๐ #7 Saying No
This week: ๐ Why we Say Yes ๐ฌ How to build a Strategy of No ๐ Measure What Matters & ๐ฆ Start/Stop/Continues
๐ Why we Say Yes
Last week I half-jokingly mused about the urge to change the website in the first 90 days. In my first week as VP Marketing, the website came up unprompted in introductory conversations with design, product, sales, executive management and nearly every marketing team member - I was also invited to a ideation exercise around the next generation of the website. I happily accepted the invitation, and chuckled to myself at my own prediction.
In the past, I would've happily proposed ideas, even volunteered to take the lead on such a project if there wasn't one or if I felt it was something strategic for my team to own. This time - so far, at least - I am careful about protecting my time, shadowing meetings without participating in them, setting expectations prior to the meeting with whoever has invited me that my role is to listen and understand how things are done today, not commit myself or my team to any action.
A recurring theme for my current Leadership Plan revolves around being intentional & dependable - which is relevant not only in my First 90 Days. Knowing when & why you jump into projects - and more specifically, when & why you Say No - is key to setting priorities & delegating.
Why do we Say Yes without asking ourselves whether we should?
It should be a quick win.
It's something we obviously need.
It's a strategic stepping stone.
All of the above.
Beware of quick. Beware of obvious. Beware of strategic. These are all ways that we or others tell us not to ask why, when & who questions because of the what & where.
Saying No becomes so much harder than it should be because Saying No creates conflict. Saying No isn't what a "team player" does. But most of all, Saying No often leads to us being challenged on our strategy - Why are you Saying No? When will this be done? Who is the right person to talk to?
No one asks you to explain yourself when you Say Yes.
๐ถ I'll probably be the last to know No one says until it shows See how it is They want you or they don't ๐ถ
๐ฌ Say No to what Doesn't Matter
Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) are a goal-setting framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes.
Depending on how we use them, OKRs can serve as a laundry list of projects, deliverables, deadlines & dependencies for a company, departments, teams or individuals, or they can articulate strategy. For most of my career, I have been iterating on how I use OKRs to get away from a roadmap of what we will do and getting closer to setting strategy & articulating priorities to both my team and our stakeholders.
Strategy signals Intent not only by explicitly defining towards what end we are marching, but also by explicitly ruling out all initiatives which do not further our objectives.
When crafted correctly, OKRs Say Yes or No for you. When evaluating or being presented with a project / opportunity / initiative by your team, management or other stakeholders, ask yourself OKR-centric questions:
What's the objective? How does this support or distract from our current objectives?
What are the key results? How do these key results support or distract from our current key results?
Who's buy-in will be necessary for this initiative to succeed? How does getting buy-in from those stakeholders support or distract from their existing OKRs? What's the earliest you can proactively get this on their roadmap?
OKRs are a great hose to protect your team from putting out short-term fires, which tend to derail long-term strategy. If you find yourself in a situation where you feel like you must decide & engage in an unexpected project, create time for reflection (read: never start working on a project the same week you hear about it for the first time) and reflect on what this project implies for your OKRs and that of your team. You should always leave a little room in your team's OKRs for quick wins & firefighting; however, it should be proactively set aside as opposed to reactively activated - and try to keep it to less than 10% of their workload. Generals march into battle first, not last - if you're not willing to fight the fire, don't ask your team to.
Be wary of being too unavailable, though. Teams that hide behind their OKRs will create focus, but they may alienate stakeholders. Make sure you systemically involve stakeholders in OKRs as early as possible so that they know when is a good time to bring projects to your team - typically, I begin working on next quarter's OKRs about four weeks before I want to have OKRs finalized.
When setting Key Results, think about what the KPI you choose says about your priorities. "Leading indicator" KPIs for marketing teams like engagement/reach/views send a message that marketing isn't accountable for revenue pipeline. Think about what you're communicating to your team when you choose a certain individual, team, or event department-level KPI.
๐ Say Yes to What Matters
If you're looking to read more on OKRs, I highly recommend Measure What Matters, which I come back to often to improve and understand better how to lead through OKRs. I'm also currently reading High Output Management by Intel's Andy Grove.
Three big takeaways for me from Measure What Matters:
Objectives are qualitative & aspirational for a reason: the key result metric is not the objective, it is just the best way you know to measure it. If you're building a company, "get 20 new customers" is not the objective, "Build something that people love" may be, and you may choose to measure your progress in number of customers. When presented with two equally good paths forward, the objective is the tie-breaker, not the key result - if your team believes the metric sets the direction as opposed to the inverse, there is a much more narrow space for autonomous decision making.
OKRs should cascade up: at work, your individual OKRs should draw a direct line to your team OKRs, and those up to your department's, and those up to the company's. At home, your OKRs as partner should cascade up to your family's. Your objective should be a subset of the larger objective ( Brand Team goal "Become the go-to source of knowledge for our ICP" rolls up to the company goal "Become a recognized leader in our industry") . Key Results don't all have to roll-up, but it's good to have at least one key result that does in your OKRs.
Make measuring Key Results obvious to measure : in writing OKRs, we are often unsure about how we will measure success of an objective, and it manifests itself through key results like "everyone is happy with the outcome," which seems like it can be easy to measure ("Are we happy? Yes? Great!"), but it is subjective and a third party could not measure it without your involvement. Stick to objective key results - instead of "I run every time I plan to", go with "I run every day for 7 days straight".
I also try to minimize the number of binary key results I set for myself, like if my Objective is "Share more of what you've learned as a leader in startups," instead of "Launch my email newsletter," I'll aim for "Get 50 signups for your new newsletter," as launching the newsletter is just a means to an end.
๐ฆStop / Start / Continues
Concrete changes you can make to your processes & habits in order to overcome this Blindspot.
๐ด Stop prioritizing firefighting over pre-determined priorities.
๐ด Stop allowing a loose sense or laundry list of priorities.
๐ด Stop allowing people to avoid giving deadlines/timelines.
๐ด Stop building a roadmap of initiatives. Translate initiative intuition into OKRs and then build forward from them.
๐ด Stop rewarding deliverables or other binary measures of success.
๐ข Start asking for an explicit handshake on decisions that require stakeholder buy-in.
๐ข Start setting an explicit roadmap of who does what when & how success will be measured.
๐ข Start asking for an explicit timeline, even if it's conservative.
๐ข Start communicating priorities in a consistent way, such as at the beginning of every weekly meeting.
๐ข Start connecting initiatives back to success metrics.
๐ข Start creating individual accountability inside of collective focus by sharing Objectives and creating a single owner for a success metric.
๐ก Continue making prioritization a group discussion.
๐ก Continue aligning with executive stakeholders on priorities.
๐ก Continue creating focus by stripping down OKRs into the minimum number possible.
๐ก Continue providing context to your team about overall business growth, impediments and the bigger picture they fit into.