As someone who’s built BizOps teams more than once, her talk reaffirmed what I’ve long believed: BizOps isn’t just a support function—it’s a strategic lever that helps a company scale with clarity instead of chaos.

1. From Knowledge to Adaptability

Rachel started by challenging something most of us take for granted—deep expertise as a moat. Her take: functional expertise has a short shelf life in today’s world. What matters more is your team’s ability to learn fast and adapt faster.

We’re not just in a knowledge economy anymore—we’re operating in an adaptive economy. For BizOps, that means hiring for range, not just depth. Think systems thinkers who can jump across finance, GTM, and product — and connect dots in high-ambiguity situations. It reminded me of a hiring lesson I learned early: passion + learning agility > textbook expertise.

2. BizOps Should Evolve with the Company

Rachel offered a great stage-wise breakdown:

• Early stage? BizOps is glue. Filling gaps, stitching together insights, and helping teams make sense of the chaos.

• Mid-stage? BizOps starts laying tracks—building processes and bringing repeatability to how things run.

• Late stage? It becomes the orchestrator—aligning teams, informing strategic bets, and helping the company scale smart.

The takeaway? Don’t copy-paste a BizOps structure from another company. Build for the stage you’re in.

3. Structure Reflects the Pain You’re Solving

Where BizOps reports in your org says a lot about what you expect from them. Under the CEO? You’re solving for change. Under the CFO? Efficiency. Under the CRO? GTM acceleration.

One other thing that struck a chord—Rachel’s reminder that BizOps is not project management. That was a déjà vu moment for me. I’ve had to explain the same before: project management is about executing a known solution, while BizOps is about uncovering the problem and defining the path forward. It’s a subtle but critical distinction.

4. The BizOps Superpowers

Rachel laid out four competencies I loved:

• Clarify what really matters

• Align cross-functional priorities

• Anticipate issues before they escalate

• Optimize systems without slowing things down

Yes, they may sound familiar—these are the same muscles we expect from high-performing teams. But here’s the difference: BizOps operationalizes them across the organization. That’s what sets it apart. BizOps doesn’t just support execution—it designs how the company executes at scale.

Final Thought

Rachel’s talk was a reminder that BizOps isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about creating the systems, habits, and conversations that help you ask better questions—and scale smarter.

If you’re navigating your next stage of growth, a well-structured BizOps team might just be your best investment.

In today's fast-paced business environment, leadership or manager changes are becoming more and more common. As someone who has been through it multiple times myself, I understand how challenging it can be. However, it's essential to manage this phase effectively to ensure a smooth transition.

The success of this change depends on how you handle it. While it can be an opportunity to learn something new from a different person, it can also result in fitment issues. Moreover, your career progression might be affected because your new leader will evaluate you based on their experiences, and your historical performance may not matter so much.

I remember once having a manager whose management style was different from mine. To maintain my leadership style, I had to make a constant effort not to learn from them and stick to my way of doing things.

Here are some tips to help you make this transition easier for yourself and your new manager:

Build Trust & Credibility: Building trust and credibility is crucial for establishing a strong relationship. Focus on developing it during your onboarding journey, and it will go a long way.

Be Honest: Be honest about the team and the organization. Recognize your personal bias and avoid them while onboarding your new leader.

Align on Success & Failure: A new leader may have different expectations in terms of success metrics. Align with them to understand what success means to your new leader.

Ensure Skip-level Relationships: Onboarding is an excellent time to ease people into skip-level relationships. Create clear communication channels between your team members and the new leader. Your team's life is going to change, so involve them in the process.

Check How Reporting Will Change: Understand how reporting will change with this change in leadership. Clear any doubts around new organizational structures and hierarchies. This will make things easier for you from a reporting perspective.

These are some of the things that you can do to manage your leadership change well. However, everyone has a different style, and one size doesn't fit all. Collaborate with the incoming leader and stay unbiased, and you'll do just fine!

What are some of the things that you have done to manage a leadership change? Share with me in the comments below.

We are already one month into 2023, and I am sure as leaders most of us have already started to plan for what lies ahead. While some of us have everything chalked out already, others are busy planning for it. Don’t worry, we will all come around! 

It’s ok if you haven’t written your CEO’s memo or haven’t done those strategic year end conversations with your team. It’s not too late yet! In fact, it’s the right time to do all that and also create your strategic routine for the year. 

A strategic routine helps you define your course of action over a period of time. For instance, I like to make a yearly routine and then break it down to quarterly, monthly and also sometimes weekly. It helps me plan my workflow better because I know exactly what I want to do and how I want to achieve it. 

Your strategic routine isn’t just about professional goal setting but also about your personal goals. So don’t think of this routine as only something that caters to your workplace, rather think of it as a holistic routine that takes into account your personal life also. 

For instance, your professional goal could be to make your company a better workplace which can be judged by a lesser attrition rate but your personal goal could be to get healthier which could result in better management of weight and resting heart rate. 

As a father, my personal goal this year is to spend more time with my 5-year-old. That means I have already decided my weekly activities, where I have time allotted on activities like playing soccer and tennis together. All of this will help me to proactively plan my time. 

The idea of having a strategic routine isn’t to get chained by it, but to create a structure which can help you to scale yourself up. It will help you prioritize better and save you from spending time regularly on thinking what to do next. It is important to focus on the outcomes and remember that strategic routines are a way to reach there. Therefore you should change your routine when the need arises to do so.

All in all, strategic routines help you be more productive at work and in life. Do you follow such routines? Do let me know!

I wish that you would not feeling the ripple effects (or direct in many cases) of the current market conditions, but that would be wishful thinking! There are layoffs all around. This winter season has also come with a funding winter for the startup world and the consumers globally are trying to hold their money. 

As leaders, we often take these situations rightly as challenges, but we forget that these are also out of our hands and there is only so much you can do to keep your team motivated or drive those revenue numbers. 

However, you can definitely keep your head down and focus on the things that are in your hands. While at this point it might be extremely tough to crack those enterprise deals or to grow in a new market, but it may be possible is to fix what is broken internally. For example, this might be the right time to take up those long pending decisions or to think of ways to invest in your platform, operations, processes or other parts of the business which might not have been a priority for you earlier. 

History tells us that in this scenario few businesses will definitely perish and many will survive. But in the long run only those who come out stronger and well prepared for the better days, will really grow. And by stronger I don’t mean externally but also internally. 

How to Fix Things Internally?

Easier said than done, fixing things when the world around you is crashing can be quite challenging. But there are always some steps that can help you in managing these situations. 

• Write a Leadership Memo

A leadership memo sets a lot of things straight. In one of my previous newsletters, I have spoken about the importance of the same. Once you put your thoughts on where the company has to go in writing in a memo, things become clearer. More often than not, it will provide renewed energy to your team.

• Realign the North Star

Evaluate whether your North Star metric still makes sense. There is a high chance you will have to reset it and realign your teams. Make them understand why this is urgent and important for the organization’s survival and growth.

• Over communication is the key

In times of ambiguity and chaos, over communication always helps. So speak with your team often to reinforce your current goals and visions. Intentionally, find opportunities to communicate with your team. Be honest and vulnerable (if needed). You will see the magic.

When everything around seems crashing, the role of the senior leadership becomes very important to lead the ship forward. As leaders, we can help to keep the team’s anxiety at bay and make the company stronger even in a downtime.

Do tell me, what are you doing internally to mitigate the risks of the current market situation?

As we move towards 2023, it’s time that we start gearing up for it.

As leaders, year closure can be a daunting task. There are projects that need to be completed, targets that have to be met, decisions that have to be taken and teams to be aligned for the upcoming year. So in the next few newsletters, I will try to share some of my thoughts and experiences on how to strategize for the coming year and scale it up!

First on my list is a leadership memo. Whether it is a short document or a detailed email, a leadership memo goes a long way. It helps align teams and team members while ensuring that the doc binds people together. It makes them aware of the past while informing them about what’s to come next. 

A leadership memo usually has the following components:

• It sets a vision for the future

• It takes in learnings from the past

• It establishes the company goals and talks about the levers that the company can pull to achieve these goals

• It establishes metrics that the company is chasing

• It could also set guardrails for what not to do

Benefits of Writing a Leadership Memo

Contrary to popular belief, a leadership memo is meant for companies of all scales and sizes. Year end is a time when most fast growing companies pull different levers to close the year on a higher note. At the same time, large companies take it as an opportunity to optimize products and services from a long term growth perspective. A leadership memo can definitely come in handy at both these stages. 

Here are some benefits of writing a memo:

• Drive Team Alignment: A written word from leadership helps in alignment toward company goals. When people know the future course of action for the organization, they are able to better align themself to the company’s vision. 

• Create Accountability: A written memo creates two way accountability for the author, i.e. the leadership, as well as the recipient which is the company at large. In fact, this is more relevant in a fast growing companies where the leadership often needs to pivot to scale or even stay relevant

• Provides Check Points:  The leadership memo acts as a living and breathing alignment document for the company. Not only does it serve as the bedrock for teams to go back to align and realign themselves but it also helps to put relevant checkpoints and milestones throughout the year for the company (and employees) to evaluate the progress.

In fact, I believe that every leader should write a leadership memo. It’s not just for the CEOs or other CXOs. If you manage a team or have people working in close collaboration with you, then writing a memo will help in aligning them with your vision and overall vision of the company. 

As leaders we are often faced with situations that are important and/or urgent. But many times, it is difficult to differentiate between what is urgent and what is important. We often confuse the two and thus find it tough to prioritize and act efficiently. 

Because urgent tasks come with a deadline, they often take an unconscious and default precedence over what is important. As you scale your team and organization, it is important to know this difference and then further management - upwards and downwards.

Important tasks are critical to the success of the organization. They are typically more strategic and long-term. Whereas, urgent tasks have to be done in a time sensitive manner and are critical for short-term successes or even needed for business continuity.  

Managing the Important vs the Urgent

It’s important to know what’s important vs what’s urgent. Most of the time, leaders in an organization should be able to differentiate between the two and lead the team in the right direction. 

But what if you are stuck with a leader who isn’t skilled enough to know the difference between the two and considers every task to be urgent? Worse, if they lack the ability to prioritize, they also end up making important tasks into urgent ones. 

In such situations, act as a wall between the leader and your team. Help your team by identifying these tasks yourself. You have to manage upwards in this case.

Asking the following questions have helped me in such situations and can also help you make the right decisions:

• Why is the task important? Knowing the reason behind what you have to do sets a lot of things straight. Once you know the impact of your actions, you will prioritize them accordingly.

• Is this a real deadline? Always ask if the deadline being communicated is the real, absolutely necessary deadline. Easier said than done though. Once you start questioning it, you will realize that it’s not always urgent. This will give a breather to you and your team.

• What should be dropped to make space? Remember that there are on-going tasks which might be important as well as urgent. Before picking up something new, get a buy-in from your leaders that existing projects might get delayed or de-prioritized. 

Caution: Urgency Ahead!

The final step is to get your team’s buy-in when you use the word urgent, as this is one of the most over-exploited tools that leaders use more often than they should.

As a leader, be careful when you ask your team to stretch for a project. Do it when you really need to. Explain the reasons for why you are asking your team to do the project and give them confidence that you will take care of the cross functional alignment. Be part of the process!

In order for the organization to scale up, drive a culture that’s not dependent on urgent tasks, but functions in a more planned manner. Otherwise, you will always find yourself running on a treadmill. You and your team may end up completing a lot of tasks, but may not really move ahead! 

Do you have a culture of urgency at your company? What do you do to differentiate between urgent vs important tasks?

Workplaces are going virtual, teams are spread across geographies and meetings are turning into Slack huddles or Hangouts — welcome to the era of over-communication!

Over-communication might sound unproductive or counter intuitive to some but with increased need of distributed collaboration, owing to the remote or hybrid work setups, over-communication is becoming table stakes!

According to Lee Ellis, leadership consultant, author, presenter, retired colonel USAF, “Over-communicating is the glue that holds a high-performing team together and keeps them focused in the same direction. And, it circles back to clarity. Without good, consistent communication, you don’t have clarity.”

Why Over-Communicate?

Over-communication is an important tool, particularly for fast-growing companies. Many times leaders rely on specific events, be it good or bad for communication. However, as leaders we need to intentionally find more opportunities to communicate with the teams. This is particularly relevant in hybrid and remote teams where there is increased reliance on constant communication for goal alignment. 

It’s also important to recognize the fact that over-communication doesn’t come naturally to all. While extroverts may find it doable, introverts can find it tiring. This is why it is important to know when to over-communicate, especially in times of change and crisis.  Also be vulnerable, if needed. 

If you are leading large teams, scaling up your teams or have significant cross functional responsibilities, you will find that communication (and over communication) is a part of your job responsibilities!  As someone who has been an entrepreneur from very early in his career,  I found it necessary to communicate repeatedly about important things so that more and more clarity could be driven across the organization. 

What Over-Communication is Not?

Communicating effectively is not easy! I continue to get it wrong many times even now, after being  in leadership positions for more than a decade.

Here are few things I have learnt about what it is not -

• Over-communication doesn’t mean using more words to communicate the same thing or taking more time. It means to increase the frequency of effective communication. It’s definitely not over-dumping of information or micromanagement. 

• It’s also not wasting your time by bombarding your team’s inbox with emails or asking them to tag you on each email. Rather, it’s about increased understanding and alignment — prioritizing and delivering the right information in the right manner at the right time. 

• It is important to point out that building a culture of “effective over-communication” requires you to build trust between the employees and the leadership as trust is important for communication to flow both ways. 

Over-Communication, FTW

Today there is no dearth of tools that can help you communicate, even in a remote setup. In fact, most organizations have adapted themselves where it would be easy to over communicate.

 It can be tiring at times and it’s definitely a muscle that needs to be built overtime but it has enough merit for everyone, whether you are a distributed team, hybrid workplace, remote or work from office.

One of the core responsibilities of every leader is to align their colleagues for critical initiatives. This could sometimes result in never-ending debates during the decision making process.  Alignment is all about effective execution by ensuring engagement and involvement from others. Unlike consensus which essentially means to choose the option that no one objects to, alignment generates real commitment from the stakeholders by discussing every relevant aspect. 

I prefer to go into alignment meetings, after having done the pre-work to create a proposal (or a decision). In this case, the decision you make becomes the starting point for the alignment. You first decide what is to be done and then communicate the what, why and how of the decision to the relevant stakeholders to generate alignment. 

True alignment stems from the ability to discuss every aspect of the decision and pursue the agreed upon direction collectively. Remember that the outcome may not always be that everyone agrees to your decision. Sometimes when there is disagreement, you may need to drive teams to “disagree and commit” if you strongly believe that your decision (or the modified decision, after the debate) is the right way to go. 

How do you drive alignment?

Here are some guiding principles that can help you drive alignment:

• Get all the stakeholders in one place and discuss the what, when and why of the decision.

• Get feedback and listen to what others have to say about the decision. Always build on other people’s thoughts and ideas. Don’t reject other’s ideas until and unless you have evaluated them fairly. 

• Be humble enough and intellectually honest to change your decision if you get relevant inputs.

• Ask transparently for people to commit to the decision.

• If you find a lack of alignment, even after a healthy debate has taken place, propose a “disagree and commit” if you continue to believe in the proposal under discussion.

• Define clear ownership for the execution process. Everyone should know what is expected out of them. 

• Keep periodic check-ins to assess progress and ensure continued alignment. 

Like almost all strategic conversations, the alignment conversation also has to be planned and thought through. Try not to get lost in the “endless” debates and discussions, hold your ground, modify your proposal if you hear relevant inputs and drive genuine commitment to the decision. 

Driving alignment can be a tough and a taxing process, but it pays to have everyone’s steadfast commitment to a cause. Everyone might not agree with you but when they are aligned, it means that there is enough trust and maturity to work towards the common goal and outcome.

Do you think alignment is more important than consensus? How do you drive alignment in your team?

Companies across the world have been planning team offsites. One of the top reasons to have plan leadership offsites is to drive alignment and instill a feeling of team spirit. 

But can a simple gathering of individuals away from their day-to-day work actually prove to be effective for team building? Yes, if planned right. No, if not managed well as there can be unintended results like bringing out competition and hostility instead of enhancing team spirit. 

Despite the risks, a well planned offsite is worth the effort. Especially in today’s times when many teams are operating remotely and the leadership team may have turned over in the last few years. At my current company, we recently conducted a successful offsite for our leadership team, and I am glad to share that the offsite has helped us in more ways than one — better alignment being the most important one. 

What happens at the offsite, doesn’t stay at the offsite

It trickles down to the entire organization and the outcomes–positive or negative — go beyond those couple of days.  

Offsites have the power to bring different teams together as one and boost collaboration. The leadership offsite at my current organization was no different. We wanted to achieve these three goals - 

• Align on where the business has to head

• Build better relationships among colleagues 

• Boost the excitement to work with each other

While many would argue that you can do this remotely as well, I strongly believe that despite having communication tools like Slack, Zoom, Hangout, etc. nothing beats that sense of 'oneness' unless you are together at the same place. 

So what’s the best way to plan for an offsite?

Different strategies work for different teams depending on what is the outcome that you wish to drive. Some themes that I have seen  work well, especially when your participants span multiple cultures are - 

• Forgetting Hierarchy: we are at a level-playing field and look at each other as equals.

• Don’t Hold Back: we respectfully challenge each other during discussions. 

• Create Space for Each Other:  we listen to each other and provide equal opportunity to share our thoughts.

At our recent offsite, we had similar themes as well. We did some serious work but had fun at the same time. Team building and having fun are important parts of any offsite. When you look past each other as more than colleagues, you realize that working with each other can be so much fun. 

Our fun included team dinners and building sand castles at the beach! While many might question the efficacy of these activities, they really bring teams together by breaking conscious and unconscious barriers. 

At my previous job, as the head of an ed tech company in India, I would ensure that we did a big offsite at least once a year. There we not only discussed the strategy for the next year, but also spent a lot of time bonding with each other through dinners and team building activities. Many years later, me and many of my ex-colleagues still count those offsites as the most cherished memories of that period. 

Have Fun While You Scale Up

Undoubtedly, teams scale faster when they are having fun and are aligned. You can hire some of the smartest people to work in a company, but if they are not aligned as a team, you won't make much progress. Every time I say this, I can't help but remember the visual of a team rowing a boat; everyone’s got to row in the same direction to actually move forward. 

This analogy is true for every business. Unless all of you move towards the same goal post, you won’t be able to make it.

Offsites can play an important role in helping achieve just that.

Work and workplaces are becoming increasingly complex. This means that employees have to now navigate through various complexities, wear many hats and manage multiple work identities. They are also experimenting with side gigs outside for various reasons such as building more skills, earning a side income or even following a hobby.

Enough has been said and done about a person juggling their multiple identities at work and in their personal life (let’s say as a leader and as a parent). But what about the engineers who are also doubling up as technical experts or people in the gig economy who are UX/UI designers by the day, developers during the evening and brand strategists at night. Or a lead marketeer who also runs an informal angel group at work. 

Today, it has become critical to be able to manage one’s multiple identities. But how does that impact one’s performance?

The Impact of Bringing Multiple Identities at Work

The impact of this would depend on how harmoniously those identities align with each other. If you can construct your identities in a way that they complement each other, then that will have positive consequences. 

The tricky part is to identify if your identities are harmonious and can help you navigate between the different roles you play at work and outside. More often than not, deciding this is a natural process and not a conscious effort. This means that what might be an advantage to someone, can appear as a roadblock to another. 

For me personally, writing “Scale It Up”,  my weekly newsletter, while having a full time day job feels very harmonious. I believe that I am able to utilise the learnings from my writings at work effectively. At the same time, work gives me opportunities to figure out topics to write on! So for me it's about finding a balance between my employee and writer identities.

As leaders it becomes our responsibility to identify multiple identities of our team members and help them amplify those which can support their holistic development. In fact the positive impact of multiple identities have been linked to affecting an employee’s happiness at work and consequently reducing the chances of someone leaving the organization.

Should You Cultivate Multiple Identities at Work?

The short answer is yes! 

Work will not always be fun. It will sometimes feel monotonous or sometimes a heavy lift. Therefore it is important to cultivate multiple identities at work and in adjacent areas, so that they come together to support you harmoniously. Some identities that you may have at work include being a manager, reporting to a manager and being a peer. Along with that, you could build identities by taking on special projects or by including yourself in cultural activities at work. Now imagine if you are having trouble in managing your teams and that is demotivating you, your success in your identities would help you to keep your motivation levels high. This will provide you with energy to try to solve the issues with your team. 

I have often heard people saying “I am not enjoying work”. When I would ask what part of their work they were not enjoying, the answers would become much more specific - their relationship with their manager, or performance of their team or some specific cultural aspect at the company. My advice at that point is to invest in areas at work in which they are actually enjoying, so that they can utilise the energy generated out of those interactions to solve the areas which are not working out for them. 

The key takeaway here is that multiple identities can be very powerful to make work enjoyable, even if all parts of work are not perfect. 

What can Leaders Do?

Wear your multiple identities on your sleeve!

As dramatic as it may sound, the only way to motivate your teams to develop multiple identities is to show them that it really works. Tell them about the other projects you are leading, things you are doing outside your formal work, the different skill sets you identify with and how all of these are transferable skills that complement each other contributing to your success. 

As leaders we have the dual responsibility of managing our own identities and also to identify and nurture our team’s multiple identities in order to get the best results. 

What are you doing to build your own and your team’s multiple identities?

In today’s fast moving and ever changing corporate environment, chances are that you must have experienced at least one reorg in your career. According to Harvard Business Review, around two-thirds of reorgs deliver some kind of improvement in performance. Perhaps, this is one reason why reorgs are so common!

As John Ferraro, the former COO of Ernst & Young says, “Every company today is being disrupted and so must frequently reorganize to keep up with the incredible pace of change. Those that can do this well will thrive in the current environment and be tomorrow’s winners”.

But are all reorgs successful? Apparently, not! In fact, data shows that ~10% of them cause serious damage to the company. Research also shows that reorgs—and the uncertainty they can lead to about the future—can cause greater stress and anxiety than layoffs, leading in about 60% of cases to noticeably reduced productivity.

Having said that, I have personally been a part of many reorgs and led some of them. The key is to know why you are doing one and then to execute a plan with thoroughness and empathy. Some reasons for the reorgs that I have been a part of are listed below:

• Performance: low performance of teams in companies is a big drive for reorgs. In such cases, reorgs help in realigning expectations and priorities. If done right, they give a boost to productivity and performance.

For a startup that I once advised, we decided to do a reorg because the performance of the sales teams, supporting different business lines, were below expectations. So the CEO took a call to consolidate them under a chief revenue officer, which dramatically improved the performance. 

• Distributed functions: when certain functions or teams are distributed across geographies, it becomes tough for them to have a voice on the table. It becomes important to reorganize to give them a collective voice.

At one of the companies that I worked for in the past, we did a reorg because the company was structured by markets. However at its size and scale, we realised that it was particularly cost inefficient for us. Consolidation through reorg really helped us to drive tons of cost savings and improve our return on investment. 

• Over-hiring: over-hiring in some parts of the organization is a big reason for reorgs. This one is even more relevant during frothy environments when companies get funded really fast and are under pressure to deliver accelerated growth. When the markets correct, companies find their teams to be bloated and have to downsize to manage their expenses. 

• Exits of senior leaders: exits can also lead to a requirement for a reorg to align teams. 

I was part of a reorg once where a senior leader has many functions under them. However when they were exiting, it made sense to distribute the functions in a way that they were evenly spread. 

• Market conditions: sometimes a reorg is motivated by market conditions. Pivoting your business structure according to the conditions of the market is sometimes necessary to keep your business competitive and efficient. 

Having seen many such reorgs from close up, I have realized that there is no one method to guarantee success. But, here are a few things that you can keep in mind:

• A reorg should support the strategy of the company. So think long and hard about it before embarking on it. Thinking short-term and doing multiple reorgs can lead to fatigue.

• A reorg should be done for the service of the company and not of a particular leader.

• Reorgs impact people the most. So they should be done in a respectful and fair manner. This is true even if a reorg means letting go of some people.

• Stakeholder alignment is a must during reorg. Don’t try to do it in a silo, but build consensus around it with your key stakeholders. 

• Lastly, reorg is just the beginning. What happens after a reorg defines its success. Teams have to come together to accept the change and collectively drive towards success. 

These are just some of the ways which have helped me to manage reorgs in the past. Reorgs are tough and require leaders to show tenacity. But they are also great tools to take companies through the tough times and onto the path of scaling up. 

Have you been through a reorg? What are the challenges you have faced and how did you steer your team through them?

In my previous newsletter, I have written about how to set your North Star. While setting your North Star is extremely important, what is more important is what you do next with it. Intentional execution is the key to your success. 

Here are some key learnings that I have gained over the years on how to drive alignment towards your most valuable metric.

Articulate the why’s behind your metric

Once you have set up your North Star metric, it is extremely crucial to identify the “why” behind it. To do that, having the answers to the following questions is always helpful. 

• Why is that particular metric important?

• What would happen if you achieved it?

For example: for an adult learning edtech company the North Star metric could be X million graduates (time bound) to show that the learning methodology is effective or Y number of jobs (time bound) to show that the courses offer job ready skills. For a lending company, the % default could be a metric to show that they are able to give out loans to the correct set of audiences and recover them effectively. 

Communicate and reiterate

Communicate about the North Star metric to the entire company. Since the success of your metric depends heavily on how the team aligns with it, it is important to communicate the what’s and why’s of your North Star strategy with the team. You should also reiterate the metrics to the team from time to time so the team stays on track and there is continued alignment.

Define how the North Star relates to teams

As important it is to define how different teams align with the North Star, it is also important to define how the North Star aligns with the different teams! Every North Star needs to be broken down to sub metrics for each team. 

For example: in an Edtech company with the number of graduates as the North Star metric, the content development team may not directly impact the metric but by creating more courses they can help get more people into the funnel. Similarly, the marketing team decides to generate a certain volume of leads, the delivery team decides initiatives to help in the learning journey and the product team works on increasing engagement. Each team has to come together to achieve their sub metrics to collectively achieve the North Star metric. Supporting businesses like human resource and finance can immensely help by hiring the right talent and managing the required cash flows and margins.

Measure, measure and measure 

As you get into execution mode, it’s critical to measure the progress towards the North Star metric periodically. Make sure you talk about it in monthly and quarterly updates. The dashboards should be made available for everyone to be able to see the progress anytime. 

Explain to the company at town hall events what’s working & what’s not working. Highlight the decisions that were taken in support of achieving the metric. It is also important to highlight those decisions which were geared towards stopping certain projects or activities to build more focus to achieve the North Star.

Incentivize and align through a bonus plan 

Finally, one way that I have seen work very well in small to midsize companies is to create a very transparent bonus plan that gets triggered when the company hits the metric. The bonus plan can become a very positive forcing function for leaders and teams to always keep the North Start at the focal point of everything they do. 

All said and done, execution is the key to drive success for your North Star metrics. Once the metrics are deconstructed for different teams, plan for execution. Timely and high quality execution is key. Just as fast and low quality work doesn’t help, similarly slow but high quality work is of no use. 

What has worked for you to achieve your North Star?

A few months back, I wrote about the importance of having a north star, especially for aligning your team and organization to one common goal. While there are various external metrics to measure the success of a company like revenue, sales and/or market share, the north star metric really relates to the mission of the company. It defines the purpose of a business. For example, the north star metric for Facebook is the number of monthly active users and for YouTube is the number of minutes played.

Your north star helps you prioritize resources and efforts. It tells you what matters to you the most. A few days back I was speaking with a the CEO of an edtech company. The company has built a robust AI platform and offers tutoring services. The CEO was thinking about his north star metric. The first thing I asked him is to identify whether they are building an “AI company that powers tutoring” or a “Tutor management company, supported by AI”. Depending on the answer, the north star metric could vary from engagement on the AI Platform to number of tutoring sessions.

So if you are looking for setting your north star or the big hairy audacious goal then here are some tips to keep in mind:

1. Focus beyond revenue

While setting your north star metric, think beyond revenue targets. While revenue is the one of the most critical measurements, it fails to show long term success indicators like overall quality of the product and the value customers derive from the product, which will showcase the success of the product and tie into the revenue.

For instance, at EduKart, the metric was the number of courses on the marketplace platform. This was critical as without a critical mass of courses, EduKart would not really become a true education marketplace.

2. Align your entire company to the north star metric

Your north star metric should be something that the entire company can align with. It shouldn’t be a metric just for the sales team or the development team, rather something that the entire company can align with and work toward. 

For instance in a global edtech organization that I worked for, there was a debate on whether we should focus on higher graduation rates for our learners or focus on a path that can make us a preferred learning partner for Fortune 500 companies. Once this debate was settled, we knew what kind of people to hire for, where to divert our resources and how to prioritize team OKRs.

3. Your north star should be time bound

Your north star metric defines the purpose of your business over a period of time. The time component is super important as it helps you judge how much you are growing and improving in a particular period of time. 

4. Beware of vanity metrics

Your north star metrics should result in actual growth. If your north star isn’t driving revenue growth, then it might be a possibility that you have chosen a vanity metric. 

For instance, if an edtech company chooses graduation rate as a north star metric, then it is pointing to effectiveness of its courses. If that is true, then there will be a strong word of mouth and repeat purchases. So while a graduation rate metric is not a revenue metric, you can clearly draw a line to revenue.

So what should be your north star?

TLDR: It depends on your business.

Some of the most popular north star metrics are:

(Source: a16z blog)

• Consumption growth, for marketplaces and platforms

• Growth efficiency, for paid-growth driven businesses

• Engagement and/or customer growth, for freemium team-based B2B products and consumer subscription products

• Consumption, for UGC subscription-based products

• User Experience, for businesses that depend on experience

But these are just based on existing examples. Think about what matters the most to your business and decide on your north star metric. A much bigger task after this would be to achieve this goal. As always, execution is the key!

Let’s face the reality that not everyone in the organization can directly help you with achieving the north star metric. So the next step is to break down your big hairy audacious goal into smaller milestones for each team. Identify the levers that move your north star metric and focus your short term goals around those. 

The north star metric is a powerful tool that needs to be used very thoughtfully as keeping a wrong north start metric can take the company in a wrong direction. However, when chosen wisely, it can really help drive alignment in the company, which in turn can position the company for a rapid scale up.

In one of my previous articles, I had written about the importance of managing relationships with your manager and how it is one of the best investments you can make at work. It is equally important to manage relationships with your peers. 

Workplaces are built around the relationships we have with our peers. In fact, our relationships with our peers can be a source of positivity, learning, support and energy. We need each others support and we also need to support each other. On the flip side, if these relationships aren’t managed positively, then they can also be a cause for frustration and stagnation. 

So let's dive into the Why and How of managing our relationships with our peers! 

Should you really care about your relationship with your peers?

TLDR: Yes!

Why? To be honest, one can’t list enough reasons to maintain healthy relationships with your peers. Here are some of my top reasons of why you should care for it:

• Cross-Functional Dependencies

I would find it hard to believe that a head of product  can succeed without support from the head of technology or vice versa. This is just one example of it. We all have cross-functional dependencies. Sales depends on marketing, marketing depends on data, data depends on tech, tech depends on hr, hr depends on finance, finance depends on ops, so on and so forth!

This makes it imperative for us to work in close collaboration with each other to succeed at our jobs. 

• Peer Feedback is Important

As you move up the ladder, your credibility is built, not only with the feedback your manager has for you, but also by the feedback your peers have for you. Also, remember your peers can give you feedback that is candid and direct. Such feedback has really helped me to course correct at the right time. 

At my current role in Tala, where I joined four months ago, I have continuously asked for feedback from my peers. I have gotten invaluable nuggets which have helped me not only learn the culture of the company quickly, but also onboard faster to become more effective at my work. 

• Feeling of a Support Group

You can also count on your peers to support you when you are feeling vulnerable. It sure gets lonelier as you move up the corporate ladder. Having peers you can trust and be vulnerable with, can really help improve yourself as a leader.

What can you do to build your relationships with your peers?

Here are some ways in which I try to build a relationship with my peers.

• Be clear about your personal agendas in the company. When you decide to stay away from hidden agendas and communicate openly with your peers about your objectives in the company, they will more often than not find ways to collaborate with you and support you. This also builds trust among your peers and eliminates politics.

• Be intentional to meet with your peers regularly. This has become even more important in the current scenario, where most of us are working remotely. Attend these meetings with the intention of building personal connections. One way of doing it could be to find common areas of interest—at work and outside of it. You can also use these meetings to ask for candid feedback from your peers. 

• Offer to help your peers. You must focus on the ways in which you can help your peers. Try to ask questions about the key areas of focus for them and identify ways in which you can help them to achieve their goals.

• Be assertive and not aggressive while managing conflicts or asking for something from your peers. This helps you build an honest and respectful relationship with them and credibility for yourself. 

• Foster healthy relationships for the next level of leaders. Once you have built a credible relationship with your peer, you must try to create the same level of credibility among the next set of leaders on your respective teams. Connect both of your team members and find ways in which they can collaborate together. The stronger relationships your team members form cross-functionally, the easier it gets for you to build cross-functional peer relationships. That is because now your team leaders can manage their own conflicts versus you having to solve them with your peers.

These are some ways in which you can build strong relationships at work. These are not just relevant for leaders, but for anyone who wants to build stronger peer relationships, irrespective of their seniority. An organization can be set up well to scale, when people work well with each other and healthy relationships with peers is a big part of that. 

What steps do you follow to build relationships with your peers?

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As leaders and executives, we all know how critical strategic thinking is. It’s a skill-set that you see on most senior leadership job descriptions. But while most talk about strategic thinking, not many pay heed to its close partner - strategic communication. 

I undertook executive coaching last year, wherein my coach kept on bringing up the point of how we as leaders think strategically, but often fail to communicate our thinking effectively, which ultimately creates execution gaps. This is where strategic communication comes in.

In simple terms, strategic communication allows you to demonstrate and communicate your strategic thinking to a wider audience—your manager, peers, teams and other stakeholders. So if you want to put strategic thinking to action, you need strategic communication.

The Toughest Part of Strategic Communication

TLDR: To keep it simple

Ironically, the toughest part of strategic communication is to keep it simple.

Consider the 2021 Bill and Melinda Gates letter which speaks about the very complex topic of coronavirus. But the letter is extremely simple, relatable and succinct. And that makes all the difference.  

Keeping your communication simple, helps you to translate your strategic thoughts into quick actions. There is a lesser chance of things going wrong due to miscommunication. Remember the garbage in, garbage out rule? Well the same goes for communication - complex in, complex out! 

Many times our unconscious bias makes us assume that people around us at work would know what we are talking about and will be aware of the assumptions we make in our communication. However, my experience says that it’s always good to foolproof your communication. Taking out an extra few minutes to just go through it once again to see if what you are saying can be misunderstood, really helps the communication to stand out. 

The Three Simple Fundamentals of Strategic Communication

1. Simple Language, Thoughts and Structure 

As leaders, sometimes we tend to use complex vocabulary or fancy jargon during communication. We forget that only few people can understand such complex language. Many times it’s also because we want to impress our readers with our “knowledge”. 

The following tips can come in handy while drafting your next communication.

• Use short sentences

• Change paragraphs after every 2-3 sentences

• Use easy vocabulary 

• Use limited jargon and explain them whenever needed

You can also try some online tools which can give you a readability score. If you are writing an email addressing the entire organization, ensure that your newest or the least experienced employee can understand it clearly!

2. Relatable

Our mind tends to process relatable information faster than what seems like completely new information to it. So while explaining complex business situations, try to find relatable metaphors. 

Choose examples that most of your audience can understand and relate to. You can’t avoid sharing complex information with your team, but if you can break it down into relatable pieces, then your audience will grasp it more effectively. 

3. Share Stories, not just Facts

If you are using data, then try to support it with real stories. Stories and personal anecdotes have far greater impact than pure facts or data points. 

Using real stories of real people to support your data and facts not only makes your argument more human, but also makes it more concrete. Always remember that stories reach hearts, and when you can get your audience emotionally invested in your communication, you are increasing the chance to get acceptance for your message.

My communication goal for 2022 - Keep it Simple!

In a virtual world where most of my communication is happening over Zoom, Meet, Email or Slack, I am attempting to simplify my communication further, so that I can help drive more effective execution at work. 

How? I will,

• write short and crisp slack messages and emails

• explain, whenever I can’t do away with jargon

• try to summarize after important meetings

• not use any thesaurus in 2022 ;)  

What are your communications goals for 2022? Share them with me!

I have always believed that the difference between output and outcome is more fundamental and profound than just semantics. To put it simply, outcome is the difference made by the output and output is the way to achieve the outcome.

If I link this to “Leading with Why”, my previous article, the output is the “What” and in some cases the “How”, but the outcome is the “Why”. Having clarity about what is the outcome vs output helps ensure alignment across the board. 

Creating and Measuring Impact through Output and Outcome

I am a big fan of creating measurable impact. This includes not only impact on revenues, products and services, but also impact on relationships, satisfaction and engagement. 

However, in order to differentiate between the output and outcome, you need to place rock solid tools which can help you measure them distinctly. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is one of my favorite tools to drive the differentiation between output and outcome and align the company on it. 

Objective = Outcome | Key Result = Output

According to a study by MIT Sloan, ~49% of the senior leadership team can’t name strategic priorities. This gap further increases to ~87% when we talk about frontline leaders. This says a lot about the importance of closing the alignment gap. OKRs can keep your teams connected, aligned and help them move towards the outcomes that matter faster and together. And after having created and managed OKRs for 18 straight quarters in one of my previous organizations, I can vouch that they can really work!

Used by Google, Co-Founder Larry Page credits them for its successful growth: 

“OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of organizing the world’s information perhaps even more achievable. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most.”

At one of the companies I worked before, one of the company’s objectives was to become the best-in-class company in their sector. So as a leader for customer operations, I chose to make our objective to drive best-in-class customer engagement.  This laddered very well with the company’s objective to become the best-in-class in its sector. The alignment helped the operations team to work towards a common outcome—to be the best-in-class within their scope of work. We then went on to deploy initiatives which would essentially drive better engagement for our customers and measured key results such as CSAT and NPS among others. 

Shift Your Focus from Short-term Activities to Long-term Impact

Easier said than done, the shift of focus from output to outcome takes time, especially when the entire company is adopting something like this for the first time. We are used to measuring activities like:

• Shipping a new product feature

• Acquiring new customers

• Launching a marketing campaign

All the above are examples of output. 

However, we miss out on the outcomes that are achieved by undertaking these activities-

• Shipping a new product feature, to deliver higher engagement

• Acquiring new customers, to test a product market fit

• Launching a marketing campaign, to establish thought leadership

When a team knows they are working towards an outcome, they can be more agile, think strategically, and perhaps even  innovate at a more rapid pace. Focussing on outcomes helps you create value vs completing tasks!

So, what do you focus on more—output or outcome? Do you also use the OKR framework?  If yes, has it helped you?

In early 2014, I decided to create a set of values for my three year old EdTech startup, EduKart. And why not, our team was scaling up and having a clear set of company’s values would help set expectations for new and existing employees. My core team and I discussed and debated and came up with six values that we thought would define EduKart.

Corporate values are an important lever at the disposal of top leaders to build a team’s culture. Company values act as the guiding light that helps teams to bond with a shared sense of purpose, for achieving common goals. Moreover, they also guide teams on how to behave and react to internal and external events. 

Company Values: The Guiding Principles of Company Culture

Company values form the bedrock of decision making in any organization. Leaders lean on these pillars to drive performance, especially during times of change, crisis or rapid growth. Hence, it is very important for the company values to be specific, so that the team can easily resonate with them. 

For example, Southwest Airlines is known for its culture of fun and that shows in everything they do. Right from the fun impromptu flight announcements by their crew to the way they treat their customers with spontaneity, everything shows their love for fun, even though they are in a serious business of running an airline. Below is a snapshot of the culture page  where Southwest is really intentional to highlight their values of a fun loving culture. 

Corporate values are not only important to align the behavior of internal teams, but many times they also play an important role in guiding customer behavior. According to a study by Accenture, as many as 63% of consumers are buying from companies whose values resonate with their own personal values. 

Your company corporate values can resonate with your internal and external stakeholders

Think of words like integrity, ethical, fun, customer-centric. These are some of the most common corporate values. So much so that Denise Lee Yohn, a leading authority on positioning great brands and building exceptional organizations, suggests to ban some of these overused words in corporate values!

While the viewpoint sounds controversial, it makes a ton of sense to me as a company can really leverage its values to stand out! Choose the words in a manner which define your core values distinctively.

For example, many companies have a core value around being customer-centric. If you want to stay customer centric, think of who your customer is and what being customer centric means to this customer. 

At one of the previous employers, a global EdTech company, one of  our core values was ‘Students First’. It essentially meant that while all of us would be student centric, we would always try to do right by the student, and not necessarily what the student feels is right.  The value really drove the passion around student success in the company and spoke about our distinct and unique view of customer centricity.

Similarly, at Tala, where I started recently, the company is centered around the value of ‘Radical Trust’.  Just by the way it has been worded, it distinguishes Tala from many other companies which use “trust” as their core value. “Radical trust” at Tala is essentially a deep fundamental belief in people, both employees and customers equally, to uphold their commitments.  I really believe that this is both bold and refreshing for a company, which essentially is in the business of trusting people, as it gives out loans to the underbanked around the world! 

At EduKart, we had a value called ‘Build it for yourself’ which put ownership in the hands of the people—employees and students. Internally, it meant that we looked at everyone as intrapreneurs who were empowered to make decisions and deliver. Externally, it meant that our customers, i.e. students would take the right decisions on our platform to choose the programs that would eventually build their careers. 

The Ever-Evolving Company Values & Company Culture

Just like a company’s culture is ever -evolving, the company values also need to evolve over time. This might be a result of growth, scale, changes in the business model or just maturity of the business. As you modify the values with evolution of the company, make sure to get a buy-in from your team. After all, they will make the adoption of your core values a success or failure. Many times, you have to make an extra effort to help your team get accustomed to the shift. 

At one of my previous companies, we came out with a new set of values as the company had outgrown its existing set. One of the new values introduced was ‘Data-Driven’. For the effective implementation of this value, democratization of data was important and hence the company deployed a new set of tools to give the power of data analysis into the hands of employees across the company. Even in our day-to-day conversations, data started taking centre stage and accelerated the adoption of the new value.

Engage and Empower Your Company With Core Values

Core company values are great levers to boost engagement and empowerment for your employees. Undoubtedly, working for an organization whose values align with your own values and beliefs makes people feel engaged and empowered.

Finally, this can have a very positive effect on hiring as you would tend to attract more people who can relate to your values. I have always been impressed by the work that Stripe has done in this area and how clear it is about the kind of people who would succeed in Stripe as a result of their values and the resultant culture. 

Do you believe in the concept of having a set of core values for the company? Which values attracted you to join your current company? Mine was definitely the value of radical trust. Tell me yours!

In my previous article, I spoke about using frameworks for an efficient decision making process. One of the biggest challenges for making decisions is the constant dilemma of choosing between gut instinct and data. 

Lately, there has been a lot of conversation around data driven decision making. But how many of us are actually able to prioritize data for decision making. Aren’t most of our decisions still based on our gut feeling? In fact, according to Alation's new "State of Data Culture" report two-thirds of CEOs still rely on gut feeling while making decisions. 

And why not? While making decisions you are dealing with people and when people are involved, you have to consider all factors and not just cold facts and data. After all, your gut is not completely random. It’s a sum total of all your experiences. 

Gut Feeling vs Data: What is Better?

Gut without data is just your whim, and data without gut is just a cold, hard fact. In my opinion, marrying the two is important.

Gut paves the way for experimentation; data helps make it a success

As I said earlier, your gut feeling isn’t completely random. Rather, it is a sum total of all your experiences that shapes up your intuition. It gives you the ability to try something new for the first time. 

For example, while working at an EdTech company in India, we launched a bundled pricing option on top of our existing pricing packages. It was based on the hypothesis that if we gave an option to the Indian learners to do as many courses as they could in a fixed period of time, they would find the bundled offering very cost effective. And our gut feeling was right. The pricing experiment turned out to be a huge success for the market.

But that would not have been the case, if we did not keep a check on data from the very beginning. While preparing to launch this bundle offering, we had data which showed that people might not be willing to pay a huge amount upfront (3x more than the current course price). So we worked with a financing platform to offer personal loans at affordable rates, available within a few minutes at the point of checkout. Once we launched this bundle pricing with the personal loan option we saw an immediate uptake of the bundle option.  The data driven execution proved useful and a significant minority percentage of our customers shifted to this option.

Gut is limited by your experience; Data is limited by its availability 

Your gut feeling depends on what you have learnt and experienced in the past. Hence, in the beginning you might not feel confident about your gut, but it will get better with time and you will become more confident. 

Data is limited by your ability to collect and analyze it. Many times, people fail to look at all the aspects of data. And by looking at it in parts, you can make wrong decisions. 

Gut allows you to be human; Data allows you to be practical

Gut brings in the human element to your decision making. It tells you to treat your customers right, to listen to your employees, and to be empathetic to your stakeholders. 

Data helps you analyze the impact of your actions and to stay practical. 

For example, you might be doing a lot of employee engagement activities for your employees thinking this keeps employees happy and increases retention. But by analyzing data like employee retention percentage, employee net promoters score, enablement score, etc, you can see the actual impact of your actions and keep yourself practical. Don’t be surprised if your data shows a completely different picture. At least, you now know what is not to be done!

Data Driven Gut Instinct: The Real Cool Kid

I am confident that you are using data inputs in your decision making, especially in today’s complex business situations. But if data was the sole important factor in decision making, then how did businesses run and succeed when there was not enough access to it.

In my view the combination of data and gut, essentially, a data driven gut instinct is the answer for leaders to lead in today’s environment! But like most people I am still trying to figure out what is the right balance to leverage data and intuition. If you have the answer, then do let me know!

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As an entrepreneur and an operator who has been part of global businesses, I am often asked about my decision making process. To be honest, I was quite late to realize the importance of having a standardized decision making process or a framework around it. 

But, why so? I will have to admit that I really enjoyed the freedom in decision making, without having to bother about the “discipline” needed while using frameworks! Also, at many of the places I worked, it was very clear who owned the decision; so the process to make it effectively, mattered less. 

But as my team scaled up, I came across some challenges when it came to decision making:

• Found it tough to be closer to the points of decision making

• Wasted a lot of time in discussions that did not lead to a decision

• Got confused often on whether to go with the data or gut

• Struggled to bring my highly talented and strongly opinionated team to agree on a decision.

As I started reading about the nuances of decision making, I came across a lot of seasoned leaders who believed that the success of your decision making process wasn’t always in choosing the best option, but in making the most of the information available to you, acquiring trust from your stakeholders and then executing it with conviction and commitment. And now, I can’t agree more!

A team might have internal conflicts and debates, but when they decide to implement something then they should stand committed to it. That’s the art of decision-making!

I spent some time looking at some of the frameworks that can be helpful when you are trying to scale-up your business or teams. These frameworks not only expedite the decision making, but also help in creating a culture that cuts through politics and bureaucracy by bringing transparency in the “why” and “how” of decision making!

Here’re some of my learnings from my experiments. Do share yours with me.

Defining the roles for decision making creates transparency and accountability

Transparency is pivotal for decision making, both in startups and large organizations. Lack of transparency in the process erodes trust among employees and can become a cause of conflict. It is important to clarify who plays what roles in the process. 

I recently came across RAPID, a framework created by Bain & Company to clarify different roles while a decision has to be made. RAPID is a loose acronym that stands for Input, Recommend, Agree, Decide and Perform. The framework assigns owners to the five key roles in any decision. It has been successfully used in fast growing companies like Uber, LinkedIn & Coinbase (Hear Emilie Choi, COO and President of Coinbase talking about it).

Of course, as a startup leader this might seem like too much effort. You might think that a lot of this can be done instinctively. But I have learnt from experience, that as your business scales up, you will need frameworks to define your decision making, roles and responsibilities. And it’s better if you make this a part of the process early on. 

It’s not one-size fits all, but some items are table stakes

Decision-making process varies for different organizations. It’s not like you can replicate exactly what the other organization is doing. So whatever be your decision-making framework, here are some of the best practices that have helped me:

• Clear Communication: The shorter your communication is on a problem and its solutions, the better it is. Shorter and crisper communication helps remove any chance of confusion. Not to mention, it’s also time-saving and easier to implement.

• Solutions-oriented: The decision-making framework should avoid blame games or finger-pointing in outlining the problem or opportunity, and be constructive. Be positive and shine light on solutions and not just the problems.

• Outline the Options: Your decision making document should include the options you considered, the tradeoffs, and your recommendation. Support with data wherever possible

• Inputs from the Experts: In every organization there are decision makers and there are experts. In many cases, they are not the same. So if you are a decision maker or a recommender for a decision, seek inputs from the experts. These inputs will tremendously improve the quality of recommendations and mitigate risks around the decision. 

• Reversible vs Irreversible Decision: It is important to clarify whether a decision is reversible or irreversible. More often than not most of the decisions fall into the reversible category. Some of them may be very important and have a cost and time associated with reversing them, but reversible nonetheless. When you tag a decision as reversible, it reduces the pressure from the decision maker and makes decision making faster. Of course, exercise much more rigor if the decision is irreversible.

• Explain Why the Decision: When a decision is made, make sure you add “Why” you made the decision. While the document may show the “How” very well, the “Why” really matters in the long term, in case one has to revisit the decision at a later point of time. It also helps you to get higher buy-in from your teams. 

Organizations use different frameworks for decision making as there is no perfect framework! In fact sometimes overusing a framework can even make the teams slower, so one has to choose what sort of framework is right for the company.

However, the idea of having a common language around decision making is powerful. Imagine if your junior most employees to your c-suite, across your multiple offices (or in the remote world) use a similar process to make their decisions, how much consistency will come in daily discussions and decisions.

Are you considering testing something like this or do you already have such frameworks in place in your organization? I would love to learn more about it!

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Until a few years back, if you would have asked me if you should always solve your team’s conflicts, my answer would have been a vehement yes! After all, that’s what dedicated leaders are supposed to do—solve their team’s problems. Or, is it?

In the last few years where I have spent time managing large global teams and spoken to many successful leaders, I have realized that as leaders we spend too much time solving our team’s problems. While that is an important part of our jobs, it is much more important to enable and empower your teams to solve their conflicts themselves. 

In fact, I can now go on to say that you are not doing your job effectively as a leader if your team is constantly bringing their problems to you to address them, instead of trying to find solutions themselves. 

When I look back at my entrepreneurship days, I remember most of my meetings ended with a request for me to exercise my authority to help resolve cross team issues. Many times they sounded like-

• The tech team is not prioritizing the marketing team’s projects

• The sales team is not happy with the kind of leads the marketing team was sending to them

• The marketing wasn’t satisfied with the sales pitches

• An old employee wasn’t respecting the a new employee’s seniority in the organization 

• Someone wasn’t happy with the way their manager was behaving

• Someone wanted me to step in their team meetings to stress on the priority of the projects at hand

While I always assume good intent behind these issues, the problem was that every time these challenges cropped up, the teams were bringing the conflicts to me instead of trying to resolve among themselves. “Managing escalations” had become one of the most important (and time consuming) tasks for me on a daily basis.

As leaders and managers we find ourselves in these situations often. What do we do? We go ahead and resolve. Well, at least that is what I did and now I realise that I should have handled many of those situations differently. 

The other day I was reading a book, Crucial Conversations, and came across an interesting data point. According to a survey of around 20,000 people, those who mastered crucial conversations were better able to tackle challenges and became opinion leaders in their organizations. 

The author, Joseph Grenny, further goes on to say that prior to taking a management role, you can measure your contribution to the organization by counting the number of important problems you solve. But the day you become a manager, the arithmetic changes. Your success is no longer measured by how many problems you solve. Instead, your role is to build a team that solves problems. 

And, I can’t agree more!

When do you let your teams solve their problems themselves?

One of your team members, let’s say X comes and says “Can you help me solve a challenge with person Y?” or “Can you ask person Y to do this for me (X)?”

At this point, ask yourself “can you teach your team something by letting them discuss the problem themselves?” If the answer is even a slight yes then do not surrender yourself to the temptation of getting involved. Ask X to reach out to Y and find a solution directly and then collectively inform you about the decision. 

If X refuses to do it or feels uncomfortable, you could connect X & Y and ask them to solve the problem together. 

When do you step in?

If X and Y (or even if more people are involved) are not able to find a resolution, then get all the parties in a room, instead of trying to solve problems for individuals.

Also, on a side note, continue to encourage X and your team to make this a “shared escalation” next time onwards i.e. discuss the problem beforehand with Y and then reach out to you together, if they are not able to solve it. 

This model has worked for me really well because getting all parties involved in the conflict resolution together not only helps build trust in the decision making process but also encourages your team to try to resolve the issues by themselves first.

I did this at Udacity and I saw that my direct reportees eventually resolved most of their issues by themselves. In fact, escalations that were being brought to me had become much lesser in number and much higher in quality.

No leader can deny the importance of building trust for effective team collaboration. Shared escalations not only create a stronger relationship between team members, but also change the dynamics of the manager-reportee relationship within the organization. 

Create a High-Performing Team By Holding Them Accountable for Themselves

In one of my previous articles, I had stressed on the importance of committing as a team despite respectful confrontations among team members. Peer accountability sits at the heart of shared escalations. I have seen that in most high-performing teams, it is the team members who manage most of the problems themselves. 

Yes, it is a time taking effort to build the culture of peer accountability and shared escalations but eventually you will find yourself saving a lot of time as conflicts get resolved faster.

Do you think this could work for you? I would love to hear from you, if you are already practicing this!

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