Robin Daniels, CBO at Zensai, outlines a three-stage playbook for team alignment: crystal-clear strategy and priorities, the right people in the right roles, and relentless execution with 20-30% capacity reserved for market shifts. He used this framework to align a 400-person marketing team at WeWork and now applies it in fast-moving AI competition.
Chapters
Amanda Smith. I don't know about you, but this year feels like a growth year for a lot of companies. Everybody is figuring out how to grow their teams, grow their business, grow their training, literally from all facets. And sometimes you're doing it with a lot of different teams. This is something that's been on my mind a lot recently as Share Your Genius really grows. So I called Robin Daniels because he's spent 20 years leading high-growth teams and his superpower, it's taking that change, that growth chaos, and really transforming it into clarity. And that clarity then leads to really well-oiled execution. Robin believes the fastest way to lose trust is to let teams drift. And trust, we all know, nobody wants to lose. So what's his playbook? Alignment, optimization, and then relentless execution with just enough agility to pivot when needed. So I asked him, when you're working with different teams, How do you cultivate trust to ensure there's alignment? Here's what he had to say.
Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. At the tone, please record your message. Hey, Amanda, it's great to hear from you. Great question. I've been really working with some of the, I think, elite teams of the world. It's one of the questions I get most often is how do you ensure that everyone's kind of rowing in the same direction. And I would say everything comes back to one key thing, and this is where you have to start with, and that's around clarity. It's very hard to do great work, to do epic work, if you're not clear about what you're trying to achieve. Because in the absence of clarity, oftentimes you get teams who are self-serving, who get political, who fight for resources that maybe they don't really need, or maybe you have competing goals around what people actually are trying to achieve. The way to get around this is making it crystal clear what you're trying to achieve in the first place. And that starts with what is your North Star? Then from there you say, okay, what is the strategy that we're going to employ to achieve our North Star? Then what tactics and actions are we going to actually take in order to achieve our strategy and ultimately our North Star? Because once you have that and you make it clear for everyone what you're trying to achieve and everyone's rowing in the same boat, then suddenly you can hold people accountable to behaviors, to their actions, to the outcomes that they have. But in the absence of that, often time I see some of the most political, toxic environments because everyone's fighting for themselves and their own little kingdoms. And it just becomes a kind of place that everybody hates working in. I would say the first thing you have to do is get everyone in a room, the people who are leading this project you're working on, and make sure that you're crystal clear on what you're trying to achieve. And that could take anywhere from an hour or maybe even a few days because you have to sometimes really hash it out because you have to leave that room or that virtual room or that session making it clear Exactly that everyone's on the same page around what you're trying to achieve. Everything else from there is fairly easy 'cause then you get into the mechanics of how you do something and when you do it and the sequence of events and all that stuff. But it's nearly impossible to achieve greatness if you don't have clarity. Start there. I'll give you an example, Amanda. When I came into WeWork in 2019, the fastest growing companies of all time, we were just over 10,000 people. It was the biggest team I've ever led in my career. We were about 400 people or so in the marketing team. And the first thing I did was sit down with all my peers and the CEO, of course, Adam Neumann, to talk about what was the thing that we were trying to achieve. Because I knew from past experience at LinkedIn and Salesforce and Box, it's really hard to do great things if you're not clear on that. So we spent probably 2, 3 weeks, myself and the other leaders in the company, like really working on what are the ultimately the goals for the marketing team, create a brand that people love, create a revenue engine that's predictable, make sure that we are supporting the team and going out there and generating new business, all those kind of things. And then also making sure that those kind of priorities are stack ranked because when everything else is kind of same priority, then nothing is important. The famous saying of if everything's important, nothing's important. And so making sure that, okay, this is the number 1 priority, this is number 2, number 3, number 4, and so on. And then the second thing after that is then you go and figure out, okay, do I actually have the right people and the skills and the team to achieve those things? It's great to have really crystal clarity on what you're trying to achieve, but if you don't have the your team to achieve it, you're never going to achieve that. So that's kind of the second phase of it. You spend probably a couple of weeks, maybe even a couple of months optimizing people's roles, skills based on what you're trying to achieve. And then the third part of that is then you execute like crazy because now there shouldn't really be that much room for discussion about what you're trying to achieve because you spent the first part of your time figuring that out. Now it's all about the next 6, 12, 18 months, all about execution towards those goals that you've set out. My playbook when I come into a new company is stage 1 is all about alignment and clarity, stage 2 is all about optimization, and stage 3 is all about execution. But you also want to leave enough room in the execution phase for agility and for ad hoc things to come along because things change very rapidly, especially in the world that we're living in. So even though you have your North Star goals and everyone's aligned on what those North Star goals are, you will probably want to leave 20%, 30% of your capacity to things that could come up so you can move fast because you don't want to be so rigid where you say, no, there's this new competitor in the market or there's this new thing happening in the world that we can't respond to because we're so rigid around holding ourselves just to those north stars. That should be the core way you do the work, but you still need that agility. Just think about in today's world with AI, me being the chief business officer at Sensai, I feel like I'm constantly now having to be agile because new competitors are coming on the market very quickly. There's different marketing tactics that are being employed, and we can't rely on the old playbook, so you have to move really fast. But again, that doesn't neglect the fact that you have to have that North Star, because if you don't have it, then everything just becomes a free-for-all. You look back at the end of the year and you go, we worked our asses off, but I'm not really sure if we achieved anything. You know that feeling where you're just doing marketing by consensus or shiny object marketing? It's like that. It works in short sprints, but it doesn't really work overall over a long period of time. Amanda, I hope that was helpful. You know where to find me if you need anything. Catch you later.
Thank you for listening. Want your podcast to do more? Subscribe to Genius Cuts because it's never just a podcast.
