March Pulse - The 5 Cs to Align Your Team - Episode #93

We want to grow this much this quarter. Every single person in the company literally can have an impact. If you're in a company of 50, 100, 200, 500 people and you individually email someone and say, I saw that what you did really moved the needle, that's gonna be so powerful. You will be surprised how fast you start to see momentum. Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host, David Politis. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders. And get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys. Hello everyone, David Pletus here. Today's going to be a solo episode, and I want to talk about some, something I talked about on the Substack about 10 days ago, an article that I wrote, and it was about how We're a quarter into the year and already 90% of teams have a whole new set of priorities that have been added on top of the ones that they came into the year with. And these priorities are coming from customer meetings and having to move the roadmap around to satisfy an important customer, or an idea that came from an investor that was a good idea and you want to add to the mix, or something that a competitor did and your team noticed and needed to react to. So you came into the year, you had this set of priorities, by the way, probably already too many things to do in the first quarter, and now you've layered on a whole nother set of things. And my article talks about the fact that it's really important as you go into Q2 to actually stay focused and reprioritize all of this, to take this whole set of things that you're looking at, that you're contemplating, that are on the, the, the priority board for the company, and take it to the leadership team and whittle it down, reprioritize it, stack rank it. If you added stuff, you have to remove stuff. You probably have to remove stuff anyway, uh, and, and ultimately then take it to the team and communicate what has changed. I got a lot of feedback on that article. It was actually one of the most popular articles we've published, but one of the things that people are asking is, can you be a little bit more specific about how I align the whole company around these priorities that I've just reprioritized? What do I actually do tactically? So I've been thinking a lot about this, and I wanted to share my thoughts here. Now, I did not expect this to come out this way, but basically I came up with the 5 C's of how to drive focus. So the first is concentrating the efforts. When I say concentrating the efforts, I mean really, really narrowing down that focus. And narrowing down the set of priorities and concentrating the entire company on that small set. That could be literally one thing. Actually, I have seen companies be super successful. Actually, I have been through this myself where going into a quarter, there is just one thing that the entire company is focused on. Now, it is important that that one thing is something that everyone in the company can impact. So for example, it may be something like, we want to drive growth of X percent total growth, which includes new logo, which includes net retention growth on existing accounts, all of that. If you think about that and you put an actual number out there and you tell everyone, hey, we want to do this, we want to grow this much this quarter, every single person in the company literally can have an impact. Obviously marketing can help with new logos, lead generation, and existing customer upsells. Sales is gonna drive those new logos and build pipeline and close deals faster. And the account management team is gonna bring on the new products to these customers and upsell them. Even the legal team can make the contracts easier and more streamlined. The deal desk can put in a new process so that there's no friction in the approvals process internally to get discounts. The executives can join calls. I can keep going. Point is, something like that is a single goal that the entire company can rally around. So first is concentrate. The second is communication, making sure that when you do this, you're explaining to everyone, this is our goal. This is why it's the goal. Having a cadence to tell people how we're pacing against that goal. I'm a big believer in monthly all-hands, but if you're going to get super focused on a specific goal or small set of goals, I actually believe you should be sending updates on a weekly basis. There is something about that that gets the cadence for the company going where people understand there is urgency. We're reporting on this weekly. I mean, to be honest, you can probably even report on it daily if it's something that moves on a daily basis to make, to, to make people understand the importance. By the way, there's a little bit of, uh, addition by subtraction. The less you communicate about the other things and the more you just make all the communication about that thing, people are gonna understand this is what we're focusing on. You could come up with an entire all-hands every single week dedicated to something like I just mentioned. You could have all those different teams come up and present one, one week at a time, one team at a time, talking about what they're seeing in their part of the org, what they're doing, the, the needle that they're moving that's going to drive that bigger goal. So it's about understanding how to communicate, when to communicate, the cadence of communication, the urgency of that communication. The next is having a culture that doesn't reward work for work's sake, but that actually rewards work for the outcome that it drives. If you have that outcome-based focus, and it's a culture, and also have it about the company and not the individuals. Now, of course, you need the right team and you need the right culture to be set, the right values, all of that. But if you have that culture, then people understand, I'm driving the company forward. My work is to serve the company's success, and I'm going to be recognized when I do that. I'm gonna be rewarded when I do that, but I'm not doing this just to show people that I'm working. You know, the people who come in and, oh man, I worked all weekend, I did all this. It's like, cool, did it actually move the needle for the company? The next is celebration. If you think about this, it's about how do I make sure that as things are going well, as we're moving the needle, as we're moving the ball forward, we're celebrating the people and the teams and the company when doing that. Right? Someone closes a deal in this period of time and the whole thing is about growth and a new rep closes a deal or, or an existing customer success manager gets a customer who's been a customer for 3 years to, to buy that new module, or the engineering team releases a feature that we get a, a bunch of new free trials on or something like that. That thing has to be celebrated. It has to be celebrated maybe in Slack, in email, at that all hands. And it should really come from you, from the CEO or from the leader. And it could even be just emailing or calling that person who achieved that goal, who moved the ball forward, calling them or emailing them and saying, hey, I saw that you did that. You're, if you're in a company of 50, 100, 200, 500 people and you individually email someone and say, I saw that what you did really moved the needle. That's gonna be so powerful. And so it's about, it's about how you celebrate those things, celebrate those teams. It's about at the all hands when the team gets up to talk about what they did, you pumping them up, telling everyone how excited you are, pointing out why that was so important for the company. And then the last one is compensation. Now I like to put this last because I don't even believe that this is the most important. I, I know a lot of people who said, oh, you got to compensate them, you gotta— that's how it's gonna, it's gonna work. No, I actually believe that the other things we just talked about will drive this focus and will drive execution. But it is true that compensation drives behavior. That's true. The thing is, most people, again, most companies think about variable compensation as something that should only be done for the sales team or the account management team or whoever carries a quota, maybe the executive team as well with their annual bonuses. But my point in compensation is you should come up with ways to compensate, not forever, but in this period of time of focus and trying to build momentum, pretty much anyone in the correct way that drives the behavior. So for example, I know of a company that was dealing with a situation that they really needed to figure out on the product side. It had to do with AI. They were trying to figure it out, and they, they had a hackathon, and they ended up putting a bounty on solving this problem. So all the people who joined in on the hackathon all would get $5,000 if they solved this particular problem. So each person would get it. There was 10 people, it's $50,000. But the problem was such a big problem that unlocking that was worth— I mean, who knows? I mean, in enterprise value, probably tens of millions or hundreds of millions. But it's about saying, hey, I understand that you're going to go above and beyond. You're going to be working the weekend, the night, all of that. And this is a major problem and a major unlock. And for this, at this moment right now, we're going to compensate for that. It's about making sure that the executive team is aligned to this. I see a lot of exec team comp plans that different exec members are compensated in different ways. This one for what they're doing in their team, this one for what they're doing, this one if they complete this project, this one. I feel very strongly that regardless of what you're trying to do in the company, everyone on the exec team should have the exact same comp bonus structure. Not necessarily the amount, but the structure. Uh, this could be for sales or account management. I'm a big believer, especially in the world we live in today that's moving so quickly, not to do annual comp plans for salespeople, BDRs, account managers, because we don't know what's going to happen next quarter. So I'm a big believer in telling people, this is your on-target earnings. We're going to do everything we can to get you to those on-target earnings. But there is a chance that we're going to change the what we pay for each quarter because we need to make sure that it makes sense for the company. And as long as you say it upfront, actually, that works. But now Let's say you want to lock a bunch of customers in for multi-year deals. You can focus this quarter on paying extra for multi-year deals. Maybe you want to drive the acceleration of the number of new logos. Well, now you can pay for a volume, not just a dollar amount. And you maybe you want to have a specific module upsold, not just any module. And so now you can put that specific module into the comp plan and, and reward the team for doing that. So I know that's a lot, but if you concentrate the efforts, communicate effectively, ensure you have that right culture in place, celebrate the wins that are driving those priorities, and ultimately compensate people to drive the right behavior— if you do those things, you will be surprised how fast you start to see momentum. You start to feel pace pick up. It's, it's about aligning people. It's about removing the other distractions. It's about, and I think especially founders, CEOs as well, but especially founders, we have a tendency because we have this mind where we're thinking about all the opportunities, we're thinking 2 years down the road, we're stressed out about this, that we're talking to our team about all of these things and 10 things, 10 other things. And this week you care about this and next week you care about this. I would really challenge everyone to stay concentrated and stay focused for at least one quarter with what I just said. Try it for one quarter. Anytime you have an idea, don't tell anyone, write it down in a doc and save it and come back to it at the end of the quarter when it's time to prioritize next quarter. When you see someone doing something and it's not happening at the pace you want, go help them unblock it. Don't change the priority or change the thing that they're working on. So anyway, I hope that this is helpful. I meant to put a lot of this in the Substack article that I wrote, but I, but I got feedback and I wanted to share this out with the group. So hopefully you enjoy. And if you do, please share this out with your networks. And if you have ideas for future episodes, guests you want me to talk to, you can just email david@notanotherceo.com. And with that, enjoy the rest of your day. and I hope to see you for the next episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please visit notanotherceopodcast.com. We'll see you next week.