5 Ways to Create an Empowered and High Performing Team
For the past 2 years Zensai, a 200+ employee global tech company, has been named a Great Place to Work by the employees. In this session we will dive into the 5 strategies that has helped propel Zensai into a high-performing culture that is out-pacing competitors who have more resources, people, and funding. Rasmus and Robin have spent decades in leadership roles at companies like Salesforce, Box, LinkedIn, WeWork, and more, and will share the secrets of their success in human-first leadership.
All right, good afternoon everyone.
Welcome to this amazing session.
Last session of Pulse Europe.
I hope everybody's been having an amazing time.
I'm Matthew Wozley.
I'm gonna be the session host today.
And I'm really excited to introduce Robin Daniels,
Chief Business and Product Officer
and Rasmus Host, CEO of Zen Sai
for this session on five ways to create
an empowered and high performing team.
So quick, a couple housekeeping notes really quick.
Don't forget to put all of your questions
into the polls and Q&A's part of the app.
Make sure you're in session or on track six.
And always remember to upvote the questions
that are already in there to make sure that
we get to them 'cause that's kind of
the order of priority.
So let's give Robin and Rasmus a round of applause.
- Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you everyone.
And first and foremost, creating empowered teams,
creating teams that makes decisions on their own,
creating teams that actually wants to be part of a mission
is very, very dear to what we do on an everyday basis.
And that's why that's the topic for this.
But let's start with one thing first.
Let's give you guys a lot of praise
because you work in customer success.
And of Robin and I, I can hear that
when you're at the game side of it,
you need to say something that is a secret thing
that you know or you can do
and how it helps you in business.
But the interesting thing is that one of us
is a resource and the other one is success.
You can make your decision later,
but that's how we started out.
But let me try and actually give you the context
of what I'm saying here.
Many of you work in customer success,
many of you are leaders.
You talk about your customers in the following way.
I invest in your success.
You've bought my product.
I would like you to have ROI from my product.
I would like you to be successful
using the product I've just sold you.
And conversely, when you hire somebody,
what is the department that hires people?
Is it called human resources?
Let's just, I'm not a native English speaker by any means,
but if we use the word resources,
it's not a part of our lives.
People are concerned about climate crisis
and we're also using resources, disposable resources.
That is how we welcome people into our teams.
So the congratulations actually goes to you
because you've managed to change the narrative
of how we think about customers to talk about success.
And if anyone is close enough,
there is a bit of gray hair here.
I am way past the 50 mark.
So I've been part of shipping software out on CDs
and that meant we had customer support.
Nobody ever knew whether that was,
any support tickets were actually salespeople
over selling the stuff.
The product actually not functioning at all
or it was actually a legitimate,
hey, this doesn't work.
And when it didn't work, we had to send out a new one.
But in the context of SaaS, all of you here,
you can actually praise yourself and say,
we've been part of changing that narrative.
We invest in our customer's success.
Good.
But the problem here is that 100% of your customers are people
and in the 100% of your employees are people.
So if you don't understand people,
we're not really in business.
So why do we have this disconnect?
And why do we think we want to empower our customers?
But we really don't talk about it
as we want to empower people.
Because when you really, really think about it,
there are a lot of similarities
between what customer success does
and what you do with your teams.
But you don't think about it in the same way.
I get to be a CEO and that means
that you will also be asked to valuation
and talk to investors and all those kinds of things.
And when they come, they always ask me for my NRR.
They ask for a predictor for the future.
Is this an outcome that I can count on
that will be successful going forward?
And it basically into that account,
you kind of take if you had a product today,
it's worth 100.
If you don't do anything to it, it will be worth 20.
It's at least not as valuable in five years.
But nobody asks me who actually learns
in your organization.
What are your expectations for what you need to learn
and all of us are in front of a huge challenge
in terms of AI?
Who has a roadmap for what we want to be doing
with our customers?
Who has a roadmap for what we want to be learning with AI?
Very, very few of us.
And when you then think about how we actually go about
with our business, how we engage with our customers,
actually if I came and told you, I have 2,000 customers
and I have an engagement of those
of about 50 customers logged in every month.
How many customers success people
would be really, really scared about that?
Because your adoption and engagement is terrible.
Let me now try and ask you.
How many of your team members are 100% engaged?
How do you tell?
In this era where we're making so many changes
to how we operate businesses,
we really don't have a measure for that.
But it's the same metric as we've actually done
with customer success.
It's a lot of the same thoughts about engagement
and adoption, it's about roadmap,
it's about how frequently we check in
and all those kind of things.
So many of these things actually don't translate
into how we manage people on an everyday basis.
And that is one of the things that you should be thinking
about not only to have a great engagement
and a great team and to empower the team,
but actually to go through a change,
we've heard a lot about human first
and all those kind of things.
But now let me be a little bit CEO like.
AI is gonna inflict cost savings on all of us.
We all say, hey, this has gotta be great productivity gain,
all of that.
CEO chair, my owners, my shareholders,
they will go, what's the gain?
How are you gonna be more efficient?
You're gonna be faced with how do I retain
the best talent in my teams?
How do I make them engaged?
How do I make sure that that is actually
the way they work with AI going forward?
And that's not dystopian or anything.
It's just making sure that a transition we know is coming.
We are responsible for as leaders.
We are responsible for making sure that that change happens.
And the only way this can start
is that people accept that that's what happening.
You need to flip the script.
The era of human success will not be about me telling
every single one of you what you need to do.
It is actually about you showing up every day,
doing your best, wanting to be the best,
and me as a CEO, being very happy when you're
net better off when you exit the business.
Either you're promoted, maybe you choose to go somewhere else,
maybe it's an AI redundancy,
but that's kind of how we should be thinking about it.
And the other thing we're saying is
how do we show up as leaders?
How do we lead through this?
And I will bet you that if I now ask a question,
which is every single one of the companies in here,
probably have seven trades of leadership
that you need to remember.
I've been in those companies.
I've also worked on it and I've tried to remember empathy
and decided to win and some other stuff.
And when I get to number three or four,
I go like, yeah, maybe,
if you actually change the vocabulary,
and I'm again starting as an inspiration
from where you came from,
customer support to customer success,
investing in the success of those who are beyond you.
If you think of those two things,
who in your team is responsible for being a good human?
The people in the team,
who's responsible for the team actually feeling good?
You can not as a leader be responsible
for the team feeling good.
They will only feel good if they embrace responsibility
for making them feel good.
That's actually one part of it.
And as you hear, it's a soft part.
It feels really good.
Because it is.
It is the way we engage with each other.
And in a time where that's probably more important
than in a long time, this is important.
Success on the other hand.
You know this from your daily jobs.
It's a hot master.
The thing about this, have you ever been part of a team
where it felt really, really, really good?
But you are missing every single quarter,
every single month, every single renewal.
You're in our ours, 97.
It doesn't feel good.
We can be the best of friends and all of that.
But the duality in how we build teams going forward,
and how we empower teams,
because it actually has the same underpinning.
Who's responsible for my success?
I am.
I'm responsible for moving forward.
Who's responsible for the team's success?
The team is.
In those two words, you have everything you need
to learn about leadership,
just like you've put into customer success.
And in doing so, you're actually telling,
and it requires you to be a brave leader.
It requires you to stand up and say,
I actually trust you as a team to show up this way every day.
But what I promise you in return,
is that I will say, this is about human success.
This is about your success first,
because if it starts from the bottom,
listen to how many of the sessions,
you'll take a quick peek back at the sessions you've heard,
how many of the sessions have been talked to as a CEO,
setting KPIs, pushing them down.
And how many have been told as,
let the team lift themselves up,
let the team build that.
Bear in mind, I'm a father of a 21 year old
and a 19 year old tomorrow.
So I need to get back with my flight today.
They're used to this.
That's how they engage.
They're used to building those communities.
They're used to the kudos,
they're used to all of those types of things,
happening all of the time for them.
And that's where we actually,
that's where we are today.
And it's a quick litmus test.
We're really, really good at these KPIs.
So how many in here are sure that their teams
actually checked in with the customer this week
while you were here?
Everyone?
Probably yes.
Now let me give you the other one.
How many checked in with the team member
and gave them a kudos deliberately?
Like sat down for five minutes and went,
"Hey, you did a great job.
"This was fantastic."
Probably very few.
That's usually the answer I get when I do this.
And then you go, "Why not?"
Because that's the fuel we all live from.
What did we do on stage with Nick?
We brought people up who were the trailblazers
of this community, the game site,
stars and all of those types of things.
Why?
Because we recognize people.
How does that make them feel?
Amazing.
You know what it is?
As a business owner, shareholder, anything like that?
What's the cost of kindness?
What's the cost of showing up as a good human?
What's the cost of taking that five minutes to tell your
colleague that this is what it is?
Nothing.
It is the biggest single impact you can make on a business
without pouring millions into your organization
and changing lots of stuff.
Listen to a team that changes in this way.
And you will see that smaller teams can do even better.
There's a reason why if anyone's soccer,
I've lived in the US, football or soccer fan,
some of those clubs that buy hugely expensive players,
they still don't win anything.
Why?
Because team chemistry is not there.
And there's a reason why sometimes smaller clubs
actually move up to the top
because the team chemistry is there.
That is how you actually build success
and investment in success of those who will be on to
into the way we support our customers.
Now for this one, we wanna figure out
how do we build this into how we support our teams
and how we make them better
because we are all dependent on them doing
amazingly well in an era that's gonna inflict
a lot of change.
Nick talked about the economy,
you know AI is coming and we still have business goals
and they're not as easy to hit
as they were maybe two or three years ago.
But to give you an insight into how we actually got here,
I wanna welcome Robin up.
And the thing I will now just hand it over
to Robin with the following words,
we are so terrible at doing stuff together
that he also wore a blue jacket that he had to take off.
But I'm really thankful that you took it off
so we don't really look alike.
- I appreciate it, I appreciate it.
(audience applauding)
Thank you, thank you.
I'll tell you how we got here
and then I'll tell you what we're gonna do about it.
So I'm Robin Daniels, I'm the Chief Business Officer
at Sensei.
I spent more than two decades of my life
in high growth companies, Salesforce, Box, LinkedIn,
WeWork and I've become obsessed with how do you create
high performing and engage teams
to do the best work of their life.
And I wanna walk you through what keeps me up at night.
It's these things here.
Like when I see these statistics that say
that two out of three people wanna quit their jobs
because they're so unhappy or nobody's investing
in their team's growth or future.
Yet we know that the companies who have figured this out,
the companies that do invest in their team's growth
and capabilities, they see better outputs,
they see more engagement, more innovation,
their profitability is much higher.
And so when I think about this,
I think about the fact that two out of three people
wanna quit their jobs, this is from Gallup,
but it's the same if you look at McKinsey or HBR
or any of these things, they all show the same thing.
And my question to you is,
do you think those people are showing up
every single day doing the best work of their lives?
Are they super engaged?
Are they super excited?
Are they super motivated to like go above and beyond?
No, probably not.
But if you dig deep into why they're saying
that they wanna quit their jobs, it's pretty stark.
It says it's because that nobody's investing
in their growth, their potential,
they're not giving them any new skills
and not putting them on a path for success.
And I know for a fact that I am where I am today in my life
because so many people along the way
have seen something in me, invested in me,
given me the skills that I needed to be successful
or push me in a direction that I needed to be successful.
And I can guarantee that most of you here
probably have the same story, a teacher,
a parent, a coworker, a boss,
or somebody saw something in you and said,
you're doing this, but maybe you should do this,
or maybe go learn this skill or go this direction
and it changed your life completely.
And so what frustrates me is when I see those numbers
and the fact that they're not really changing you
over a year, because if you look at 2022,
it was about the same.
2021, the numbers were about the same
and going back decades and decades,
there's been this discontent in the world
because we're moving so fast and yet we feel stuck.
It's a really kind of a weird dichotomy.
The world is moving fast yet.
I feel like I'm not really going anywhere in my life
and my career and so on.
And we wanna change that.
And so when we think about it,
we think about this fact that we're witnessing
a people revolution.
And what I mean is that when you think about everything
that's happening in the world,
just like we saw a revolution in the realm
of customer success,
and I was at one of the early pioneers at Salesforce
who started kind of using that term
and then of course, Gainside really took it
to the next level and made it an industry standard.
And we think that we're witnessing the same thing happening
in the realm of people.
The old way of thinking about people
is this antiquated HR notion,
which is all about making sure that people get paid,
they take their vacation,
they're complying with the training that they need to take,
and that we're kind of monitoring them and so on.
That's kind of like traditional HR 1.0.
And the thing about this is,
it's been around for a long time
and it's not going anywhere
because it's actually really important.
It's important that you get paid.
It's important that you take your vacation.
It's important that you're complying with whatever
you need to be compliant with and so on.
So it's not going away,
but we also know that this is not enough
just doing covering these things to motivate a team
or an individual to go above and beyond
and do the best work of their life.
Then we thought about two decades ago,
let's change HR to people and culture.
How many of you have a people in culture team
or a chief people officer and so on, right?
Yep.
And we thought, well, if we just change
kind of the outer things around this,
maybe it'll be better for people.
If we give them free pizza, kombucha on tap,
ping pong tables and so on,
I was the chief marketing officer at WeWork.
I know all about this.
At least making the office somewhat joyful when you go in,
so it's not a soulless place that kind of sucks the life out of you.
And you know what?
It helped a little bit.
It did.
It made it so you had a place where you could go
and that felt a little bit warmer,
a little bit more like a family and so on.
But it didn't actually really address the underlying issues
of why people are discontent or why people feel stuck
or why people feel like they want to quit their jobs.
And so we believe that we're in this new era
of what we call human success.
And actually, Gartner's been starting to use this term as well.
I was just at the Gartner Symposium last week in Barcelona.
And they were starting talking about human success.
They actually showed something very similar to this,
where they said it used to be called
kind of human capital management.
The future's going to be all about human success.
But human success, what is it?
Well, it's really about this mindset and philosophy around
how do you empower people to be the best that they can be
every single day?
By giving them the skills and the knowledge
and the mentoring and coaching that they need
so they feel like they have the skills
that they need today to be successful.
But also, the momentum in their life
to feel like there's a future they're going into
that's exciting and motivating to them to show up every day
and go above and beyond.
And so we're in this time where we recognize
that it's all about focusing on people.
And I think it's so funny when I go talk to CEOs
or business leaders, most of them would not along.
Yeah, people are most important asset.
And then they go right back to not really focusing
on people because they're chasing the wrong things.
And I think one of my heroes who said it best,
this is Richard Branson, hopefully you know who he is.
It's a legendary entrepreneur.
He's created several companies.
And he said this, clients do not come first.
Employees come first.
And if you take care of your employees,
they will take care of the clients.
And it's such an often forgotten truth
because we're chasing profitability and growth and revenue
and all these things.
Of course, super important the company will not be
around without them.
But this philosophy of focusing on employees first,
so they're showing up every day, motivated,
that will of course spill over to the other team members,
but also to the customers that you have.
And so we think like we have to shift the dichotomy
from efficiency, chasing growth at a nonstop.
And that's been kind of the last couple of decades
when it comes to businesses to really saying,
we're going to focus on people to employ productivity,
happiness, and ultimately success.
And just to be clear, it's not to say that profitability
and revenue and productivity are not important.
Of course, they're massively important.
You will not have a business if you don't have that.
But we think those are outcomes if you create an environment
where people show up to do the best work of their life.
And so we also believe then that the old formula
for success is broken.
The old way of thinking about success
is that it's about outcomes at all costs.
Doesn't really matter how you get there.
As long as we get the results, that's all that matters.
And it's not really the world that you want to live in.
I think we've seen some of the effects of that world
in many different industries where
it's about chasing results and growth at all costs.
And there's been so many other damages
besides of those kind of effects of just having that mindset.
And so the old mindset is very much
that it doesn't really matter how you get there.
As long as we get those results, that is a very antiquated mindset.
And if you speak to the younger generation,
I have an 18-year-old, you know,
Rasmus has some younger kids as well.
That's not how they think about the world at all.
They actually care about what goes into those outcomes as well.
How you get there is just as important as the outcome as well.
And so the new formula that I'd like to propose for success
looks a little bit something like this.
It's about input and output that equals outcome.
It's not just about outcome at all costs.
But let me just explain what I mean
because it's like what does this equation actually mean?
And this is how we actually run our company as well at Sensei.
We're just over 200 people.
We're a fast-growing company.
But this is how we run our company too.
So what it means to have this input plus output equals outcome
is this.
Because it's about turning actions into the right motivations
and the right behaviors and rewarding those right behaviors
so you can create a culture that inspires people
every single day when they come in.
So what is an input?
An input is something that goes into something.
Your mindset, your energy, the way you show up
at work every single day, the way that you speak
to your colleagues and all those kind of different things.
And you know what's so beautiful about inputs?
You control this 100%.
Doesn't mean it's easy if you're being cut off in traffic,
or you're late for work, or your kid
is being a jerk in the morning.
It's happened a few times.
Of course, it colors your angry slack message
or something.
Of course, it colors your mindset and the way you show up.
Doesn't change the fact, though, that you control this 100%.
The moment I walk into work, I think about this a lot.
Like, the way I show up to my team is in my control.
They don't care necessarily that what happened
the two hours before I got there.
But the way I show up, the way I talk to them
and inspire them or guide them and leave them
so it matters hugely.
And the beauty of this is we can control this 100%.
Doesn't mean it's easy again, but we do.
It's the reality of life.
The next thing is output.
What is an output?
Well, that is kind of the result of something that you do.
So let's say it's a new HR policy or new marketing program
or a new customer success program you're putting out there,
or a new sales spiff or whatever it is.
You can also control this.
It's a best in class.
Are you proud of it?
Do you stand by it?
Do you think it's something that's
aligned with your values and who you are as a company
and what you want to put out in the world?
You can control this 100% too.
What you can't control is outcome.
Because what happens when you put out a marketing program?
Suddenly maybe a competitor puts out something
that's better than yours.
Maybe there's a geopolitical crisis.
Maybe there's a global pandemic.
There's all these things that you can't control.
But it's not an application of responsibility
when it comes to outcomes.
Because input and output really matters.
Let's say your goal is to reach 10 million in sales
in the next year.
And if you show up or your team shows up with a bad attitude,
the output is kind of crappy.
Do you think you're going to hit 10 million?
No, probably not.
But if you show up every day, you do the work,
your team does the work, the right attitude,
you try to do the hard work, dig deep,
create great stuff that you're proud of.
Are you going to hit the 10 million?
Maybe not 100%, but you're certainly
going to be a lot closer because you've put the work
into the strategy, the tactics, the way you show up every day,
the way the team works together, the way they collaborate,
they treat each other, and so on.
And so what we're suggesting is that you also
need to start rewarding the input and the output,
as well as the outcome.
It's, again, it's not an application of responsibility
about outcomes or goals.
Those are really important because, of course,
that's how you grow as a business.
But it can't be the only thing you reward.
Traditionally, we have rewarded outcome like 100%.
What you could do is you could say,
we would do a third, a third, a third, or maybe it's 25%
on input, 25% on output, and maybe 50% on output.
You can figure out your own equation.
But once you start doing that, it
changes the behavior of everybody in the company
because suddenly people are rewarded
on the way they show up every day,
the way they collaborate, they communicate with each other,
and so on.
It creates a very different dynamic for your whole company.
And this whole thing together should
drive the motivation of who you are.
So your philosophy is of how you run your team.
My grasp was talking about--
I've been in so many companies where it's like,
these five philosophies is how we run our teams.
And this is the values that we have.
But nobody's ever accountable to them, right?
It's like, oh, we're accountable.
We-- customers come first and blah, blah, blah.
This is actually a way of driving accountability
into your team in a way that motivates and inspires
everyone to do so.
And so you think about it.
They go to work for money, but they really go to work--
they go to extra mile for a recognition, praise,
and rewards.
And so this is one of those ways of building that into the culture
itself.
This is Dale Carnegie.
He's one of the gurus when it comes to motivation,
wrote this book over 100 years ago.
But it still stands that people really care about these things.
So if you reward the input and the output,
the work that's being done, the way people show up,
it really creates a culture where people are motivated,
inspired every single day.
And we think that this idea of rewarding the right outcomes,
how do you actually operationalize it?
Well, you have to dig a little bit deeper and say, well,
what is it that really makes people show up every day
to be the best that they can be?
And it's three core pillars.
There's probably many pillars, but we
think that there are three core pillars around this.
One is, are people learning the right skills
to be effective today, but also in the future?
Do they have clarity around the goals
that they need to succeed today and also in the future?
Because it's very hard to achieve anything great
or be motivated if you don't know what you're trying to chase.
We've seen this all the time.
And then finally, are you engaged in the work you're doing?
Are you passionate about this, both in the work you're doing,
but also in the team you're working with in the mission
that you're fighting for every single day?
And the reason why these three pillars are so core,
because at the intersection of those three pillars,
you start seeing something really interesting.
When you have an employee that shows up every day
and they're learning a lot of skills that they need today
and also for tomorrow and they're performing really well,
you're, of course, optimizing the outcomes
that you have the goals that you've set.
We have these goals per quarter and these goals
for this year and so on.
If you have an employee who's learning a lot
and constantly like, you know, upscaling themselves
and reskilling themselves, and they have clarity
on their goals, you're creating great outcomes.
And if you have an employee who's learning a lot
and deeply engaged in what they're doing,
you have one of those kind of dream team members
that all of you point to, I've seen this so many times
where you go, this person is like so engaged,
they're showing up with this energy, excitement, passion
and so on, and everybody wants to work with them, right?
We've all seen those team members.
And it's often times because they're deeply engaged,
they're super passionate, but they're also like,
constantly have this growth mindset of,
I want to be the best that I can be,
they're great team members, and it just creates this team
work that everybody wants to be a part of.
And then finally, when you have somebody
who's like performing really well,
and they're deeply engaged in it with me
and they're crushing their goals, they're deeply engaged,
they're showing up every day with that energy
and excitement and conviction, those are the people
that we as leaders point to and go,
we should promote that person or give them more responsibility,
they're just awesome, right?
They're a net benefit for everyone.
And so these three kind of core pillars
of a high performance culture are absolutely essential.
Because if you miss one of them,
the opposite is also true, if you have an employee
who's performing really well and learning a lot
but they're not engaged at all,
the moment something better comes along,
a better job, they're gonna leave, right?
And if you have an employee who's learning
and deeply engaged but they're not performing,
you probably have an issue, right?
Then you have to put them on a plan
or you have to exit them out of the business,
that's not good either.
And if you have somebody who's performing really well
and they're deeply engaged but they're not actually
learning anything new, they might be valuable today
but either gonna be valuable in the future.
Think about how rapidly the world is changing with AI
and everything else, you need to constantly think about
how can I sharpen my skills,
be the best that I can be every single day.
And so on their own, these kind of things
are super important, engagement, the clarity around goals
and skills and so on, and continuous upskilling
and learning, but combine those different pillars,
if you institute a program in your company
that focuses on how can we make sure
that every single employee is learning the right skills,
deeply engaged in the work that they're doing
and also have clarity around their goals,
and guarantee you're gonna see big movement
in terms of your performance.
So it starts in some ways by being honest about
where you are, if you look at a spectrum, a graph,
whatever you want to, like where is your HR?
And I don't know, many of you are maybe not in HR, right?
But you can certainly influence this, go talk
to your counterparts and say, what can we do
to create an environment where people can be
the best that they can be?
Are we really stuck in the past where our HR
is just focused on compliance, like us having the basics
that we need to be successful, or are we moving more into
by thinking about HR as something transformative
that's really focused on the humans, the people,
like a human first kind of organization
that wants everybody to be the best that they can be,
giving everyone the skills and knowledge and motivation
that they need to be successful every day,
or are we somewhere in between?
But once you have that clarity and honesty about it,
then you can actually start making movements towards
a much better future.
I did a little poll on LinkedIn.
I have a decent enough amount of following,
so I use LinkedIn a lot to ask questions,
get better and learn a lot of information
about what's happening in the world,
give me new perspectives and so on.
And I asked, how often do you want feedback
from your manager and the frequency basically,
I don't know if you can all see it in the back,
but basically I asked, do you want feedback every week,
month, quarter or year?
And of course, when you think about the new generation
that's coming into the workforce,
they said mostly every week, or mostly every month.
And the reason comes back to that first thing I share
where people feel stuck in their jobs,
they're not learning anything new,
they don't have a coach on their side,
or a mentor that's pushing them the right direction.
And if we want people to be motivated,
we have to give people much more real-time feedback.
Maybe not every day, maybe not every week,
but certainly much more frequently than every year.
Like those dreaded annual reviews where you sit down,
it's kind of a pain in the ass for the manager,
it's a pain for the employees,
it's like a little awkward and so on.
But if you actually have continuous performance feedback
and that kind of culture where you can have
an honest conversation, it becomes much more,
we're in this together.
I'm here to help you, I'm here to unblock whatever
is keeping you back or motivate you around this
to give you clarity around your goals.
That's what we as leaders should be spending all our time on
because that's how we get the best out of our people too.
And so I'm just gonna wrap up by saying,
I think we should make it packed here and say,
this is about putting people in humans first.
This is how we create a better future for all of us.
It starts with us, we have to look ourselves in the mirror
and make it packed with ourselves
that we wanna take this journey on.
It's really about investing in people
and their humans that we have around us,
not about managing them or thinking of them as resources,
such a cold, hard term that I hate, I absolutely detest.
It's about thinking of people as humans
with infinite potential to be the best that they can be
if we just invest in them in the right way
and give them the right kind of like motivation.
It's really about thinking about how do we give them a path
that's inspirational and motivational for them.
If you have a CSM on your team and they say,
"I wanna be a VP of Customer Success one day,"
what is the path?
Here's who you should go talk to,
here's the skill you should be learning,
here are the courses you should be taking,
here's the goal you should be setting yourself and so on.
If you put everyone on a path that's motivational
and inspirational for themselves,
they will usually go above and beyond
'cause they now have a target to go for,
but so few actually do.
They kinda just do the same thing
because they don't know what the end goal is.
And so this idea of like investing in people,
giving them knowledge and skills,
the motivation is more important than ever.
And AI, just to wrap it up,
of course it's gonna play a key part of this.
I always think of it this way.
AI will basically disrupt everything,
everything to do with hard skills and data
and synthesizing information.
AI will not disrupt everything to do
with soft skills and the humans.
It'll help, it can maybe help guide you
and put you in the right direction
and give you the right information at the right time
and so on, but it won't replace everything to do
with soft skills.
So when you think about where to invest,
you as a leader or also in your team,
those human moments motivating people
is where it's going to be at.
So that just kinda hopefully gives you some guidelines
and inspiration about how you can think
a little bit differently about people.
I'm gonna bring Rasmus up here to kinda take us home,
come up here, Rasmus.
All right, if you're only gonna take the stairs,
you have such long legs as well.
- No, no, that's my advantage.
- I know, I know.
(laughing)
- So in essence to try and bring it home,
I think Robin tried to run through
how you should be thinking about the world going forward.
I know it's a lot because it requires us
to rethink how we manage teams.
But this is actually the best audience we can have for this
because you managed to change
how we thought about customers.
They were just somebody who paid us
and thank you and goodbye.
So in essence, this is Robin and me
and rather than me being a resource and him being success,
if we could make a small pact with all of you
and when you go home, you look at your teams and go,
"You know we want to have success for our customers,
but we also want to have success for you as our team."
Then these 45 minutes would have been better off
for all of us.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- All right, all right, thank you.
I definitely need to take the stairs.
I cannot make that leap.
So we definitely have a couple minutes here for Q&A
and tons of questions have flooded in.
So we're gonna start at the top here.
What are some creative, non-monetary ways
and you've seen work well for recognizing
employee contributions that go beyond
the typical shout out or reward point system?
- I can give you one.
The question I asked of you,
did you take five minutes to just sit down
and give anyone in your team, Kudos?
We actually asked everyone in the business
to do that for 10 minutes every week.
When the weekend, that's how you check in.
Before you leave, that's what you do.
First and foremost, I'm a CEO of 200 People Company
and you know what?
My team actually gives in between 600 on a bad week
and 1500 on a great week, Kudos to each other.
Again, I told you it was free,
but that's how we do it.
And it creates this cross-functional.
You can see people.
You can visually see people going,
"Oh, I got this from Eric here over."
I'm so happy about that.
So you can surely use that
and it's more effective than you think.
Think about this frequent reiteration
that you're good enough.
You are doing a great job,
all of those types of things.
And I'll also give a different perspective,
which is somebody in Robin's team.
She's an absolute rock star.
She's quiet.
Anyone heard about this thing before?
Do you think she would get promoted, those kind of things?
The one thing that happened in this case is
she is leading the company by a margin of like 10% in Kudos.
So as Robin looks through his team and goes,
"Hey, we have a VPA of product marketing open.
Who should have that?"
Obviously, Anya.
There's no doubt about it.
We have invested in her whole,
everyone around her tells us she is great.
And as you promote somebody like that,
the whole team goes, "That is so right."
And those things uncover these hidden talents as well,
which I think is not the core thing you actually ask people to do,
but it's a side effect and a very, very good side effect.
Actually, you could turn around and say
that should be the number one positive outcome,
but that's how we think about it.
Amazing. Thank you.
So the next question here is,
"Developing people is key,
but do you have any ideas on how to handle the new generation
that think they know everything within a week or two?"
What? What?
And expect to be CEO.
OK.
Do you want to talk to someone about my son?
No, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can do that.
I'll answer this question, though.
Go ahead.
I'll top it over.
It's probably the number one question I've gotten, though.
So Frederick, thank you for asking this question.
The number one question I usually get as a leader,
and I've been a leader for a long time,
is how do I get to the next level?
And this is kind of this question
hidden in a little different way.
And I usually, I'm very honestly,
there's three things you need to do.
Number one is you have to have clarity around your goals.
You need to consistently crush your goals,
not just a quarter or two,
but like consistently quarter after quarter after quarter.
That's how you show you have mastery into something.
What does that require?
Require a favor.
You have clarity around your goals.
You can't crush anything if you don't know
what you're trying to crush in the first place.
So that's number one.
Number two is that you have to start acting
as if you're at the next level.
So let's say you're a junior employee,
and you want to get to the next,
to be a manager at the next level.
Well, what are the people at the next level
doing that you're not doing?
Start modeling those behaviors.
The best ones, not the worst ones,
but try to learn from those people.
Maybe get a mentor or something.
Try to see what they're doing that you can learn from.
The best people that I have, whatever level,
whether they're director and they want to get to VP,
VP want to get to a C level,
they always start acting as if at the next level
without even being at the next level,
because it shows a maturity to get there.
So I say that's number two,
but of course requires you to have some people around you
that you can model yourself after.
And then number three is you have to create
a chorus of support around you.
I've never been in an organization,
and I mentioned some of the ones I was at,
where it's just me as a dictator
deciding who's going to get promoted just on my own.
It's usually sitting with a team of people,
a group of people deciding,
let's talk about this person.
Oh, Joe, what do you think about Joe?
And I can always tell which way the conversation is going,
like, oh yeah, Joe is nice,
but I'm not really sure what Joe has been doing
for the last six months or so,
but yeah, he's a good guy,
I'm like, I just not,
he's not going to get promoted,
I can tell, he's just not spread out enough,
influential enough, collaborative enough,
integrated enough into the company.
He's probably doing a good job,
maybe on some of the other things,
but not in that metric.
And then somebody like Enya comes up, right?
Like, let's talk about Enya.
Oh, yeah, she's amazing, I love working with her.
Can we get her on this project?
Oh, she's like, she's always showing up
with that energy and excitement and conviction.
And I can always tell,
this is going well in the conversation.
She's integrated into the company,
she's a net positive for everyone around her,
she's showing up with that energy that makes everyone,
she's raising everybody's spirits up,
they're level up, their game is getting better
because of her.
And so it's not one of these things,
'cause you can't just have people who are just nice
and then they get promoted,
it has to be all those three things.
And so if you can say that to a junior employer
who comes in and says,
I want to get promoted to CEO,
then six months,
it becomes a little bit of a dose of reality
that it's actually pretty hard,
it should be hard to get to the next level.
And they start realizing that there are actually
many hurdles that you have to get across.
But what's your story?
- Now my story, I saw we had 21,
so I think we need to answer some sort of timeframes.
I have that at home.
My 19 year old was stopped by Danish radio in the train
and was asked, what do you want to do when you grow up?
And he answered,
want to be a CEO of,
not just CEO,
he answered, I want to be the CEO of Microsoft.
(laughing)
- He's ambitious.
- He's ambitious, so that's okay.
But I am very sure,
and this is actually a very good litmus chest.
He's also a boy and he's 19,
so energy is something he has sometimes.
And so if you actually start to tell them what CEO means,
we had a game at one of our leadership conferences
where one was supposed to be the CEO
and I managed to sit next to him and be the board.
And I gave him all kinds of weird things,
so at the end,
he had sold half the stake in the company,
he had given one side of the company,
so many warrants that all the part of the company
was so upset because I knew I could continue to change
and his comment was at the beginning,
oh, CEO is easy because I always say,
I only need to do three things,
hire the right people,
make sure we never run out of money and set the strategy.
And he went, that's the easiest thing.
When he was done, he went like, I don't want you to.
(laughing)
And sometimes it's actually exposing people
to what it takes and what the responsibilities are
to get there, sorry.
- Okay, excellent.
So this next question that came in is about mentorship.
What is the best way to mentor junior colleagues
on their career roadmap that may not have the best idea
or may not be sure what they want from their career?
- I'm a big fan of signing everyone a mentor
or coach, everyone,
and have like not maybe weekly,
but at least monthly conversations with them,
see if their life is going in the right direction,
are they learning the right skills,
are they feeling motivated?
And enough to do you can course correct,
but it requires actually a lot of deep work
by the managers and the leaders to dig into what that is,
'cause you can't just take everyone for granted,
you can't just treat everyone the same way,
but it's the best way to do it,
assign everyone a mentor,
somebody that maybe they can look up to and learn from,
maybe not somebody in their direct hierarchy,
but somebody that they can learn from.
Maybe that's inside the company,
sometimes it's outside the company.
- Very often outside.
- Very often outside.
- Also, get them out.
- Yeah.
- Too many people think that the only way
they can learn is to sit at that desk
and they do something,
and then they talk to the person next to them,
that's not learning.
It's getting out there, it's also feeling,
hey, you've been here, maybe you've talked to somebody
and you go, oh, I thought my,
this was what I was doing with this and this
was not that really a world class,
and then you figure out, I've talked to 10 people,
they're all worse than me,
maybe we are actually world class.
And that realization is also a piece of how you coach
that into the organization,
and allow them to experience what
that future can actually be.
Remember, we are still asking that you hold yourself
accountable for success and the company.
How many think that it's actually the company's
obligation to promote you?
If you tell people what it takes to get there,
most people say no.
If you ask all the ones who want to be a professional athlete
and they get to 16, 17 years and it's no parties,
no going out, physical training,
snow school, all of that,
most of them say no.
So sometimes the CEO, you wanna have the title,
but you don't wanna put in the work,
and if you make people responsible,
they're responsible, and you tell them
that they are responsible.
I'm not responsible for you,
before my son becoming a CEO of Microsoft,
I will never be, and the level of work he needs to put in,
it will never happen, I'll say this out loud,
if it happens, you may all call me and say, you're wrong,
and then I'll be happy for that.
- So you're telling me there's a chance?
- Yeah, that dumb and dumber, but that's fine.
But let's go.
- Okay, I think we have time for one more question here
from Julian, which is probably top of mind
for a lot of businesses these days and leaders.
What do you do in scenarios,
or how do you think about scenarios
when you're not able to reward your high performers
with the financial compensation they might deserve
without impacting their motivation?
- Is that on the CEO?
- You take that one, yeah.
You can't.
If people believe that they deserve a higher pay
and all those kind of things,
you will impact that motivation, for sure.
The only thing I will say is,
if you still think of the team as one leader
and then people underneath,
you're missing the actual glue of the team.
Because a lot of people would rather be on a great team
with a slightly less pay,
if everyone is actually supporting them,
and if you feel valued,
and if you feel like you're really performing in this team,
you actually wanna stay.
Because, and if they say,
hey, I would actually love to go on further
and it's your high performer and all those kinds of things.
The one thing you can do if that's the scenario you have,
you can make a pact with them and say,
I'm your leader, I've helped you.
You're net better off as you leave.
Let's make a pact that in six months, you can leave.
But you give me enough time to hire the next one.
I know that happens at sea level, but there's no,
I mean, you can easily make those agreements with people.
I've had one of the most fantastic customer success managers.
She, I told her from the beginning,
you should manage that much larger team.
It was a slightly smaller company,
so her team, where we were at, were 15.
And she was such a talent.
She now manages the team at 150, she's doing enormously well.
But we made the pact that said,
you are destined for something bigger.
I gave her access to a lot of the people I know around,
and I could hear how she was doing.
The one thing she wasn't good at was telling bad news.
So we, I know that for the rest of her life,
she will show up with a black slide.
Because we deliberately, in all of her presentation,
put one with black background,
and she had to put all the things that went wrong.
(laughs)
She was used to everything going well,
and as she embraced that, I can do that.
She became world-class.
I now speak to the Venture Fund
that invested in that company.
And when I go, that's Shannon.
Oh, she's good.
And I hear that from one of the larger European Venture Fund,
without her being in the room.
You know what?
It's almost like if my son made it to see of myself.
(laughs)
Because it feels for me like,
it's almost something I gave, passed on,
but she also gave me the commitment it was in COVID,
all of those types of things.
So she was actually in Germany,
I was in the US, but at the time,
we gave each other that commitment.
And if you're ever, now you can try and see
if there's a Shannon in my context and stuff.
If she posts something, or I do something,
we will instantly give each other coolers.
It's a lifelong relationship.
I hope she makes it to CEO.
I hope she gives me, I know we talk.
I hope she gives me that call and says,
raspous, what is it like to be CEO?
What should I look out for?
Are there two or three black slides?
And I will say, yes.
(laughs)
I've seen them.
Thank you anonymous as well.
Appreciate it.
Amazing.
Well, what an inspiring presentation, raspous.
Robin, thank you so much.
Round of applause, yes.
(audience applauds)
Seriously, thank you guys.
And thank you all for joining us here in Amsterdam,
Pulse 2024, and we'll see you in Dublin next year.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
