Transcript

Amy Dalebout: Quite frankly not everyone wants to be a manager. You don’t want to hope people will be a good manager.

Didi: It’s the People Ops Podcast, the only show dedicated to small businesses, sharing stories of pivotal people, moments. I’m your host, Didi D’Errico leading teams remotely. It’s not a novel topic at this point. More and more companies are rethinking their entire organization shifting to a digital-first environment, regardless of where your business falls from remote to hybrid to eventually back in the office.

One thing remains the same manager development is essential. Managers are the flywheel in making your business go, but are you helping them to help shed light on this topic? Here’s Amy Dalebout VP of People and Culture at MotoRefi, a fast-growing company that has tripled in size since she joined in the spring of 2020.

Oh. And her first day at the company. Just happened to be the first day, the whole company moved to remote work due to pandemic. Before we get to that, let’s take one small step back and get some insight on how Amy found herself, where she is today.

Amy Dalebout: Professionally. I actually started my career in the nonprofit sector and had a real passion for making impact and social entrepreneurship around the world.

And I just find that I can’t resist any chance to solve inefficiency and especially organizational inefficiency, making a career of, of making work just in a, an inspiring place to be in a great place for people. And so. Excellent people management. It can really make the workplace special and where we always feel like we’re learning.

Didi: And you heard a little bit about her impressive background there, but what I hope you also heard is her excitement behind working with people on this show. We share a passion with Amy and that’s the powering, the people with power, small business. What is it about running and scaling small businesses that appeals to Amy?

Amy Dalebout: I love getting to build in a high-growth business. You’re never going to get too comfortable. You can never take too much credit for your work because it’s either something that’s not in place since you’re getting feedback all the time, or you need to update what you’ve built to match the scale of the business, where it’s at now. So if you really enjoy continuous learning, you won’t feel stagnant when your business is changing a lot.

Didi: As you know, on this show, we like to challenge conventional thinking around HR. When it comes to small business, what often happens is people who are doing well as individual contributors, they get promoted and we assume they’ll also be great at coaching others to do great things.

Then we leave them to it. Go make that magic happen. Yeah, well, it doesn’t always work out so well. So let’s start there. Here’s Amy, on what manager? Promotion and manage your coaching looks like in small businesses. And how we should be changing that to work in today’s changing environment.

Amy Dalebout: Great individual contributor. Let’s take the next. What seemed like the next logical step in your career and make you a manager. And that may or may not be logical. A team member might not want to be a manager, really understand what that’s all about, but that’s often what happens. And then you’ve got a group of managers.

Um, a lot of times. I think training for those managers can be overlooked or maybe an alternate scenario that it looks really formal. So, you know, you’ll get a mandatory meeting for all managers placed on your account or from HR, and it’s sort of an annual cadence and that information is delivered at you, not in consultation with you. And it’s a top down approach and it can be really disempowering for managers. 

Didi: Yeah, one end or the other, or even if you wanted to be a manager in the first place. So there’s a couple of examples in the show so far in the podcast. So far this year, we’ve had a couple of conversations about the importance of managers and managers as coaches.

One example is. From another customer of ours, Eric Edelson, he grew his company to almost 140 people before he brought in a people operations person. And he really focused on technology. And certainly people he’s very focused on individuals and making sure he sets them up to thrive. But what he didn’t really think about.

Was that when he brought in managers that they might not have the same ethos as he did in terms of people. And that’s something that really needs attention. And then it kind of a separate note. We just recently talked with a motivational expert, Neil Doshi, who wrote a book actually about motivation. And he talks about one of the biggest things that kind of sideswiped us in 2020.

Is the manager, coach model has changed with this new virtual or hybrid reality and where we kind of fell into a pattern of coaching over the shoulder of someone in connection with someone and helping be part of the game and the results with someone. It kind of shifted when they’re remote and it’s sort of like, okay, go do your thing.

And I will, I’ll weigh in when you’re done. So maybe if you could talk about those two examples and how that resonates with what you’ve seen in small business and how you think about it as a leader. 

Amy Dalebout: Yeah, these are rich conversations and coaching managers is critical that they come from a variety of different organizations and they have to understand what the role of a manager means that your organization because it might look different.

So I’ve also asked my managers questions about, well, how has coaching and working with your team changed during this time? How has the management experience changed as you’ve moved to a remote? Set up here. And honestly, some of them said, you know, it’s, it is harder to coach for instance, like our sales managers, they’re real used to being on a Salesforce together with their teams and, um, giving live in the moment, coaching, you know, you hear someone say something, you kind of turn around and you say, okay, have you thought about presenting it this way?

Or you did this on the phone and now most people are doing their work remotely and you have a time delay in reviewing their work because maybe the time zone or, or it’s happening asynchronously. Really. And so while I’m not sure that coaching has gotten harder for every role, it certainly appears to be true for some roles.

Didi: Is this something that most small companies understand how to set up at all, whether they’re in person or whether they’re remote?

Amy Dalebout: I think with kind of a shift to true people, operations we’ve seen manager and training and coaching get a lot more attention. I think one of the challenges is that it feels daunting to roll out.

Like you have to have a massive curriculum or something developed around this. It just feels like it needs to be a big thing. So because of that, right. If it has to be too big, it’s often just going to get sidelined or wait until we can bring that consultant in to tie everything up with a ribbon and help fix our issues. Basically, I think it’s a, it’s an area most of us can improve on and we don’t need to be scared of. 

Didi: one side of the equation is how do you build managers, essentially, people who actually want to be promoted into being men. The other side of the equation is how do you think about hiring good people who maybe have either have good manager experience or could be good managers?

How do you even think about that? And to your point that you made management is different for every culture. So what are the kinds of things you want to think about there?

Amy Dalebout: I mean, the first thing is to know that quite frankly, not everyone wants to be a manager and that is okay. So, so making assumptions about who would be good or who wants to be, because they’re good at that individual contributor role, that’s really a dangerous thing to do.

Management is a skill. Some people may gravitate towards it or be more natural about it. But quite frankly, a lot of us like kind of muddle our way through it until we learn what matters, how to be a good manager, or we find someone to model our behavior after. And so I think the key thing is you don’t want to hope.

People will be good managers or hope that they’ll adapt to your company. You often say like hope is not strategy. And it may result in some loss, whether that is a loss through attrition or a team that feels lost, or a manager who knows they need more support to do the job. And it just feels like they’re not getting it.

So I think those are things companies gotta think about and, and be aware of proactively.

Didi: As I mentioned at the beginning, yes. Had the opportunity to start your very first day at your new job remote. So your whole existence and motor refi has been remote and most people we’ve just done a survey that asks small businesses. Do you think that 2020 was a blip or do you think we’ve changed the way we work?

Permanently 70% of the people said you changed where we’re going to work, how we’re going to work and who we’re going to work with permanently. This is different. And while we might go to a hybrid future there in most industries, there’s going to be some aspect of remote that you probably want to bake in there. So maybe let’s talk a little bit about that.

Amy Dalebout: Yeah. You know, Didi, I, I really agree like our current reality and our future, it looks different than our past did. And so for me, not only have I. Only been remoted motor refight. The majority of our team is actually in the same situation because we’ve hired and scaled so much train this time.

And so as the world returns to normal, I think I’m gonna have some managers who they are managing team members that report to them from all of our locations. That means for us DC, Denver, Austin. Um, but I also gotta say. That, that includes a fourth geography, which is the remote geography. And, and even of those who report in from a geography that the managers in those team members will probably work from home some of those days.

And so simply put managers have to expand their competency of what effective management is. To include effective management regardless of geographic boundaries. So while the principles of management are going to be the same, the tools and the deliberateness that is needed to approach this management, um, in, in a situation, you know, that continues like that it has to be better. And honestly, we have to spend some time obsessing over it to get it right.  

Didi: I appreciate the point of the deliberate newness of it, particularly because we are in a world of, if you don’t see your team, how do they, how do they know that you’re there? How do they know that they’ve got support and how do you know what they’re up to? So let’s talk about what you see as the kind of the most fundamental criteria for managers, especially in this new reality.

Amy Dalebout: Okay, so this is, this is I’m going to sound really basic, but, uh, Moodle refi, we talk a lot about a manager’s responsibility to care. So you could write the best strategic plan your team has ever seen.

You could follow up on every single action item loop in all the right individuals. On communication. But if, if you didn’t care and I, and I mean really care about your team, it’s, it’s going to be felt so in a remote or hybrid environment that does not happen by accident. There’s no spillover effect. They don’t get to see you in the office, you know, helping a struggling team member or carrying boxes for the office manager.

And, and you’re not granted some sort of automatic badge of virtue. So you have to be, again, going back to that deliberate practices, you got to show up with your one-on-ones with thoughtful questions, understand your team members’ goals professionally, and doing things to help, you know, sending them a book on a topic.

You know, they want to learn about putting a handwritten note in the mail, um, asking about how things outside of work are going, um, asking what they want. From you and, um, genuinely listening to any, um, feedback that may even be hard for you to hear. And when you do those things and you’re truly genuinely interested in the success of your team, they feel it.

And you have a foundation for trust so that you can do all of the other difficult things that an organization requires to build it out. Nothing else can compensate for that. And I’m in a remote environment. It’s just as important, if not more important now than ever. 

Didi: Well and I imagine it’s changed a lot. I think empathetic managers or something in business we’ve always generally looked for. You want competency probably first is what everybody looks for. Again, back to the individual contributor thing, but care in a world where you need to worry about not only your employees, knowing that they’ve got the skills and the development that they need to do their job, but they’ve got fiscal health week.

They’ve got the emotional health. That they’ve got that their family has got the, you know, they’ve got the financial wellbeing or rigor or whatever, all of those resiliency tent posts, I guess that, that kind of level of care. And I think, you know, next, I think you’re going to talk a little bit about how you bring together your managers, something you call a manager pod, but I’d love to, uh, I’d love to understand how maybe that definition of care has expanded in the last 12 months as well.

Amy Dalebout: That definition has expanded, right? So, so we, the benefits we offer are different. Now we have a mental health benefit. That’s, that’s important for us. That’s important that our team knew that we could talk about that internally, that there were reasons for why we put, put that in place we’ve created.

Frameworks for our team to increase flexibility, especially for our managers to increase increased flexibility, or take on workloads for other team members when needed. And, you know, there was this past week, we have a team of about 20 people in Texas, and we were super concerned about that team. And you can do things from an organizational level as well, and then have your managers communicate it out.

We decided. That no one would be required to use their PTO because of the emergency because they couldn’t log on or didn’t have power. We wanted them to set work out outside of their mind, focus on emergency needs first. And our managers are on the frontline of communicating the care. So yes, we, we push out that to the company and we do it on some internal communication channels, but the managers reinforced it and say, no, really we’ve got you covered right now.

Didi: That’s a powerful and timely example. Let’s talk about your coaching and your care for your managers. I think you call it the manager pod. Let’s talk a little bit about what that is and how that’s functioning at motor refi. And also if you wouldn’t mind your company, I think has tripled since you started, how many managers did you start with when you joined back in March last year and now you’re a year later, and what does that, what is the scale of that, that impact look like now?

Amy Dalebout: now? Ooh, DD, I don’t have exact numbers for you, but I can tell you today that our manager pod is 26 people. And that is just the term for our group of direct managers who are responsible for a team of individuals. And they generally report to an executive or another senior leader.

And so, so that’s, that’s what our manager plot is. And every week, including this week, we welcomed two new people into managing our pots. It’s a lot of fun. Um, but we bring that manager pod together. For about three specific purposes. So first to provide information about organizational changes or things, they need to know such as a strategic plan for the next year, the second purpose would be to get feedback from them.

So here’s a policy we’re considering, you know, looking through your lens, how would this impact your team? What questions do you have? What, what do you want us to know as we consider this? The third is really to provide training and development opportunities, peer to peer learning from the group coaching.

And for us, if we can make our managers even just a little bit better, every time we have a gathering, uh, it’s very high leverage because these are the people, um, That are leading a team. And so the folks who report to them are going to benefit a lot over time. And so it doesn’t have to be hard for us. We bring our manager pod together for about 45 minutes every two weeks.

And we connect on a Slack channel in between. So, you know, logistically that’s how it works. And then, and then the content is, is where the richness comes in. 

Didi: I think that’s really powerful in my experience. A lot of what happens when you get into a manager role, as you’re kind of off doing your own thing, right.

And you don’t necessarily see how somebody in a different department, or even within your own department and in a different function is leading and managing. There’s so much we can learn from each other. As I think one of the things that we always try to pay attention to is there’s a, there are a lot of things, big companies do because they have big staffs and I have a whole training organization or whatever, but.

For small companies, what are practical ways of 45 minutes? Every couple of weeks sounds totally reasonable. And that mix is nice and it kind of goes to my next question is balance, right? So, you know, you’re looking at aligning your managers behind a shared purpose, but you also want to make sure they’re representing the voice of their teams and their people. How do you balance that? 

Amy Dalebout: First our managers know we’re going to come to them for input because we’ve now established that as a cultural pattern internally and at the same time, because they engage with other managers in the pod, they kind of start to recognize, Hey, there are lots of perspectives here to be considered.

Now I understand the way that team is thinking about it versus the way I’m thinking about it. And so, um, you know, we had a large conversation for instance about what the future of office life would look like for us and the CEO. And I. You know, instinctively, we wanted to take it to manager pot, not simply as a buy-in exercise, but because honestly, we need their perspective.

And so we brought something drafted that they could respond to. And the listening process for us was just amazing. And we learned that our managers they’ve seen stuff, policy changes or things play out at other organizations and they had questions that helped us design our next iteration. When you trust your managers to give input and to do the right thing for the business, when they understand the big picture, you really make them a key part of the process. And you have to give them the credit when you succeed.

Didi: We’ll always try to do it. Show is to look at and what you’ve given us a ton of great examples already, but maybe a pivotal moment. Something that, that happened as part of your work with making sure you have. Engaged managers who feel like they’re supported and feel like they’re being listened to. And how does it change your culture and your team engagement?

When you’re trying to connect people, as you said, are in multiple different regions and in, in their own kind of remote reality, um, with the business itself

Amy Dalebout: So that’s kind of a fun example, but our CEO joined one of our manager pods, um, back in November and he had a bit of an unexpected topic that he wanted to go through with the group about leading through storytelling.

And then that came on the heels of some more serious topics that we’d have in manager, pod. Um, and so some manager, pod members were able to share how they had created analogies for their team to rally around. So one example was that there was this Wolf pack that, um, there was an actual group of wolfs that were released into a national park and fundamentally their presence over time, ended up changing the ecosystem of the park, um, even alter altering the flow of an actual river.

And so the team then could use that phrase internally. To have a shared identity around what they’re trying to accomplish and why they, they need that their presence in the Wolf pack to do it. Um, we had another team member who has really focused the language around this concept of the moon too, which is this beautiful, beautifully expressed you of humanity expressed that, you know, I am, because we are.

And, um, he’s gotten his team to all watch it. Netflix documentary episode called the playbook about doc rivers, which really helped his team understand this concept and rally around this idea of, Hey, we help each other because we are a team. And so, um, these, these can seem like really small cultural artifacts in practice, but they’re actually not, they are so much more there.

There are powerful identities that our managers can come together around, build teams around, um, share what they’ve done. And, and, you know, that manager product experience was all about helping to understand how storytelling matters so that other managers can say, okay, like what kind of concepts do I want to form for my team, and, and how can we, um, have a strong kind of rallying cry, loves?

Didi: I love that collectiveness. I think that’s incredibly important. I think, you know, in growing up in Silicon Valley in terms of my career, I remember going through arrows of rallying, everybody around, not the competitor or, you know, things like that.

And it’s like, it was just very different. Mindshift and I, and I really love connecting the dots there and how you’re doing that.

So other companies take away from this, what would you counsel other small business leaders to consider maybe first, if they wanted to build their managers into great coaches and kind of the process to ensure trust and clarity for that remote-friendly reality and a future that’s coming our way. That’s that we’re in, I guess right now.

Amy Dalebout: Well, I, I don’t know if this is going to sound too earth-shattering, but I think it’s really important that small business leaders realize one of the core roles of a manager is to coach and that you messaged that over and over again, we can fall short of truly mobilizing and inspiring our teams. If we limit. The role of manager to one who simply gets X amount of production from their team. I personally, right now, I still meet with all our new managers at motor refi. And one of the main things in that conversation when I’m introducing them to, Hey, this is what management’s all about it. Motor refi. Can we talk a lot about these three CS, you know, just to make it really simple for them?

You just got to care. You’ve got a coach, you’ve got to communicate. So you give your managers some space to understand and adopt this as an identity. Honestly, they’ll love it. I mean, who doesn’t love the chance to help people be more successful when you build that into your management? Specific values.

You emphasize it. Every chance you get our manager, pod has been a big part of helping create this identity and it’s been simple and inexpensive to do. And so I think when small businesses poke around and think about this and they’ll, they’ll find a way to do it too. 

Didi: I love that maybe we could talk a little bit about assessing and measuring the impact of such programs. Everybody wants to, when you’re, when you’re doing a good people operations program, you’re really wanting to look at what are your strategies? Has it aligned your business? How are you designing for a great customer experience? And then how do you measure the impact of what you’re doing?

Amy Dalebout:  I love that question. You’ve got to measure the cultural health of your teams. You can use tools like engagement surveys, employee, net, promoter score, regular check-ins, and then really, really important. Make sure that data doesn’t just live and die with you, you know, share it out. Consider making a scorecard for your managers based on management behaviors, my managers have seen how their performance in certain management behaviors like having regular, one-on-ones using a feature where they can praise team members, responding to weekly updates, um, their, their teams and PS score.

Um, you know, they can see whether or not that’s consistent with the management expectations that we’ve set at motor refi. So oftentimes, um, those scorecards are an indication to me in my role that I might need to do more work emphasizing what it means to be a manager of Moto refi. And the why behind the behaviors.

And when you do them, it’s not a checklist, but it’s like, Hey, this is what you get. And you get strong relationships with your team. You get this ability to do the hard work together. So all those measurements can then change the conversation to, Hey, this is why this matters. Let’s talk about it. 

Didi: Do you use that to highlight a couple of your folks that would have got the teams with the high EMPS and the, and that have the, have the higher scorecards so they can kind of help lead each other. And we can use that as a, as a focal point, I guess, in terms of expectation setting. 

Amy Dalebout: Yeah, we do. Um, when we use these managers’ scorecards internally, we put it on a sheet. We showed everyone, Hey, these are who’s adopted these behaviors. Here’s, who’s sort of appears to be adopting them. And here’s some folks who are, who are new to the manager pod, um, who maybe haven’t yet can some of the managers who are really experienced with this.

Share the why behind what you’re doing and share what some of the results are. Right? Because we want people to understand it. The last thing I need is people completing a checklist to complete a checklist. I need them truly believing, Hey, here’s what I do as a manager. And here’s why. And then, then they’re also going to start contributing ideas to the rest of the organization about how to do this.

Didi: You had mentioned to me kind of on that the idea of fostering a culture where people are encouraged to ask powerful questions. Can you share an example of how that works at motor refi? 

Amy Dalebout: Yeah. So we, we gave our managers feedback from their teams that came from our employee engagement survey. We asked them to review that feedback and come prepared to talk about it at a manager pod.

And then we walked them through questions, simple but powerful questions like. What did you learn? What was hard to hear? What surprised you, you know, these, what questions really helped them stay in a learning space rather than a why question? Like, why did you get that resolved? Why does your data look that way?

Um, because that, that could tend to put them on the defensive and so they can answer bravely. When you’ve created psychological safety. So you can do this in a group setting, you can do it in a one-on-one setting. You can get out and model it and say for me, right. I had the, um, engagement scores for my team.

So I can say, well, you know, I got feedback on XYZ and that was tough. And. It was tough for me to hear because I’m supposed to be leading the whole company on people and culture. And when I get out there and say something like that and admit that, um, it opened up the chance for everyone else, to be honest, and to answer the questions and have those questions be powerful for them.

And the managers were able to. Think deeply about the feedback and come up with some ideas and ways they wanted to address it, group. We could then have this great conversation around, Hey, across the different issues. We noticed that they stemmed from the same place, you know, maybe communication. That was a really big one.

Like some of the feedback is just a lack of communication on certain topics. And so showed our managers that they have a lot in common. Even if they’re on different teams and it sort of reaffirmed the commitment to sharing information and getting in front of the issues so that otherwise a separate narrative wouldn’t fill the void.

Didi: What are you most optimistic about for us for small businesses like yours in 2021? 

Amy Dalebout: It’s a big question. And actually, I think we have a lot to be optimistic about. We’ve learned a lot about resilience. There’s so much to look forward to. We learned that we could do business differently. Um, we can adapt and, and once, you know, all the restrictions are lifted, we can still keep parts that.

Of the different that were good, that we liked, we can blend it together. And so what I, what I think I’m really excited about is that we actually have a few more years of amazing learning ahead of us.

Rob: Hey, there it’s Rob with our first installment of the pops employee mailbag today’s submission comes from SF tech, bro, for 20, who writes Rob? I absolutely love your segment. You are totally crushing it. You really should get your own show. And I am saying that as a totally real person, and I’m definitely not just a plot device to move along today’s episode.

Anyway, I have my performance review coming up and was thinking of asking for a raise. I need the extra cash to fund my side hustles and cover moving expenses to Boise. Any negotiating tips. Well, thanks very much tech bro, for the shout-out and listener love. I certainly do it for the fans and the sponsor ad revenue and merchant sales.

I must admit that pain negotiation has never been my strong suit. I normally just take whatever they offer me and then try to make up the difference stealing office supplies and reselling power bars from the kitchen. But I never let lack of experience get in the way of offering my opinion. So here are a couple of ideas to get you going.

The key to a successful ASCA is timing and positioning for the first you’re going to want to wait until your boss is well into the feedback sandwich. You know, after they finished the opening, I like your zoom background and moved on to the do not reflect our mission and core values part that’s when you make your move point out your boss, then most of his frustrations with your performance are tied to the fact that he’s been subscribed to your base tier participant package.

All along this low-pay entry-level offering barely covers feigned interest meeting attendance and reactive bare minimum work output. Then you quickly introduce them to your most popular offering. The engaged package. This package has everything is looking for all the features of participant, but with important upgrades, like intrinsic motivation, discretionary effort, and proactive identification of opportunities, all for a very nominal price increase before sealing the deal.

You’ll want to give them a peek at your top-of-the-line offering. The high performer, this stream tier packaging extends the engaged package to include an act like an owner, work ethic, lack of threatening political ambition, and full nights and weekends availability. Don’t worry. No one buys the high-performer.

They can’t afford it. It’s just there to make the engaged package seemed like a relatively more attractive option. If he’s still on the fence, you can always dangle a discount in favor of switching from month-to-month payment, to an annual prepaid option. And not only helps you use the sticker shock of the upgrade.

But ensures you’re unfavorable for at least the next 12 months. Well, good luck tech, bro. I hope that gives you some food for thought. I’d stick around to see how it turns out. But I got to run. I’m late for a meeting. 

Didi: That’s Rob. I’m Didi, and this was PIVOT. If you have questions, you want us to answer on our show, check out the link in our show notes below and we’ll get it covered.