Are You Ready to Deliver Results???

Jun 29, 2022

“Do or do not. There is no try.” Yoda, Star Wars Ep V: The Empire Strikes Back

The pollyannaish vision of “collaborating” and “innovating” is perhaps a scene in which colleagues are gathered around an office whiteboard brandishing marker pens, Post-It Notes, and bright smiles. With an epiphany, a concept presents itself, like a genie coming out of a bottle and offering three wishes. Wouldn’t it be “nice” if improving customer experiences, employee experiences, or products and services was a Norman Rockwell-inspired scene?

But sadly, it is not. Hopefully, there are some moments that have this spirit, but the more accurate metaphor is mud wrestling. It’s slippery and dirty, you have poor vision, the situation can change quickly, and there are many different techniques and skills required. Your energy expenditure is high and it’s easy to get tired.

Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration — Thomas Edison

Delivering hard results, especially when driving growth and innovation initiatives, is a game of statesmanship, influence, clarity, simplification, and prioritization while having high standards for the work and results, each having many types and levels of risks. The environment is typically not a “command and control” situation — many of the teams and capabilities don’t report to you and they have competing priorities. The environment is unpredictable — there are aspects of the innovation having feasibility, scaling, functional, or other types of risks. You have “dependencies”.

How do you deliver “hard results” in an environment like this???

THE BUCK STOPS HERE

Jocko Willink was the commander of Task Unit Bruiser, the most decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War.

He’s also co-author of the New York Times bestseller Extreme Ownership.

As you might imagine from a Navy SEAL, the book’s messaging is heavy on personal discipline and responsibility. “War is hell,” Willink says. “It is a brutal teacher.” While business will never be war—and Willink makes this very clear—there is no reason why you cannot transpose that intensity, those types of brick wall dependencies, to your organization. The book has some excellent lessons for delivering hard results in unpredictable environments. Here are a few of them:

Great leaders believe in the cause of the mission. If they don’t, they ask up the chain of command until they do. They consistently communicate the “why”, “what” and “how” of the mission.
Keep your plans simple, clear, and concise. Avoid confusion and complexity in the communication of the mission, plans, or situation. Always be clarifying and summarize the situation.
Always be prioritizing and understanding the next best available action and alternatives.

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OWN YOUR DEPENDENCIES

Managing your own direct team is hard enough. Most innovation projects go across multiple teams and partners. If you are leading this type of initiative, you have dependencies. How you manage these is a likely a significant predictor of the success of the initiative.

Here’s the bar, the level of expectations, and the mindset I have learned (often through failure) for delivering hard projects, initiatives, and innovation projects when you have a lot of dependencies:

Work hard at defining the mission in clear terms and from multiple facets. Have urgency but do not rush this. This is why the Amazon culture of “writing and debating” is a technique I believe in. Many of these topics, most importantly defining “the mission”, are clarified, debated, defined, and agreed to through this process far better than PowerPoint presentations.
Negotiate and manage unambiguous and clear commitments from others. That means having rock-solid commitments and shared understanding, a great plan - even though you know the plan will change. Trust that everyone will speak directly and be solution-oriented. Getting everyone to be “all in”. You can assume nothing.
Create hedges wherever possible. For every dependency, devise a fallback plan—a redundancy in a supply chain, for example. Taking absolute responsibility for every possible dependency is no small task. This is one reason that few leaders have the rigor, determination, creativity, and tenacity to make to successfully deliver.
Have weekly cross-team status meetings that feature “the problems” — run towards the hard things, not towards the easy topics. Again, feature the issues, risks, concerns, and problems — the “bad news”. It can be a bit awkward at first, but once status reports and discussions are geared in this way, it actually builds incredible risk and co-ownership.
Trust, but verify. Always ask for the right type of evidence that tests and validates the demonstration that something is “done”. If you communicate to the team at the start of the project that “trust, but verify” is one we manage risks, and that we should all adopt a “trust, but verify” approach, everyone operating at a higher level.
Develop appropriate project management and control approaches — and don’t get lazy! Having great project hygiene is how you systematize this rigor. Project hygiene includes project status reporting, issue and risk tracking, steering committee communications, budget controls, and scope management — all of the “project management” disciplines that teams and leaders know are important, but we tend to get lazy about these.

The Rubicon of Accountability — Build Your Personal Brand

Willink’s book reminds me of an Adam Lashinsky story regarding Steve Jobs and Apple’s vice presidents and janitors (paraphrased)

According to Lashinksy, Steve Jobs told employees a short story when they were promoted to vice president at Apple. Jobs would tell the VP that if the garbage in his office was not being emptied, Jobs would naturally demand an explanation from the janitor. “Well, the lock on the door was changed,” the janitor could reasonably respond. “And I couldn’t get a key.” It’s an irritation for Jobs, but the janitor’s response is reasonable. It’s an understandable excuse. The janitor can’t do his job without the key. As a janitor, he’s allowed to have excuses. “When you’re the janitor, reasons matter,” Jobs told his newly minted vice presidents. “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.” In other words, the Rubicon of accountability is “crossed when the employee becomes a vice president. He or she must vacate all excuses for failure. A vice president is responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn’t matter what you say.”1

What’s your reputation? Your professional brand? Are you the leader that delivers hard results in situations of uncertainty, high risk, and dependencies? Do you “do or do not”?

Are you ready to deliver results???

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Extra Credit

For extra credit read Chapter 14 from The Amazon Way

Chapter 14: Deliver Results

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

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At the end of the day, delivering results matters to leaders at Amazon. It really matters. This simple fact, however, belies a wildly complex reality. Carefully crafted and thoroughly debated, this set of “controllable inputs” clearly ties the individual’s goals to those of the team, the business unit, the executive team, and the organization as a whole. Here are four subtle-but-critical lessons to help build a culture of accountability and pioneering based on Amazon’s mission to consistently “deliver results.”

Focus on the Inputs

Ever struggled to achieve goals or felt that your goals were overly ambitious? After I left Amazon, I was a partner at a global consulting firm. As a partner, the goal was simple—develop and deliver new business every year with a specific revenue target directly tied to our compensation. Quality, mentoring, IP development, and assisting others were all important, but 90 percent of the goals and focus were on revenue. This simple approach possessed a certain elegance, yet most partners felt detached from the outcome because they did not have direct control. Instead, we controlled a wide variety of proven inputs, including client relationships, business development meetings, white papers, and how we developed and marketed our expertise inside and outside the firm, which would ultimately lead to the output: consulting projects and revenue. I focused on the inputs and advised other partners to do the same. If applied consistently, they should lead to the correct output.

Amazon has a deep belief in setting goals that stretch teams and individuals but defining them in a way that puts the team in control of hitting these lofty goals. This empowers teams and stretches them to great achievements. Of course, many of the goals have a direct customer experience component and rarely are they revenue-oriented. “Senior leaders that are new to Amazon are often surprised by how little time we spend discussing actual financial results or debating projected financial outputs,” wrote Bezos. “To be clear, we take these financial outputs seriously, but we believe that focusing our energy on the controllable inputs to our business is the most effective way to maximize financial outputs over time.”2

Amazon’s annual goal-setting and initiative review process hasn’t changed in many years. It begins in the fall and concludes early in the new year following the peak holiday quarter. These “lengthy, spirited, and detail-oriented” goal-setting sessions are designed to raise the bar on customer experience, operations and initiatives it will proceed on. In 2010, for example, the sessions produced 452 detailed goals, each with its own set of owners, deliverables, and targeted completion dates. These aren’t the only goals the teams set for themselves, but they are the ones that are most important to monitor. None of these goals are “low-hanging fruit.” Many can’t be achieved without assistance. What’s more, senior leadership reviews the status of each goal several times during the year, adding, removing, and modifying them as necessary. “Taken as a whole, the set of goals is indicative of our fundamental approach,” explains Bezos. “Start with customers and work backwards. Listen to customers, but don’t just listen to customers—also invent on their behalf. We can’t assure you that we’ll meet all of this year’s goals. We haven’t in past years. However, we can assure you that we’ll continue to obsess over customers. We have a strong conviction that that approach—in the long term—is every bit as good for owners as it is for customers.”3

Intensely Debate and Coordinate

In 2020, I interviewed a fifteen-year Amazon leader for this book about the goal-setting process. Each annual goal required four multi-hour reviews before they could be submitted. The debate is a combination of clearly understanding what they are trying to achieve, understanding the “controllable input” to achieve that goal, and then setting a stretch but achievable target. These goals never have an “earning per share” and often don’t have other output financial metrics attached to them. Leaders who think like owners are crucial to this process because you don’t want people who prioritize short-term results at the expense of long-term enterprise value. When organizations prioritize output financial goals, they often sacrifice the big picture. As a result, it’s important to debate and coordinate annual goals more intensely than ever before.

Good Teams are Gritty

At Amazon, a stretch objective is called a “BHAG,” or “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal.” Amazon empowers its teams with BHAGS. By removing all excuses as a fallback position, Amazon allows high-performing teams to overachieve and underperforming teams to fail, inevitably improving their performance. When the goals are clear, achievable, and within your control, good teams double down, recommit and overcome—regardless of challenges and obstacles. They have grit.

The Closed-Loop Management Process

Once you focus on controllable inputs, create SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound), and set stretch initiatives for individuals and goals, you must commit to a closed-loop performance management approach. Amazon has had several different approaches to the performance review, including a system providing employees daily feedback from their peers. However, Amazon’s performance management philosophy is rooted in three principles:

1) A BIG difference exists between “A” and “B” performers. As a result, “A” performers receive a majority of the company’s compensation rewards, primarily in the form of stock.

2) Promotions are heavily scrutinized. They require multi-page written documents with hard evidence rationalizing the promotion. They must be debated and read all the way up the chain of command to the CEO. These promotion documents can also be audited to ensure claims are not inflated. Finally, every year, Amazon terminates five to eight percent of the organization for not reaching the required standards of excellence.

3) Live the leadership principles. Annual reviews factor in how well an employee “has lived up to the leadership principles.” This review metric requires employees to account for “how” they reached their goals while perpetuating and reinforcing the leadership principles as the company’s North Star. If you violate the leadership principles by failing to obsess over the customer, communicating vaguely, or failing to hire or develop a first-rate team or if you allow low standards, ignore details, or fail to “think big,” you won’t deliver the right results.

There is tremendous pressure to deliver results at Amazon. Being a pioneer doesn’t come easy. I think it’s the fourteenth principle to put the “end point” on it. Leaders have to get results the right way, but results matter—a lot.

Onward,

John

The Digital Leader Newsletter -- By John Rossman