In this episode we discuss: How do you actually create a high performance culture? We are joined by Andrew Richardson, Managing Partner at Foundation Partners

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We chat about the following with Andrew Richardson: 

1. What does high performance truly mean in the context of your organisation, and how can it be clearly defined to align with its goals?
2. How can a culture of ownership, where employees feel empowered yet aligned with organisational objectives, be fostered to enhance motivation and success?
3. In what ways can feedback and challenges be incorporated into daily management practices to ensure they are continuous, constructive, and impactful?
4. How can leaders balance the focus on results and behaviours to create an environment of abundance, reducing competition and fostering collaboration among team members?
5. What role should managers play in transforming performance management from a task-oriented system to a behaviour-changing practice that supports team development and success?

References 

• linkedin.com/in/andrew-richardson-34404b33
• www.foundationpartners.co.uk

Biography 

Andrew is the Co-founder & Managing Partner of Foundation Partners, an EU-focused People, Talent & HR Consultancy. The group has worked with over 200 high-growth technology companies and venture funds over the last 7 years. 

Early in his career, he scaled award-winning technology consulting company La Fosse from 10-250 people. He went on to be Co-founder of Eka Ventures a $100m Consumer technology venture fund. Most recently he was Director of People & Ops for Napo, a growth stage technology company. 

To learn more about Beth and Brandon or to find out about sponsorship opportunities click here. 

Summary

6:32 Introduction to Performance Management

22:50 What are the three things a company can do to encourage high performance? 

23:52 Defining High Performance Culture

24:54 Ownership

26:21 Facilitating Results in Organizations

27:15 Creating an Abundant Work Environment

28:35 Focus

29:26 Creating a Culture of Abundance

32:20 Rethinking Performance Management

34:20 The Importance of Continuous Feedback

35:36 Ownership

41:40 Documentation in Performance Management

43:30 High performance vs values

45:56 Key takeaways

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Music.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the operations room, a podcast for coos. I am Brandon mensinga, joined by my amazing co host, Bethany Ayers, how are things going? Bethany, Why

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am I always so surprised they're going well?

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I thought, rather than a story today in particular from me or regular random thoughts, we could talk about the operations nation event that we partook in in various formats a couple weeks ago in lending because it was pretty good, fabulous event. I talked to Charlene Shen. She's the co founder of the operations nation conference, but she was saying that the numbers this year doubled from last year. So obviously the community itself is taking hold. The operations nation body, and the conference is obviously gaining traction. So that's fabulous. It was based in London, but there was a global audience, so loads of people who flew in for it from either Europe or a couple from Africa, which I thought was great to that kind of pull for the event. We ran a round table on aha moments. So we talked about performance management, and what was the other one that was like a really big conversation, OKRs, because OKRs don't exist in any format. That's helpful for anyone. I think that the reason why performance management and OKRs end up being our topics is because those are my the two banes of my existence, and the areas that I feel like I have not cracked in any way. And I just keep coming back to and keep coming back to, and nobody gives me a solution that I think, Ah, yes, that's what I could go implement tomorrow. Yeah. Because when you think about it, it's the the most important stuff in the business, which is, how do you align the company, and how do you actually ensure that people are accountable and focused on what they're doing? IE, performance management. It does also make me think about when we read other people's books and other people's advice, and it's like, oh, well, Google did OKRs. And so you have to do OKRs to succeed. Is it really or Netflix to had the no rules, rules. And so therefore, what you need is a highly empowered organization with loads of accountability versus just luck. And you get people together and they have the right time, the right market, and basically, despite themselves, they excelled. And then, like the bias of what was it that we did that mattered? I think that happens all the time, to be honest. I mean, we talked about this one of our previous episodes, but the time window, technology wise, you have for something to succeed. If you hit the time window, both in the entry point and the exit point, it takes you on a ride as long as the product obviously has that PMF, and the product is fantastic and really solves a problem. You can be dragged along despite any number of internal machinations and problems that you have. And I think you're right, there's a bias that happens after the exit happens whereby it's perceived as a huge success. Everyone feels like it's been a huge success. And then you start attributing things in terms of why it was a success, and you're like, Okay, our OKR process, or whatever it was, was maybe, wasn't that bad. Maybe it was phenomenal,

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despite the fact that it was very painful when you were actually living it, yeah, and also despite the fact that whenever you talk to anybody who works at Google, they're like, Oh no, we don't use it, or it's horrible, or it's completely beyond use of what it was at the time. The reality versus the sales that everybody gets always seems to be quite big, whereas fundamentally, like a good product and people moving in a single direction. And I don't think okay, are is the requirement to have people move in one direction? I think massively explaining your strategy and your plan for the year is what moves people in the same direction, and whether or not you measure those perfectly. Does not matter. If you can boil the OKRs down to actually the three most important things, then it doesn't really matter what your framework is or whatever, like, you just know that these are the things you absolutely have to do. And the problem is you don't know what's important, or there's 12 competing priorities. And then it doesn't matter how prettily you put that into something, it's a lack of clarity is going to cause a problem. And I guess the argument is, oh, how you know if it's a good product or not, unless you have x of this or Y of that. But fundamentally, shipping a good product with everybody understanding what that looks like, embedding it matters more than like, the absolute perfect reporting. And I think people get really caught up on either gaming the system or like, making the reporting as foolproof as possible, whereas basically, it's like, are people buying the product or not? So the head of growth, I think it was from Shopify, was on Lenny's podcast, and he said exactly that, which is, they don't really have results that they track to they do it based on some level of quantitative, some level of qualitative, and feeling like they're fulfilling the vision of the company and really just engagement with the feature or whatever they're releasing at that point. He said, sometimes the conversations are squishy because of that, in terms of results and whatnot, but for the most part, they feel like they're doing the right things. And obviously Shopify is a huge success. So.

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Did the round table together, and then I was on a panel around the original title was how to make ops sexy for VCs. And we had an interesting conversation around,

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should ops matter? Does ops matter? What do we mean by ops? And fundamentally, early stage, even to mid stage, ops just doesn't matter. Sorry for any of our listeners here, coos matter as being the experienced adult in the room, but building out efficient systems doesn't matter until you have product market fit and you have something that you want to scale. I think the bigger question is to make sure you get scaling right in the first place. We were the penultimate session, the final session, being a COO comedian, so we were the last like serious session. And it was amazing. Despite it being a very long day, how engaged the audience was, which I just think goes to show. Like coos are a great community and audience to grow, because unlike flighty CROs, we are serious and we care, and we'll spend the day dedicated to work without any alcohol as a promise to get us through the day.

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So we have got a great topic for today, which is, how do you actually create a high performance culture? We have an amazing guest for this which is Andrew Richardson. He's the co founder of the amplifying group, which, of course, is now acquired JBM, which is run by a good friend of the podcast, being James Mitra. Before we get to Andrew, just wanted to ask you a couple questions. Bethany, and I think for this session, what I wanted to do is to focus on the quantum light playbook called driving high performance, which really is the revolute playbook for high performance. I guess the first question I wanted to ask you about the playbook was functionally separating talent, HR and performance as three distinct units, and what you think about that in the playbook? I'm not sure whether HR and talent are explicitly separated, but they are like, we kind of already separate them, whether they report to a single leader or not. Is here and are there? Separating out performance from talent and people does seem to make sense. And also, just like it's such a hard thing to do, you know to our discussion earlier, OKRs and performance management are the two things that I feel like I have not gotten right in my career, and having it elevated to the CEO does seem to make sense, particularly since in tech businesses, 90% of your expense are people. Your business are people. Why would you not have the performance of your people report directly into you. I kind of feel like the three different functions are radically different in terms of the skill sets required to be successful. So when you think about good talent acquisition, what's required to make that happen, it really does have kind of much more of a sales orientation of doing the value prop and describing that to candidates to get them tremendously excited, and a bit of a funnel approach to converting them to the actual employees. In that case, HR, strictly speaking, if you think about compliance, compliance requirements and what's needed to ensure that you're satisfying the letter of the law, so to speak. You know, again, is quite different from talent. And then you have performance which is different from those two. And then I would argue, there's a fourth bucket, more of the generalist people function, which is more to do with the employee experience and employee well being and a bit of change management within organizations and so on. So what I tend to find is that a good VP of people is really good at change management, dealing with leadership, the employee well being and experience part of it. They tend to be not so good at talent, any of their lineage, and also not so good at the compliance side, and I think traditionally, not great at the performance side either, to be honest. So you get this kind of mixed bag that isn't particularly effective. I think by cutting or carving out the three functions separately and having performance report into the CEO, conceptually, seems awesome. So coos often have people reporting into them. Sorry, the people function, not people as humans. They

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often have the people function reporting into them. It could depending on the way that your structure is and not having to be like dogmatically following somebody else's playbook. Because, to my point earlier, there's a lot of other reasons why revolute was successful, beyond their performance playbook, and you need to adjust things to your organization and not dogmatically apply everybody else's that's definitely the way to not succeed is to blindly put in other people's playbooks. Let me not go into my rant on why you should look at the spirit and idea of things and then change it for how it works best in your organization. Thinking about it in some of the organizations I work with, it could be that the performance management team doesn't have to report to the CEO explicitly, but the COO could own performance management because.

A lot of the description of what the performance management person is are the same spikes. Hate the word spikes, but there I am using it anyhow that a COO has. So they are strong operators with a strategic background who can handle large amounts of information and plan and execute a quarterly process well, which sounds like a COO to me, and so if you made the Coos, main reason for being is a top quality, high performance team. You don't actually need to then create yet another C suite, or somebody reporting into the CEO. In the description of the playbook, it talks about performance being staffed by a smart team of operators, right? So a smart team of operators to run a process, and the process has a system attached to it, which is, what is the framework? What are the cycles that you go through? What's the infrastructure? How do you trigger promotions and terminations the KPIs associated to it? So it feels like there's a machine there, and having SMART operators to operate it naturally, you would think almost that it reports into the COO instead of the CEO in that case. But also my argument isn't they report into the COO, but the COO is the high performance person, up to 100 people, you have one person doing it, and I think the COO could do that for 100 person company and smaller, because it's not that complicated, and then they have it like with a junior person. I would hold the COO to account to deliver the high performance reporting into the CEO, and not have it be another layer down. So I would still keep that the high performance person reports to the CEO, but I would elevate it to being the CEOs responsibility. And accountability, and they can maybe have a bit of a team underneath them, but they're not like, oh, well, this is my head of performance, who's one of my seven direct reports. You might have your performance team who reports in to you, but you are the head of performance as part of your COO role. Because if you think about what is a CEO's role. It's around being the glue that holds everybody together, building the systems, owning OKRs, and making sure we're all in the same direction, and so adding to that responsibility that everybody in the organization is good at their job almost seems like a natural evolution, for sure, but do you not think it's already been there? Like every company I've ever worked at, is ever worked in, is the CEO that's always been part of the remit. I've had the people persons report into me over a seven year period. Within that people person team, we execute performance management, not particularly well, but as part of my remit, it was part of my ownership, if you want to call that. So the difference between what I've experienced and what you just said is, what then you're held accountable, not your people person. So it's not just responsible, it's accountable if you have a low performance team. Because this problem is, it's not a low performance team, it's a good enough team. If your team is a good enough team, it's a coos problem and needs to be fixed, not the head of people's okay. So that makes sense. The other little piece that they talked about, more than honor employees, was to have more formalized compensation equity support in that case, and I'm curious what you make of that. I'm a big fan of it. I think you should put grades in early. You should have clear performance paths. You should have a compensation strategy. Are you a top percentile, mid percentile, low percentile? Does it depend on what the role is? Does it depend on the performers? And it should be laid out. It doesn't need to be a 500 page document, but you should really understand what your people strategy and philosophy are and have it be relatively public, whether or not you want to be we're going to pay on the 75th and above percentile for these roles, and the 25th percentile on those roles. I don't know if that needs to be transparent, although maybe it does, because when you have somebody who's in like a function that's in the 25% they just inherently understand that their role is not as valued in the organization as a different role. What I found helpful in this, because they do show you scorecards and the wording is they're not a lot of words, and they're very clear words, and it's not softening. And I think for a lot of a UK audience, it will be uncomfortable to be so explicit. And also the way that they've done it is, there's under performers, there's average performers, then there's like, good and exceptional. And that bar of average, I think, for a lot of companies, would be their good, and then the good would be exceptional, and then exceptional just doesn't even exist. And so holding that average is pretty high, I think for a lot of organizations, would be uncomfortable and being so clear about it. So this is where it comes back to being able to give good feedback, having managers who are well prepared to have these conversations, and hiring people who really.

Want to push themselves are critical. But then reading it because I was like, oh, that's average, wow, okay, huh? Let me raise my bar. Was also because it is so explicit, people who want to achieve understand exactly the behavior that will give them a good or an exceptional and I think that's really motivating for the A star people out there. So where I've seen these not go well is it gets fluffy and it gets complicated and there are too many descriptions, and people are trying to capture everything in the description, whereas these ones are like, one sentence, maximum two sentences, and there is nowhere to hide. I'll read this to you because I really like this as well, which is the scorecard they need to assess their team's performance by simply thinking about their actions over the past few months and filling in a series of statements with yes or no answers. And those yes or no answers are on a gradient. By the time you go through those questions, you'll get to the point where you start saying that the first time you say no, that's where you stop. So it's very easy to do mentally in terms of the manager sitting there going, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, boom, it stops. Then you move on to the next one. In particular, what I loved was that there is no 360 reviews, right? 360 reviews, I think, are the biggest joke on the planet, where you know you have to sit there write these crazy paragraphs, recognizing that a, they might be able to identify you as a person. B, you have to write those statements in a way where they're constructed both politically but also very sensitively. And you have to like the level of thought that goes into it is off the charts, because when I think about the time and effort that I put into that kind of description, the only other time I would do that for a company is either for maybe for a board deck or for a board report, and maybe PIP terminations, where I have to write paragraphs for that too. Those are the three things where it takes me so much time and effort to think about it and write something that's sensible, yeah. And then also I just don't think it changes behavior or makes any difference, and which was their point as well. Like, 360s are a complete waste of time. And I was thinking about like, so 360s I think, are a waste of time for everybody, because also people are just shockingly un self aware. And so that was my thinking of even in this process management, where it's very clear sentences, is how the people who just don't see it. And I'd be interested if it because it's so clear, if it makes it easier, or if you actually just end up churning away at out the non self reflective people, which also now has just made me think, if I ever start my own company, one of my values might be the ability to be self reflective and self knowing, because it's so critical to my humanity, like just who I am is, I'm incredibly self aware, because I struggle with people who do not see it at all, which is also like, because I was thinking about it in reality. I think one of the major reasons why companies do not roll out performance management well is because you have to have a lot of difficult conversations with people who are not self aware. And two, you're going to end up with higher attrition, at least in the beginning, as you're getting rid of people who don't fit because you've realized that they're not a good culture fit. They're not self aware, they're not good enough. They don't want to be held to account in this way. And so it's kind of scary, particularly before the tech crash, when it was so hard to hire anybody, the idea of losing a third of your team because you've put in performance management well. But I know the argument, the converse argument is, but you need high performers, blah, blah, blah, but like, that's when you bring the talent people in, just crying because I can't find people in the first place. You bring up a good point here, because the managers, the senior executives, everyone needs to sharpen their ability to give feedback in a very clear, cut way. And I think all of us, myself included, naturally, you shy away from the stuff because it's like it puts you in a position of vulnerability, both for yourself and also for the person that you're speaking to. So inherently, you try to avoid it, right? And what you need to do for the company and for the managers, and for the sake of the managers, is get them to get good at it and good at it on a quarterly basis with a system that actually works, that supports them effectively. And if they can sharpen their ability to give feedback, you know, clearly, concisely, in a credible way, where it's done quarterly, and they're trained on it, and they become very good at it, then it's almost like a self reinforcing cycle a little bit instead of like this annual thing that seems scary to everyone, and have people who are motivated to get better and the ones who aren't will self select out. The question is, how many are going to select out, and how many do you have to replace? So why don't we Park it here and get on to our conversation with Mr. Andrew Richardson.

I am delighted to welcome Andrew Richardson to the podcast. Today, Andrew is going to be part of our ongoing series of, is it all a load of bollocks? And today's we're going to be talking about performance management.

It's right up my street.

Yeah.

Well, just thinking we've talked about OKRs, we don't really believe in them. We've What else have we talked about, where we just think it's not a lot of the performance management, you know, we're just going to carry on with that one. Jessica Swann, she was good for that because I think she's equally kind of like, not negative on it, but doubting the veracity of performance management as a whole. Yeah. So maybe, rather than a load of bollocks, we can say, is it all about the emperor's new clothes? Are these all the things, the fads that everybody says they do and nobody does particularly well? So when it comes to high performance culture, in a series, a company as an example, you've got, let's say, 5075, employees, what are the three things that that company should do in relation to a high performance culture. What is the answer? What are those three things that you should do to make that happen? There's a lot of dependencies on the type of business you're building, right? But let's say you're a SaaS business Series A, and you need to kind of grow 3x 18 months, otherwise, raising Series B is going to be really difficult. Results are obviously incredibly important when it comes to building a SaaS business, post series A and actually, nothing is probably more important than the results, as in the financial results of that business, because if you don't hit those results, you'd go away. So if I say one is relentless focus on outputs, if you're a series a SaaS business, I think two is a culture of challenge, low fear feedback. If I look at the reading I've done and the people I've met from meta, Google and other just really high performing businesses, the extreme level of challenge you're able to do in your business, the extreme level of like feedback that you're able to give in your there's nothing quite like it. It's a raw expectation of you in that environment. Nothing goes unsaid. The output of that behavior is huge. The third bit around a kind of culture hub is likely to be ownership. If you can create high ownership in the things that people are doing every day, it's more likely to succeed. So whether that's product management engineering or a sales target or whatever, if someone has complete ownership over doing that, they're more likely to be motivated to achieve it. They're more likely to jump over hurdles. They're more likely to come up with complex problem solving dynamics. They're more likely to go the extra mile if they feel like they own it. So I would say those three things. So for me, the question, of course, is, what do you mean by ownership? What's the definition, and what do leaders do in order to give people ownership, I typically find you get these two types of leaders. You get people who are like, there you go. It's yours. Crack on. Do it. You'll be fine. You get that leader, or you get the all over, the detail, micro manager, leader that can't let go, That can't drive right. Like, you get those two. And we've all worked with those people, I suppose. And I think both of their extremes are awful, to be honest, like you may ask. Or why is, if ownership is really important, why is the high ownership person bad? Well, you give ownership to people who can't do the job, is the key thing. And I think we forget that when we set goals or when we set targets, or when we give people projects or give people things to oh, we forget that they have to know how to achieve something, to be able to actually own it. So controlled ownership is allowing them to set goals that are aligned to a mission or purpose or strategic vision that you've set. So the ownership of a goal is really, really important, the ownership of how they're going to do that. But the most important thing is they can define and they can articulate how they're going to achieve something, and then go on. And so I think it's the ownership over the goal or the target, ownership over how. Circling back to the first one they mentioned around extreme focus on results, how do you enable that or facilitate that in the organization? So you've got top down goal setting structures and bottom up goal setting structures. One is actually setting the high achieving goal, and what actually high achievement is. And most leaders don't actually do that very well. They don't really understand what a company is capable of. They either set crazy, wild targets that nobody can believe in, and they're so they're demotivated, or they don't actually know what the target is in the first place, and that got the same outcome. So I think a really, really strong conviction articulation on why a goal is what it is, and then a relentless focus on hitting it, and that goes into like the culture and the behaviors of the company every day. Right? If you want to be relentlessly focused on results, everything you talk about, everything you reward, everything you you structure, has to be focused on that. I know we're supposed to talk about performance management, but what you just said really interested me, because I've been thinking a lot around scarcity and abundance and results. And I feel like a lot of the way that we work in the VC world is almost by definition around scarcity, because you're watching your burn rate go you're getting to the results so you can get some more money, so you can spend it as fast as possible. And when you have that view of scarcity, the mind becomes very limiting, I think, because there ends up being an underlying sense of fear, because there's like an end date, and we all have to worry about that. But conversely, if there's a false sense of abundance, like the money is unlimited, we can do whatever we.

End up creating all kinds of vanity projects and don't get to results. And what I've been thinking about a lot as a leader right now is, how do I create a world of abundance in that we have unlimited creativity, unlimited ability to work together, yet in an environment that has a scarce resource in order to hit a result, so that there is still a sense of the house isn't on fire. Focus is absolutely key, and I don't think that's at the odds of like creativity. I think what you can do is, when you're setting where you focus and what you do next, you can have the most creative bottom up dynamics where you're getting everybody involved, all the ideas coming in, there's a point at which you need to relentlessly focus on the thing that you think will achieve the results that you need to achieve. And that is the point where you can align it to the finances you have, the people you have, the resources you have, the time frames you have. And I think they all come into the same point of decision making time. So you have this great creative bit, which is the art of what's possible. I think after that, you've got to then have an incredible focus. And the inputs to that focus are the time you have to achieve something, the impact that that thing will have, and the resources you have available to achieve it. So if I just talk a little bit more about my theory of abundance and scarcity, is I feel like we get the best out of people, not just at work, but in life, when there is no threat of a finite resource. And we can do that, we can look at siblings, siblings, at a dysfunctional household where there's not enough love to go around, fight with each other bitterly for whatever bit of love they can get in a household where there's an abundance of love, siblings don't really have much sibling rivalry, because they all feel like they have enough. And if you extrapolate that into the adult world, because we're all still children, we act much better. We don't go to war when we feel like we all have enough water and we all have enough oil and we go to war, we feel like we don't have enough. And so as a leader, I would like to create an environment where people are competitive with the outside, but not competitive with each other, and as a way of maybe being able to not have that level of politics that you get, and yet, in an environment that is so high pressured as SaaS startups, it's hard to create that abundance. It's interesting because I think you framed it up pretty well Bethany in terms of what people struggle with from a leadership standpoint. And there's all sorts of tools in the toolkit that CEOs and CEOs think about to try to structure this, whether it's, you know, the first team approach for leadership, or whether, you know, it's clarity around the mission and the strategy and the OKRs of the company, and also giving the empowerment and autonomy to individuals and collective teams to make choices, and in particular, the ways of working across the functional teams themselves, and how you ensure that there's good ways of working across product marketing to sales and so on. Is there anything in particular that you would think about that are the most important elements of that puzzle to enable what Bethany had just spoken about. I think if you've got a lack of resource in every environment that you have, you've got the people you have, you've got to try and be as clear on what you need to achieve as you possibly possibly can. Then you've got to help people go. How can I impact what we need to achieve? Have I got the right goal and how every individual actually focuses on that, I think you'll go a long way. Then there's the basics, right? I think people forget that only lever for performance in your business is your managers, right? They're the people who hire everybody. They're the people who tell people what to do. They're the people who develop them. They're people who who talk to them every day. I think there is an under focus on the the impact of like on managers, middle management, senior managers, leaders, there's a lot of focus on, I get that, but actually, as a middle manager, senior manager, I think there's a lack of focus on in regards to like, creating performance and creating the safety where you can fail. Also, if we change tack now and talk about performance, because we started to talk about it around managers. I have never seen a performance management system work. I have been on both ends of it. I have filled in who knows how many tick boxes and the scales and ratings. It has not changed anybody's behavior, and yet we all do it. Help us get it right? I think people go straight to performance management right, like the amount of startups that I found as a small businesses, 1020, people, 30 people. But I get a call and say, hey, the thing we need to do is set up our performance management structures. No, that's not the first thing you need to do. I think the obsession needs to be, how do I create high performance, and then what are the structures that I need to do that right? And in your environment, performance management might be one of them, but I thought it's an ambiguous term as well in regards to what actually the management of performance is, yeah, okay, you can do like appraisal processes and all this sort of stuff. I care a lot more about.

Out, do people really, really understand what performance is in their own environment? Like the actual definition of high performance in your company? Most performance management structures don't even know what they're assessing. They don't even know what the manager what high performance is in that environment. For me, start with figuring out what high performance is in your business. Once you have that, you can go down into kind of okay, what does my performance management structure need to look like to achieve that? And there are lots of different ways to do performance management. You can do it on an ongoing basis. You don't have to do this kind of twice a year, once a year, massive upheaval of everybody's day and routine, and suddenly they're spending a month or two weeks to a month doing a performance management review. Ultimately, what is designed for is feedback to individuals on their performance, which should be continuous, right? You should be continuously understanding whether you are performing or under performing, focusing managers on continuously understanding where the performance of an individual is is actually. It's really beneficial for the development of that manager two is pay and promotions, right? There's a lot of debate around whether to tie it in to performance reviews or not. Ultimately, pay and promotions is aligned to performance but I think those are the two things for me that I think that you can just, if you separate it from performance management, get away from it or, okay, do I have a continuous understanding of what performance is, and then when someone hits a point where they should be promoted, they get promoted. And you don't have to have a systems of performance management, like an appraisal system to do that, although you do need some level of clarity of what's required to be promoted, because otherwise, all of their bias and the relationships come into play, and people can start to feel that it's quite unfair. I just think about my earlier career where things were not as transparent as they are now, and it was a lot around who's in the golf course, and I think it's important to make sure that it does not creep back in. For me, the guidelines that I often use because I'm also on a couple boards and doing advisory work is when you're pre post series A you do not have the luxury of hand holding your new employees or your new team members. And also, I do also feel like while we were in this mad cash was free, grow at all cost, and the employees were powerful, we became way too paternalistic and held everybody's hand, and it was our responsibility to make sure that everything was perfect for people. I think it felt like a lot of people did not have ownership, or did not feel like they should have ownership, and everything was handed to them, and we're now in a different environment, where employees have more power, but also cash is not as free as it once was, but leaders are still over, owning their responsibilities. And when you hire somebody in series A that person should you need to be able to give them clarity, what's their role, what's the goal, and then they should be creating the rest of it, really, rather than going, Oh, well, you didn't give me 100% clear job description. I didn't have an onboarding for three months that gave me every tool that I needed. Those people are appropriate when you're in a later stage of scale, but you should hire people who within the first week, you're like, oh my god, I have so much more time to think of the next thing, because this person is totally owning it. And for me, that's what impact is. I think it's a societal problem, actually, around ownership. I think we've got into a place where we don't take responsibility for our own feelings, our own output, our own action. You've got to hire people at the stage that can own the thing that they need to own. Very quickly, you have an onboarding process, and you have a probationary period, pretty much to find out whether that person can own that thing. Can they do that job? And I suppose there's two elements to the pie, like one is, I think, when you hire somebody within your team as a manager, and this idea of, are they picking things up, and are they owning their space and creating a positive ripple effect across the team? Usually, I always get a feel for this, and you see it in their work, and you can see it within the team. And I don't need tables and tick boxes to understand that for the most part. If I'm the direct manager in this case, then the other bit is more of the accountability, straight up, continuous feedback every single week, where you're getting into a session where what's gone well, what's not gone well, that type of thing. And I think that accountability and that continuous feedback cycle on a weekly basis, this is where most of the companies I've worked with in the past, that's where they fall down. If you wanted to structure that correctly for a series a company for line managers to do that effectively. What would you recommend in that space? Let's assume that you've defined high performance in your environment really well, like you've just got that definition, and that's what everybody speaks about, what you can do. Then at that point, all the feedback you can give can be aligned to the definition of high performance in your environment. So when you sit down, and I don't think you need to be you know is, can.

Would be pretty relentless if you're giving someone performance feedback every week. I wouldn't suggest doing that, just to take a step back on the psychology of it all, every behavior that we have is formed by a positive feedback loop at some point in our life, right? So continuous positive feedback loops define a behavior whether that behavior is quote, unquote, good or bad. So when you see a great behavior in your environment, you should be creating a positive feedback loop where that person is being told that is a great behavior or that is a great result, or that is great impact, and they need to be reconfirmed by the manager consistently, so they continually do that. And I think that's one thing that we don't quite realize. And on the adverse if there's an underperforming behavior or underperforming result, that person needs to be told really quickly. And the problem with performance management is you you can wait six months before you're doing that, especially if you're a manager that's under confident in giving feedback. I really like this idea of going okay, like this is our definition performance I'm going to give you positive feedback when I see behaviors and results aligned to align to that, and I'm going to give you constructive feedback when it's not getting managers to do that consistently. Actually taking the Performance Manager structure away means that they have to do it consistently, or they have to do it all the time. And love questions in surveys and things like that around you know what you need to do to be successful. Gallup 12 is a really interesting study done over 15 years around individual high performance, and the first step on that ladder they came up with over 50 years of research was they need to know what they need to do to be successful every day, if you don't have that in your business, if they've got no hope in being impactful or success, or high performing or successful in that environment. So coming back to the point around if you did to take performance management structure away, you would create this environment where managers have to give feedback more regularly on high performance and low performance. And I think ultimately that would have better results. I think where people and HR clash or come to attention is it's great to do continual assessment, or, you know, feedback, that's definitely my management style, but then how much of it needs to be documented? So we have, like a constant thing around are the one to ones being documented? Has the feedback been documented? And, quite frankly, if I have to document everything, it ends up being an inhibitor for me giving feedback. So basically, I give feedback, but never remember to document it, and then, who knows, maybe I'm going to get sued. So how important is the documentation as part of this process? We're bad at remembering everything, right? Like we're not great at remembering feedback. We're not great at remembering goals that we've set or whatever. But ultimately, documentation at a performance level is just important to be able to provide clarity on the feedback that you've given. And it doesn't have to be war and peace, right? Like, it's like, bullet pointed, this is the feedback, and this is the impact, and it's fine move on from that, but you've got to be able to look back in a certain time period and go, Look, I gave you this feedback, even if you take away the performance management side, take away the kind of employment law side, which is, this is the feedback I gave you two months ago. I've either seen an amazing change, well done, because it just solidifies the change, or you've got I haven't seen a change. We've not what's gone wrong, what? Let's talk about it. It allows you to have those sorts of conversations a little bit more easily, I think. Yeah. And then there's obviously the employment law side, which you're different every country, and you've just you've got to follow the rules. It was obviously not the answer I wanted. But Fine, I'll get documenting.

One question I have is around the defining performance, or what high performance looks like. Is that the same as defining the values and then using the values as the framework to define it, or is it like a sentence that is what high performance is, and this separate two values, I think separate, but aligned, if that makes sense, it's a separate conversation, but they're very much aligned. Basically, there's kind of three ways of defining performance. You can go, I'm results focused, and only thing I care about is results. I'm inputs focused, so 100%

almost, behaviors. That's very much like what sport has done to business over the last 30 years, because a coach or an elite athlete will define performance as the inputs you need to do to have the results you're looking to achieve, or it's a mix of both, which, depending on the business that you're building, it probably is. I know, like meta and Google have this 7030 rule, which is 70% impact, so 70% output and 30% behaviors. They may not define that on a piece of paper, but in one to one conversations, that is what they talk about. Now you look at Revolut, that's probably 9010 90% results, 10% behaviors, but then there's obviously a lot of chat about the culture that has created. So I think when it comes to defining behaviors, a Where do you want to be on that spectrum? Then you're going back to.

Your values and going, Okay, well, these are the behaviors that we value in this organization. Actually, a lot of co founders that I meet early on, I get them to have this conversation right at the beginning, like, what is high performance for you? Because if they if someone's like, way over here on results and someone's way over here on kind of inputs, actually, that's the biggest clash, is aligning on what the mission is of the company. We've had a very wide ranging conversation today. If our listeners can only remember one thing or take one thing away from the conversation, what would it be, I think, really spend the time to define what high performance is in your environment like I just don't think that conversation happens very often. Are we results focused? Are we input focused, whatever, and are we aligned on that? Well, never, because I never heard of the concept until today. So I'm like, Oh, that's really good, results versus behaviors. I'm going to go away and think about it. Yeah, it's a really tough one. And it's like, Where does the universe begin? Because this question that can't be actually answered only believed in perfect. So the results of this podcast are fantastic. Thank you, Andrew Richardson for joining us on the operations room. If you like what you hear, please leave us a comment or subscribe, and we will see you next week.