five birds, one crumb with a scorecard

just put your whole organization inside this simple machine and BLAMMO

Clear thinking upfront about what a role on your team is for can solve four or five challenges that new managers and founders often grapple with. These leaders can waste loads of time and confuse their people with bespoke approaches to 

1. the weekly 1:1 check-in with a manager

2. the (semi)annual performance review

3. promotion decisions

4. the performance improvement plan (PIP) 

5. and regular, relatively lower-stakes feedback

Instead of cooking up five processes – a slow and painful approach, even when you have great people – you can get five birds with one crumb. To do this, we recommend an exercise we call “CEO of x” or, more simply, “creating a scorecard.” Each role on a team is "CEO" of something: "CEO of x". X is the function or outcome this person owns. Here’s the exercise:

1. State what "x" is as concisely as you can – try to doit in <5 words, rather than a big gnarly sentence.

Example:

• Terrance is CEO of Business Development

Non-example:

• Terrance is CEO of developing relationships with potential clients in current and prospective business lines for the company and he handles some of the ops stuff, too, since Julie left.

2. Imagine a year from now (or maybe 6 months), you decide to fire this person and/or dissolve the role entirely, not even rehiring to fill it. Holding aside cases of lawbreaking or egregious abuse, what went wrong? What did this person do or fail to do that led to you letting them go? Identify the 3-4 specific and most important things.

• Example:

• Pipeline of future clients is thin or non-existent. We’re in a sort of “all eggs in one basket” situation.

• Promising leads that CEO and others are sourcing rarely make it all the way through to a closed sale

• Systems are leaky, inefficient, or remain unbuilt - it’s a handmade, confusing process for T and anyone who is chipping in to help

3. Take the 3-4 items from the previous step. Flip them to the positive versions of themselves - the opposites of the failures, which make this role and person a big and vital success for the team. Attach a measure (even if binary yes/no or more qualitative survey response). These flipped failures, once they have metrics, are the measures of success for this role.

Those measures of success are the ingredients you use in all five of the recipes. They are the crumb that gets you all five birds. Use them as the agenda items or prompts for discussion in weekly 1:1s, performance reviews, feedback delivery, performance improvement plans, and promotion decisions.

-ben and eric