by Jared Belsky
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Here the table is represented by this nonlinear (exponential) curve:
Given this, why do reviews among account people always, always focus on the negative, regardless of the value of improvement? First, there is a human instinct to manage by highlighting an employee’s deficits. Second, people in general, and specifically client leaders, tend to appeal to the heart first and the math second, or last, or never.
If you apply some basic math to this logic, you can see that managing to the strengths is better. This is not to say you shouldn’t address areas of development, but rather think of it as risk mitigation, not elimination. Besides accentuating the strengths, it is also important to recognize attributes that are culturally important and contagious to the interpersonal dynamics of your team, which is particularly important for client leaders.
Three Habit Changes
Embark on every review with empathy and identify your team members’ signature strengths, their superpowers.
Set a course to get employees from an eight to a ten because this is where the real value lies.
Mitigate their weaknesses and focus on minimizing the downside of a negative trait rather than making that the focus and obsession of the review.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM a leader who harps only on the negative, TO a leader that looks for superpowers in those around you and leans into those.
Lesson 18
18. Enthusiasm and Optimism Are Weapons
“Enthusiasm will be a big asset to you in your career.”
—Jim Warner, former President of Razorfish and CBS Networks
Jim Warner, president of Avenue A at the time, decided to give me an audience. It was one of my more important reviews. He leaned back, sighed, and said, “Jared, your enthusiasm will be a big asset to you in your career, even if you create a wake of destruction with the other things you are not that great at.”
It took me a minute to compute. Was this a compliment or an insult? Neither or both? What it was, ultimately, was a lesson. The observation was made, to be clear, at the highest of levels, given that Jim was the president. It struck me, accordingly, that this was a compliment. He was not calling me stupid or vapid or incapable of math. Instead, he was just saying that my best trait, the one I could most leverage, was enthusiasm and optimism.
In preparation for this book, I read over my old employee reviews. There were some good memories in there but also some hard truths to sift through. I think I began to see clearly that I was at my best when I had a manager who appreciated my ability to create revenue, to innovate, and to solve problems without harping on the little things that mattered less. It was an affirming experience because I realize more fully that my superpowers are, essentially, optimism and my ability to evangelize, to get others to believe as well.
I found one review from my time on the Fanta brand team, right out of my MBA program at Emory. The author of this review has gone on to the top of the Coca-Cola Company. She understood the importance of enthusiasm and a good attitude and took care to: (1) point it out; and (2) make sure others saw it as important.
In the forward of this book, I discussed the notion of soft skills and how these are often downplayed or worse, dismissed. In the services industry, enthusiasm is not a soft skill; it’s an indispensable skill. For many clients, it’s more important to know how enthusiastic and passionate your agency is about their brand or product compared to simply how knowledgeable you are about the marketing world.
Why are optimism and enthusiasm so important? In the marketing services industry, your emotional bank account is constantly debited. Long nights take their toll and are a debit. Compressed deadlines are a debit. Certain client situations can be tough, especially under stress, and those are a debit. Those debits on the emotional bank account add up. Collectively, they drain your team and can threaten the work product over time. A great leader must have followers, and followers look for enthusiasm and optimism as signposts. Further, enthusiasm and optimism are credits back into the emotional bank account of the team.
Why else? Optimism is your best and most consistent weapon to deal with the pace of change. The marketing industry is on what looks to be a multidecade radical transformation. As such, one of the most common questions I tend to get from new employees is, “How do you keep up with all the new tech, changes, and transformation in the market?” To this, I usually answer, “Optimism.” No, optimism is not a business strategy; rather, it’s a mindset. Simply, I mean that I am optimistic our team and our company can weather any change by being adaptable and listening to client needs. Skepticism, while fashionable these days, is the enemy of adaptability.
So, you can see why optimism and enthusiasm are great leadership weapons.
When I first started working on the Enterprise Rental Car account almost eight years ago, someone there said to me, “Jared, we don’t care how much you know until we know how much you care.” That quote still sticks with me.
Show people you care, every hour of every day.
Three Habit Changes
Be sure to make it clear that attitude, enthusiasm, and the how (or the way you approach tasks as opposed to what you do and why) are important to you in a practical way.
During your next review cycle, figure out the one thing that your direct report is uniquely great at and help them get even greater. You will get more productivity out of that person if you do that and less of something else.
If enthusiasm doesn’t come naturally, figure out how to schedule it into your day. This does not make you disingenuous. It makes you good at your job.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM thinking that people will follow you blindly, TO realizing the most optimistic leaders have the most zealous followers.
Lesson 19
19. Not Every Individual Contributor Is Meant to Be a People Leader
“Ever wonder why there are so many VPs and so few leaders?”
—Vipul Kapadia, founder of ThinqShift
Service agencies have the veneer of a management pyramid scheme. Not a real scheme, mind you, rather just the shape of a pyramid in which you get to the top by managing more and more people…even if management is not your superpower.
What you see in the graphic on page 150 is the ladder of individual contribution that usually commences for an entry-level employee at a services firm. In the advertising world, the way this would work would be that every year and a half, on average, Sally would get promoted from intern, to coordinator, to manager, to senior manager, and then on to supervisor. Ninety percent of the reason for promotion has to do with individual skill—how well an employee organizes, how well they think and communicate, how well they optimize search bids, and how well they put copy together. The point is, it’s a ladder that is specific to each employee, a “ladder of individual contribution.”
So here you have Sally, who is exceeding expectations on her reviews and doing really well and climbing that ladder. Now, there should be a fork in the road that is completely open and entirely based on her core strengths.
There should be a choice and a discussion first about the ideal path of each employee. In truth, some great (and I mean truly great) employees should focus on being the best individual contributor they can be, while others are destined to manage others and scale in a leadership path.
If you end up in the individual contributor category, it’s helpful to understand what that might mean for you and what to do about it. Broadly speaking, it means you must continue to keep your specific skills ahead of the market if you want to continue to earn increases in compensation. It means that while others are spending time honing their management skills, you hone your content power.
I have created a simple self-reflection survey below, that your employees (or you) can fill out so you can understand if management is truly your destiny, or perhaps you are a stellar individual contributor.
Questionnaire
On a scale of 1 to 10, how strongly would you rate your desire to manage people when you wake up each morning?
Which of the two would you prefer doing today: (1) solve a complicated challenge on your computer; or (2) help drive a team toward an end goal?
What did your last five reviews say was your single best talent?
When you feel most excited about your job, what are you doing?
What are the top adjectives used to describe your management style?
What are you doing when you feel most alive at work?
Respond to these questions honestly, and then discuss with your spouse or partner, and with your manager.
Three Habit Changes
Don’t let great individual contributors feel as though they need to become managers. Map out a variety of career paths your team members can travel.
Regularly (weekly/monthly/quarterly) analyze and reflect on your career development, asking where your skills are and what you really want.
Identify the specific rungs on your personal ladder of individual contribution—which elements of your job are the most important on a daily basis, from interpersonal communication, to optimizing search bids, to organizing status updates—and select one rung to strengthen and improve each week.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM a promotion engine, TO a leader who recognizes and reinforces the value of individual contributors.
Lesson 20
20. Make 6s Your Enemy
“My biggest regret is usually hanging on too long.”
—Ryan Harris, Partner, NVP
You’re a VP, Client Services Leader, and it’s a sunny Thursday and you are walking to work. You’re in a good mood. You arrive at your desk and the phone rings.
It’s your client and they want to talk.
They no longer think Sally, a member of your team, is delivering the goods. You take it in, you listen, you make notes. Ultimately, you try and work through it mutually.
Another two months go by, and then you hear some new feedback about the quality of work that the team is providing. The reporting and insights are not up to par. The client is frustrated. But you’re a cheerleader by nature, right? That’s how you got into client leadership, after all. So you buckle down, dedicate more time to coaching, helping, and prodding Sally to greatness. You start to realize, however, that it’s not just the client who is feeling this way. You realize that Sally is not feeling that great either. However, Sally is not all that bad, and you have tons of other more pressing problems, you say to yourself, and you move on.
Another month after that, Sally’s name comes up on a conference call with the client. It’s a slight but a small one. It’s a subtle remark, so you barely note it before moving on. Further, you continue to realize Sally is just solid, reliable, and good…just barely good.
Finally, your client calls you up to tell you they are fed up with Sally. They want her off the account, and further, they want a three-month refund for the money on the retainer that she wasted. You somehow feel this is all new information, but in reality, it was laid out for you clearly—you just missed all the telltale signs.
There are two issues. First, there is the matter of lag. Second, you held on to a six.
The first issue is there is a very real lag that you might not be aware of. Here is a picture of that time lag.
Essentially, there is always lag between the time when you or your client realize someone is not a great employee and the time you take action to exit that person or coach them up with urgency. Lag point one is a killer because, typically, the work suffers for months before anyone has the courage to speak up. Lag point two is the time it takes to decide on a course of action. Lag point three is the time it takes to take the action. In my experience, this overall lag phenomena means that in your head, you might be aware there is a problem and you are taking action, but in reality, far too much time is elapsing that causes more risk to the client relationship and health.
The second issue is that a six can kill a company. In the example of the account manager named Sally, she very clearly could be ranked a six out of ten.
A simple yet classic rating system for performance at a services firm is a scale of one through ten, where ten is the highest. Some of the best commentary about this comes from a New York Times article on the tyranny of the six.* In the spirit of oversimplification, it suggests that 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s are folks who are a poor fit for the organization. It does not mean they are not great people or employees, just that they don’t fit in on your team. At the other end are the 8s, 9s, and 10s, who are fantastic in general, or specifically having a great year. This leaves us with the 5s, 6s, and 7s.
The 5s, well—in theory, they would have a chance at salvation and could find their way to becoming a 7, 8, 9, or 10, but they look up and set their bar too low based on what they see from the 6. Accordingly, they have an even greater chance than need be at falling into the 1–4 pile and finding the exit. The 7, ordinarily, would have a 75 percent chance to move into the 8–10 zone and celebrate amongst the best employees; only, they look down, see that the 6 is still in the office and determine that 6 is the bar. Now the 7 has a greater chance than need be of ending up in the wrong pile.
So what of the 6? Well, you see the erosion the 6 causes. No, they are not your biggest problem in that they are not a raging fire you must deal with. But as you can see, like a cancer, they eat your organization from the inside.
Yes, the 6 could be meeting expectations occasionally. But as the client leader, it’s your job to help them not just meet expectations but to exceed them and join the 7+ group or show them the door.
Meanwhile, you are also in charge of the whole health of the team and client and business (sigh, you have a hard job), which means you must be the person to also raise the flag when you see the person stalled out and regressing in to 5-ville. If it were easy, anyone could do it. But it’s not easy. The key is to find the right leaders who don’t put up with 6s.
A favorite quote I recently heard was, “A’s hire other A’s, and B’s hire C’s.”
Find 10s who want to hire other 10s, who collectively have zero tolerance for 6s.
Understanding what harm a 6 can do, let’s spend some time talking about strategies for how to identify, coach, and exit.
Strategy 1: Ensure your firm’s review system creates some level of confrontation. If you have a ten-point system, for example, it creates too many places to hide (five, six, seven). Less complex systems create more clarity and more choice. I have seen a simple one-to-five scale as the best. One’s and two’s are compassionately exited, four’s and five’s are exceeding, where a three is just meeting expectations. That is clear. There are too many systems that create so many available grades that it allows managers to avoid having difficult conversations.
Strategy 2: Don’t distribute spoils equally. The best people should be getting disproportionate awards in the form of bonuses, compensation, coaching, and assignments. It becomes very easy
during merit-and-review season to start from a point of worrying about person X leaving if they don’t get a certain percentage raise. Instead, start with the core people who are moving the needle and ensure they really know they matter.
Above all else, be ruthless in figuring out where the 6s are hiding and make it clear to your company that you do not tolerate it.
Strategy 3: Exit people with compassion and decisiveness. I encourage leaders to come to the right decision as to whether someone is a six first, and then figure out the exit plan. Too often, leaders conflate those two decisions, causing delay. Once you know that someone is not right for the organization, you can quickly spend more time on the most humane thing you can do, which is a compassionate exit plan. When leaders dither and invent PIP (performance improvement plans) and other instruments, even though they know the person is not right, it creates mutual stress. Remember, if you know that person is not doing a great job, they likely know it as well and don’t feel great about coming to work either.
Three Habit Changes
My core advice is to ensure your firm’s review system creates some level of confrontation to weed out your 6s. A scale that I have seen work is a simple one-to-five scale. This creates a true decision-making moment and forces a critical conversation to be had with the employee if they are a three.
Focus each quarter on your three’s and how to get them up the ladder, or compassionately to another, more fitting role. Focus even more on your five’s.
