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How to Delegate Decisions – Make Like a Tree

By Matt Hately on February 16, 2022

One of the key factors that determines how far you can scale your business is how effective you are at delegating decisions. The magic lies in figuring out which decisions you need to make, which you can delegate.

The most useful model I’ve encountered is the Tree Model of Decision Making. This is different from a Decision Tree, which you may be familiar with. The Tree Model is in fact an actual tree, while a decision tree is more like a pyramid, and not at all like a tree.

If you think of all the decisions you need to make to run your business, from strategic to tactical to mundane, imagine that they lie somewhere on a tree. For our purposes, we’re going to be even more specific, and imagine that it’s a deciduous tree, else this analogy won’t take root (see what I did there?).

Speaking of roots…

In the roots are the fundamental decisions that decide what shape your company will take. What do we stand for? Who do we want to be? Getting these right makes other decisions easier, plants you on solid footing and gives you a strong foundation on which to grow. These decisions lie with the CEO, the founders, and the board.

In the trunk are the decisions that decide the direction of the company. What products are we developing this year? Who are our customers? What are our key operating priorities? What is our overall operating budget this year? These decisions fundamentally shape the future of the company where it’s headed. Get these wrong, and it takes a long time to right the trunk. These decisions lie with the executive management team, and are typically decided once a year in a strategic offsite (and sometimes revisited every quarter to confirm that that your fundamental assumptions are still correct).

In the branches are the decisions that lie with teams and divisions – marketing, sales, engineering, HR, finance, manufacturing, and so on. Given who we are, and where we are headed, what are the departmental priorities for the year? Where should we focus our marketing spend? What’s our strategy for attracting and retaining key talent? These decisions are typically domain specific, and when they are well executed, contribute to the health of the tree. Unlike a trunk decision, if you get one or two wrong its painful and may require pruning, but the core business remains healthy. Get a lot of them wrong though, and the health of the tree is at stake.

Out in the leaves are the day-to-day decisions, made by individuals, that keep the business healthy and moving in the right direction. If you get a couple of these wrong, the leaf falls off and a new one grows, but you want to have systems in place to make sure, say, half the leaves don’t take leave. Examples of leaf decisions are things like, should we give this customer a refund? What brand of camera should we buy for the social media team? What color should we paint the boardroom? As the CEO, the less involvement you have in these decisions the better, else you quickly become the bottleneck and slow things down. Try to set guidelines and budgets so that individual employees can make smart decisions without having to go through multiple levels of approvals.

I love simple frameworks like these because they give you and your management team a common language. When a decision arises in your weekly management meeting, you can refer to the framework – is this core to the business, and something that needs to be decided by the management team, or can it be delegated to a team or an individual? Straightforward frameworks should help you execute faster and reduce bottlenecks.

Did you find this model useful? Or is there another that your team uses to determine how and when to delegate decisions? Let us know in the comments.

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Effective One-to-One Meetings

By Matt Hately on February 2, 2022

One-to-one meetings (sometimes called a One-on-One, or 1:1 meeting) are a staple in almost every manager’s calendar. They’re a fundamental pillar of effective management, and a key tool for driving performance. I believe it’s one of the most important tools you have at your disposal, and if you could only do one thing to improve your team’s performance, it would be to make better use of your one-to-ones.

From handling difficult conversations, to turning up unprepared, there are a number of pitfalls that managers fall into. So how can you ensure that your one-to-ones are actually effective? How do you get the most out of them?

Here are a few ideas drawn from my own experience as manager, and coaching first-time and experienced leaders alike. But first, what exactly is a one-to-one and why is it important?

What Is a One-to-One Meeting?

A one-to-one meeting is a regular, scheduled meeting between a manager and their direct report. You’ll meet to discuss progress, ongoing priorities, and roadblocks anywhere from 45 minutes to 1 hour at least twice a month, if not every week. It can be intimate and free-flowing, but as a manager you need to make sure you cover a baseline of topics, and are asking the right questions for both you and your direct report to get the most out of the meeting.

It’s also important to remember what a one-to-one is not – it’s not a status meeting. You should have other systems in place, such as team meetings, project tracking, and status emails that tell you the overall status of ongoing projects. A one-to-one is about developing your team and uncovering roadblocks, not getting updates.

Why Are One-to-One Meetings Important?

One-to-one meetings are crucial for effective management because they’re the foundation of regular communication between you and your employee. They provide a space where you can learn about their work, share feedback, and coach them on what’s working well and what’s not. This regular communication is crucial for building trust and addressing any issues that might adversely impact their progress.

One-to-ones are also an opportunity to develop your employee’s career. Employees usually have goals they’re working towards, even if they are not documented in a formal performance review. One-to-one meetings provide space to talk about these goals and support your employee on their path to success.

The outcome of one-to-one meetings is actionable next steps for both parties. You will leave the session with a clear idea of what you need to do to help them progress, and they’ll be more aware of your expectations for their role.

How to Structure Effective One-to-One Meetings

Effective one-to-ones are about creating a space for your team members to give honest feedback on what’s working well, where they’re struggling, and how you can help them perform better in their role.

One of European soccer’s most decorated coaches stated that one-to-one meetings were an integral part of his management style. In his management coaching sessions with Harvard Business school, Sir Alex Ferguson, who won multiple trophies throughout his career, explained how his players benefited from 1:1 meetings – the players thrived knowing they had the ‘coach’s shoulder.’

Having these conversations away from the rest of the team paid dividends for Ferguson’s results on the field. Similarly, engaging with your staff will likely prove equally as fruitful.

Here’s how to ensure your one-to-ones are as effective as possible.

Optimal 1:1 Agenda

When conducting a one-to-one meeting, it’s essential to have a set agenda. Setting an agenda will allow the discussion to flow organically, rather than simply be a status update. Again, if you cycle through the employee’s task list in a one-to-one session, you risk eating up time and failing to identify the real issues, ultimately preventing great results.

The First 5 Minutes

How you start the meeting determines whether you’ll engage in a productive dialogue or whether it will stay at a surface-level.

First, it’s paramount to create a safe environment for your team members, so take care with how you start out the one-to-one – don’t jump into discussing work right away.

Ask about things outside of work. How’s their family? What did they think about the game last night? Do they have any kids? If so, where do they go to school? Life doesn’t start and stop at work, and life outside of work affects how people show up at work.

Good leadership is about showing people they are valued. Ensuring your team feels supported will not only result in a positive work culture but will also encourage them to deliver their best. After all, if your employees feel you’ve got their back, they’ll reciprocate and want to be successful for you and the rest of the team.

Challenges and Roadblocks

Next, ask open-ended questions to understand the key issues that might be impeding their progress. It can be tempting to go into solution mode, but the aim is to prompt the employee to come up with their own answers. You are there to guide and help the staff learn and grow. If they cannot think of any challenges, or are hesitant to bring them up, ask more direct questions such as, “how do you feel about your upcoming deadlines?” or “how are things going with your new hire?”

Current Priorities

This part of the meeting not about getting project updates – it’s about helping your team set priorities. In most businesses, there are more projects and new ideas than there are hours in the day. Even the most disciplined employee can take tangents and get distracted by shiny new ideas. This is your opportunity to talk through their current project list and understand how they set priorities. Some of the best coaching opportunities come from helping your staff align their priorities with those of the business.

Career goals and personal development

Too often managers skip this step, which can leave people feeling like there’s nowhere to grow in the organization, or that you don’t care. Not every meeting needs to talk about career goals (though you should be touching on this at least 4 times a year), but you should be talking about some aspect of their personal development. For example, if they are struggling with having difficult conversations, and have committed to work on it, now’s a great time to follow up – what did they take away from the book you recommended? How did their last difficult conversation go?

The Wrap Up

The final step in a highly effective one-to-one is review the key takeaways and agree on commitments. Ask the employee – “what were your key takeaways from this meeting?” Letting them summarize the meeting, rather than you, is a great way to see if you’re on the same page. Then ask “what are you are actioning from this meeting?” Having someone articulate, in their own words, what they are committing to, often has a very different outcome than you telling them what to do.

Avoid Common Traps

There are a few common pitfalls where one-to-one meetings can go off the rails. Here are four to look out for:

Avoid jumping straight to solutions

You know what people say about when we assume things.

This is your opportunity to understand what makes your staff tick, how they think about their work, and what might be holding them back. Don’t assume you know what they are thinking and feeling, and jump to conclusions about what they need. Ask clarifying questions. Dig deep.

Don’t ignore your high performers because they are “low maintenance”

Another dangerous assumption is thinking your high performers don’t need a regular 1:1 conversation. Every member of the team has blind spots. It’s tempting to focus all your time and energy on employees you feel need the most help or might be underperforming. Remember, it is the strong performers that you’re trying to retain. Don’t let yourself fall into a situation where key players exit the firm due to a lack of engagement from higher management because you labelled them “low maintenance”.

Show up

Be present. One-to-ones only work when you devote your full attention. Silence your phone and close your laptop. Try to use a paper notebook so you’re not tempted to look at your emails and Slack messages. Try not to be thinking of the next thing to say, and try not to dominate the conversation. If you’re talking more than 50% of the time, it’s an at-versation, not a conversation.

Try not to take on their work

Employees who fail to follow through on objectives might try to shift the blame, or shift the responsibility back on you. For example, ‘I haven’t got the answer I need from marketing, can you help?’ The team member is putting the onus on you to fix the issue. Don’t let them put that responsibility on your back.

Teach your team that they are ultimately accountable for the work. If they are not getting the answers they need from other departments, or from clients, it’s on them to follow up relentlessly to get what they need. If you start taking on that responsibility, not only are you teaching them that they have an out, but you will ultimately become the bottleneck as you chase down issues for your team.

Final Thoughts

We hope this article has been enlightening, and you can take something away to improve your 1-on-1’s. Remember, the key to having effective meetings is that you are prepared, focused, and present. It doesn’t have to be perfect the first time. Try this agenda, keep these strategies in mind, and iterate your way to success. The most important thing is to make them a priority.

If you are new to 1:1s, or you feel like you’re not getting the most of the 1:1s you’re having with your team and would like to have a focused coaching session to dive deeper into 1:1s, email me at matthew@spark-insights.com

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Finding and Hiring Great People (Part 3)

By Matt Hately on August 25, 2021

Effective Interviewing (or how to REALLY get to know someone in 60 minutes)

Hiring is a funny thing – no where else in life do you choose a partner for a long-term, co-dependent relationship based on an hour-long conversation. Thankfully, there are some proven tactics you can use to get the best possible sense for how a candidate will behave on the job, however they do require some work up-front and some discipline when it comes to the interview.

Preparing for interviews and planning your questions

70% of your success lies in this step. The goal of preparing interview questions ahead of time is to make sure you compare candidates on equal footing, and to help you stay on track in the interview. Have you ever concluded an interview only to realize that you chatted for 10 minutes about their experience, but had a great 20 minute chat about the NHL playoffs?

To start creating a list of interview questions, dig out the job description you wrote for the posting. Using the preliminary job description as a starting point, list the essential job functions – the 6 to 10 tasks, goals, or projects that the new hire will focus on day-to-day. For example, a few essential job functions for a VP of Sales might be:

Create the yearly sales forecast and break the forecast down into team and individual sales goals
Build the overall sales strategy for the company
Create and maintain sales funnel metrics to track overall progress

Again, you should have somewhere between 6 and 10 essential job functions for a given job.

Now, for each essential function, list out the technical skills and work habits required for each of those functions – 1 or 2 for each function. Technical skills are WHAT a candidate needs to know to do the job, while work habits describe HOW they perform in a job. For example, if you were hiring a social media coordinator, and an essential job function is to update the Instagram account daily, a technical skill would be “digital photography” and a work habit would be “self-organizing”. When you’re done, prioritize the list and you should have around 5 skills and 5 habits that are a must for the role. You’re ready to start crafting your questions.

Behavior-based interview questions

Behavior-based interviewing isn’t my idea – rather it’s the central theme of an excellent booked titled “High Impact Hiring”. In my opinion, behavior-based interviewing is the least error prone and most effective interviewing method for technical managers.

Candidates are savvy – they’ve read the books, been to many interviews, and are locked and loaded for the “what is your biggest weakness” questions. The purpose of behavior-based interviewing is to dig into the candidate’s behavior – how do they behave on the job? Past behavior is an indicator of future behavior. The trick is to dig beyond what they want you to hear and find specific examples of how they handled tasks and situations on previous jobs.

From each job function you should have about five technical skills and work habits. For each of these skills and habits, you need to come up with at least two questions (for a total of around 10) that help you determine if this person meets your criteria. Use open-ended questions rather than closed-ended questions.

Open-ended questions start with: “Give me an example of” or “tell me the story about”. An open-ended question gives the candidate the opportunity to describe behaviors in their own words.

Avoid closed-ended questions such as: “Do you have experience working with Salesforce?” or “Have you ever worked in a fast-paced environment?”. When confronted with a closed-ended question, the candidate will tell you what you want to hear, and nothing more.

Behavior-based interviewing requires that you train the candidate to respond with behavior-based examples. Typically, candidates answer questions with a characteristic, for example, “I’m a good problem solver”. If you dig a little more, they might answer with a general process or testimonial, for example, “In my last job I successfully solved a lot of problems using a problem solving method I learned in school”. Pressed further, they may talk about “what we did at Acme co” (as opposed to “what I did at Acme Co). All of these rely on the candidate’s own view of themselves, or their ability to sell themselves – both completely useless to you. None of these responses tell you “does this person really know what they say they know”.

What you need is a behavior-based description – a story recalling a single event with considerable detail what they did given a certain problem or situation. You can train the candidate by asking them open-ended questions built around a handy acronym – STAR: Situation or Task, Action and Result. For example: “Tell me about a specific time when you used your problem solving skills. Tell me about the Situation or Task, what Action you took, and what the Result was.” Keep digging – ask for more detail and rephrase the question until you find out what the real action and result was.

Beyond behavior-based interviewing, here are a few other tips we’ve picked up to getting the most out of every interview:

Use silence to your advantage. Silence is uncomfortable, but fight the urge to help the candidate along and give them hints about what you’d like to hear; let them know they have time to think and let them formulate the answer.

Interrupt to maintain control: Mom always taught you that interrupting is rude, but in an interview, you have to interrupt from time to time to make sure you get through the full set of questions. If you run out of time with seven questions unanswered, you will have no way of comparing this candidate on an equal, objective footing.

Never answer your own questions: It’s tempting sometimes, especially if the candidate is keen, to give hints or help answer questions. Let the candidate sweat it out if they don’t know the answer. Give them a reasonable amount of time (a minute) to answer and move on to the next question. If they don’t know the answer, it’s not your responsibility to teach them either.

Pressure cooker questions: I like to introduce a question or two that is a little uncomfortable to answer, but will give me some insight into how they work with others. One of my favorites is “what did you and your manager disagree on most often?”. The key is to not let them off the hook. Their first answer will almost always be “nothing, we got along great”, to which your follow up should be “Of course, but there has to be something on which you didn’t see eye to eye”. Their answer can give you interesting insights into how they manage conflict.

The Impossible Question: The Impossible Question is something I borrowed from Microsoft and Joel Spolsky. It’s fallen a little out of favor lately, but I still like it as a way of judging how open-minded someone is, and how they react to challenges. It’s a question the candidate will have no hope of answering correctly, which gives you a strong indication of how they will react to tough problems. An example of an impossible question would be, “how many gas stations are there in Philidelphia?” or “how would you move the Washington Monument to Los Angeles?” A smart candidate will realize you’re not quizzing them on their knowledge, and enthusiastically jump into trying to solve it – these are the people I look for. Others will look at you like you’re crazy, and will need a lot of prompting. An important thing to note is that The Impossible Question is NOT a puzzle or a brainteaser. Brainteasers tell you nothing except whether or not the candidate has heard the puzzle in the past.

Leave time for their questions: One of the most insightful parts of an interview are when you turn it over to the candidate and say “What would you like to know about working here? Ask me anything”. What they ask (and don’t ask) tells you a lot about their values, and about how well they prepared for the interview.

In the next (and final) installment on hiring, I’ll dig into how to decide among candidates, how (and why) to do reference checks, and making the offer. Stay tuned!

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Finding and Hiring Great People (Part 2)

By Matt Hately on June 2, 2021

Screening resumes

If you’re lucky, you’ll receive lots of eligible resumes, but everyone dreads the drudgery of screening resumes. Hopefully, your self-screening tactics have whittled the number of resumes down to dozens, rather than over a hundred, but still, that’s dozens of resumes to read and evaluate. Here are a few tips to make the process a little less painful.

When you’re screening resumes, don’t try to jump straight to a Yes or No on the first pass. You’ll find yourself reading, and re-reading resumes and either throwing out too many or including too many to interview. It’s really hard to tell if someone’s a fit based on the resume. At this stage, you’re just trying to stack-rank them so that you can prioritize your interviews. Instead of a Yes/No, grade them from AA to D:

AA: Wow. Looks like exactly the person you were looking for. E.g., has exactly the right amount of relevant industry experience (you’ll probably only have a few of these)
A: Relevant experience, at the right level of responsibility; no red flags
B: Some experience, but maybe a little more junior than you were looking for or not quite the scope of experience
C: Has some of the right experience, but there are some red flags, like jumping from job to job, resume typos
D: Not enough experience, the wrong kind of experience, or a poorly written resume

If you don’t have a resume-tracking tool or hiring portal, an easy way to manage the process and keep them organized is to put all the resumes in a folder, and rename the file leading with your ranking. For example, “B_JohnDoeResume”. You can add a suffix to keep track of where they are in the process, e.g. “B_JohnDoeResume_screened”.

Trust your gut. Don’t overthink it, or you’ll be at it for days. Only go back and do a second pass if you find yourself putting everyone in the B category, or if you end up with more than a few AAs and As.
Hopefully you have 2-3 AAs, and something like 5-7 As. Set up a screening interview with these candidates first. If you eliminate too many in the screening process, you can always move on to the more promising B candidates, but chances are your final candidate is somewhere in this initial list.

The screening interview

You can save yourself a considerable amount of time by screening candidates by phone before conducting face-to-face interviews. There’s nothing worse than spending an hour or more in an in-person interview only to find out they can’t move to your location, don’t really have the experience they are touting, or aren’t interested in working on your product. Phone interviews should be no more than 20 minutes, and should mostly be focused on verifying the facts on the resume – current position, current responsibilities, basic contact information, location preferences, willingness to relocate, and salary expectations. Take a few minutes to ask them about their current role and responsibilities. There’s no need to go too deep here, rather, try to get a sense of whether they are embellishing on their resume, or if they do really have the level of responsibility they are stating in the resume.

The screening interview also gives you the opportunity to gauge their communication skills, both in the process of setting up the phone call, and the call itself. How quickly did they respond to your email requesting a phone call? Was their response succinct and well written?

Incorporate one question that helps you determine if they have the single most important technical skill for the role. For example, if you’re hiring software developers, it might be a question to determine if they really understand OO programming. If you’re hiring automotive technicians, it might be a question about how they’d diagnose a tricky non-start condition on a specific make/model.

Next week we’re going to dive into the interview – how to prepare questions, how to really dig if you’re not getting the right level of detail from a candidate, and dos & don’ts for the interview itself.

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Finding and hiring great people (Part 1)

By Matt Hately on May 25, 2021

As I write this, we’re in what we hope to be the tail end of the pandemic. Businesses are reopening and hiring (or if you’re in certain industries like Powersports, you’re having a record year). Several of my clients have asked me to either help them hire for a key position, or to help coach and train their team on effective interviewing and hiring. Over the years, and over countless hires (and even more interviews), I’ve tried to refine my hiring process to make it more repeatable and less error prone. Hopefully, you too are hiring, and this process can help you make your next hire a little easier. Here’s Part One – laying the groundwork and creating your job posting.

The groundwork – writing the job description and the posting

The key to successful hiring starts with a solid job description. Not only will it help you write a posting that attracts the right candidates, but it will help you build your interview questions. The job description needs to include:

Title
Primary tasks and duties
Responsibilities and authority
Reporting relationships (who will their manager be?)
Qualifications and characteristics (what skills and personality traits do you need for this role?)
Desired experience
Organization level (Jr., Intermediate, Manager?)
Education requirements
Salary range

These bullet points give you all the information you need to write your job posting, but describing the job is table stakes. Despite what the media may tell you, qualified talent is scarce. Your job posting needs to stand out. Don’t be dry. Let the personality of your company come through. Tell applicants why you’re a great place to work, and what to expect from the culture.

Let your candidates help you screen the resumes

Screening resumes is a drag. With any luck, you’ll get dozens or hundreds of applicants, and trying to whittle that down to 5 or 6 people you want to interview can be really time consuming. Make this more manageable by having the candidates do this for you.

Whenever I post a job, I try to devise a way to separate the people who are genuinely interested from the people who are just carpet-bombing companies with their resumes in hopes of a hit. In the job posting, I include – in plain sight – detailed instructions of how to apply for the job. For example, I might say that we only accept applications through email, and that we don’t want a separate cover letter – instead, write us an email, and we’ll only accept resumes in PDF or Word format. Anyone who doesn’t follow the instructions, I immediately delete. It might sound counterintuitive, but that self-eliminates the bottom half of the applicants. My theory is, if you can’t follow simple instructions, or you can’t take the time to read the whole posting, I don’t want to work with you. From time to time, to test my theory, I’ll interview a candidate who has a decent resume but didn’t follow the instructions. In every case, the interview was a waste of time. The candidate either lacked attention to detail, had a sense of entitlement, or had a massive ego.

I’ll also make a second ask to help me narrow the field down further. If I’m hiring for a specific skill-set, say a designer or a writer, I’ll ask for samples or a portfolio. In other roles, I’ll simply ask them to write an email describing why they think they are a fit for the role, and why they are passionate about the industry. Another 10% of applicants won’t follow the instructions, which I immediately delete. For another 10%, their portfolio or samples won’t be up to par, or their email will be poorly written or simply sloppy (punctuation anyone?). Before even starting to screen resumes, you’ve already eliminated 70% of the work.

Where to post

Where you post your job depends on the type of skills you’re looking for. Overall, I find LinkedIn works best for knowledge-based roles and management positions, especially if you pay to boost the posting and broadcast the job to your LinkedIn network. Many of my clients have had good luck with Indeed, and for technician roles or entry-level positions, you can’t beat Craigslist. Make sure you post the job to your company website, and encourage your staff to share the job posting to their social media networks. Often the best candidates come from staff referrals.

In the next article, I’ll show you how to make it easier to screen and track resumes, and how the screening interview can save you a ton of time in the interview process.

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7 Things Racing Will Teach You About Business

By Matt Hately on February 13, 2020

I first wrote this article 10 years ago, and recently came across it in my Evernote files. Since then, I’ve graduated from working inside growth companies to coaching CEOs of growing companies, and I’m in the process of graduating from track days and time-trials to door-to-door racing. Reading the article 10 years later, I realized these same lessons ring true, and that I’ve learned a few things along the way, so here’s version 2.0. Enjoy!

I love analogies, but for years I’ve listened to my colleagues in Canada relate every business lesson to a hockey analogy. Everything will work out fine if we just “skate where the puck is”. Working now in the US, everything is a football analogy – “we need more team members who are broken-field runners”. I do enjoy hockey and football, but I barely know the difference between an offside and icing let alone who won the Stanley Cup in ’72. Half of the time the analogy is completely lost on me.

So in an effort to bridge the communication gap, I’ve related my learnings in business to one of my passions – auto racing. I hope this helps other business-minded gear-heads communicate more fluently with their peers, and if nothing else, I’ve laid the foundation for you to take your team to the Skip Barber racing school for “team-building”.

Look where you want to go
One of the deadliest errors, often made by beginners on the racetrack but occasionally made by experts, is called “Target Fixation”. In a moment of high stress, your brain is so overloaded that it becomes fixated on exactly what you are trying to avoid – gravel in a corner, an obstacle, or another car. You end up hitting it square on.

In business, it’s very easy to get fixated on what you don’t want – losing a key customer, a market downturn, your best performer leaving. More often than not, you run straight into what you were trying desperately to avoid. It almost happened to me in a previous business in the so-called “Great Recession”. Around 2009, our pipeline was drying up, and in a sombre management meeting, we told ourselves “I guess we’d better start planning to downsize”. Luckily, one of our mentors snapped us out of it. He wouldn’t let us even mention downsizing until we had exhausted every possible option for filling up our project pipeline and hitting our revenue targets. It was every man on deck. He refocused us on the positive outcome, and guess what, we turned it around and headed straight into our best year in history.

To be a great auto racer, you need to have “wide eyes” – you learn to look far ahead, use every corner of your peripheral vision, and look where you want to go. Being a leader is no different – your job is to look further than tomorrow, get a lot of advice and input, and keep your team focused on where your business is headed.

It’s a mental game
Time and time again, I hit a plateau at the race track. I think I’ve wrung every last bit of performance out of my car and driving to my absolute abilities. Then I invite a very fast, very experienced driver to drive me around the track in my car. After a warm-up, they do a few blistering hot laps, a full 2.5 seconds faster than I. We returned to the pits, review the session, and he sent me on my way. The very next lap, I was 1.5 seconds faster, and the next 5 laps I was consistently 2 seconds faster than my previous laps (I’m still chasing that last few tenths, and that’s what makes racing so fun). It wasn’t the car, or even my abilities that was slowing me down – it was my mental model of what was possible.

Success in business has a lot to do with your mental attitude. Studies have found strong correlations between entrepreneurs with positive outlooks and business success. Most of the time, it’s not your competition or the economy that’s holding you back, it’s your own attitude and beliefs. Those that have an attitude of abundance generally outperform those that believe the glass is half-empty.

Persevere

A minor shunt. It’ll buff out.

In racing, no matter how practiced and prepared you are, you can suffer dramatic setbacks. Parts break, someone bumps you, or for whatever reason, your perfect setup just isn’t working on a particular track like you thought it would. Even world-championship teams have bad weekends. The best drivers have persevered through dozens of bad weekends. They learn, they adjust, and they go try again.

The business press loves the “overnight success story”. What they fail to mention is that behind almost every business success is years of blood, sweat, and tears. Yes, one day they break through, but often these overnight success stories have been at it 10, 20, or even 30 years before they became a household name. Every business had failed starts, bad sales calls, unproductive employees – you name it. Things that are completely out of your control hit you from left field. The only thing you can do is dust yourself off and keep going. So much of success in business is just showing up and trying. If you’re self-aware and inquisitive, you’ll learn with every setback, and one day you’ll wake up amazed at the progress you’ve made.

Change one thing at a time
There’s a popular business mantra that says “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. I also believe that to measure change, you can’t change everything at once.

In a growing company, you will always looking for things to improve. As you grow, you’ll find it increasingly difficult to apply measure progress when you’re changing so many things at the same time.

In racing, we only change one thing at a time, and test it’s effect. You change your sway bar settings on one end of the car, and you go test. You adjust your shock absorber rebound, and you go test. If you were to change all those things at once, and you spun in turn one, you’d have no idea what caused it, and lose precious hours going back to square one.

The same is true whether you are changing a business system, or changing an attribute of your product or web site. If you change your customer acquisition strategy, launch a new web site, and restructure your sales team all at the same time, you’ll never know which one moved the needle.

Win together, lose together

Coaching session with racers360.com

Even at the amateur level, successful racers have coaches and mechanics. At the professional level, teams spend an enormous amount of time learning to work together in perfect harmony. They know that everything, from the pit crew who refuel the car in seconds, to the suspension engineer who knows exactly how to set up a shock absorber for a specific track, have to come together flawlessly to win a race. Lewis Hamilton gets most of the press for winning 6 championships, but what impresses me most is how Toto Wolff and his team coordinate and motivate the hundreds of people that work behind the scenes to build and maintain a winning race car.

New leaders often believe they need to have all the answers. It’s ok to tell your team “I don’t know. I’m not an expert in this area and I need your help figuring this out”. On top of that, there is probably someone, somewhere who has gone through exactly what you are going through who is willing to help. In my career I’ve been lucky to have a few people who were willing to sit down and talk through a business challenge for nothing more than a latte and the promise to pay it forward.

Successful management teams are staffed with people who compliment one another’s strengths, and who think differently from one another – some big picture thinkers, some detail-oriented; some who are engineers and some who have arts backgrounds. Believe me, it’s not easy – you’ll disagree constantly, but in the end you’ll make better decisions because they’ve been dissected from every angle.

The really successful teams invest time and money learning how to communicate better and work better as teams. They set aside personal ambition and break down silos to achieve a shared vision. Like a championship race team, great teams are built with trust, shared respect, and communication.

If everything feels under control, you’re not going fast enough
World champions drive their cars at the very edge of control. A little more steering input, or a fraction more throttle, and they would go careening off into the weeds. It’s a strange sensation, to feel almost completely out of control, but at the same time, completely in control. Legendary driving coach Ross Bentley calls this “being comfortable with being uncomfortable”. The flip side of that coin is that once and a while, you will spin out (ask me how I know).

If you’re an auto racing fan, you’ve witnessed the two extremes – on one hand are the wildly aggressive drivers that lead one race by a half a lap, but crash out in the next one. They burn their teams out and burn their bridges. On the other hand are the backmarkers who are unwilling to be as aggressive as the winners. Champions find that perfect balance – they are blisteringly fast, take calculated risks, but are patient and persistent, tracking their opponents lap after lap, waiting for them to slip up so they can take the pass for the lead.

In business, I’ve seen companies who are unwilling to take risks, and unwilling to live on that edge of controlled chaos, and they usually plateau. I’ve also worked with companies that are in constant chaos, where the leadership team leaves burning bridges, burned out employees, and fried customers in their wake. The perfect flow is right down the middle – taking calculated risks, moving quickly, and working right in that zone where things feel a little out of control.

You’ll never have all the data and all the answers – a napkin-sketch plan passionately executed will beat a perfect plan poorly executed every single time.

Slow hands, fast car

The final, and most difficult lesson to learn for executives and CEOs is to lead with calm, patience, and perseverance. In a race car, it looks impressive to be attacking every corner beyond the limit, sliding the car, hands frantically correcting and sawing at the wheel. Typically this racer runs out of tires, or talent, and loses their lead to someone smoother. The same goes for business. The model we see on TV reality shows is the frantic, yelling CEO, driving everyone to the brink and leaving a wake of destruction. In real life, it’s a marathon. The toughest lessons for me personally, both on the track and in the boardroom, has been to remember to breathe, to listen, to seek to understand, and to slow down time when everything’s feeling out of control. The best leaders lead with grace and build confidence in their team, and are aware of the wake they leave.

And remember, if you’re still stuck on your hockey and football analogies – as Hemingway (or Ken Purdy, or Banarby Conrad, depending on who you ask) once said “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

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The One Thing

By Matt Hately on May 16, 2018

What if I told you that there is One Thing that, if you rallied your team around and focused your attention on in the next year, could grow your business by double-digits?

One of the most misunderstood and controversial topics in company strategy is the idea of the One Thing. Nine times out of ten, when I introduce the concept to a management team, the response is “It’s impossible for us to choose just one thing. We just finished our strategic planning, and we have 10 key priorities this year. If we drop any of these balls we’re dead in the water. Our business just isn’t that simple.”

Don’t confuse the One Thing with your operating priorities. In any well-run business, each department is going to have multiple priorities for the year – things they need to improve on, process they need to optimize, and so on.

I’m also not talking about a silver bullet, which typically sounds something like “if we had this one feature”, “if we sold in this one country” or, “if we would just lower our price”. Silver bullets are grasping at easy solutions to tough problems, and there’s nothing easy about the One Thing. To paraphrase Ben Horowitz in the Hard Thing about Hard Things, there are no silver bullets, just lots of iron nails.

The One Thing is about focus, and finding the 80/20 rule for your business. It’s the answer to the question – “What that one thing that, if we’re able to get every team and every department rallied behind, would be our biggest lever to growth this year?”

When this concept was first explained to me, it was by a former CPG executive who took over as CEO at an aging and declining food brand, and by focusing on their One Thing, achieved 3x growth in less than 3 years. After struggling to figure out why sales were declining, the CEO and his direct reports went out into the field to visit grocery stores first-hand. After visiting just a few dozen stores around the country, they observed that, as an older brand, they were consistently being moved to the bottom shelf in favor of younger brands. They quickly realized their One Thing was shelf positioning. Was it as simple as asking to be moved up a shelf? No, it required a coordinated strategy of meetings with the executives at the nationwide grocery chains, participation and cooperation of dozens of broker teams, special promotions, and much more. Having One Thing doesn’t mean your strategy will be easy to execute, but it does mean you will simplify the goal and the message to make it easy for everyone to understand.

We’ve used the One Thing to help transform and turn around a number of businesses. In a manufacturing company, our One Thing was improving the relationship with their dealers. Sales were sliding, so we started traveling around the country to reconnect with our dealers to try to figure out what was going on at the source. We expected to hear that we were missing something in our product suite, or that we were too expensive. Instead, we heard a number of deeply concerning things – “you’re difficult to work with”, “you take forever to ship”, and my favorite, “sometimes I can’t even get a hold of you”. When we got back to the factory, we also tuned in to how we talked about our dealers internally, and we heard things like “our customers are so demanding” and “XYZ customer is a pain to deal with”. We realized were taking our dealers for granted, and we had created adversarial relationships with the channel. A new competitor simply wanted the business more, and they were willing to be more flexible, they were doing a better job of listening to their needs, and they were providing better service. They were stealing away our dealers all across the country. To turn our sliding sales into growth, we realized we’d need to rebuild our trust with the channel. Sounds simple, right? On the contrary, it meant everything from changing how we managed finished goods inventory to how we invoiced. Every department needed to be on board. Having a single overarching priority that year meant we all shared a common goal, and a common language. It meant we tracked our progress to that goal. Most importantly, it meant it was top of everyone’s mind. The result? Our sales slide turned into double-digit sales growth.

Sometimes the One Thing isn’t self evident. More often than not, discovering your One Thing requires time in the field, polling customers, listening to employees, and lots of self-reflection. Having someone from the outside provide a fresh, non-biased perspective doesn’t hurt either. If you’re intrigued by the One Thing and want to chat about how to find the One Thing for your business, drop me a line at matthew@spark-insights.com

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There are 5 personalities that can derail a meeting. Here’s how to manage them.

By Matt Hately on March 21, 2018

We’ve all attended unproductive meetings – strategy meetings that don’t wrap with an actionable plan, meetings to decide on a direction where no decision is made, or brainstorming meetings that result in zero new ideas. While sometimes that’s because there wasn’t a clear agenda or maybe because of a lack of coffee, I’m willing to bet that, 80% of the time, the meeting was derailed by one of four personality types. As a manager or facilitator, you need to know how to recognize these personalities and have strategies for mitigating their counterproductive tendencies.

Tell me if you recognize these behavior patterns:

The Arm Crosser: Sits through the entire meeting not saying anything, usually with arms crossed, often frowning, and sometimes harrumphing. Typically engages in “meetings after the meeting” where they complain to a colleague that the meeting was a waste of time, or that the direction chosen was clearly the wrong one, and what they would have done differently.

The Multitasker: Uses the meeting to catch up on email. Interrupts halfway through to repeat something someone said 15 minutes ago. Calls another meeting two days later to rehash the same topic.

The Dominator: Tries to wrestle control of the meeting as early as possible to press their ideas or agenda. They are the most recognizable personality type because their voice is 20dB louder than everyone else, and they are doing 80% of the talking. A variation on this theme is the Passive Dominator, who listens just long enough to make the team feel they are being heard, but uses the remaining time to tell everyone why their viewpoint is the right one.

The Nay Sayer: Responds to every new idea with “let me tell you why that won’t work”.

The Tangent Taker: At first opportunity introduces a completely tangential topic – e.g. “What we really need to be talking about is why we don’t have Stumptown Coffee anymore in the break room and the impact that’s having on morale.”

You probably won’t change personalities and habits, at least not in the short-term, but you can dramatically reduce their impact on the meeting with a few key techniques.

Post-It: Time to break out the Post-it Notes and Sharpie markers. Whether you’re looking for new ideas, or running a project post-mortem, when it comes to getting everyone’s input, use Post-its rather than an open discussion, which tends to be dominated by one or two people.

Make sure everyone has a marker and a few packs of Post-Its. Using a large, blank piece of paper, write down the issue you’re trying to address, whether that’s new potential uses for a product, brainstorming on a new feature, or a SWOT analysis, and paste it on the wall. Invite everyone to take 10 minutes and write down as many ideas and input as they can think of, and post them on the blank sheet. When the time is up, go through the Post-Its with the team, asking for more detail and grouping like ideas. Depending on the goals, you can then start prioritizing or narrowing down the ideas with the group or moving them into an action plan.

Post-Its give people time to think, and let the introverts have as much impact and input as the extroverts in the room, while the extroverts still have the same opportunity to contribute. I much prefer Post-Its to whiteboards, which make it difficult for everyone to crowd around and make it harder to prioritize and group ideas.

Plan: We all know that a meeting should always have an agenda, but the structure of that agenda makes a world of difference in how productive it is. In a brainstorming meeting, or one where a decision needs to be made, start with getting all of the ideas on the table. This is where visual techniques really come in handy. Go broad, then cluster and group, then narrow and prioritize.

Set ground rules: In the email invite, and before the meeting starts, circulate and reiterate the ground rules for the meeting. No phones, no laptops, and everyone participates. No ideas are bad ideas – there will be an opportunity for the group to synthesize and prioritize, so no interrupting or shooting down people’s input.

Facilitate: One of the hardest things for a new facilitator or manager can be getting used to interrupting. To keep the energy level high and keep the pace of the meeting moving, you’ll need to interrupt or prompt the team from time to time, and every personality will need a different approach. To the Arm Crosser, “we haven’t heard from you yet”. To the Dominator “hold that thought a second”. To the Nay Sayer “we’re going to get to prioritizing and eliminating ideas soon”. To the Tangent Taker ” let’s put that in the Parking Lot list, and we’ll either come back to it if we have time or set a separate meeting”

I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on strategies for more productive brainstorming and getting the most participating in a meeting. Submit your comments below! And of course, if you’d like to chat about having an expert facilitator moderate your next brainstorming or strategy meeting, drop us a line.

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Asking the right questions

By Matt Hately on May 8, 2013

The power of asking the right questions

One of the most powerful ways of getting the best ideas from brainstorming and sparking creativity is to start with the right question.

The opposite is also true – you can spin your wheels, and kill ideation by asking the wrong question.

Too often, brainstorming meetings get stuck in a rut. They either cycling over the same ideas, go off on a tangent that ends up miles from your business, or is simply uninspired and flat. Most often, it’s because we started with the wrong question – one that is either closed-ended, suggests a solution, or is too wide open.

A common myth about creativity

One of the most persistent fallacies of creativity is that to be creative, we need to remove the boundaries and that brainstorming needs to be wide-open. The reality is that we need some boundaries and direction to have our best ideas. With no guideposts, or no starting point, we have nothing with which to associate, and nothing to challenge our thinking and take it in a new direction. In the absence of boundaries, we either rehash the familiar, or come up with ideas that are so far off the charts that they have no applicability to the market at hand. No doubt you’ve witnessed both.

So what is the right question?

The right question is focused, and at the same time, open-ended. Many of our best ideas come from the intersection of two, seemingly opposed ideas, or in the new application of an existing product. The right question is focused enough to give our creative minds a jumping-off point, but open-ended enough to not suggest a solution.

Let’s take two trends that are the topics of many brainstorming meetings in many businesses right now – social media and mobile. Nearly every business is trying to determine how they should be incorporating social media and mobility into their product or service. Here are a couple of examples of both good and bad questions with which to launch a brainstorming session:

Good questions: Social media:

How would our business change if people could share what they are doing with our product on social media?

In what ways could they engage with other friends using our product through Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn using our product?

What if Facebook was the only way you could interface with our product. What would that look like?

What works about these questions – they focus the team on how customers might actually use the product with social media, and how it might enhance the product experience. The questions are directed towards the intersection of the product and social media, and at the same time, open enough as to not suggest an answer.

The wrong questions – social media:

What could we do with Facebook?

What’s wrong with this question? It’s at once too wide open, and too focused on technology. With no jumping off point, and nothing for our brains to pattern-make with, you’ll get two types of responses – the same-old-same-old ideas that your competitors are using, or ideas that are focused purely on the technology, such as the Facebook API, that may or may not have a real-world value to your customers.

How do we get people to “Like” us on Facebook?

While this might be a perfectly legitimate tactical question, when it comes to brainstorming product ideas, this is a closed-ended question disguised as an open-ended question. It suggests that “Liking” on Facebook is the right answer to how people want to engage with your product on Facebook. The ideas you that will flow from this question will be far from revolutionary. They will be purely tactical solutions on how to motivate people to press Like on Facebook or integrate with the Like feature.

Good questions – Mobility:

What would our customers want to be doing with our product while on driving to a meeting, or waiting in an airport lounge?

What if we know the precise location of all of our customers through their smart phone? What would that tell us about them, and how could we improve what we offer them and improve our relationship with them?

What works about these questions is that they get the team into the mindset of the customer, thinking about how they would actually use the product in their context. They can envision themselves in the customer’s shoes, waiting for a delayed flight in an airport lounge, and pulling out their smartphones to pass the time. It gets the team away from the technology for technology’s sake, and focused on customer value. At the same time it’s open enough to bring out creative solutions.

The wrong questions – Mobility

How do we tap into the incredible growth in mobile?

This question focuses on a broad market opportunity, and so the ideas you will get will be broad and mostly irrelevant. Again, without a jumping off point, you will get every idea from creating a new smartphone, to building games, to virtual snow-globes. This is simply a high-level question that should lead you to more detailed brainstorming and idea making.

What should our product look like on a tablet?

This question will have the team focused on things like the form factor itself, like the screen size. In the early, fuzzy stages of ideation, the team will spin their wheels on things like button size and fonts – things that are largely irrelevant until you actually start prototyping and building the product – after you’ve decided what you’re going to build and why.

Inspiration is 99% preparation.

Productive brainstorming requires preparation and forethought. For every hour you’ll spend brainstorming, you need to spend at least an hour preparing the environment, the tools, and the right questions you’ll need to get the best ideas flowing from the team.

If you’re not happy with where your brainstorming is going, and the results you’re getting, change the question.

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Playing games at work

By Matt Hately on April 25, 2013

Last week I had a great chat with a friend and colleague of mine, Joe Connelly, who just released a book, and is doing some amazing work around helping people change the way they communicate, to be more authentic and open, ultimately changing their business and improving their relationships. But that’s a story for a whole other day.

Joe and I got talking about games in business – something that’s core to Spark Insights and obviously gets me excited. If you know Joe or I personally, you’ll know it was an animated conversation.

Joe is always looking for ways to make their course material really stick, and help his clients retain what they are learning. He and his partners have started introducing games into their training seminars, and he was thrilled with the results. People were 100% engaged, experiencing the material first-hand, and learning from one another. And – they were having fun.

What is it about games?

The rules and systems of our day-to-day work often inhibit creativity and learning. We have emails to answer, tasks that need checking off our todo lists, and meetings to attend. In our daily routine, there’s not much time or headspace left to be creative, and when the time comes to create new ideas, it’s hard to switch gears.

I’m not a brain scientist, nor have I ever played one on TV, but solving problems or learning new material using games seems to activate a different part of your brain. Games let us step into a different world, with different rules and different goals, and temporarily suspend our routine. Having fun helps us relax, and when we’re relaxed, ideas flow more freely. I’ve written about how changing context, boundaries, and environment helps us be more creative, and a well-designed game helps us do that without ever leaving the office.

Are we talking about gamification?

Not exactly. Gamification is about adding elements of games, like competition and rewards, to things like social media, marketing campaigns, online learning, and the like, typically to increase customer engagement. I’m talking about using collaborative play in your business to gain customer insights, facilitate brainstorming, or create experiential learning.

Serious games for serious business

I’ll admit, the mere notion of combining games and work can be a turnoff to some, but I believe that if you’re not at least willing to try it, you’re giving up a serious competitive advantage. The early adopters of Innovation Games, for example, include some of the world’s most innovative companies, like Qualcomm and Fiat. I can almost guarantee that if you take one of your toughest problems, and tackle it with a collaborative game, you will come out some breakthrough ideas. No need to re-invent the wheel either. Grab a copy of the excellent Innovation Games book by Luke Hohmann, and Gamestorming by Gray, Brown and Macanufo, and you’ll be armed with a recipe book of games to apply to almost any situation – ideation, problem solving, getting customer feedback, or gaining consensus. You might even have fun in the process.

Happy gaming!

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