I’m a managing director of resurgence technology partners, kind of helping build and oversee everything that has to do with our talent and people, you know, let’s figure out how to get the right people in the right roles.

Help you guys do that, uh, and help manage them effectively and grow people’s careers and accomplish the business’s goals all at the same time. Um, whatever, all that stuff works pretty well. Good outcomes tend to happen for the businesses and for the people involved. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to figure out, get better and better at all the way over time and help you guys get better and better at that all the way over time.

In that vein, uh, a couple of years ago, I met, uh, Jeremy Hay as a candidate for the head of people at office space office space was a resurgent and still is a, uh, resurgence technology partners investment, a company that we invested in and helped grow. Um, and we are, we still are invested in it. Just, we no longer are the majority owner. We’re now kind of sitting second seat, if you will, but Jeremy stepped into the head of people role there. Um, and, uh, did a great job.

And when we shifted our ownership position, Jeremy also transitioned out of the business to start his own consulting firm, turn of talent. Um, philosophically though, as far as this whole, let’s figure out how to get the right people in the right role and help them do their jobs and grow their careers effectively more and more over, over time and build a mousetrap to do it better and better and more and more over time.

We found a way to kind of form a partnership with him as a, in a consulting capacity to help us, uh, do that and support our companies at an individual level and also kind of systemically across the board and across our portfolio with that. He has been a great partner for us and for you, for many of you already on the line, and hopefully that partnership, we find a way to kind of keep finding good mutual benefit with that, uh, with each other.

Um, but without, without further ado, like I’ll kind of let turn, turn the floor over to Jeremy here, uh, to maybe fill in any gaps that I missed, uh, for on the introduction side and, or tee up the topic, uh, at hand today.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Brian. And hello everybody. Uh, for those that I have not met yet, amazing to meet you. Uh, so let’s dive in. I’ll go ahead and share my screen. And, you know, one of the things that I want to preface this with is, this is a conversation. Uh, so I want anybody here to feel free throughout the presentation to ask questions, whether you want to put them in chat, whether you want to chime in right over the mic, which is totally fine. Um, so again, please don’t hesitate to ask questions.

This is a collaborative dialogue and, uh, looking forward to running through some details with you together. So a little bit about myself before we dive right in. Um, so I’ve been in the HR recruiting space, uh, now for about 12 years, uh, heading towards 13. Um, started off on the agency recruiting side, was brought in to build out a talent acquisition role, was then told two weeks in to a series A, uh, funded company that I was also their head of HR. And then my journey began.

Uh, it was a very hands- on journey, um, and it has been an exciting journey. And just a couple of things about myself. Um, I’m actually here in Atlanta, uh, right where Resurgence is, right near, uh, Resurgence HQ. Um, I was born in Germany and, uh, also spent four years in Italy as a kid. So it is part of the Army brat journey. And then, uh, I started TurnUp Talent, uh, just about two years ago. And what we do is we recruit talent, we train managers, how to grow and keep talent. And then we help orgs build performance- driven cultures.

So a little bit about what we’re going to discuss today. And, uh, we’re going to do our best to make it through all of the content, but I definitely make sure we leave some room, uh, for good Q& A, which is also, I want you to feel free to ask as we go through. Um, but we’re going to talk a little bit about management in general. I think it’s important to preface this with the difference between management and leadership. And let’s talk about a couple of really key components. Granted, management is a very large topic. It is a broad and deep topic.

Uh, so I want to cover just high level, a couple of really important items. Um, some things that you can be able to quickly implement today and, or just start thinking about as an organization and really thinking about where you’re going to take things. Um, through one- on- ones, performance reviews, career pathing, and just a quick recap on the importance of manager training.

So let’s start high level, you know, you hear management, your leadership, let’s talk a little bit about what leadership and management are the differences, the similarities and the overlaps here. So, management, you know, we’ll start on the right side is really kind of the tactical science measurable inputs when it comes to getting a team to move forward. So this is really going to be your processes, your systems and data, what your cadence is, whereas leadership is really going to be your art, right?

This is where things can get a little bit more gray, and there might be multiple ways to get to the same end goal. But it’s really about influence, and influence obviously comes through inspiration, it comes from driving that strategic direction. And often, really good managers may not always be leaders, but really good leaders are almost always really good managers. And this is why today we’re going to really talk about the management side of things.

You know, when you think about breaking these things down further, just to kind of help differentiate the two, you know, leadership is really about vision, inspiration, it’s actually about change. Whereas management, interestingly, is more about stability, and cadence and recurrence, right? And it is that perfect overlap, which really leads to a very high functioning team and organization that is the application of the science in the cadence in the art and the documentation and the flow and the feedback, combined with the interpersonal aspect, right?

And there’s a lot of overlap, you know, to be an effective manager and a leader, you have to communicate really well, you know, they do have a common goal of achieving organizational success, you have to be adaptive, right? Your leadership style, your management style are going to have to change over time. So as we jump into the next part of this presentation, really going to be focusing on the managerial side of things, kind of the tactical, what can you implement and actionably do today, to really start getting a good operating rhythm in place.

Before I hop to the next section, where we start diving into onboarding and one on ones, any questions about the difference between leadership, management overlaps? All right. So one of the underlying foundations…

Do you mind if I emphasize, just re- emphasize a point you just made there, Jeremy? Absolutely. So I’ve spent a lot of time on this topic in my life for the last 10 years, particularly, but in small growing companies, there’s a lot of stuff to do. And there is a lot of, and again, there’s a lot of times we observe from our seat, and I’m saying this as a resurgence guy, and I’ve seen it in my past lives too.

There is a whole lot of times that most of the people in a organization, business group, just any time multiple people get involved, there is a lot of times, most of the time, people are doing a lot of the right things. But if it is not coordinated and architected well, it is just grossly inefficient and can ultimately become quite frustrating to the individuals involved in it. And it just becomes a, you fundamentally waste time if it is not managed well.

So management, I would argue, is a prerequisite to being an effective leader in a business at the end of the day. You can be a good leader, you know, interpersonally and help, you know, change and elevate the state of play of an individual. But whenever you get multiple people involved, of which that’s what we’re doing, you got to, management’s just kind of like the basics that you got to nail down. And frankly, it’s not always all that straightforward and easy.

So like, let’s, we’re going to make sure we focus on not the basics because we think everybody’s got to go back to square one. And we think it’s rudimentary, remediary training, but it is hard to do well very consistently over time. It is also critical to lay that foundation early in your career and early in the foundation of these, each of your respective businesses. But we think there’s, I am confident you as a prospective future leader, because I think that’s why you opted to join the conversation today.

You’re going to be really, really best served to also, to not discount the value and the criticality of management as well.

100%.

And one of those key components, right? One of the most introductory components here is onboarding.

Right?

This is something as we grow as organizations, as we hire new individuals into the company is so, so important to ensure from an onboarding perspective that we build out really effective onboarding and task oriented onboarding. So you can see what’s getting done and ensure that people are learning the things they can to get the end goal here, obviously, is that we want to ensure that these individuals are performing at a high level quickly.

And one of the important things to do in the very beginning of onboarding is to really explain your why as an organizations. There’s a lot of organizations that hire individuals and it’s immediately go to work, right? And if they don’t understand your why, what you’re solving in the greater marketplace, why you do what you do, you miss a really good opportunity to grapevine from the get go.

You know, and the best product companies, they answer that question when they talk about the product, we should be doing the same thing for our people when we bring them in. So high level, when you think about a good 90 day onboarding program, one of the big things to start off with is obviously our introduction and really learning about the company, the different departments, who we’re working with, what’s involved there. And then I like to break it up into three main chunks.

And it really starts off with in phase one, and we’ll talk a little bit about how to build this, but in the beginning, this is really about the company’s why, what and how. You really want to focus on why you do what you do, what you do, how you do it. And then you start really diving in into the role within that second to third week. And then as you go into phase two and phase three, this is where you are gradually having them take on more and more in the organization and within their role. So this is a good graduated method.

If you were to build out a good 90 day program and filled in even with basic content, that is an excellent MVP for an onboarding program. And, you know, there’s a couple of best practices here when building out an onboarding program. And, you know, a lot of individuals, when they say, hey, go and build out onboarding, they’re like, whoa, this is a huge task here. In fact, this should be a crowdsource effort where you’re empowering your team.

So this is where you’re empowering your team to help you crowdsource the content, the processes, things that you’ve recorded, right, into a checklist. And this thing doesn’t have to be perfect and pretty. Phase one, getting it down, and then being able to throw it into a Google Sheet or a monday. com or something like that is incredibly powerful so that you can track who’s doing what. And it’s also serves kind of as a gap analysis for yourself on what do I have documented?

What don’t I have documented?

Another quick win, assign every new hire an onboarding partner. So just think of another high performing employee. We’ll talk a little bit about nine boxes later on in the conversation, briefly cover it. But for those of you who have started doing nine boxing, those individuals who are hungry for more opportunity, this is the best opportunity to give them the initial experience of what is it like to coach, mentor, train, and manage another employee.

So you’re really knocking two birds out of one stone, providing a great onboarding experience and having them shout your best while also identifying what content do I and do I not have. This is also your opportunity during that first 90 days, we’re gonna talk a little bit about performance here in a few minutes. You wanna make sure, especially during that 90 days, that that is where you’re setting the tone for cadence.

This is where you’re setting the tone for how we give constructive feedback and also welcoming constructive feedback because that’s how both sides are gonna grow. And this is also your opportunity to listen to their ideas, get their input on how to improve onboarding and or other processes that they’re now freshly seeing, which these individuals are gonna be the most perceptive individuals, right? So use these new hires as a really good opportunity to continuously refine your onboarding.

And then remember, crowdsource that information from your team and just start with a good MVP and a checklist. And if you can, chunk it into phases, just makes it easier to tell the story when you have chapters.

And then most importantly, make it fun, make it engaging, make sure that you’re connecting with these individuals and establishing a relationship and rules of engagement from the beginning because it will impact the rest of your one- on- ones, performance reviews, promotions, and on for the rest of that relationship. Start strong. Any questions about online? I know this is fairly high level, but we wanna make sure our cover is gonna be there.

Hey, Jeremy. Yes, sir.

Jeff Thibodeau here in the good state of Iowa at Agency Block. We’re going through onboarding with a number of team members right now. Yeah. Two of them are on track, one of them I would describe as off track. It’s maybe the first experience I’ve had, and again, I’m a sales leader to add context. It’s maybe the first experience I’ve had where this early we’ve discovered someone is off track. And maybe you could say we’ve honed our skills to identify someone being off track earlier. So good for us.

But can you talk a little bit about just, I think what you’re laying out in terms of that plan helps identify that too. But what are the, kind of what’s your approach when someone is off track and what you do to evaluate and ultimately kind of decide what to do next?

A hundred percent. One of the benefits of having this pre- laid out in the beginning, right? So let’s assume in this case, we have a full onboarding plan laid out. That expectation is set from the very beginning. So they know what’s expected of them in a visual format. Nonetheless, not everybody is going to excel during this time. And this is where very, very candid conversation in these recurring moments should be taking place. So ideally this individual is having two key conversations every week. I mean, many conversations, but two key conversations.

One is a midweek check- in with their manager. And this can be just a 15 minute midweek coffee to build a relationship. Whereas the one- on- one with their manager is weekly going over what did we not complete? What did we complete? And why did we not complete what we should have completed?

Right?

Obviously, you know, the context as to what’s not getting completed and why is crucial, right? Did we set too ambitious of objectives? Is there too much happening within one week? Or is this not the right role? And those conversations will definitely flush that out. There’s obviously an opportunity to pivot here in some direction. The question is, is it the barrel or is it the apple? I know that’s not the panacea, but I hope that was at least helpful as far as kind of addressing what type of issue is this?

And then I’d be happy to talk to you offline based off of that answer and share some ideas.

Yep.

That was helpful. Other than I’m not sure I’m following the analogy around the apple or the barrel. Maybe that was a Georgia analogy that us professors just don’t get, but love it. We’ll tell you that later, Jeff.

That’s a part two.

Thanks for bringing the sales guy along.

Thanks for joining.

Yep.

Any other questions on onboarding? All right, let’s jump into one- on- ones. So one- on- ones are incredibly important just both from an employee engagement standpoint and from There are very measurable results and impacts from holding regular one- on- ones. And we’re talking, you know, end results of higher profitability, higher productivity in general. Very, very important. This is essentially the scrum stand up for humans. And this is what allows companies to really rapidly pivot, iterate and grow.

You know, the big purpose here in a one- on- one is to, A, identify that we are focused on the right things, right? You don’t want to go six months only between performance reviews to figure out somebody really missed the mark when we could have iterated on this on a weekly basis. It’s also your opportunity to enhance your performance via very good feedback. And not only that, to enhance your own performance as a manager and learn what we can improve.

And one of the big things here too is, you know, molehills rarely become mountains when you address things real time. And this is your opportunity to have those important conversations and solve problems right then, there, and now, real time. And then underlying all that from an engagement standpoint, this is where you build the engagement and trust for that individual to not only learn to take accountability, but to also listen and understand what direction they should be going.

One- on- ones are a win- win- win across the board, and it helps you as a manager understand, where’s my team doing well down to the individual level? What are the roadblocks? Are there patterns here that I need to address that are maybe cross- departmental, et cetera? So if you are not holding one- on- ones, if it’s the one thing you take away from this whole call, if you start doing weekly one- on- ones, you have made a massive quantum leap in where your team’s going to be six months from now.

So a couple of key points, because it’s not all on the manager to run the one- on- one. You are facilitating it, you are providing structure here, but the employees also need to prepare. They should come with their own questions, and you should put that on them. Just as we’re crowdsourcing information for onboarding, we should be soliciting that information from them on what types of help they need, where they’re running into walls, and also, obviously, making sure we’re providing some praise here.

One very important thing that I highly suggest, too, for all of your one- on- ones is, A, document that one- on- one, always write down what was discussed, and then if you want to take it to a pro level, recap that every Friday, for example, to the employee. Hey, great meeting with you this week. Here’s what we said we’re going to get done next week. It can’t be more crystal clear on where we need to go, what we need to do, and what’s expected, right? You’ve really laid the groundwork clear.

This is your visual handshake agreement on what we’re going to do and what we’re going to deliver on. So don’t underscore the absolute importance of recapping and documenting your one- on- ones, and summarizing in just a quick, free bullet point blurb to them in an email what we’re going to get done next week. Any questions on one- on- ones? All right. Yes, please.

Hi, Jeremy. I’m Zach. I’m at EnergyCap. I’m in Pennsylvania, and I admit I missed the analogy as well, so I guess it’s this other thing. As far as one- on- ones go, one of the things that I run into is that my employees seem to desire to use it for tactical operations more than sort of a backward and forward- looking performance discussion and issues discussion. More like, hey, I finally have time to talk to just you, and I can ask you whatever I want, which is really important on the engagement front. Sure.

They feel like they finally have undivided attention. I’m seeing that across the list. All of my employees hit that, and some of them, it seems like every single time, it’s like, I have this big list of things. Any suggestions on how or whether to steer away from that?

So this is what I would say, is at the end of the day, one of the main goals of a one- on- one is to address top- level employee issues, roadblocks, concerns, right? So if you are filling in that gap for them, you’re already headed in a good direction. Now, should they be purely, hey, this is what got done, this is what’s going to get done next week, see you next week? You need to make sure that there is time to address performance.

If there are performance issues, if somebody’s doing really well, obviously the nature of the conversation can be focused more on, hey, here are the things we’ve done this week. This person’s a very strong self- manager, and they know Real question is, are they still pointed towards the right north star? Are they improving? If so, you’re doing pretty good, but nonetheless, try to give yourself at least 15 minutes to talk about anything performance- related and to just personally connect with the employee.

I think it’s very important to not lose that part of the conversation.

So long story short, I would say, give yourself a little bit more time. Are you doing an hour or are you doing 30 minutes?

They’re typically 20- 30 minutes. That seems to be about all the employee is interested in. We’ve run some a little bit longer and they start to fidget a little more. Typically, it includes a little bit of non- transactional, a little bit of this is where you stand on our performance metric KPIs and a little bit of what are all the problems that you wish you could ask me this morning, but we didn’t have time to connect and now it’s your time.

Yeah.

That’s how it works out. I’ve tried a few different formats and seems like that keeps coming up. I wasn’t sure if that’s an okay format or if I need to keep some other pieces in there.

I would extend the length of your one- on- ones, to be honest with you. I think 30 minutes, it’s a very small amount of time to actually cover what’s really important here. And I highly suggest a 60- minute one- on- one. Do you have more than five to seven direct reports?

I have five.

Okay. First off, I think that’s a great number and it gives you the opportunity to do, you can either chunk these all into one day and this is manager day, right? And you do five one- hour one- on- ones. I’m not saying that that’s an easy feat by any means to do five in a day, but if you did one a day, I think you definitely need an hour.

And it doesn’t mean you have to use the whole hour, but give yourself an hour to dive a little bit deeper, have those conversations, or you’re going to end up at the performance review and then nobody should be shocked by anything in a performance review. A performance review really should just be a summary of all of your one- on- ones. Awesome.

Thanks.

And of course, any other questions there?

Jeremy, this is Rich with Wellsprout. There’s something that I’ve added to mine and also my direct reports who are also managers is because we’re virtual nowadays, is make sure they carve out a piece kind of like water cooler talk, as I like to call it, because we don’t really get the chance to see each other in an office every day. So you really get to know your employees that when there are difficult conversations or difficult tasks, it’s easier because you see each other as human because you’ve worked through just getting to know one another.

And that’s something that since COVID, I’ve added to our formats traditionally. And I was curious, what some of you guys’ thoughts are on that in general across the group and the round table. Sorry, I’m eating at the same time. So I’m going on and off video.

So I apologize. That jives with what I was calling the non- transactional portion of our format. It’s coaching soccer or whatever. It’s the same thing, trying to get people connected.

Yeah, yeah. That’s what I thought you meant, Zach. I just had to make sure.

Yep.

I’m glad other people are having some success there.

I like to always start my one- on- ones personal with a personal check- in, right? And even if it’s just five, 10 minutes, that’s still a good use of time. Personally, what I like to do is actually measure on a scale of one to five. And I built my own Google form when I was doing this. And I literally would go back and review how somebody was doing at certain, were they doing better in one quarter than another from an average perspective? So I think it’s a great opportunity to say, hey, just on a scale of one to five, how are you feeling this week?

Tell me about what’s going on with you, right? Starting that conversation there will naturally and positively force more connection type conversation. So I would suggest don’t dive right into business. Start with a personal check- in and then go into goals and status updates. Then go into roadblocks and solutions. Make sure there’s room for any kind of feedback. And look, these aren’t gonna always be 15 minutes and 15 minutes. This might be five minutes. This might, this week, might be 30 minutes, right? Depending on what’s going on.

But I think if you can cover these five areas here in each of your conversations, you will naturally have very, very positive outcomes and also just good data to look back on and say, hey, what did we do this year? What went well? Where could we improve?

Any other questions on one- on- ones? All right.

One other, this may sound like an EOR comment compared to the prior two. But if as a manager and or leader, you find yourself or a team member needing a disproportionate amount of one- on- one time so that they are staying aligned and they are clear on what to do and constantly like requiring guidance from you, I’m going to suggest that you ask yourself the question of what would life be like if I had somebody who was more competent in their job in that role?

And again, that’s the, by definition, like a lot of the framing of our conversation today is how to best, you know, empower and ensure our team members have the right thing, have what they need to do their jobs well. And that’s both tactical and strategic. At the end of the day, there also should be a paradigm here of, hey, you know, fundamentally there’s, you know, time allocation for the manager is, it can’t be 100%, you know, nonstop with your team aligning with them. So there is a governor to this point being.

Absolutely. And this brings me back to my metaphor that totally missed the mark, the apple and the barrel. So the apple being the employee, the barrel being the structure in which the employee resides, right? What you’ve got to sometimes ask yourself is, you know, is this an individual lack of skill or something kind of problem? Or maybe do I need to question the structure? You know, the inputs here, the process, the cadence, the onboarding, right?

So it’s a really good opportunity for you to diagnose, hey, do I need to improve something about the experience and training? Or, you know, are there more skill set related conversations we could have in order to help this person on the right path? Hopefully now my apple barrel metaphor makes more sense. All right, team. So let’s talk a little bit about performance reviews. So, you know, we have talked about onboarding, right? That initial experience.

We’ve talked about setting the cadence in the one- on- one from the beginning, you know, ensuring that there’s consistent feedback loops and a place to have real, open, candid, honest conversations with one another about what’s going awesome or maybe what can improve. And then you have performance reviews, right? Performance reviews are really for setting new goals, expectations, and timelines. That’s really one of the biggest point of performance reviews is to leave that conversation, once you’ve done the review, of new goals.

And these are personal development goals as well, right? Areas I need to improve in, what I need to learn.

They’re really… had.

And your one- on- ones are then for managing and guiding goal achievement, right? So you set goals and you’re incrementally guiding the achievement of those goals. And ideally, everybody’s improving over time, incrementally, and pivoting where needed. So when it comes to performance reviews, there’s two, you know, philosophies here. It’s, do we go with more of a generic rubric or do we build out role- specific scorecards, right? And one of these is obviously a little bit easier to do than the other. And they both have their own pros and cons, right?

Time input and the ease of managing these things versus having very measurable, tangible, role- specific measurements and outputs here. So what I usually say here is, for any companies that aren’t doing performance reviews yet and are thinking about starting performance reviews, I usually suggest in the beginning, build a generic rubric, get managers and employees into a good operating rhythm with understanding your rating paradigm and how to write good, you know, full- sentence feedback and be really thoughtful about goals.

And then when and if you’re ready, jump into more role- specific scorecards so that you’re actually measuring things that are specific to the position, whether it is prospecting skills for a salesperson or it is data architecture, you know, for a senior software engineer.

And then just high- level, when it comes to the overall performance review cycle, really what I suggest is once you’ve made a decision on the style you’re going to go with, get it into a system. It can be as simple as a Google Form, but ideally you’re going into more of a sophisticated platform that can automate these things and save the organization hundreds of hours when it comes to submitting, tracking, all of these things.

And then I highly suggest doing a good mix of an employee self- review.

Hey, I’m going to see what you would rate yourself, a manager down review.

Here’s the rating I would give you.

And then it’s almost good to also get an up review, right? We want feedback as well. The more feedback you can get without it being too nosy, the more holistic of a picture we’re going to be able to paint on what are the areas we need to focus on over the next six months. And when I think about a performance review meeting, it’s fairly similar. It’s a little bit longer than a one- on- one. So I always suggest for one- on- ones, block off an hour.

You may not use all of the time, but have that hour.

Whereas with this once or twice a year, or sometimes four times a year, depending on the organization, make sure you block off 90 minutes.

You want to give yourself a little time to establish your agenda. Hey, here’s what we’re going to discuss today.

To go over the accomplishments, go over areas of improvement, and make sure that there is a dedicated time to talk about where they want to take their career. Obviously, we should be having those conversations in a more condensed format in our one- on- ones, whereas this is the more formalized summary of all of those conversations in a documented form. And then importantly, just as we did for our one- on- ones, it’s always good to recap, right?

Here’s the goals that we set for the next three, six, twelve months. And by the way, I suggest when it comes to performance reviews, I think a really good cadence is twice a year.

Reason being, it’s not overly frequent, especially for smaller orgs who are getting into the flow of things, or maybe yours is practice, but it’s not infrequent enough to where you’re letting too much time go by between setting goals. And then kind of a little extra hack.

We definitely won’t dive too deep here.

One really cool thing to do with your performance reviews at the end is go through a nine box exercise.

I actually had a couple of different portfolio companies go through this exercise this year, and it has been really helpful not only to say, hey, you know, when we’re thinking about things such as promotions or merit increases, right?

You know, who are the individuals who are really going above and beyond and are ready for the next role?

But this is also a great succession planning tool. And it also helps you understand, you know, from a growth perspective, who is ready for that next managerial role or high level practitioner role, depending on which direction you go. So any questions about performance reviews that I can help answer for anybody before we dive into career pathing? Just kind of pulling a lot of this together.

Jeremy, just to hop in with a pre- submitted question. Someone asked if you had any tips for coaching people to move higher on the nine box grid.

Absolutely. Great question. So we have two different scales here.

We have performance and potential. And we’ll just do a little mini one minute crash course here on nine boxes. Performance. These are going to be the measurable criteria of the position.

Are they performing well as a software engineer, a senior sales executive, a product manager, right? These are going to typically be the things that you are going to see in a job description as to what you are responsible for. Those are the things that typically you’re going to rate for performance. Potential is going to be a little bit of a mix of, A, do they want to move to the next level? Because the willingness and intent is a part of potential.

And then the other part is, you know, do they have the soft skills and the hunger to move to the next level? So first and foremost, it’s really important for you to diagnose. If you were to choose one direction first, I know we want to do it all at the same time.

Everybody up to the to the bright blue in the top right corner.

Right.

But if you think about what area do they need to improve at first? I would usually say, hey, try to push everybody, right? And then go up.

If you’re going right, this is where you’re putting together very measurable smart goals around the role. If you’re looking to go, oh, this is really good, this is kind of where, if you want to put it in other terms, this is a lot of management here, and this is where leadership and inspiration and influence are going to take place. This is where we’re really talking about the soft skills, how we’re inspiring and leading others, how we’re presenting ourselves to others.

And this piece here is going to be setting those smart goals around specific criteria in which they should improve them. So my personal suggestion, go right and then up. Any other questions here? All right. If anything pops up, don’t hesitate to ask. So let’s talk a little bit about career pathing. This is pulling a lot of these things that we’ve talked about together. And really, you’ve heard the term job architecture, career pathing, very similar words and phrases here.

And essentially what this is, is it is your library of well- built job descriptions that are tailored to each position or company with a purpose of outlining how employees move up, over, et cetera. So when we think about career pathing, you know, this is becoming a very, very important topic in many companies. And one of the big reasons here is there’s two major reasons, and there can be many reasons, but two of the biggest, most recurring reasons why employees leave organizations are either, A, they don’t have a good relationship with their manager.

So your one on ones and feedback are crucial. And B, I don’t feel like I have any growth. You know, I feel like I’ve hit my growth potential. And look, there are going to be some times in which, yeah, you know, the next thing may not exist to you. But more often than not, it really is just because we didn’t take the time to outline it. And this leads to substantial retention improvement, especially of our highest performing employees. Those are typically the ones that are leaving because they hit their growth potential, our top performers.

So really what we’re trying to do here is put together a library of job descriptions, if you will. I’ll show you kind of what the output of one looks like. But really, we’re trying to build a go and earn it culture.

Right.

Hey, here’s what you need to do to move to the next level. Do the job before you get the job kind of mentality. Right. And those individuals, by the way, who have that hunger, that desire to go and earn it. Those are your high potential employees. We look back at our inbox. You know, this is definitely going to not only be your here’s why I move up and move over. But this should be the same scorecard that could be your performance review. It’s your interview scorecard.

So this thing really plays three to four major goals that if you do this one exercise, it replicates in multiple areas that are incredibly measurable for the organization. And then it also when you tie it to compensation, it’s really kind of bring the whole program together. Now you’re also helping your company control and forecast costs and establishing pay equity. So this exercise, I can’t really stress how important of an order or of organizational exercises. It doesn’t have to be super complex. You know, and here’s a basic example.

You know, here is what we imagine for this organization. Maybe today we only have two people at this level and we have an engineering manager. And that happens a lot. Right. Really, what you’re doing is you’re saying, hey, if I were to build a map right now and I were told that I need to go and hire X amount of people, here are the levels that I would put in place.

And then you essentially back yourself into it using existing job descriptions and market job descriptions, and also whittling down or adding to those existing job descriptions. And I always suggest where possible, it’s not possible on every single word, but try to establish this is going to be your individual contributor path. And I would establish both the management path and a high level practitioner path, again, where applicable. And not only that, you as a manager can also help build your future goal, right?

This is also you setting goals for yourself. So this really touches on a lot of areas. And essentially, this is what a really rich one would look like, it does not have to look just like this, or have just as many things. But what I usually do is I say, hey, break this down into all this is right here is if you were going to create a job description, we’d almost copy and paste these and go, here are the requirements. You know, here are the requirements for the individual we want to hire into this position.

So take the requirements section of your job description, pop it in to a spreadsheet, and then maybe add a couple of other things you think are important. Personally, I like to bucket these and what are some of the knowledge points they should have? What are the technical skills they should have? And then what are the soft skills, which we’re just calling abilities here, they should have. And then here are the things that need to happen for you to get promoted.

Now you can do is employee goes, hey, I’ve been an associate software engineer for nine months, I’m doing an amazing job. What’s next? And you’re able to go, boom, here you go, I want to put the ownership on you. I’m going to support you the whole way through. So ask me for help. Here’s how to get there. You’ve solved 50% of the equation of one of the biggest reasons employees leave organizations and you’ve solved multiple problems, all in one snapshot.

Any questions on career pathing before we jump into the last section and just open the floor up for additional questions and conversation?

I’d actually just like to ask the group, how many of, this is just a little bit of a pulse check. How many of your members of your team are asking for the career, like ask to have that conversation before it’s suggested? And you know, on the other end of the spectrum, nobody ever says anything and everything’s just fine. And I paint those as ends of a spectrum somewhat intentionally. I know, I’m sure the answer is in between, but curious to kind of hear some takes here.

This is rich from my point. Every org I’ve been in the last, I don’t know, decade or so, it’s always come up if it wasn’t already in place, depending on when I, you know, kind of took over Brian, but it’s always come up because it’s pretty standard now in the technical field because, you know, the bigger companies have, you know, set that standard, no matter what your size is, you have to grow into this pretty quick for retention. Otherwise, you know, they just look, they just look differently. It doesn’t mean you have to make it elaborate.

Once again, keep it simple, keep it manageable to your size and measurable to be able to go up that ladder. That’s the key. Don’t try to make it Google instantly because that’s, you know, that just doesn’t fit necessarily where the growth model is.

That’s a good take, Rich. And for Rich, you introduced yourself earlier, but Rich is the CTO of Wellspring and he’s referring, of course, to a lot of engineering and technical slash technology talent, kind of general heads nodding across other functional areas as well, or any other takes. I’m not looking for a reason to start to not do this, by the way, but I’m just, but I am curious, like the functional lens is an interest, is something I’m curious about. And that big company point you call out, Rich, is a really good call out too.

Hey.

Go ahead. Go ahead, Colby.

Awesome. Hey, Colby.

This is Colby Claiborne. I’m over at NAC as the People Operations Manager here. I think that, so I joined NAC about three months ago and then NAC overall grew a lot in 2023, like almost, I think, doubled our employee size. And so it feels like last year was the year of acquiring the talent and this is the year of growing the talent. And so this has been a really common theme that we’re getting across the board.

I know I just messaged our NACsters that are in the call, but spoiler alert, this is going to be a big initiative for me in Q2, building these career paths and getting this in place because we’ve seen so many requests. And it’s at all levels. We have, you know, VPs or directors asking how to get to VP and we have associates asking how to get, you know, to staff into that next role as well. And so we’re really excited to see that growth in that initiative really across the board.

And this is Rich again, a couple of things to think, whether it’s technical or non- technical, it doesn’t all have to be about salary. Yeah, it can be about recognition, little things about being able to go to conferences. There’s lots of ways of making it work to fit within whatever budget. We all have budgets, you know how it works. And being able to still make it celebratory for the employees, they can share amongst themselves and at the same time rise and make it competitive at the same time.

Because right now, market looks one way, but you guys can remember a couple of years ago, it was pretty ugly out there to get talent because everybody was fighting and jacking up those salaries just because there was such a shortage. You just never know where you’re gonna be. So by setting a baseline of everything, both I’ll say compensatory, as well as one- offs, it really sets that morale and sets that standard that you guys can, that we can follow. And it leaves a good legacy because the little things matter too, not just the title and you laugh.

Think about business cards. I know we don’t really issue them anymore, but as you get to a certain rank, because you interact more with vendors, you have them. I know it’s kind of dopey, but every little thing adds up to why that rank, if you will, for a better word, matters, both on the technical side and of course the manager side, because there’s that growth there too.

So just something to kind of keep in mind as you, every policy, everybody invents it a different way, but there’s a lot of cool things you can do and not break the bank too, because obviously we still have to work within a means, if you will. But, because what I have found early on before I kind of learned the other things, if I didn’t think out of the box, I would stop myself from doing it because I didn’t have the budget.

And I got to think beyond that because you want to help your employees first and then figure out how to get the budget as time goes on sometimes. Thanks Rich.

Jeff, I know we were stepping on you before you jumped in there. No, no, that was a great answer that Rich had and love those thoughts, Colby. So I’ve been with AgencyBlock for three years, came from a publicly traded company, a small publicly traded company, but a larger sales organization before I was here. And since then I’ve been part of 10, maybe almost 15 kind of hires within the sales org at AgencyBlock. And for us, career pathing comes up in two ways.

One, from internal employees, when you post externally for positions and two, in that interview process, right? And it’s a balancing act. We’re now about 150 team members. When I started, we were about 45 team members. And so it’s a balancing act between what Rich was talking about, which is being creative without being like too cute. Cause you don’t want it just to be symbolic only, but you do want it to be meaningful to each and every one of those team members. And you wanna provide a career path to growth.

And so now we’re kind of embarking on our next hire, which is an inside sales manager and super important to our organization. And it’s tricky because we don’t have seven inside sales managers. We have one and it’s like the core portion of our revenue and it’s super, super important. But there are plenty of team members internally that are interested in career pathing. And so that set off a series of conversations that I’ve had with them of like, how do we get you prepared to lead?

What are those like team lead subject matter expert items that, and Rich pointed out shows, I love that too. What are those things that can get you prepared to lead? Because what I’ve shared with each of those team members is like, this isn’t a learn on the job opportunity, right? It’s like, you’ve gotta be ready and willing and ready to go when that opportunity opens up. But when we think about companies of our size, there’s not gonna be seven openings, it’s gonna be one and you’re gonna have to make that best choice from.

But as you scale those opportunities and different segments will open up. So that’s kinda where it comes up for us, Brian.

Awesome.

Totally resonates. I’ll say one thing that may be an observation, both really what everybody just said is, I would say is that this is where the overlap of management and leadership really starts to kick in. Cause you’re starting to help paint a picture for somebody of, hey, what’s my life? How’s my life going to be different professionally, maybe more broadly tomorrow if I do these certain things that that’s starting to elevate, you know, potentially the and grow somebody. And that’s really kind of getting at this part of it too.

And the goal here is, again, this is a more refined built out one. It does not have to be this specific, right? Starting off with a good MVP is an amazing place to be. It’s farther than many companies get, to be honest with you. So don’t hesitate to take the requirements section of your job descriptions, throw it in there, and then say, hey, if you were to take, you know, you’re the only person in your role today, but if you were to take it to the next level, what would you challenge somebody in your position to go and learn and do to move up, right?

Again, outsourcing, make this a collaborative thing. And the whole goal of these, these should be employee facing and they are going to change over time, right? Cause organizations and roles are going to change over time, which is totally fine.

I’ll do a very quick run through, cause I know that we’re short on time here, but just kind of to wrap all of this up, you know, when we’re thinking about just the employee life cycle, I think an easy metaphor here is if you’re to think about a clock and not every clock is ticking at the same pace, but our goal is to get every clock ticking essentially as fast as possible, right? And this is the employee productivity clock. Think about your seconds as your one- on- ones. Think about your, maybe your half and one hour mark as your performance reviews.

Think about your goals as, you know, maybe your quarters or your specific hour marks, right? It’s really about establishing a good cadence, making sure that we have good, meaningful inputs, and then we’re bringing in some structure and just overall viewability of what’s next, right? So the smallest inputs, don’t forget how important these add up to make sure that these things are more impactful and that we’re tracking these things, right?

And really effective manager train, you know, really empowering and equipping your managers to do these things well, and very importantly, to do these things consistently, right, across the board, that’s where you’re are very real outputs to providing a good manager training program.

It doesn’t have to be super lengthy and robust, but you’re now creating an environment where you’re increasing productivity and performance, and you can trust your managers to make those decisions because they’ve all been trained in a similar way and fashion, and they can share ideas easily together because of that. Now you’re more capable of promoting from within, which is helping obviously build morale, and you’re equipping all of those individuals to be able to take on teams.

And then again, it is a huge retention mechanism, not only for your employees, but also for your managers. So definitely invest in this thing. And just remember, effective employees are very often built by effective managers, and effective managers are built through effective training. You know, so getting everybody on the same page is going to have serious, serious ROI for the organization. And I digress. Thank you for, you know, really letting me dive into just a couple of high- level items specifically on the managerial side.

Any other questions I can answer before we hop here in just a minute or so?

No, I appreciate you guys putting this together. I love these roundtables, get to know one another and exchange ideas. You just never know what you’re going to pick up at any of these, and so I love having these and appreciate, you know, the Portco putting this together. I look forward to more sessions like this on other topics too.

It’s awesome.

You bet, Rich.