Leadership & OKRs Fuel Growth
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Chris Cravens, former CIO of Zynga and Uber as well as former VP, Software Engineering for Splunk shares what he learned about OKRs from Zynga, his passion for clarity, and how servant leadership leads to better business outcomes. Chris is one of few people who has ridden three high growth rockets -- his lessons are worth learning, including how ruthless prioritization helps people thrive as fast growth companies scale.
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Chris Cravens
Dadri Pack Nod
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00:06
You're listening to The OKR Podcast. We talk About the power of lateral alignment and outcome mindset and empowering teams to do their best work from anywhere. We also talk about operating as a digital company which is crucial. Now here journeys learnings and victories from our guest speakers and get expertise from our host to scale your leadership capacity and operate with high impact trust and efficiency. Here's your host Dadri Pack Nod.
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Dadri Pack Nod
00:33
Today my guest is Chris Cravens. Chris is a tech executive who's built scaled and transformed global teams for some of the fastest growing companies in
Silicon Valley
.Share
00:44
He's on a much-deserved sabbatical right now focused on his family, his health and wellness. I'm incredibly jealous but skipping that over the course of Chris's career, he's really built some of the most amazing and scaled teams in super fast-growth companies. He led multiple tech and Ops teams at
Uber
as the company was doubling quarterly.Share
01:08
He headed up I. T. at
Zynga
while they were doubling every six months and the rise of gaming was growing insanely fast and then he went on to Splunk
and scaled with them from 800 million to over two billion in revenue. All of them epic journeys in industry creating companies.Share
01:30
Chris is also a practitioner of servant leadership, has some very nice insights on what leading well looks like and he's got lots of experience in
OKRs
and all of that implies. Zynga
was one of course the earliest users of OKRs
his coaching. His approach to mentoring will make our conversation terrific today. Chris welcome.Share
Chris Cravens
01:53
Thank you so much I'm really excited to be here. I'm so excited to talk today.
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Dadri Pack Nod
01:58
Awesome. So you have super interesting career. Not not very many people get to go on three different rocket rides.
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Chris Cravens
02:07
Yeah for better or for worse, right? Be careful what you wish for, right? Yeah. So I am very fortunate in my career in that I have been able to put myself in the right place at the right time a couple of a couple of times and it's been personally and professionally transformative.
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02:27
So as you alluded to kind of the first real big rocket ride was that
Zynga
I was brought in there to start the I. T. organization as we were what 150 people. This was before FarmVille
. This was early days really online gaming at all. Right in the early days of Facebook
very quickly we took off we launched FarmVille
we learned all about EC2 and scaling in Amazon we wrote a bunch of stuff we like I think I was on 20 plus MNA, as we did like well over 30 and just massive scaling and figuring out like how do I set up this machine to constantly grow. Right and what does it look like to build this thing. And I had never done anything like that before.Share
03:12
I mean I had been operational in I. T. and I had run projects and done some transformation work but never anything where kind of your baseline data day is, "Okay. You know think of how your business grows now imagine you're gonna double every six months right?". So your baseline is on this massive tilt and everything just has to go accordingly right? So you have to figure out how do I scale ahead of that and anticipate what's next and it is a difficult experience and not something to be undertaken lightly.
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Dadri Pack Nod
03:45
In those days almost no one had grown that fast before. I mean it was maybe
Google
maybe Facebook
but there were not hundreds of companies that were super high growth in the early days of Zynga
that was inventing what super-scaling looks like.Share
Chris Cravens
04:04
Yes absolutely and I mean so I remember actually I don't remember the date but I remember the day that news started to scatter through headquarters that we had actually officially outpaced
Google
as the fastest-growing startup.Share
04:20
And there was there was some there was a metric there and I wish I had this like more effectively committed to memory right? But it was it was a different register for me, it was it was more of an emotional thing of like you know that was really exciting to me because you know that that felt like impact to me.
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Dadri Pack Nod
04:38
Yeah yeah and then famously
Zynga
used OKRs
as a mechanism for driving clarity for accelerating for actually helping people adjust to what it means to grow that fast.Share
Chris Cravens
04:52
Absolutely,
OKRs
were an absolutely essential tool for us at Zynga
and something that, you know, it was a challenge at first to figure out how to shift your mindset, especially as somebody who's, you know, comes from an operational background or comes from like that real execution mindset to pivot to think in outcomes and thinking in measures and think downrange, especially when you're so used to, you know, the way that the organization so frequently plan their activities this quarter, I'm gonna do this thing and then this quarter I'm gonna do that thing, right?Share
05:33
But you can't necessarily depend on that when you need to grow like that because you don't have the luxury of being able to wait to see how those outcomes really come out and how things shake out, you have to move faster, right?
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05:46
Which also means then... And the other piece of this at
Zynga
specifically, and one of the other great learnings there, that was really freeing and something that I think more people need to do and embrace is "ruthless prioritization". And the combination of okay, are, is like well written, OKRs
that unequivocally clarify and create that kind of harmonic resonance for everybody on the team where you understand what that is, you can tie it out and you understand your piece of it that coupled with the clarity of ruthless prioritization is exceptionally freeing and you can go so fast and accomplished a ton and so for context.Share
06:36
Right? So I know, you know, folks out there may not understand what ruthless prioritization is, right? So the simple thing of it is this.
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06:44
You always have a whack ton of stuff that needs to get done in a given week. There's way more than you can possibly get done at a level of quality that's going to be acceptable to you or the receiving party. Right? So just admit that. It's not about you, it's not a judgment, it's not a problem. It's just a thing, right? This is where we all live and in hyper-scale, that is a thing. We all are there.
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07:06
Go ahead. Okay, full stop admit "I got more stuff than I need". What do I need to focus on? I can't spend all my time thinking about how I got more stuff, I can't spend all my time organizing it. I can't spend all my time making any promises. I can't back up. I need to very quickly decide what are the three things I can do and then go do them.
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07:27
You know, when you're building a product, right? And the people that depend on those other seven things, when they're outside your walls, they don't know they're coming.
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07:35
It's cool. If you are working in a broader team and there are people that have dependencies on you. You know, it requires another level of communication and trust, right? And that's where the interaction I think between ruthless prioritization of cars really gets good at that cross-functional management level, when, when, when you can get really crisp about what matters and what you can truly do to drive that outcome in this period, right? And how you're going to measure the efficacy of that great things happen.
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Dadri Pack Nod
08:12
I equate the dynamic, you talked about in really the gap between our ambition and our current capacity and lots of...
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Chris Cravens
08:21
Oh my Gosh, yes, yes!
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Dadri Pack Nod
08:22
Right? If you have a lot of ambition, there is inevitably a gap between what you aspire to, but you imagine are the possibilities and what your current capacity is, and instead of getting tripped up in that gap, right? Just like fantastic! That's the best news there is!
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Chris Cravens
08:44
About yourself and understand also like, "okay, there is a, you know, if you imagine the
Venn diagram
, I would guess there's a high level of overlap between the people who are going to have a propensity to overreach because they're super ambitious and the people who show up in companies that grow really fast".Share
Dadri Pack Nod
08:59
Yep, absolutely, yep. And the device, right, that helps them bridge that gap and to actually move closer to their ambition is, as you point out, right, it's ruthless prioritization, "Okay, can't do everything". So let me be unbelievably shrewd about the truth I make with my time because my capacity is simply time, right?
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Chris Cravens
09:22
However, it takes an involved person and it takes an evolved management team to understand this, right? Because as long as we focus on activities and this kind of tactical task list kind of approach, right? It doesn't work.
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09:38
This is why those people do so well in
OKR-based
environments right? It becomes this very freeing thing of okay, here's the outcome that you need to drop that. I am not going to tell you how you get there right? We need to figure out like there's always this negotiation of how much work is there and all this thing right?Share
09:57
But the spirit of it is, you own the how here's the here's the what and how much and how many right now go get it and you have the tools to constrain your world such that you can focus, right? But we all have to be prepared for that conversation.
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Dadri Pack Nod
10:18
Yeah and that doesn't happen without leadership itself being prepared for that conversation. Right?
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Chris Cravens
10:24
And yeah, that's a sign of good mature governance, right? Is an understanding and look, pincus was the one who was shouting ruthless prioritization from the rooftop, so absolutely huge credit to him and I still think that is like the most valuable thing I ever learned from the man, it changed my professional life.
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Dadri Pack Nod
10:49
Yeah, I had the actually my last real trip in 2020 before there was no travel he and I were
Mark Pincus
and I were guest speakers at a multiday Harvard Business School
symposium on OKRs
and using new ways of teaming in, new ways of managing and leading the way forward, and he talked a lot about the early days and just why it was so important to him and it was awesome to hear his stories obviously, but man, he was clear on why being explicit about the outcomes and measuring was so important to take in the hill, right, and growing at the rate that the company was growing quite good, it was also very open about the wrong turns taken and have been done differently. The candor was just seemed just as important as the rest, actually.Share
Chris Cravens
11:42
Oh absolutely, well if you think about it like through your process right, you need to have that ability to candidly and with great self-awareness, retrospect and understand truly where am I in the same, same spirit of, I know I've got more stuff on my plate than I can possibly execute with quality, so therefore I will prioritize right, it's okay, I know that I don't execute everything perfectly, yep, yep, there we go, there we go, let's set up a feedback loop, you know, and I, you know, I remember a lot of the chaos around
OKRs
early on and it was, it was hard, like it was really, really hard and when that cross-team coordination wasn't there, and this is why I say that that's where the magic is, because I remember the quarters where that didn't work right?Share
12:35
And invariably what would happen is when that friction was there and when the alignment wasn't really there, right?
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12:44
Somebody runs in two weeks before the end of the quarter and says, you have to do fill in the blank because it is fill in the blank executives, okay, are right. And then you're right back to managing by personality, by fear by task, you know, and to
Zynga's
credit, they kept fighting through that, right?Share
13:06
And that's important, right? That in this kind of thing, that is your trough of disillusionment moment, that's where you as the leader need to like, go ahead and whatever it is, whatever your metaphor is, pull up your Wellies, have your Wheaties, you know, whatever it is, you as the leader now need to own this and make it better. Yes, nobody else owns it for you.
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Dadri Pack Nod
13:31
It takes a ton of guts to really, really aligned laterally.
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Chris Cravens
13:39
Yes. And you can never wait. Like if you're sitting there, if you're sitting there in that exact staff meeting or in that cross-functional planning meeting and you have even an inkling of the thought of, you know, this is unfair or that person isn't reaching out to me, that is your signal that you are not reaching out enough, right? That's it, 100%.
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Dadri Pack Nod
14:00
Yeah, that's right.
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Chris Cravens
14:02
You know, I felt that and that was just fear, that was that kind of, "Jeez, I don't know if I'm doing this right". You know, and it's ultimately like those kind of interactions, they need to be built on a better level of trust for that cross-functional leadership team to gel and really execute well.
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14:24
If you, if you don't have that trust, cross-functionally... The same way if you don't have the trust within your own organization, yeah, things are not going to flow correctly, right? The information won't flow...
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Dadri Pack Nod
14:38
The conversation won't flow.
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Chris Cravens
14:39
Correct, right? People will hold back information, they'll overstate the positive, understate the negative. You know, we always called, you know, multi-level management turd polishing, you know, that you start with something at the, like the individual contributor level where it's like, "Something here is really, really bad". And, you know, maybe there's a clear called action and maybe there's not, but it's bad.
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15:05
And by the time it makes it to the line manager, to the Senior Manager, to the Director and the Senior director to the VP to the CIO When it gets on, my status report is the CIO, like, "This is all fantastic".
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Dadri Pack Nod
15:18
Yeah. Right.
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Chris Cravens
15:20
And it's just, that is a sign of a problem in the organization around trust, right? And yeah, yeah, that's the sign that goes, right, right.
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Dadri Pack Nod
15:34
So let's let's transition to some of the experiences you had at, at
Splunk
in particular. I know you did some really transformative things there and in particular, maybe some of your servant leadership and teeming superpowers came from your experience, it at Splunk
.Share
Chris Cravens
15:53
So thank you. Yeah, so teaming is a huge thing, right? And I'm a fan of teaming in a slightly different way, right? And the same way I really like to think about how we measure the organization by business outcome.
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16:10
I like to think about organizing also by business outcome and building execution teams around business outcomes And you know, this is not anything new, right? This is kind of digital 101. And this is the way that web products are built, right?
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16:27
So in the areas where this can work, technically, right? And there's heavy caveats around this. This doesn't work for every piece of an internal technology organization from the actual like tech piece of it. But from the organizational mindset, I think it's rock solid.
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16:45
You organize yourself more around business topic areas and you govern your investments around these topic areas and it takes work to be able to define them and you need to be able to redefine them on an ongoing basis.
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17:03
The organizational structure really becomes somewhat fluid at that team level, but by and large. So I would look at, you know, within that organization, I was primarily aligned to sales is my primary customer because my job was to go and transform our top line and think about how do we effectively prosecute digital transformation, widen the funnel polish the sides get deals through faster, right?
Share
17:28
And then there was a greater stock price. So we have to be able to focus within that, but it's not just enough to stack up a whole bunch of projects and think that you're going to get an outcome right? That doesn't work.
Share
17:43
It's much more about what commitment do we want to make to clear previous debt and having a conscious understanding of how much we want to be drawn to the past versus where are we going to just burn the boats and move on? Alright. How much of a conscious investment are we going to make into repairing something versus building something new? What are our conscious investments? And that's in particular topic areas? So for ours we did big transformation first on the lead to opportunity flow within salesforce.
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18:17
We partnered really closely with the business, we defined the objectives, we set a team around it, we swarmed on it and executed very much in a scrum mentality. We proved that and then started to replicate it out kind of topic by topic. Again, starting with go to market first and then continuing to build out.
Share
18:36
But organizing in that way, it gave us a completely different way to have the conversation also, it changed the governance model, it changed the way that we framed the conversation with exact staff, It changed the way that I reported on my spend, you know, I didn't report on this kind of project-level spend anymore.
Share
18:55
The detail was all there, but I really wanted to be able to and we were actually pursuing four zones with
Jeff Moore
at the time. So I was able to mold that a little bit into our vernacular and what we ended up doing was we worked through that at one point, but then we adapted it to how do we define our investments as things that either run the business, grow the business or transform the business, right? And then how do I, how do I govern my investments and govern my objectives?Share
19:30
And at a at a very quick glance, I can tell how well or how poorly I am aligned to the strategy of the company and what's necessary.
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Dadri Pack Nod
19:40
I think the one of the things we're seeing a lot of is this just reimagining what team and organizing models are. So this there's the legacy, the organizational legacy of particularly large enterprise and I'll call like relatively slow-moving enterprise is we have vertical alignment and we goal individuals which are fundamentally a set of private conversations between two people and vertically aligned where the growth you've experienced and the growth I've experienced and what I'm seeing and companies are trying to move faster is actually it's not vertically aligned, private individual conversations.
Share
20:21
It's how we team, like teams are the engine of value creation and the lateral alignment is how we growth.
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Chris Cravens
20:30
Absolutely. It's that lateral alignment and then it is the further component ization of the work and definition of ownership, accountability and outcome in those teams, right? And you're right, it is having that cross functional view within the team. You know, if you look at a scrum team in a great technology company, there is somebody thinking about the user experience, there is somebody thinking about the and the aesthetics, there is somebody thinking about functionality, there's somebody thinking about data, there's something thinking about security.
Share
21:04
These are all rolls right? And it's going to be split up differently amongst different people but these are the kind of roles that need to happen.
Share
21:12
There is no reason when we go to apply a new teaming model to some other context that we can't think about it the same way. Right. If you are, let's say let's say you're in a C R O stack and you're trying to think about how do I want to build a team to accomplish an objective?
Share
21:30
You still have the same models. You may not hire a product manager but you still need to think about what is my process and how do I automate it? You may not hire a designer but you still need to think about how do I craft my message and make my decks look good? You may not have like a PMM person but you're gonna need to write copy right. Those roles are all there. It all works. But the the real benefit is focus and ownership at that level. Right? And then these autonomous teams move fast!
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Dadri Pack Nod
22:03
That's right. When we have teams and we think of them as dynamic teams, right? So teams where their not formed because there's authority and hierarchy, but teams that are formed because that's the right set of talented people and skills. We need to drive a particular mission if you will.
Share
22:20
And so we don't have authority to get the team to do the right thing in the right order. Right? There's a vacuum. What I love about team-level
OKRs
is they become a way for self-forming teams to self articulate what their intention is, whether it is they're trying to achieve and get to a shared understanding, co-authored understanding of what are the outcomes?Share
22:44
We're collectively going to drive and then we all care about them. We're accountable to each other. We have a different relationship to what it is we're going to do than the classic model of like the specialized teams, here's your activity list. Where are you on the activity? Right. Which sounds like a death march.
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Chris Cravens
23:05
Activity lists are an absolute death march. And that's, unfortunately, kind of how people are really marshaling right now on this, this new distributed work model as well. But you're right. Like it's this kind of tactical thing of what have you done for me today as opposed to tell me about the piece of the business that you own and contribute to and how's it going?
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Dadri Pack Nod
23:28
Yeah. And what's your ambition?
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Chris Cravens
23:30
Right? Which one would you... Which one would you rather hear, right? Like this is the piece of the business that you have accountability for. We have the maturity to have the process and the systems in place, so that we understand like here's the goals, here's the objectives, here's what here's how we measure the outcome.
Share
23:46
That needs to all be part of the process so that you can elevate that conversation to that, that level of this is the human being providing this capability.
Share
23:59
You know, whether it's leading the team or they're contributing to the team. You know, they are somebody in your organization contributing to an outcome, right? And your responsibility as the leader is to ensure that they understand how they're connected. They are aligned, they are invested, right? They're contributing. Write your role as a leader is not to badger them with a task list.
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Dadri Pack Nod
24:25
No, I think if you think about like the potential for
OKRs
and in particular in dynamic teams that cross-functional teams, it's this potential for every single team to actually have ambition and be unbelievably clear about how they're going to use their finite capacity to realize their ambition.Share
24:44
And it's really hard to get ambitious about a long list. It's way easier to get ambitious about shared intentions that make a measurable impact on the company you work for customers you serve?
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Chris Cravens
24:57
Yeah. And guess what? It may still be 80% of that stuff. That's on that long list. That absolutely has to get done to get that?
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Dadri Pack Nod
25:06
You don't know why.
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Chris Cravens
25:07
Right? Why! Write that. That if you can tie it back to like why are you doing this not? You know, so it gets done. I want to implement ASAP I gotta set up the firewall. If I don't turn on the firewall, we get breached.
Share
25:24
You know, that's not why you're doing it, you're doing it so that we have a great experience for our end users, you're doing it so that we grow top line 400% this year, you're doing it so that we, you know, there's some outcome that's there and if we can effectively as leaders and this is really what we need to be able to do, right?
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25:41
It's first defining this outcome and, you know, it's creating the fiction of this new world where this outcome has happened and making it real for people, right? Because if it's you you've got to make it real in the team's mind to make it resonate, right? And that's ultimately your first role as a leader, right, is to start that conversation and and get that to be something that is now going to seed and continue to grow, right?
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26:12
And they'll continue to make that vision better, right? So, you get them there and get them the vision, you get them aligned and you get them moving, you know, and get. And get clear understanding of who is going to own what, how do we interact, what are our contracts with one another?
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26:29
It doesn't have to be this big arduous thing, but kind of, "How do we hand off from one group to another and how do we make sure that nobody's running in at the last minute saying something isn't done", right?
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Dadri Pack Nod
26:40
Yeah. Yeah.
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Chris Cravens
26:41
Right! So you also have to think about like, how do you set up your leading and lagging, lagging kind of indicators and there is real work to do with this as well, right? This is not all just like woo, woo, kind of, we're gonna burn some incense and talk about our feelings.
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Dadri Pack Nod
26:56
No, there's actually more discipline and more fortitude for leaders, not less.
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Chris Cravens
27:00
Absolutely. It is a look, this is a lifestyle and that's the thing, this is not something that you undertake lightly if you really want to do this. Like to me, okay are is a lifestyle and it's a it's a choice that you make.
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27:15
I actually had this. So, I had this discussion with my daughter, it sounds really horrible when I started like that, but she asked me, we were having, you know, we're all doing the like school from home and work from home and home from home and all the things, right?
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27:28
So, it just so happened I before we got together here, I was talking to my daughter and well, what's on your what's on your agenda? And I was telling her like recording a podcast and she's actually, well what are you talking about? And I gave her kind of a high level, right? And I gave her my kind of view on objective-based management, right?
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27:51
And she kind of gave me that look as you know, an inquisitive seven year or seventh grader does and I explained it to her like, look, it's the difference between me, like if you think about the way that I ask you about your homework, I don't hound you about is this homework done? Is that homework done? I know that I can log into the classroom system with school and see what's done, what isn't.
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28:10
Instead my conversation that I want to have with you is, "What did you observe through doing your homework? What did you learn? What was hard, what was really easy, you know, what was the thing that happened that you didn't expect?"
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28:22
Like I want to I want to be able to engage and have that deeper conversation with her. And she got an intuitive, it's like, "That's way better! I don't want you to just ask me what I'm doing".
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Dadri Pack Nod
28:31
Yeah, or nag me doing it right. Which is somehow an interpretation of what team-level management looks like right now.
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Chris Cravens
28:43
If we set up, if we set up our project management systems as glorified nagware that's what we're gonna get and you have to be able to look, you have to be able to manage the task level. You have to be able to do it and you, you have to be able to allow people to look, they're going to do jury tasks, they're gonna do a song and they're gonna do whatever the, whatever the platform is, it has to happen.
Share
29:03
But that's not the point. That's not where leadership happens. That's where the tactical execution happens. You as a leader needed to set your folks up in such a way that they have faith and that is their world, right? They have faith that you are in your world, there in their world. They get to own how they do the execution.
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29:25
Now, obviously look, if there's quality issues, you gotta dive in, you gotta fix them all those kind of things. Right? So I am speaking in this in terms of like assuming that things are going well right, you still have to be able to dive in where necessary. But you have to give those teams the ability to own really own their outcomes if you want them to grow and learn.
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Dadri Pack Nod
29:47
Yeah. And I think growth and learning are where real sustained innovation actually comes from.
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Chris Cravens
29:55
And that's the only way that you, you grow the next level of leaders right? Otherwise you grow another level of taskmasters, right? You don't grow independent, critical thought by continuing to run down task lists. Too easy.
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30:11
You need to throw people in those difficult, sticky, messy gray situations where they have to exercise critical thought where the answer is not easy.
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Dadri Pack Nod
30:21
Yeah, critical thought ambition in the face of uncertainty and scarcity. That's where original great products always come from.
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Chris Cravens
30:30
Absolutely, yeah!
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Dadri Pack Nod
30:31
And then we go and grow companies and we like squash out the conditions that created the magic in the first place. Kind of ironic.
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Chris Cravens
30:39
Yeah, that's a great observation. You're right. But that, you know, all of that uncertainty and all of that kind of vagary.
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30:49
That's an opportunity to really step up and define something right? You can you can definitely take that from a more backseat position of jeez this is so vague, it's hard to operate in this. No, no, no, no, no. But look, my take is this. And I heard this phrase once and I absolutely love it in the absence of other leadership step-in and do the right thing. Like just just go do it, go bring a little order out of that chaos and make it better.
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31:18
You know, if no one else like there's nobody else here doing it, I'm gonna go do it. Yeah, Yeah. Until somebody tells me that I'm offending them greatly by doing it. You know, great.
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Dadri Pack Nod
31:31
Good chance they won't. So let's turn to leadership because this is one of the weirdest years ever. And as we talked about earlier, right, there's a psychic taxes on 2020 for all of us really. But the big deal is what it means to lead right now looks really different than what it meant before.
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31:52
And, several shifts there. But you talked about trust a bit earlier, you talked about how important that was a lot harder to build and a lot harder to preserve and amplify when we never see each other when we have no small interactions...
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Chris Cravens
32:10
Exactly, right. That's exactly right. Because look, so adjacency is a real thing, right? And I think, look, it's a fantastic thing that those of us who have the opportunity from... to work from home are able to work from home and that at least some part of the economy can keep going.
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32:28
But the benefits that we had from being in an office are not necessarily all direct benefits to execution. There are a lot of indirect benefits, execution, you know, if you think about it, and I did mention trust really, trust is a huge thing for me, right?
Share
32:48
I think trust is knowing enough about that person that you know how they're gonna react, right? Similar to like my view on cultures, I think culture is the way that people are gonna act when like that person who's in charge of the culture is not in the room, right? The way that people act when nobody's looking right, that's your real culture. But that trust is so incredibly important when you need to be able to move fast, right?
Share
33:14
It's not just, you know, each of these things kind of build on one another, right? If you have that crisp understanding and the emotional resonance with what the outcome looks like, right, that person now knows what they need to do.
Share
33:27
You also need to develop the trust so that they can now go do it and you can stop asking about it until it's appropriate to ask about it, right?
Share
33:38
And they need the trust on their side also, so that they know when you hand it to them, you're actually handing it to them and you're not gonna come back five minutes later and try to micromanage that you're not gonna go hand it to someone else, right? That you are, you are the person who does what they say, right?
Share
33:59
And this is this is something that can depend on, we used to get that signal from all sorts of other areas and especially when you think about this, not necessarily with the people that you directly interact with, but for senior leaders, this is something to think about for your skip level folks.
Share
34:19
Now you don't see them in a monthly all hands, you don't see them in a large format meeting where one of you is talking and one of you is not, but there's that adjacency and ability to kind of tangentially interact, right?
Share
34:35
So these these kind of implicit opportunities to solidify community and trust have really gone away and we have replaced all of this with implicit conversations within our immediate execution teams, Right? And those kind of additional opportunities are fading, which I think then really changes the dynamic and the feedback I hear from people and I don't know about you.
Share
34:59
But what I hear is commute time is taken up with
Zoom
meetings. Lunchtime is taken up with Zoom
meetings, gym time is taken up with Zoom
meetings and every one of those meetings is a status check rundown.Share
Dadri Pack Nod
35:12
I won't go to a status check meeting. I just I'm not a believer and in part because I don't need to go to a meeting for that because I had a whole platform like does that job for me, but people should be jealous of that. It's a I mean, and that's actually why it's why I started work. Right? That right? I was spending half of my time at
IBM
literally in readout meetings or preparing for a readout meetings.Share
35:41
That this is like a colossal waste of my potential as a human being. I can't do it anymore. And there's got to be a better way. Right? But I think to your point about this small, you're your own team. And I think our what we observe even without the status meetings, right? Is is that our world shrinks to our nuclear team, right?
Share
36:06
There are not the adjacency or the ambient engagement we have with other people in our physical space. Right? So it's from the
Zoom
meeting with the same coworkers all the time as opposed to, I'm in the kitchen with completely different people that I never see and talk to, right? So my relationships are shrinking contracting.Share
36:25
Yeah, sort of the other big miss we feel is micro-victories. Right? And then when you walk, right, something good happens, you hang out with the customer or you walk back in the office from something and, and it was great. So you just, in the moment you just share the goodness. Right?
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Chris Cravens
36:44
Right. And that, that kind of, that spreads that feeling, you know that feeling like you have a really good customer meeting and they walk out and you go back in for like the quick two minute high five and everybody feels it right?
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Dadri Pack Nod
36:56
Like you're passing joy around. Yeah!
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Chris Cravens
36:60
Yeah!
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Dadri Pack Nod
36:60
Meeting to say, "Hey, I got, I got to tell you guys this was so great".
Share
37:04
You will walk up to somebody and say, "Oh my God, that was like one of the best meetings ever, right?" Like you will exchange that in person and you won't in this sort of
Zoom
world because it's Zoom
in structured interactions with each other, not the free flow of literally free flow of joy and micro victories. I miss that the most. Actually.Share
Chris Cravens
37:25
Well, again, it's, it's like, did you do your homework or can we talk about what you learned from your homework? Right? And this is just, this is the same thing that we all as leaders need to be really conscious about. You know, it's back to, it's just to pull it back the other I think this stuff is really simple.
Share
37:44
It's hard to do, but it's simple to define a framework. It's hard to stay within your framework, right? But there has to be some things to really, really anchor on. And I think that one gets back to ruthless prioritization, right? And what do I as a leader want to prioritize? I am not willing to shortcut the level of empathy trust. You know, I do not want to shortcut the relationships that I built with my team.
Share
38:17
I don't want to underinvest in their development and their growth, right? So I am not willing to sacrifice that time and trade that for a status meeting or for that matter to prep a board deck or an exact staff deck or whatever.
Share
38:41
Like there is nothing more important to me than building that relationship with that person. And this is my counsel to my managers as well. Is this is your job, right? Your job and part of being a manager is you are here to ensure the success of your organizations.
Share
39:01
That means you are here to ensure the success of the whole human beings in your organization, right? It's not just their execution, it's their whole selves need to be represented in the work. You know, and you need to give them that space.
Share
Dadri Pack Nod
39:19
Yeah, yeah. That's that's actually a perfect note to wrap on. And I'll say to really to leaders everywhere, what the giant positive aspect of the last six months or so that we've been zooming and working from home is we've had the opportunity to see whole human beings, see them in their homes, meet their 12-year-olds, meet their partners, understand more about what their home life looks like.
Share
39:49
And if we were curious and we were paying attention, we got to see a more integrated human being, right? We got to see the entire person and get to know them better. And maybe we got to that benefit with fewer people than we might have, but we did have and we still have that opportunity the rest of this year. So while we're still working from home, think whole human beings and then carry it into '21.
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Chris Cravens
40:18
Absolutely. How do we how do we adapt from this and define a new level of depth in those interpersonal relationships and and also in those inter team relationships and how we work together right through this, right, and you're right, how do we carry these good behaviors forward?
Share
40:39
Because there is nothing wrong with continuing to elevate our level of sophistication in this when we go back into the office, wouldn't it be an amazing world? Like if you can actually on the objective, I always set for my folks was I want status to be the off gassing of doing the work right? It needs to be the byproduct and the digital waste of doing the work right?
Share
41:01
If we can move into this world where we understand our objectives and outcomes explicitly at like that deep fibrous resident level, right? Where we can manage our interactions around the status of the work in a similarly deep way that is tied to how we execute. And we actually focus the conversations around. What are we learning from doing the work?
Share
41:30
How are we responding better to our customers? How are we anticipating what is next in the market? Right. And how are we ultimately continuing to create those growth and development opportunities for our people so that they can continue to drive greater and greater results and greater ownership, Right. We can absolutely do all of that. Like, let's not waste a good crisis.
Share
Dadri Pack Nod
41:55
There you go. You called it. Perfect, perfect conclusion for our conversation Chris. That was so fun. Thank you for sharing your experiences, your journeys. That all of the... I mean, you can just see it sort of baked into the fabric, the way you think about teaming and outcomes and the way you think about people. It was such a pleasure to talk with you.
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Chris Cravens
42:16
Thank you so much Dadri. I really enjoyed it. This is an absolute blast.
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42:24
You've been listening to The OKR Podcast. Subscribe to your favorite player, so you never miss a moment. Thanks for listening until next time.
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Dadri Pack Nod
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