The end of quarter numbers review was almost two weeks exactly before the end of the quarter. Allie would have loved to have been one of the last teams to be reviewed, but Rick was not going to go that way. He always hit the big earners first so he could figure out how to spin the story to investors and press.
She walked into the conference room fifteen minutes early, and Arash was already there. He looked up from his computer when she walked in. “Katelyn is reprinting the handouts.”
“At this late stage?”
“She got really great numbers this morning. And we’ve got a backup in case we need to present the original deck.” He waved at an innocuous gray cardboard box on the table against the wall.
“Okay.” Allie hated last-minute prep, but today they needed every minute of good data.
Yosi and Christie walked in, chatting.
“You decided to come?” Allie smiled.
Christie replied, “You made your case. If Rick needs to be shown the big picture, I’m your woman.”
George had always done these reviews with just Pete and her. Allie had followed his lead last quarter, but this time she decided to present ideas as more of a team. Or at least a republic, with representatives from the key groups.
Lawrence came in then, carrying a gray box full of printouts. “Katelyn asked me if I’d drop these by.”
“Great,” Allie smiled. “Take a seat.” When she’d asked Lawrence to join, he’d demurred. He said surely there were better people to be at the meeting. But Katelyn had had Allie’s back, and now community and customer service had a seat at the table.
Lawrence rolled his eyes at her, but took a seat. He flipped through the printout in front of him and smiled.
Rob then shyly popped his head in. “Rick suggested I sit in, since I’ll be joining next quarter.” Yosi waved him in vigorously, and Rob took a seat next to his new mentor.
Rick came in then, chatting with another GM whom he shooed off as he took a seat. The GM closed the door behind himself, and Rick turned to Allie expectantly. Arash dimmed the lights at the front of the room by the projector.
Allie spoke carefully and clearly, her voice low and resonant. After years of working with noisy gamers, she knew how to make herself heard. “Rick, we’re here to share what we believe is the future of QuiltWorld. We’ve hit a vein of player happiness, and we’re looking for permission to tap it. Arash will start with the numbers. . . . ”
Arash took Rick through the hockey-stick-shaped graph. The numbers rolled along, mostly flat, and then flew upwards in the last ten days like a flock of startled birds. Not long enough to be a real trend, but big enough to make a person imagine it could be.
Christie then walked Rick through the new strategy, illustrated with sketches and video. And Lawrence stepped up to explain the customer-service calls were tilting positive and message-board activity was up. They didn’t have a lot of data, so they had to make what positive data they had sing. Yosi lent his gravitas with nods and the occasional “Exactly.”
Rick asked many sharp questions and Allie answered them honestly. Finally, Rick glanced up at the clock. “Okay, keep going.”
Allie felt her heart leap up. They’d done it!
“We’ll talk again soon.” He walked out the door. They’d done it . . . for now. Time for the really important meeting.
After lunch, her direct reports were gathered together in Joust, the biggest conference room. Allie stood. “Okay, folks! We’ve graded our metrics. Now it’s time to grade ourselves.”
A couple of folks looked apprehensive.
“These aren’t performance reviews. We’re just going to take a little time to evaluate how we are doing as a team. Remember the norms we set beginning of quarter?”
“Nope,” said Rob.
“Hush up, noob,” Noam joked. Rob grinned back.
“Luckily for all of you, the new and the absent-minded, they are up on the wall.”
“I made a poster,” Kendra confided to Christie.
Sure enough, there they were:
Trust good intent: Clarify before you criticize.
Meetings start within five minutes of the agreed-on time no matter what.
Make time to be people together—daily coffee klatch.
Be respectful in delivering what you promised and when holding others accountable.
Work is work: Disagreements and critique are not personal. Don’t make it or take it so.
Argue, decide, commit.
And more . . . The posters had been up in all the conference rooms for a month. Allie wondered if anyone noticed them. She hadn’t.
“Now I’d like everyone to type in the URL I’ve written on the whiteboard, and rate each of our norms 1 to 5. 1 is ‘We suck’ and 5 is ‘We live this norm’ and the rest are ‘Needs work,’ ‘Okay,’ and ‘Almost there.’” She wrote these on the board. Her team called up the survey, and the room grew silent as people filled in their responses. Allie had struggled about how to get this right. If they’d just put it all on the board, social pressure might have influenced opinions. If she had sent it out ahead of time, she knew half the folks wouldn’t have bothered to fill it out.
Ten minutes later, she realized she couldn’t tell who was done and who wasn’t. “Anyone need more time?”
Two hands went up. The others were working or fiddling around, who knew. A couple of minutes later, Allie got everyone’s attention by turning on the projector. There were the results. The room silently digested their own critique. “I like the sound of a daily coffee klatch.” Rob broke the silence. The ratings on “Make time to be people together” were skewed from 1 to 5. “So what happened to that?”
“We tried to do it at three, but not everyone came,” Kendra said.
“But Monday estaff is at three,” Allie admitted.
“So is the biweekly cross-team design critique,” added Carlton.
“I thought it was great,” said Noam. “Do we really need every single person to be there every single day for it to work?”
“I’d like it to,” Christie said. “Got me off my computer midafternoon.”
“I want to keep it as is,” Lawrence added. “It’s nice to know it’s there, and it’s not enforced fun. And I wouldn’t have ever learned Jheryn is a bowler, otherwise.”
Jheryn looked at his feet. “I have my own shoes,” he admitted.
Allie waited for the laughter to subside. “Okay, I motion we keep things as is for another quarter, and hold our next offsite at a bowling alley.”
The motion carried unanimously.
Rob was smart to pick a fairly safe one to start with, Allie thought. Time to dive a little deeper. “Tell me more about why we aren’t living up to ‘Argue, decide, commit,’” she said.
The team spent a lively afternoon working through their issues. At the end of the meeting, Allie took them all out to the neighboring Thai restaurant for an impromptu celebration.
Rob leaned over to her, and said softly, “You’re getting good at this boss business.”
“Starting to,” she said. Starting to learn a great team bosses itself, she thought.