Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s Post

Have you seen this video overview of Team One? I learned about it a few years ago and it really resonated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9uM_6f5vmE

Such thought-provoking questions! 🌟 Reflecting on them, I'm intrigued – what practices have you found to be most effective in aligning senior members towards a larger company strategy? And how do you measure the success of these practices in your staff meetings? 😊

I keep failing to write a salient point and all I come up with is that as you rise up through an organization, the metrics you get evaluated on and rewarded for end up being about the mechanics of operating the organization, and less and less about the products, services, or customers generating revenue. There's a seniority layer where you're expected to simultaneously keep your feet on the ground with the products, services, customers, while also being measured on the mechanics of the business which treat the things you value as, at best, annoying externalities. So what you may have in common with your peers at this level is trying to balance keeping your feet on the ground with the products, services, and customers while getting evaluated on the more “senior” mechanics that the organization values. I utterly failed at recognizing this split in my non–executive but bizarrely senior role years ago.

1) Yes it generally means the company strategy is unclear or at the very least could use some reinforcement. In these cross-functional meetings you can ask questions about what outcomes we should be working towards or how is progress against the strategy being measured. Sometimes Product gets caught in a reaction mode and needs questions like these to bring the conversation back to the strategy.  2) If one of those meetings is yours you can set the agenda to ask how we are tracking against the strategy. What is engineering doing to support the business strategy and what engineering’s progress looks like to date? If it’s not your meeting you can reach out to suggest that agenda item. 3) Unless you have landed in an optics hellscape assume that others are interested in the same discussions. Find your allies and work with them to create the meetings that feel productive starting with 1:1’s to share how each of your departments are working towards the strategy and then work together to build agendas that reinforce this discussion. 

Such thought provoking questions! (1) being not focused on what your peers prioritize and them not focusing on what you prioritize seems like the goal and the reason for you all being separate people rather than one person who cares about everything. The hangups come when you and another peer need to be caring about the same thing, or you need them to prioritize their thing, but they think they need to prioritize their own thing. Like, is it an obstacle to you if they're not aligned on your thing? (3) meetings should be relevant to all attendees for at least half the time. If it's only for the benefit of the person whose staff it is, maybe that's separate meetings, or several email updates.

Great questions Kellan Elliott-McCrea thank you for bringing up the subject higher seniority level staff meetings can have cross company impact by enabling knowledge sharing and collaboration. But they need to have the space to allow for this. Irrespective of the seniority of the individuals in a staff meeting the principles of creating a high value meeting still exist. A meeting that generally provides value through discussion, clarification of information, collaboration and decision making. During my time at Dropbox, due to my unique role and position, I sat in on many staff meetings across the company. This gave me, the unique perspective of seeing how different teams and organizations operated. I was able to see common challenges and solutions that existed across organizations and was able to point people to talk to each other whom could collaborate and share solutions. A high-level staff meeting has the opportunity to provide a place to share key challenges, operating styles and wins to enable organizations to be able to learn from each other. Because of the scale of organizations that senior leaders will oversee the cascading, implications of improvements or solutions that are found can be huge.

Wouldn't you in theory have shared goals - and the meetings become about how teams interface best towards hitting those goals?

Maybe it’s a failure of my imagination for organizations > 2000 people, but I would expect up to that scale there are dependencies, even if only for resource allocation between departments, that need to be discussed and decided. I’d imagine regular performance review could help justify those decisions. I guess 1 would be my default and 3 definitely feels like a cop out (if attendees don’t understand why it’s working “because I say so” is never a good answer).

I love this- being aligned to something larger and compelling and the practices that foster that