Culture is Connection: How to Empower Your Team with Purpose with Cory Sanford

Randy Wootton (00:04):

Well, hello everybody. This is Randy Wooten, CEO of Maxio and your host of SaaS Expert Voices, the podcast where we bring the experts to you to talk about what’s going on in SaaS today. What are some of the trends playing out for tomorrow and how you can take advantage of both the opportunities and the challenges we’re all facing? With me, I’m delighted to have Cory Sanford, a gentleman I’ve known for about five years join us. He’s been in HR for most of his career, starting as a retail banker, has great stories about a bank robber we might get into at some point. But moved in HR in 2007, has served in that role in several different companies. To his credit, two of those companies have been ranked number one best places to work. One was Auburn Crest Hospice, and the other one is Guidant Financial, where I’ve known Cory for the last five years. I’ve been on the board for a little bit longer than that, but I remember when Cory came on board. He’s also been at Cornell. He got his master’s there in 2019. He is been a part-time instructor around HR leadership and communication since that time. And then finally he’s the author of a new book, HR You Kidding me? Surprisingly Simple Steps to Unlock the Potential of People. And so welcome Cory.

Cory Sanford (01:18):

Thank you Randy. Great introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Randy Wootton (01:22):

Oh, it’s absolutely my pleasure. And really enjoy chatting with you both at Guidant and then when you came and did the keynote for DOXS in the Philippines, and I heard your story about how to be to build connections. We took that on board at our company and it’s really excited for what you’re going to be able to share with our audience. So first, let’s talk a little bit about Guidant. Can you talk what the company is, what it does? And we’ll talk a little bit more about how you’ve thought about building HR programs and connections broadly at a fully remote company.

Cory Sanford (01:55):

You bet. So I’m really proud to be at Guidant Financial. Been there over five years now. And at Guidant Financial like to say we’re experts in small business success. Our purpose is to help more people succeed in small business. It can be a lonely and challenging road, and we like to be the partner to help along that road. We have never met an entrepreneur or a small business owner that says, “I got into business to do paperwork.” And so we like to say, “Hey, we’ll take on paperwork in the terms of 401k administration and payroll and bookkeeping and tax.” And our specialty is actually small business financing where we can help tax and penalty free use retirement funds to roll into a business so you can start a business cash rich instead of through debt, cash poor, and then we’re along for the ride. We’ll take care of the paperwork so companies can take care of their purpose and their people and their business.

Randy Wootton (02:52):

That’s great. And that was one of the things I thought was fascinating, why I was so interested in the company when I first was exposed to Dave and Jeremy, gosh, 15, 16 years ago. Was this idea that people can take advantage of the retirement savings to fund a new initiative. And so the classic example you guys … You work with a lot of franchisees or franchisors … You want a Baskin-Robbins, you want to set up a new Taco Bell and you want to get out of your corporate job and you want to be your own owner, you’re going to bootstrap it. And rather than to your point taking debt with a bank, if you’ve been saving money through a 401 or a Roth IRA, you can use and leverage those dollars to get up and going. Is that right?

Cory Sanford (03:37):

You got it. You got it. That’s right. And we know that the IRS is picky and we’ve become experts in using those funds tax and penalty free. If you don’t do it right, there can be a lot of consequences there, but we are the specialists and the experts in helping you navigate those requirements in a way where you avoid taxes and penalties from the IRS and you can start a bonafide business using your retirement funds with cash.

Randy Wootton (04:03):

Yeah. I thought it was fascinating. One of the things I love is that all the board meetings, you bring this focus of the people you’ve helped start their businesses and how it’s changed their lives and you have these stories. And I remember the guy that had the bike shop. And so you are helping to fuel America and the economy of all these small businesses that are getting up and running and people living their dreams. And I think a lot of people don’t realize they have access to cash and without having to go get debt. The other point that you make, which we overlap now not that I’m Maxio we sell really the VC and PE backed companies and we sell the billing and finance, so a slightly different size company. We focus on B2B SaaS. Is you all are really working with the bootstrappers. You’re working with the people that are grinding it out and conscious of every single penny. And what you’re providing is this back office simplicity.

Cory Sanford (04:57):

That’s right.

Randy Wootton (04:57):

As you said, they didn’t want to go into business to do the paperwork or the back office and you help standardize it and make it simpler.

Cory Sanford (05:05):

That’s right. We’ve put four or $5 billion to work in the US economy. We’ve helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs. We have over 8,000 ongoing clients today. And we call those bootstrappers, we call them dreamers. They’re the dreamers.

Randy Wootton (05:18):

Dreamers.

Cory Sanford (05:20):

Yeah. They’re the dreamers. They’re they’re main street small business and the backbone of our economy here in the United States. And it’s a privilege to provide some resources to help them be successful for sure.

Randy Wootton (05:34):

Well, that’s awesome. Well, I think that’s a good segue into the primary topic for today, which is what does it take to be successful as a founder or what we would describe as a founding CEO or successful CEO. This dovetails with some of the work I’ve been doing around writing about the seven secrets of success for CEOs. I’ll give a quick introduction to that. But then you have a very specific view. And again, working with the companies you’ve worked with specifically in supporting them as an HR leader, but then also this broad set of dreamers that you’ve engaged with. So we’ll get there in just a second. But just as a reminder people who are interested in the seven secrets of success, at some point I’ll write a book, but you’re killing me that you’re already out in front and selling the book and activating it. It’s super inspirational and we’ll talk about that book specifically.

(06:21):

But in the interim, I’ve been writing on LinkedIn about the seven secrets to success at the high level. Number one is about overall results, delivering those results for shareholders and then just making sure you’re delivering on the business objectives. Number two, establishing a winning strategy so everybody knows what business they’re in. The third one, which I think we’re going to spend most of our time talking about today is shaping values and standards that will guide your company over time. The fourth is building an effective executive team because you only got one pair of hands and you’re going to need more people. Five is managing your board and investors and setting the right expectations if you are backed by a VC or PE versus many of the folks that you deal with are bootstrapped and they’re only responsible for themselves.

(07:01):

Six is allocating capital to balance the yield today. And then number seven, which I think we’re going to touch on a little bit as well, is investing in your tribe. Making sure you’ve got a mentor coach, peer group and personal advisory board. So I’ve talked about different elements of that at podcast, but Cory, why don’t you set up your framework for what it does it mean to be a successful CEO? I know you’ve worked with several great ones, two of whom Dave and Jeremy I know personally, and they’re just inspirations. But you’ve also had a lot of other exposure and experience. What are your basic principles or dimensions that you’d like to see great CEOs embody?

Cory Sanford (07:39):

Yeah. Thanks Randy and love the seven steps there, the seven secrets. Looking forward to the book. We can dive into what I’ve experienced with the most successful CEOs. And you’re right, I’ve had the privilege of working with some amazing ones. And here’s a couple of things that I’ve taken away. So as a vice president of culture and talent, the highest ranking human resources professional in the organization, I like to say my role is a culture steward. And I use the word steward because it’s the CEO that really is the culture definer and it’s the CEO’s responsibility to set clear values and principles and then be the ultimate example of living those values and principles. And I think that one of the most important ways that A CEO can do that is through storytelling and making sure that in the organization there is a mechanism to gather and share stories of how we’re serving our clients, how we’re living our values and principles, and that there are ways to cascade those values and principles throughout the organization.

(08:44):

Guidant does a number of those things really well. That’s a key element of the CEO role I believe. Another dimension is I’ve learned that the higher up you get in an organization, so certainly the CEO is as high as it gets, is the skill set shifts from needing to have all the answers to needing to have the best questions. It’s impossible for a CEO to know everything that’s happening in the business. They need to surround themselves with good people from whom they can gather the right information at the right time to make the right decisions. And they need to do that through asking the right questions of the team rather than feeling the pressure of having to have all the answers they can have the humility and the vulnerability to ask the right questions of the team members.

(09:29):

And last thing that I’ll say is something that Jeremy Ames our current CEO has said a lot is that as leaders we need to have strong opinions held loosely. Meaning we need to have some conviction and some commitment and we need to move forward strongly towards our purpose and our vision. At the same time, there needs to be this level of vulnerability and this level of humility to explore where we might need to make shifts or we might need to make improvements. And as the CEO’s role is to understand what’s happening inside and outside the organization, having those strong commitments and convictions toward where we’re going while opening themselves up for additional perspectives and insights will help make sure that we get to the right place at the right time.

Randy Wootton (10:15):

Got it. So four basic ideas. Let’s dig in a little bit. So starting with cultural steward versus cultural leader, I really like the idea that the CEO needs to be the chief storyteller. And often if you’re a founder that comes from the origin story in terms of what was the problem we saw? Why was there not a solution in place? What are we going to do? We rebels, we’re going to go change the world. And you get people to join the cause, and it’s very vision, mission oriented until you get a bunch of customers to start to scale scale. As cultural steward what do you think of the difference in terms of the roles? So you have the CEO telling the story. I’ve never been a founder, so it’s a slightly different storytelling that I do, but still emphasize that almost Aristotelian idea of pathos. How do you lead with emotion and how do you get people to connect both with heart and head through the stories you tell? As a steward though specifically, how are you supporting engaging, wrapping, amplifying, extending what the cultural leader is trying to do?

Cory Sanford (11:21):

Yeah. That’s a really great question. I’ll tell you a couple of things that we do at Guidant that I think we do really well. First of all, Jeremy is the CEO. Every week he asks the member of the leadership team to submit a weekly report. Wins of the week, challenges we’re experiencing. And every week we are expected as a leadership body to share at least one story of somebody who has lived a value or a principle in the organization. That then gets funneled or infused into a weekly Monday morning stand up, which is our all company meeting every week. Jeremy also shares a weekly CO email where he gives updates on the business. That’s a key place where he shares stories. And so as a culture steward, I ensure that people can see those that people have access to the values and principles, they have the tools to be able to report weekly on the stories that they’re seeing.

(12:11):

We use Microsoft Teams and we’ve created a channel called Cheers Channel where people can organically go in at any time and use a value in a principle to recognize a coworker for example. And so my role is to make sure that those places and mechanisms are in place. An additional way we do that is twice a year we have what’s called our people celebration. And we just this week are getting nominations from the team of people who have lived our values and principles. We get hundreds of amazing stories of people that are living our values and principles. That all gets funneled into nominations where we select values and principle winners in the whole organization and we celebrate them coming up in July, winners from each department for living our ACE values, adaptability, connection and excellence. And so me and my team, we orchestrate that process. So Jeremy has this vision of storytelling and living principles and values. We are the executors and the stewards of the process and the timeline and the information to ensure that we’re getting the right information up to him and throughout the organization to celebrate the great stories.

Randy Wootton (13:21):

Great. I think that idea … You’re helping to put it in the systems, processes, programs, ensuring accountability, visibility and ensuring it’s playing out equally across regions and by functions. And so there’s a consistency of the culture, right?

Cory Sanford (13:21):

That’s right.

Randy Wootton (13:39):

We’ll talk more about your book on that. That’s awesome. So I’d like this other point that you made about the hire you go up in the organization, the skill set you need to have is asking good questions, not having all the answers. And I think that’s actually one of the most thrilling and at the same time, terrifying aspects of being a CEO is you come up usually through a function. So my function was go to market. Primarily service some sales, but I wasn’t an engineer, I wasn’t a finance person, I wasn’t an HR person. And then all of a sudden you get into the CEO role and you’re overseeing all of that, not by yourself, but with the ELT. And the role of that first team is to come together to think about the business holistically. And so take off their functional leader hat and put on their Maxio first hat or for you Guidant first hat. And so you build this collective understanding of the business.

(14:34):

And I do think you move from a place of where you have a lot of confidence in terms of your point of view for solving problems within your function to now being sometimes a neophyte. Like if it’s your first tour on the ELT as an engineer, you may never have thought about marketing or cared about it. You’re like, “Oh, the marketing team does that.” But if you’re in a high functioning executive team, the assumption is you’ve got smart people there and you want them all leaning in. And the way they lean in is through asking good questions. And not all questions are good, I will tell you that.

Cory Sanford (15:07):

Fair.

Randy Wootton (15:08):

So I do think it’s important to pick your shots and to be deliberate and intentional in the questions that you’re asking. I know that’s one of the things that I wrestle with is when people are presenting information, I’m always excited and want to get in and have the conversation and ask questions. But what’s the filter you put on so that you’re asking questions, they’re going to move the conversation further or deeper in terms of an exploration of a significant business issue. Have you seen CEOs that are better Socrates than others? Like those that lead with inquiry? How would you define a good question in the right question?

Cory Sanford (15:47):

Yeah. I think it depends on the audience and the timing. I’ll give you a couple of examples that I’ve seen some CEOs do really well. Jeremy Ames, again, I’ve mentioned him a lot, someone I look up to and I work with closely right now, but he is somebody who twice a year before we have our annual strategic planning and our mid-year strategic planning, we have town halls and we rotate the questions that we ask. We have three primary focuses. One is our client experience, one is our employee experience and one is our values and principles. And we rotate where we focus on each of those. And those town halls focus on let’s say client experience for example. We’ll say, “Hey, I wanted to hear all the places that we are doing a good job of creating a great client experience.” Again, that’s another place to generate these stories.

(16:27):

But then I’ll say, “Help me see around corners. What am I not seeing in the business right now where we are not providing a good client experience?” And this provides, I would say, more of a long list to start generating a long list of ideas where then we can drill down with a leadership team to say, “Hey, this is what we heard from the team. What additional insight or perspective can you offer here in terms of helping us understand a priority or the severity of a problem?” So that as we think about strategic planning, where we can figure out our biggest opportunities. An additional way with the leadership team is we say, “Here’s what we know and here’s what we don’t know. And does anybody have any additional information to share around what we do know? Is that right? And then here’s what we don’t know. Does anybody have any additional information to help us know maybe what we don’t know or provide insights?” And then exploring what is our biggest opportunity or priority based on our purpose in the direction of our business? How can we gather the information so we can make the right decisions?

Randy Wootton (17:33):

Yeah. I love that. One of the ways we talk about it Maxio is the truth is on the front lines. And so if you really want to know what’s working and not working, you go to the people that are actually daily interacting, either trying to close deals or deal with customers or get code out the door. And so I think one of challenges, the more senior you get, the easier it is to get caught up in internal meetings and where you’re not spending time deliberate intentional time with people on the front lines and saying, what’s working, what’s not. Doing that allows you then to build a more holistic understanding of what’s happening and then you can pattern match. And so to your point, and then you apply judgment in terms of what are the things that are really systemic, they’re going to make a big impact if you lean into. We get paid to take on the hardest problems. The ones that are cross-functional.

(18:17):

The other thing you bring up, which I think is great, is this idea of how do you create the context for different types of conversations? And so there’s this distinction in time around Kairos versus Kronos, Kronos time being the time of the watch and Kairos being God’s time and God’s time is where you’re divorced from the sense of time unfolding. And I think there’s a magic if either the cultural steward or the CEO is able to create space and context for the executives to sit in Kairos time and let the subconscious come forward and start to talk about, okay, so what’s really happening here versus … Or that’s more of that divergent thinking. You’re inviting the divergent thinking versus the conversion thinking, which is my natural tendency is there’s a problem, let’s go solve it. What are three options here? Let’s do an ROI analysis and go. Ready, fire, aim, go, go, go, go, go, go. My default is always like, go get stuff done.

(19:19):

And I think the opportunity, especially as an executive is are you doing the right things? Are you spending the time and energy on the most important? And I think to your last point that you made, there’s this set of knowns, there’s the set of known unknowns, and then there’s this set of unknown unknowns, which you have no idea. And so unless you’re able to tap into the Kairos time and create space for that divergent thinking, they never come forward. They never come forward.

(19:51):

Okay. Well we’ve talked a lot about the framework you set up and within that you talked about how you, in your all hands, you rotate through the client experience, the employee experience, and then the values and principles. And so I’d love to come back into what I describe as the third secret of success, which is shaping the values and the standards. And this is, I think at the core of your book around culture is connections. Can you frame this up for a little bit in terms of what that means, what you mean by that? And then we’ll go through a couple of examples.

Cory Sanford (20:24):

Sure. A couple of things. So I’ll bet our listeners have heard all of the quotes about culture and how important it is. And if we said, “Hey, how important is culture in your business?” You’d get a lot of people say, “It’s the most important thing and we’re striving towards it.” But as soon as I say, “Well, how do you measure it? Or what does culture mean?” It starts to get really fuzzy and really vague and hard to measure. And that was hard for me as somebody who is a culture steward, culture is in my title, so I better understand what that means. And a few years ago at Guidant, we were making a transition to be fully remote and we realized that in order to do that we had to shift from being on-site management and policy driven to being distributed and values driven.

(21:16):

And as we thought about culture, I realized that I wasn’t satisfied with any of the definitions that I’ve seen. Now. There’s a lot of very good, technically accurate definitions of culture out there. What I realized though is they weren’t simple, they weren’t actionable and they weren’t measurable. And so as we were thinking about our transition to fully remote, I thought about what to me makes a great culture. And to me it’s culture is connection and it’s connection to three things. It’s culture is connection to the purpose of the organization, why we exist, the problem that we’re trying to solve, the clients that we serve. It’s connection to the leaders of the organization. Do we trust and are we inspired by the senior leaders of the organization and the values and principles that they’re setting and living? And then the third is connection to each other. Are there opportunities for us to feel part of something bigger than ourselves through a team and through a connection with other members of the team?

(22:09):

And so when we broke culture down to that level, culture’s connection to those three things, we started asking our team, how connected do you feel to these elements and what is it that’s helping drive that connection and what might be missing? And with that measurement, we now have actions to take and we can now improve in a simple way what connection means. So for example, if we see that connection is low for our clients, we know that there’s opportunities for storytelling and opportunities for client stories and videos that we can share with the team. In fact, our connection to our clients was low last year. And so this year we have an annual guided connection event. It’s an all-day virtual connection event.

(22:59):

Some people think we’re crazy for even attempting something like that to connect all day virtually through Zoom. We just had it a couple of weeks ago and the entire focus was on our clients. So we created an event where Jeremy shared his origin story and how Guidant came to be. We then had a client of the year discussion where people brought nominations and we voted on who was our client of the year. We did a small business simulation where we had lemonade stands and we had to buy and sell and create stands. And then we went out and what we did was called Meet Main Street where we got out to small businesses and Guidant paid for us to go and talk to the people that work there. And so that’s just an example of how culture’s connection can be simple, it can be measurable and it can be actionable. And we just measured the team’s connection. Just this week, I shared this with the team, just this morning actually at our Monday morning standup meeting, I shared the results of our quarter two survey and connection at 4.68 out of five was the highest in the three years that since we’ve been measuring connection that way in culture that way. It’s because we make deliberate intentional actions to connect people to those three different elements of culture.

Randy Wootton (24:10):

Got it. Do you break that score down into the three components? So how connected do they feel to the purpose, how connected they feel to leaders and how connected do they feel to each other?

Cory Sanford (24:19):

You got it. That’s right.

Randy Wootton (24:20):

And so the aggregate score was 4.68 out of five.

Cory Sanford (24:24):

You got it. You got it. And so we get an aggregate score so we can compare quarter to quarter, but then we have this individual score that we can manage and say, “Wow. We’re really dipping in this area or really being really strong in this area. What can we learn to do well? Keep doing that. And then what maybe are we missing to help build a stronger connection?” So great summary. You said it exactly right.

Randy Wootton (24:46):

And I wanted to spend a little bit of time on each one of those. I think you’ve given us a great example of connecting to the purpose and what to do there. And so that client event that you had, that was just last week?

Cory Sanford (24:57):

It was in May, so May 10th. And we do two. One for our folks that are working core hours and then we have a global workforce. And so a lot of them don’t work our core hours and so we have a special event for them as well. So we do the same event twice, but it was in mid May.

Randy Wootton (25:12):

And how many people total is in the company?

Cory Sanford (25:16):

Yeah, we have about 250. We have about 130 roughly in the United States and the remaining are outside of the United States. We’re in eight total countries.

Randy Wootton (25:27):

And what was your participation rate in this event of the 250 people that could have either gone core hours or after hours, what was your sense in terms of number of people-

Cory Sanford (25:38):

It was about 90% participation. Some people were just out of the office and didn’t attend, but the expectation was everybody would be there. So we’d be around 90%.

Randy Wootton (25:45):

And what percent, if you don’t mind me asking, of the quarterly survey that you provide, what percent respond?

Cory Sanford (25:52):

Yeah. We have about 70 to 75% usually that participate in that.

Randy Wootton (25:56):

Well, congratulations. That’s incredible. Both setting up a virtual event. It’s one of the things we’re wrestling with at Maxio. We do a hybrid, not fully remote. And so we have this thing we call Maxio days and trying to figure out once a month what could we do to bring people together to build that connection on all three dimensions, purpose, leaders and people. The remote ones are a little bit different and harder to create as great experiences, I think, than the ones when everyone comes into the office and we go out and do a service project or something like that. But I think to your broader point about being deliberate about it and investing in it is really important. So we’ve talked about purpose. What about leaders? You were talking a little bit about Jeremy in particular, and I love the weekly emails that he’s sending. Do you have another example of creating connections to leaders other than Jeremy or at another company where you facilitated the leadership connection and the story that you would tell around that?

Cory Sanford (26:54):

Yeah. You bet. So I like to say there’s no silver bullet in leadership. There’s not. I’ve looked high and low. I’ve worked with great leaders, I’ve read as many books as I can get my hands on. There’s not a silver bullet in leadership. The closest thing that I have found though is effective in regular one-on-ones. The most important relationship in the workplace is the direct supervisor relationship. And so at Guidant we’ve really invested in making sure we’re hiring good people leaders, not just technical experts, but these are people that may actually have less technical expertise. But we know are actually going to be the better people leaders because that relationship is so important.

(27:32):

And then we have an expectation that we have effective and regular one-on-ones between the supervisor and each direct report. Has to happen at least monthly. And we’ve provided training and tools, even a self-assessment to gauge how well am I doing at these effective one-on-ones. Because that one-on-one is a place where all the leadership magic can happen. You can set and review goals, you can delegate, you can coach, you can explore and do discovery. If somebody’s underperforming, you can gather feedback. All of the elements of leadership, a great leader can take place in those effective and regular one-on-ones. And so where we’ve invested there has been I think, critical to our success.

(28:16):

For example, in the most recent quarter two survey, we evaluate 10 work factors and the support of a supervisor was our highest score. 4.8 out of five. Out of all the 10 work factors support of a supervisor was 4.8. We believe that that is high leverage score that’s impacting all of the other elements like connection to purpose and connection to each other and work-life balance. And I have the tools to do my job and those other important work factors. But we really invest in that first direct supervisor level role.

Randy Wootton (28:52):

That’s interesting. I heard someone say at some point that people join companies because of the vision or the mission. They stay because they have a friend and they leave because they have a bad manager. And I do think to your point, that ability to make an impact on a manager’s effectiveness is your leverage point. I have had the good fortune to be some great companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, which invested a lot in management excellence. It’s one of the things that I’ve brought with me to each company I’ve gone to is the first start with a leadership framework in terms of the great leader framework. How do you set up the ELT for success and then going right after that manager cadre to help build their skills, give them experiences. Because if they’re not good, then the six to eight people are reporting to them will just shut down. And so it’s a super high leverage. And so I think that’s a great point.

(29:46):

And I think the regular one-on-ones … I still have a standard one-on-one agenda that I want people to fill out. And I think of it as a way for us to also reduce the randomization. So rather than sending a bunch of emails, I drop things into the one-on-one, if they want me to review stuff, we can do it asynchronously. And so there’s a way to really try to maximize the time that you have together focused on the most important things versus just an ongoing barrage of questions and Slack messages.

Cory Sanford (30:15):

You got it. So smart. So smart. Yep. That’s one of the major advantages of those one-on-ones. In fact, people will send me a message, people on my team, Hey, do you have time to discuss this? And I said, “Hey, do we need to discuss it right now or is it something that can wait until Friday when we have our meeting?” “Oh, good call. We’ll wait until Friday. I’ll put that on the agenda. You got it.”

Randy Wootton (30:32):

Yep, that’s perfect. All right, well let’s go to the last one, people. Clearly you’ve been talking all around this, but do you have a specific example of how to build connections with people? So I think of that primarily being in-person and the fact that you guys are doing remote, I appreciate the virtual connection event as one of those things. But what else are you doing in terms of examples either at Guidant or other companies to build that connective tissue with people?

Cory Sanford (31:00):

Yeah. Thanks for the question. A couple of good things that I think that we’re doing that we’ve seen success on is … Again, when we were transitioning from in-office to fully remote, we put our heads together and said, “Boy, we’ve got to figure out a way to recreate this break room feel, these organic interactions.” And I asked a couple members of my team that are still with me, said, “Hey, I would love for your insights here.” And they did a lot of thinking and brainstorming and testing and we created a break room channel in Microsoft Teams. It’s literally called the break room. So if you want to debate who’s going to win the Super Bowl or if you want to find a good recipe or you want to share pictures of your vacation or your pets, that is the place to go. It’s this really fun organic place. It’s very active where people share all kinds of things like that and learn to connect with each other.

(31:47):

For new hires, we assign them a partner in crime, we call it. We believe that … I like to say that a good onboarding is the best recruiting insurance. And so investing in onboarding. When emotions are high, the chance for high leverage and high success is equally high. And so when people are nervous starting a job, we know we can make a big impact by investing there. So we give them a partner in crime. Somebody that they can ask all the questions. Hey, remind me how do I find this information? Or are those two related or when’s payday? Something they may not feel comfortable asking their supervisor something that first week they’ve got a partner in crime that they develop an individual personalized relationship with that person. So we’ve got the break room, we’ve got partners in crime at onboarding. We actually have two committees at Guidant. One is our connection, opportunity and growth committee. They monthly are putting on events that are just creating opportunities for people to opt into connecting. We play games. We have-

Randy Wootton (32:50):

Is one for US and one is for off-hours?

Cory Sanford (32:54):

Good question. So that is one committee, our connection opportunity and growth committee. The second committee we have is a diversity equity and inclusion committee. And I love this. We believe that everybody deserves to feel a sense of belonging at Guidant and this committee is committed to providing information and awareness. We’re in eight different countries and they do a great job of helping us celebrate or understand holidays in other countries, for example. They bring us together for quarterly discussions. We just recently had one about military service and what that means in each of the different countries and we’ve learned about different cultures and different customs in different places around different holidays. And so that’s a committee that’s bringing us together to create a sense of belonging for all of us. Regardless of our age or our location or our interests, they’re bringing us together to have conversations. There’s three examples of things that we’re doing to really invest and be intentional about connection to each other.

Randy Wootton (33:52):

That’s great. That was going to be the segue to the next section, which is around best practices. And you’ve called out already the events and being delivered intentional about the events. The good onboarding. I love the way you described that as the high leverage moments of when emotions are high, there’s an opportunity to make a great impact. No one forgets their first day or last day at being at a company. I think there’s also a lot around performance management and people’s anxiety of going into performance management and having that be a high leverage moment. Your theory is a little bit different than what I have done in my past where it’s less is more. Can you talk a little bit about your performance management construct and how you get value out of doing less? I think everyone in my organizations would be excited if I was less focused on robust performance management. But I think you guys have a really interesting insight on that front.

Cory Sanford (34:44):

Yeah. So I’ll just say that I am fascinated by the idea of leverage. Just as leaders and as HR professionals, in my case, there are a million things that we could be spending our time on and there are a million cool ideas that we could be considering. And performance management I think is one of those. I’ve tried doing a lot of different performance management techniques. There’s a lot of tools and systems, there’s a lot of approaches like 360. There’s people who do them twice a year or quarterly. And at Guidant as sophisticated or as advanced as I like to maybe think we are in terms of how we think about culture and remote work, we use a Word document, a one-page Word document once a year that the employee fills out as a self-evaluation.

(35:36):

Here’s what I’m most excited about, here’s my accomplishments, here’s the values that I’m totally aligned with. Here’s where my goals I’d like to be for next year. And then the supervisor fills out a very similar form that basically says things like, “Hey, here’s some successes. Here’s where you live values really well. Here’s where I’d like to see some focus or some intention over the next year.” We do that once a year. It’s very simple. It’s one-on-one. There’s no 360s. It’s not quarterly, there’s not a system. It all gets sent to our human resources professional person on my team and they make sure that they are done well, they’re thorough, and then we’re not getting ourselves into trouble or things like that with things that might be said. And our purpose is to really foster a communication and a discussion and a dialogue. And this is simply the tool to create a good conversation and a good relationship that will carry them in the next year. Rather than focusing so much on just the mechanics, we focus on the intent of the conversation and it being celebratory and inspiring and future focused.

Randy Wootton (36:43):

I love that. I think the idea of being clear about the intention of fostering the relationship building trust. I always talk about software being a people business and a people business is how do you engage with people? It’s through relationship. What’s the core cornerstone of a relationship? It’s trust. How do you build trust? Transparency around expectations, consistent and regular feedback. Everyone has a bias, but just when you’re seeking out that feedback, you feel like it’s being honest and open and balanced. And so creating a mechanism that is easy to do, I think is helpful. I think the only thing that I wonder is not everyone can get an A. Not everyone can get the raise, especially if you’re doing a performance-based culture. So how do you ensure … Do you do a calibration exercise? Do you do a scoring mechanism? How do you create differentiation in the feedback that then ties to the monetary rewards that people are going to expect? If you tell me I’m a hero, but then I don’t get a merit increase, but I know George did, I’m going to be pissed. So how do you bring those two things together?

Cory Sanford (37:57):

Yeah. You mentioned calibration, so I want to bookmark that and come back to that in a moment. And I’ll answer your question directly here. Yeah. So we use a simple meets expectations, exceeds expectations, does not meet expectations. And we have really clear criteria of what that means and we share that in advance. For example, to exceed expectations, you have to significantly outperform your goals. So someone who gets a hundred percent of their goals, you met expectations 105 or 10% of your goals, awesome. You still met expectations. And if you’re in a sales role, those commissions you benefited financially from some of those commissions. It’s exceeding that significantly. Maybe 120, 125, 130, and or you’re making significant contributions outside of your role. That’s how we define exceeds expectations. So you’re participating on a committee, you helped with a pilot project, you’ve done something else that we can demonstrate and document.

(38:53):

And so in that way, both the employees upfront know what that looks like each year. And then the supervisors are empowered to be able to say, “Hey, this is where you fall.” And it is awesome to meet expectations in our organization And it is elite to exceed expectations because this is what that means. But we do have people that do that. I want to come back to the calibration piece really quickly, and that is before I joined Guidant, so over five years ago, they did a calibration exercise. Now the company was about half the size that it is today, but it still took three days roughly.

Randy Wootton (39:31):

Oh my gosh. Holy smokes.

Cory Sanford (39:35):

It took two or three days for every leader to share, here’s where I’m rating somebody, here’s the amount that I want to give them. And all the leaders had a chance to weigh in on all these individual performances. And when I joined the team team and suggested, can we please just test a much simpler method? And when we did that, and we’ve stuck with it for five years, and that’s because every time we do the performance management, I still have long-term supervisors say, “Every time we do this, I’m so grateful that this is our process and that there isn’t this debate and fierce, intense discussion or debate over a 10th of a percent that somebody’s getting in their paycheck.” So I still get people complimenting the process now and how simple it is because it really is to drive more of the conversation and the relationship than it is to …

Randy Wootton (40:32):

Are you still doing calibrations though? It just isn’t a group thing.

Cory Sanford (40:33):

Well, yes. What I would say is they’re still reviewed by our human resources team. We help them say, “Okay. Hey, yeah, this is how you rated them. This is great. Hey, if you’re an exceeds expectations here, and this is the criteria, we’re going to need to see a little bit more shared here in this performance review to justify or demonstrate that they met this requirement or criteria for exceeding expectations.” And so the calibration happens really with the human resources team to say it meets the criteria, or they might need a little help to get there, but that’s the extent.

Randy Wootton (41:14):

But it’s not a beauty contest.

Cory Sanford (41:16):

That’s right. That’s right. And we set the percentages associated up front is what an exceeds will get or meets, or below expectations. So a lot of that confusion is taken away by sharing that up front. Supervisors job really is just to document, review, celebrate, have a conversation and rate according to those standards, and then they have some help if they need it.

Randy Wootton (41:42):

But you always have the challenge that there’s never enough budget. Do you assign budget at the supervisor level and say you have this many dollars, and so they give a exceed expectation that person’s getting the 4% raise, but they only have enough that they can only give one exceed expectation, or how do you manage the budget conversation?

Cory Sanford (42:01):

Yeah. So we set the budget at a percentage level at the leadership team level. And we use prior data around how many people ended up falling into each of these categories to back ourselves into an estimate of where we think it might be. So we use the dollars that we have available and we back into that with prior data to try to set what we think is going to be the right numbers for each of those categories.

Randy Wootton (42:32):

Got it. I think that that helps to have done it a couple of cycles. Awesome. Well, we’re almost at time. I would like to just shift. There’s so many more things we had talked about in the pre-brief I wanted to get to, I might have to do a part two.

Cory Sanford (42:44):

Happy to.

Randy Wootton (42:45):

But just to close out with the speed round. So the speed round as a reminder, there’s three things. One is what’s your favorite metric and why? What’s your favorite business book and why? Other than your own book. Who’s your favorite influencer and why? So Cory, what’s your favorite metric?

Cory Sanford (43:00):

So I’m going to show you my water bottle. It says data nerd on my water bottle. Somebody saw that and thought of me. I absolutely love data. I love metrics. One of my favorite metrics though to measure is employee referrals. To me, that is a really, really sneaky and fun and indicative measurement of culture. If we have high levels of our team members that are inviting their friends and family and network into the organization, I believe that … So that is something we’ve tracked for a long time. And I think that that’s a really, really important measurement of the health of the culture.

Randy Wootton (43:38):

That’s great. Favorite business book?

Cory Sanford (43:41):

So How To Win Friends and Influence People is a book that changed my life. I try to read it every year. But I think that people might roll their eyes. That’s a really common answer maybe. So what I will share is my second favorite is Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey. That’s another really game changing book for my career where again, it puts measurements to trust and it gave me actionable insights to say, “That’s the leader that I want to be. Here’s a path for me to get there. Where am I at today and how do I get there?” So Speed of Trust is a book that I recommend to everybody. Everybody on my team, that’s a book that I always recommend because I speak that language a lot, and it’s great to have that common language.

Randy Wootton (44:22):

Yeah. I was exposed to it when I was at Microsoft, so I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago. And at that time had a great leader, Anna Collins, who really was bought off in this idea of people and relationships and trust. And we brought them in that group to come and facilitate a workshop for a huge organization that she oversaw about the speed of trust and how to put that into place. It’s scientifically based. It’s not a foo foo Who Moved My Cheese type book. It really is powerful, lots of insights and directly applicable to any leader in any stage of your career. But I think it really does underscore this idea of being in relationship and how do you build trust and how do you decay trust as well. And so if you feel like you’re not trusting someone, how do you define that? And then how do you take a breakdown and turn it to a breakthrough? How can you turn a relationship around? I think it’s very practical advice. Great Recommendations. All right. Favorite influencer?

Cory Sanford (45:18):

Yeah. Look, I’ve mentioned Jeremy Ames a lot today, and I know that this might feel like a Homer play, but look, Jeremy Ames is the CEO and a co-founder of Guidant Financial. He has a compelling story and a long list of accomplishments and successes. And he has given a lot back to the community through Entrepreneurs’ Organization and other places. And he has just recently, in the last few months, started being really active on LinkedIn. And his insights and stories are fascinating ,they’re compelling, they’re fun, they’re funny. And I’ve just enjoyed hearing more about him and his life and behind the scenes of what’s made him such a great CEO and leader and co-founder at Guidant.

Randy Wootton (45:58):

I would agree. I’ve known Jeremy a really long time, but it’s only relatively recently that he’s been writing on LinkedIn .and it’s been so much fun to get to know him more personally. He has a great style. He’s engaging. He’s always transparent and honest, but I think he has a strong point of view that he’s willing to share. And it’s been a lot of fun. So I would recommend that to folks. And he’s got incredible experience in this space of early stage startups and how to get companies funded and be successful. And so I think he’s met thousands of companies and has a lot of experience from which to do some pattern matching. So yeah. Great recommendation. Well, Cory, thank you very much for your time. Really appreciate it. As always, look forward to continuing the conversation.

Cory Sanford (46:38):

Randy. Super fun. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure to chat with you.