Good morning, good afternoon and good evening.
Welcome to Rethink Culture.
It's the podcast that shines a spotlight on business leaders
who are rethinking workplace culture.
My name is Andreas Constantinou, and I'm your host and I'm also chairman
and founder at SlashData and an accidental micromanager who turned servant leader
over the years and developed a personal passion for workplace culture.
If you have any thoughts you'd like to share, let me know
by emailing rethink@rethinkculture.co.
And today, I have the pleasure of hosting Byron Darlison.
Byron is the founder of Rise,
which is a Canadian content management firm for digital signage.
He recently sold that and he spent a lot of time thinking
about culture and organizing the business for efficiency.
Today, Byron spends most of his time outside his business
outdoors, canoeing, camping, cycling, skiing, he tells me,
which is only four months a year in Canada, unfortunately.
So lots to talk about, Byron.
Very much welcome to the Rethink Culture podcast.
Thanks.
Glad to be here.
You are a systems thinker and that's how I would describe you.
I was fascinated, literally
fascinated when I came across Rise.
I think it was by something you posted on Slack
for Entrepreneur’s Organization, EO.
And on that page, you had a very
thoroughly thought out and documented
set of processes for everything from like
compensation and hiring and bonus schemes and like so much detail
about how Rise works.
And I thought it was very bold that you put this out
for everyone to see, but you had also taken so much
energy and focus to get it documented at that level of detail.
So what
motivated you to put out in the public and what was the thought process behind it?
Probably two parts.
Our operating system was probably comprised of
ten or 15 different frameworks
that over time we we merged together that,
you know, better thinkers than I created and they shared.
So there was a desire to pay it
forward, to make it available.
But more importantly,
there's a desire to write it down,
to put it in stone so that
it reinforces the discipline, the cadence,
what we call the artifacts that maintain each step in terms of how we work.
And by putting it down and constantly updating that,
it just reinforces the commitment
to that process.
And did you have any people who were attracted
to Rise as a result of what you posted there?
Was it meant as a as kind of employer branding in today's terms?
I would call it employee filtering.
It made it really, really clear as to how we work.
And you either thought it was amazing or.
Or you didn't.
I don't...
I'm not sure
it was a recruiting tool in the sense of hyping the company.
It was probably more of a filtering tool.
And earlier you were telling me that
when you hired someone, they
might have stayed in the company for a year, maybe not,
depending if the culture was a good fit for them.
But if they did, they stayed on for a really long time.
Yeah. So.
When I exited the company I think probably the...
I exited after 30 years, and I think
the second employee was 28 years.
Yeah. So
there's, there's a lot of friends
that have been in the company for a very long time.
If you if you like the way we work,
you stay.
There's no drama.
There's you know, it's a very straightforward
relationship,
but that's not always for everyone.
And as we discussed, we're very transparent in our work.
We're very accountable for our work
quantitatively and
it sounds
great.
But it's not for everyone.
So if you made it past a year,
you typically were there for a long time.
But in that first year, turnover could be quite high.
Mm hmm.
I think
I think a lot about this notion that every company's weird or special in a sense.
And I heard it first from Verne Harnish, who talked about it.
And if you think if you think about it, like
when we look for a relationship as people, we’re very particular
about who we want next to us, like super particular.
And a business is no different because it's influenced
top down from the values of the founder or the founders.
And the way that the company works, especially if the culture is intentional,
does not fit everyone because they reflect a particular personality
and values and principles and so on.
So I think this kind of
special values and attributes and principles the company has
that made it make it a good fit for a small part of the population,
what Robert Glazer in a previous podcast said, one or 2%
of the people who apply, I think that is
something we should be conscious
about and proud about and thinking that,
you know, this, this, this business that I've built as a founder
is very particular in the way it does things.
And so we need to be looking for
the people that, you know,
are inspired by what inspires us and follow
the same truths and values and principles.
Sorry, did you have any thoughts on that or.
I had a question after that.
I've been talking for too long.
No, no, no, no.
The dangerous side about that.
The thing to be
careful about, which always worried me,
was just drinking your own Kool-Aid too much.
So...
and this was the other part of writing it down
and committing to constantly updating it, is...
Well, as we mentioned earlier, strong convictions loosely held
the value of the company, which meaning that this is our culture,
this is how we do things.
We're very, very committed to this.
And...
but if you come along and you speak a truth that's going to improve
or, you know,
invalidate something in here we are not attached to it.
We will throw it out and adopt your truth.
We will
unabashedly steal
what you’ve just brought forward and we will incorporate it.
So I think it's extremely important.
It's strong convictions, loosely held, and I don't know who said that or when,
but I think that's incredibly important when
creating your
culture to make sure you don't become
so attached to it that it's just one big group thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, like the sign says on my
right or to your left.
I like always learning and unlearning, you know, admitting
or putting aside your ego and admitting you are wrong is part of that.
There's no there's no other way.
Absolutely.
So let's zoom in to what makes or made Rise special.
Made because you've left the company but makes because it's still around.
So what makes Rise special?
We talked earlier about focus, discipline and cadence,
which are very intentional words.
Do you want to describe the highlights of
these three words?
What do they mean for you?
Maybe if I could start with something
to the question of what makes the company special.
Coming back to tenure, the people that are there
and the time that we've been together and the time that they've spent
acquiring domain knowledge, they're experts
in their domains...
is incredible.
So I think what makes the company special are extremely experienced people
with unbelievable domain knowledge.
And what the company, me,
finally figured out is get out of the way,
empower them to exercise that domain knowledge
to do amazing things
and harness it in a way
that is extremely focused and productive.
Meaning that there is one thing that the company
is doing for a quarter or 90 days
that will harness all of that domain knowledge
to produce some improvement
that will become a baseline in the company.
So then the next quarter you add another brick,
you add another brick, you add another brick. That
getting out of the way,
focusing that domain knowledge, that expertise
and doing it in a process that is...
got a very defined cadence, rhythm
and methodology for constantly
running that engine is just very, very productive.
And it empowers people to, you know,
realize the expertise that we've acquired
and see they
get the creative return on what they're doing.
You know they feel ownership and
room to make cool stuff.
Mm hmm.
I want to get to something
we discussed earlier before starting the recording,
which is skip level reviews and how you used those
to help managers
pick one thing they wanted to improve each quarter.
How'd that, how does that work exactly?
So it's a combination of
Peter Drucker with the concept of performance agreements,
co-creating
and understanding all of the character traits
that comprise a role and what excellent
performance or adaptation of that character trait is,
and A, you know, sort of a middle ground, a B and a C,
and then I believe it was Kim
Scott and her book, Radical Candor.
Provided the framework for
skip level reviews.
So what happens is every quarter, and this is discipline because it's
hard work, someone has to go through 40 character traits,
values, their critical number of performance and rate themselves.
Did I achieve my critical number for the quarter?
Everybody has one critical number, a red, green
or yellow target.
Where am I at in the values?
You know, fully, fully aligned,
not so much, not aligned.
Where am I at on the character traits for my role in the company?
And there's a lot of them there.
You're going to be very self-critical and analytic.
And just
as an aside,
in my experience,
people were more critical
of themselves than their manager was.
Typically, it was more, No, that's not as bad as you say.
It's this.
When you provide a framework that's open and honest
and just really devoted to improving a person,
people will become very self-analytical
and in some cases a little too critical.
So you take that
personal retrospection with feedback from their manager,
but their manager, assuming that the person is a manager of people, meets
with their reports directly and discusses things like what's going really well,
what's not going so well.
If you were there, what would you do differently?
There's four or five questions.
And all of that is collated anonymously
and into a doc, and that document is shared
with the person whose performance review is up that quarter.
And you take that combined and then you say to them,
based on the feedback from people who report to you,
your own self analysis, myself as a manager's feedback,
what's the one thing that you need to do this quarter
to improve your execution, to improve your ability
to lead, to improve your ability to go along with peers, whatever it is.
Typically, people will come back with ten things.
My experience has been that everybody complains about being forced to multitask.
It's delusional.
My biggest fight with people is not to multitask.
Pick one thing.
It's very, very difficult for people to pick one plan and stick to it
until it's done.
So, just like the company, every quarter you will go out to do one thing
for the company that will improve everything.
For the people, you do one thing that will improve your ability
to be a domain expert in what you do and be able
to capitalize on that expertise and how you work with everyone around you.
How much did you see?
How much did you see people change as a result?
Marginally or phenomenally
or none at all?
For those that stayed?
I assume so, yeah.
That's an interesting question. Nobody's asked me that before.
Okay, so, I found that
people changed incredibly to a point.
And then because that process, was really, really open, transparent,
candid, radical candor, there were many cases
where the person went, No, I got to go back down a level.
I'm more happy here.
And so,
you would improve exponentially in what you did.
But sometimes someone would say, no, I'm really not happy here.
I want to go back to what I was doing before.
Interesting.
And they would stay.
So people say, you know,
you can never demote a person in terms of them
being happy and stay with the company and all that kind of stuff.
But when it's that type of process, it's not a demotion.
It's where is your expertise, your domain expertise
and your skill set and your interests lie, and what does that mean
in terms of the company?
Maybe you were thinking that you wanted to be a manager of managers
because, you know, it just seemed like you should be.
But now you're really, really unhappy because you're not feeling
as creative as you were in your previous role.
So to lose that person at that point is
expensive, extremely expensive.
You spend so much time building that expertise, that relationship,
all of that stuff.
You've got to figure out how to put them back
to where they truly want to be and can be truly productive.
So maybe the better question is
what did this process do to improve tenure?
Meaning finding the right fit for somebody where they're going to be truly happy
and want to stay at something for a long time.
It reminds me of the Peter Principle,
which says that in a hierarchy, every employee tends
to rise to their level of incompetence.
So you keep getting promoted and promoted, promoted until you are too far away
from your comfort zone and your skill zone,
and you stop being productive.
And I mean, that is particularly true because
in large organizations we tend to promote individual contributors
who then become managers without them having people skills.
But here you talk about a far broader range of skills such as people skills,
and I think it's a brilliant example of
self-awareness for someone to say, well, I'm actually more comfortable
being who I was before and I don't want to evolve because,
yeah, I'd rather stay true to my principles
and what I feel comfortable with.
And I think it's
80% a person's realization.
But where I see most companies failing
is, back to the Peter
Principle, just leaving people here
and not addressing the problem.
So back to radical candor.
You've got to come in and that's a really hard conversation.
Oh, yeah.
To say this doesn't seem to be working and you don't seem to be happy.
What are we going to do about this?
And that also is part of the culture
we created, which isn't an easy culture.
And also the reason why, you know, people would leave early
because that very candid feedback,
oh, it’s got to be delivered politely and, you know,
kindly, is not
what people are comfortable with.
Yeah,
yeah.
Talking about changing what was one thing
that you committed to as part of the process
and changed in the way you work?
One, thing, back
to one thing, there's so many things.
Well, let's have three, if you want. Three?
Oh, yeah.
Flavor of the day
killed that
which meant say no more often than yes
and saying no to myself
more often than anyone else.
No longer feeling responsible for
being
the ideation machine,
just becoming a collator and editor,
and I'll say it the polite way, shutting up.
But in my head I'm saying it the other way and it tends just to reinforce.
Like, you really shouldn't be talking.
So why?
Why did you or why did your employees feel you had to shut up?
Was it because you were speaking too much?
You had too many ideas?
You know, I never had an employee tell me
that I talked too much, that I can remember.
But what I found is, you know, if you've been in business
for a long time, you're a natural sales person
and you couldn't sell your employees
on your idea, the thing, your pet project or whatever,
and you can push and cram to get
what you think is the most amazing thing since sliced bread.
But it's something you’ve become
so attached to you’re blind, and you got biases up-the-ying-yang.
And when it's not working
because you are so attached to it, you're not willing to abandon it.
All of those things. So
why are you doing that in the first place?
You should be sitting there quietly
creating space for all of those people that you pay a lot of money
and who are experts and have been with you forever
and in many cases are much closer to the situation
to describe what should be happening.
And then you should be spending all of your time focusing on that conversation
as an editor, as a collator,
to bring it together in shared ownership
to be, Okay, we've gone through everything.
We had ten options as to what we feel we ought to be doing next.
Here's one that I think we're all in agreement
on, and
so and so, I know you don't agree what our principle is.
We disagree and commit and here we're going to commit.
I'm making the call.
You have to back this
and this is what we're going to go off and do.
So if you do it the other way around,
if you're anything like me historically,
you've lost millions on your great ideas.
Because they're not so great once they hit the...
No, they’re stupid. road.
They're absolutely stupid and they're 99% ego.
Yeah,
yeah, that's so true.
And we, we always forget or we tend to forget that
when a CEO comes in and says
another great idea and everyone knows they’re head it's
because of that person's job title and not because of the idea.
Right?
Yeah.
You also mentioned earlier to me
this paradigm of turning rocks into sand,
which sounds like a Chinese parable, but it's actually something
really tangible and
I, I,
I really like the way you describe that paradigm.
Can you tell us
more about how you put that into practice?
Well, it's not...
those term, well, I guess I put an extension on it.
So Covey
had the idea of...
Stephen Covey?
Yeah.
Of working on, how did he put it, the important
not the urgent or the, you know, he had those quadrants, so,
the four quadrants, you got to be working on something.
So his point was you take a fixed container
and if you pour in all the sand, the mundane, the urgent,
the things that are easy, and then you try to add
three rocks to the container, you can't, you can't put them in.
But if you put the three rocks in first and then pour in the sand,
it fills all the space around it,
you end up with a container with three rocks plus sand.
My extension of this is
always
do something, something new, some improvement.
That's the rock.
But at the end of that period that rock is crushed, it's
sand, it's become part of your foundation.
So now, next quarter, new rock.
So the container is getting bigger and bigger and bigger,
meaning the improvement.
And the company is getting better and better and better, in terms of what
you're delivering to your customers or how you're
attracting and retaining employees,
whatever it may be.
So taking
Covey, Stephen Covey's principle of rocks and sand,
but realizing at the end of it a rock is done when it's become sand.
So when you've incorporated that and it just happens by every day,
there's nothing, there's nothing special about it, this just get done,
is when you're ready to put another rock into the mix.
And when you no longer notice it,
and then you take
another rock and move to the next step.
And... It's interesting.
I noticed this when you're trying to produce
something that's new, let's stick with the analogy,
a rock you're pushing, pushing, pushing and trying to get people to adopt it.
You're trying to da da da, and it seems like it's never going to stick.
And then all of a sudden, in some meeting somewhere, somebody goes,
We don't do it like that.
We do it like this.
And that's a tipping point where all of a sudden
that rock is now sand and people start saying, We don't do it like that.
We do this.
And it's
you're pushing a rock up the hill and it doesn't seem
like you're ever going to get there.
But all of a sudden when that happens, it's downhill from there.
And it's all good stuff.
Something I want to go back to is this notion of transparency
and accountability, which is probably
pivotal and foundational to Rise and how it works.
Tell us a bit
more about like, the principle of having individual KPIs
and being fully transparent about your work and what does it mean
in day-to-day work.
I think a company should be
as transparent as humanly possible.
So I'm a firm believer
in the concept of a functional accountability chart.
So you have your organizational chart, but you have your functional chart,
which is here are all the roles that we need as a company.
And for these roles to be optimized this is the number
that we think is extremely important to this role.
That's the critical number for this role.
And here is what the mission is for this role.
This is what this role has to achieve as measured by this critical number.
And there may be a few leading and lighting indicators to give you
some more visibility on whatever, whatever that number may be.
So if you are organized enough to know what
your functional accountability chart is, all of those measures that make up it
and they all roll up together to be the CEO's
overall number for the company, it's very easy
to publish a weekly dashboard that is all of those critical numbers.
Here’s the team, here’s some individuals,
and everybody has access to it.
But it also means that in that weekly accounting,
we used to call it scoreboard Thursdays, if your numbers are in the red,
you have to, by end of day, produce a correction
that you're going to be making to put your number into the green
and you're going to commit to a date by when.
So you
may say at the end of the day, I can't.
I need one week to figure this out.
That's fine.
But by the end of the day, you are committing to a date
either by when it will be corrected and the action you're taking, or
the date by when you will have that commitment to be made.
So everybody knows who's doing what, where we're all at,
and somebody may say, Hey, I see you’re in trouble.
I have an idea.
And they can come in to help.
They can support you, they can do whatever, whatever you may need.
So that's very, very difficult for people to do.
Now, on the other side of that, though, is,
you know what all of these functional roles are,
you know the levels of experience that you need for them.
So it's very easy to take those roles and create a compensation ledger
that says, this role, if you're an A player,
plus or minus 20% typically, pays X
and use third party services, pay scale,
whatever you want to use, or a combination of services to actually decide, okay,
I want to pay in the 60th percentile for a company of a thousand people or more.
And the jurisdiction that that I reside in or where I'm using
as my geographic target and you list out
all of those those pay ranges
and you list out what the variable portion of that
as a percentage of the base is for all of those roles.
So it's very easy for people to go, I understand what these functional roles
pay. I understand that my performance in this role is a B, I'm not at the top level
yet, as per the performance review that we talked about earlier
and what it means if I get to that A level in terms of the compensation,
and an A level has to be sustained for at least a couple of quarters.
It can't just be a one-off affair.
So...
And then from a company's perspective
to commit to that compensation, don't break it.
And then share on a monthly basis your financial numbers and use those
financial numbers in that presentation in an all hands meeting to once again say,
say one thing.
Sorry, just give me one second.
Just say one thing that the company,
and typically it's your CFO making this presentation,
and the difficult thing for a CFO is to go, Hey, here's the numbers
and here's the one thing we've got to work on this month to improve these numbers.
And typically you want it
tied to the theme for the quarter that you're going after.
But it's not just a whole bunch of numbers.
It's like this is what it all means.
And this is by doing this, what it means for all of us.
And if you, if you’re smart, I...
Well, ok, in my opinion, if you're smart,
you have a profit sharing component that's paid out monthly to people.
So you're sharing the financial, you're telling them what that impact is on profit
sharing that they're getting that month, and you're giving them an action.
This is what we all need to do
to improve your profit sharing, which improves our financials,
which all ties back to the functional accountability
chart, who owns what and all that kind of stuff.
But this means, and it means all of your work is visible.
It applies all across the board
to have that level of
transparency, corporately, as a leader,
as a contributor,
is really uncomfortable at times,
and it's not for everybody.
So you've read a lot of books and
utilized a lot of frameworks
to build your own flavor of an operating system at Rise.
If you were to take
three or four frameworks
and you wanted to advise
people here listening, leaders, and say,
from this framework, I really take that part,
let's say the GWC system from the Entrepreneurial
Operating System or something else from Scaling Up and so on.
Is there like, do you have favorites on what are really
great techniques
that you've read and built on?
Sure.
Shannon Susko, 3HAG.
Topgrading.
Basecamp’s software methodology.
6-week sprints
in a continuous deployment environment.
StoryBrand, Donald Miller.
Radical Candor, Kim Scott.
There's probably a lot more.
I would go with those.
As a great starting point.
What's your favorite, like, your key takeaway from 3HAG
that you started with?
Probably the...
my favorite tool in there is,
well in that...
I like 3HAG a lot but I don't think it does a great job
of giving a framework and I haven't gone back to it.
I know it's being constantly improved.
It doesn't do a great job of identifying the customer.
I think StoryBrand does an amazing job of that.
So really, really dialing in on who your customer is,
and then whaling it down to 3 to 5 attributes
that they are making their buying decision on,
and then mapping scale 1 to 5,
how you do as a company at fulfilling those 3 to 5 attributes,
but then taking a look at your competition and really knowing your competition
and grading how they do at fulfilling that.
You all typically chart it out.
You will typically end up in a grouped line, probably pretty close.
But now you've got to say, Okay, I don't want to be like everyone else.
I want to distinguish myself as being exceptional in some part of this.
Same, same point as do one thing at a time.
You can't just pile on.
If I'm going to be exceptional in something,
what am I going to be unexceptional in?
Cause I can't do...
I can't make everything a 5.
It's just, it's not going to fly. So
I want
to invest in these two attributes to create an incredible amount of
whitespace between me and my competition so that I can't be compared.
That means
maybe I'm going to give up on price,
I'm going to be expensive or whatever it may be.
You figure it out and then mapping out over a three year time horizon
and always have a three year framework that you're moving one quarter to a next.
This is constantly about moving forward.
By quarter what you're investing in or divesting in, in each of these attributes.
And who owns that?
Who on your functional accountability chart is the leader,
is the person accountable for making that deliverable this quarter.
So those are what I call or no, Shannon Susko calls, strategic swimlanes.
And then you have, in your functional company,
you have your functional swimlanes.
What are the improvements by function we need to make?
And then you have your hiring swimlanes.
Who are the roles that we have to bring in?
And you're always looking at this three years of swimlanes and you're
deciding every quarter of what we're doing across these, what's the number one?
What's the theme for this quarter?
What do we got to do? And
we had a really fun way of going about the theme,
or at least I felt it was kind of unique.
We'd establish a theme for the quarter.
We'd set ‘as measured by’.
That's a very common term for us.
It's not just we did this, we are doing this to change a critical number.
It's not a
checklist on a task.
It's, no, we're doing this work because we want to improve this critical number.
So we are going to
deliver this thing, this quarter, as measured by this number.
And if we hit it, if we hit the green target everybody gets 150 bucks.
It's not a lot of money.
It's a tiny amount of money.
And if we only get the yellow target,
everybody gets, I can’t remember what it was, 50 bucks.
And if we don't, we're in the red, nobody gets anything.
But to get your reward, you have to spend the money on something fun.
And the only way that you can
claim that money is if you posted a picture
in a Slack channel called the Happy Room of that thing.
So I'm out for a drive-in movie with my family.
I am a Star Wars nut.
I bought a huge Star Wars puzzle or whatever it is.
You didn't have to submit a receipt, you just had to submit a picture.
And that just creates a culture of success and bond and all that kind of stuff.
So it's not, it's not a big amount of money at all.
But it gamifies the whole thing, makes it fun, makes people,
especially in a distributed company, get to know each other.
And it gives you a reason
at every weekly meeting, at every all hands, all of that stuff,
to talk about where you're at with the theme for the quarter.
Amazing. I love it.
No receipt?
Just send us a picture of you doing something?
Just a picture. And no picture, no money.
Yeah.
Love it.
Byron, as we wrap up,
what do you think that we as leaders
need to rethink about culture?
Be systematic in what you're doing,
commit to it, disciplined about it.
And as a leader, you can't be late for a meeting.
You can't miss a deliverable.
If you say this is how we do things
and when we do them and what gets produced from them,
you must always, always,
always show up and deliver what you said you would,
even if that means you don't sleep for a week
because the moment you don't, you just undermine the whole thing.
And just do one thing at a time.
Don't ask people to do anything other than that.
Be smart about what that one thing is and be really systematic
about it. And
I think if
you do all of those things, look after your people, you retain
and attract good people and their domain expertise will grow over time.
And they lead, not you.
So shut up and listen to them.
And it only took you 30 years to arrive to that wisdom, right?
As you mentioned earlier, 25 years oscillating
and five years really accelerating.
Yeah. And
when I'm asked about this,
I say, I spent 25 years going up and down,
five years moving in a straight line.
And when I'm coaching my line is, If you listen to me, you can do it in three.
And if I’d do it again, I would set out to do it in three.
But I would start with the framework.
Super.
Byron, thank you for the wisdom,
distilling these frameworks and books into some really tangible
operating systems and
practices that you practiced at Rise.
I'm going to go back and read 3HAG because it sounds like
a very foundational piece of
structure that maybe will be useful in my new business.
So thank you for being here with us.
And for everyone else, thank you for listening.
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Ciao. Thank you.