set, marketing qualified leads generated, customer satisfaction scores, billable hours, revenue, etc.)
    3. Review the employee’s day-to-day/week-to-week work at a daily check-in or weekly team meeting along with their metrics
    4. Provide a central system (like a Google Sheet KPIs Dashboard) for each department with everyone’s metrics so that there is peer accountability and visibility
    5. Analyze the personal goals on a quarterly basis as part of the quarterly check-ins
    6. Tie everything together with the Simplified One Page Strategic Plan and help each employee understand how their goals align to the company’s goals

    While this process seems straightforward, very few entrepreneurs actually implement this type of system. Why? It’s requires a tremendous amount of ongoing leadership and management, and most entrepreneurs don’t understand the value. The next time an entrepreneur expresses interest in growing faster and scaling more efficiently, ask them about their existing culture of accountability.

    What else? What are some more thoughts on these six steps to build a culture of accountability?

  • Balance Quantity Metrics with Quality Metrics

    As a follow-up to 2 Metrics Startups Need to Start Tracking, the idea of measuring employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction fits in well with a section from Andy Grove’s book High Output Management. In the book he says:

    Indicators tend to direct your attention toward what they are monitoring…So because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured.

    The idea is that if there’s too much emphasis on purely quantitative metrics then people will optimize for that and hurt quality. Intuitively, this makes sense as we’ve all seen when the push for one thing reduces the quality of another (e.g. focusing exclusively on signing a large number of customers only to find that some didn’t meet the ideal customer profile and churned quickly).

    Whenever designing goals and their corresponding metrics, always keep in mind the balance between quantity and quality, and find pairing indicators.

    What else? What are some more thoughts on the idea of balancing quantity metrics with quality metrics?

  • Develop a Meeting Rhythm

    At Pardot, we worked hard to develop a consistent meeting rhythm. As the business grew, communication and alignment became harder and harder. The effort necessary to get everyone on the same page at 50 employees was significantly more than when we were 5 employees. As such, we were constantly testing out the frequency and types of meetings.

    Here’s the meeting rhythm we used:

    • Daily Check-in – We held a 10 minute scrum every morning at 9:30am where we answered the following questions: what did you accomplish yesterday, what are you going to do today, and do you have any roadblocks.
    • Weekly Leadership Meeting – We reviewed the weekly KPIs from the prior week and talked about key topics in the business that could be addressed in 15 minutes or less. Topics requiring more than 15 minutes were tabled for the monthly strategy dinner.
    • Weekly All-Hands Meeting – Every Monday 30 minutes before lunch we’d have an all-hands meeting with everyone in the company (people working remotely would join via a Google Hangout) and talk about anything of note from the prior week. The meeting would be followed immediately by a catered lunch for everyone.
    • Monthly Strategy Dinner – Each month the leadership team met at a different private restaurant room for three hours and made decision about big topics as well as talked through issues that were put on the parking lot at the weekly leadership meeting.
    • Quarterly One Page Strategic Plan Off-site – Each quarter we’d take a day off-site and put the simplified one page strategic plan together for the next quarter.
    • Quarterly Celebration – Each quarter we got out of the office and celebrated as a team (e.g. a baseball game, picnic, etc).

    While this meeting rhythm kept us getting together for different reasons at a fairly frequent pace, it didn’t feel overwhelming and was incredibly effective for growing the business. Meeting rhythms vary from company to company and I recommend being intentional about the frequency and types of meetings.

    What else? What are some more thoughts on developing a meeting rhythm?

  • Example Simplified One Page Strategic Plan

    Clay brought up a great point that with all this talk about the Simplified One Page Strategic Plan, it’d be great to see an example.

    Here’s an example Simplified One Page Strategic Plan for the Atlanta Tech Village.

    Purpose

    • To support and inspire Atlanta entrepreneurs to achieve success through a community that promotes faster connections between talent, ideas and capital.

    Core Values

    Market

    • Ambitious Atlanta-based tech entrepreneurs with 1 – 25 employees

    Brand Promise

    • The Atlanta Tech Village increases an entrepreneur’s chance of success.

    Elevator Pitch

    • The Atlanta Tech Village is a community of innovation powered by a 103,000 square foot building. The Village is designed for technology and technology-related companies that have a unique set of needs in their quest to change the world. Your workspace should be more than just a desk and a place to hang your hat — it should bring the community together, promote serendipitous interactions, and be a powerful tool for recruiting the best talent.

    3 Year Target

    • Create 1,000 new high tech jobs by way of startups housed or previously housed at the Atlanta Tech Village

    Annual Goals

    • Jobs Created
    • Recognized Revenue
    • Net Operating Income
    • Customer Satisfaction Score (NPS)

    Quarterly Goals

    • Renewal Rate
    • Member Revenue
    • Event Revenue
    • Parking Revenue

    Quarterly Priority Projects

    • Install new parking deck lighting
    • Install rooftop patio shading system
    • Launch a new event series

    For the annual and quarterly goals, there would be a table with four columns: goal name, start value (e.g. $0), current value (e.g. $150,000), and target value (e.g. $1,000,000) as every goal should be SMART. Everything else should be pretty straightforward.

    The Simplified One Page Strategic Plan is my favorite business worksheet as it brings together vision, accountability, and alignment at the highest level for everyone in the company. I’d highly recommend it (Google Doc Template).

    What else? What are some more thoughts on this example simplified one page strategic plan?

  • Revising the Simplified One Page Strategic Plan

    After publishing the original Simplified One Page Strategic Plan (OPSP) over four years ago, I’ve met and worked with dozens of entrepreneurs that use it (see Requiring a OPSP Prior to Meeting). Based on these meetings, and on-going feedback from entrepreneurs that have incorporated it into the day-to-day running of their companies, it’s time to freshen it up.

    Here are the changes:

    • Removed S.W.O.T. Analysis – This section didn’t resonate with entrepreneurs as it wasn’t as relevant to all levels of the business (it’s a good senior management team exercise but not necessary company-wide).
    • Added a Current Value to Goal Metrics – Instead of having Goal Value and Baseline Value, having Start Value, Current Value, and Target Value is more understandable and makes it more of a living document that should be visited weekly/monthly now that it has a slot to track the Current Value.
    • Moved the Goals and Priority Projects to the Bottom – Most of the OPSP is static text that doesn’t change often (e.g. the core values and purpose). By moving the goals and priority projects to the bottom, the top part is fixed and the bottom part is dynamic.

    Take a look at the new Google Doc Template and try out the revised Simplified One Page Strategic Plan — I think you’ll like it.

    What else? What are some other areas of the Simplified One Page Strategic Plan that should be revised?

  • John Maxwell’s Five Levels of Leadership

    In yesterday’s video, John Maxwell talks about the leadership ideas from his best-selling book The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential. These are a must-learn for anyone that’s in a leadership role, or aspires to be in a leadership role.

    Here are the five levels of leadership from the book synopsis:

    1. Position – People follow because they have to.
    2. Permission – People follow because they want to.
    3. Production – People follow because of what you have done for the organization.
    4. People Development – People follow because of what you have done for them personally.
    5. Pinnacle – People follow because of who you are and what you represent.

    Read the book, or watch the video, and remember the author’s critical point at the end: know that your leadership level differs from person to person and work to improve the level with each person.

    What else? What are some more thoughts on John Maxwell’s Five Levels of Leadership?