Financial Ownership

A complement to Functional Ownership is Financial Ownership. We touched on this in Part 3: Make Sales Scalable, in the section in Chapter 13 titled “Jason's Advice to CEOs: Put Nonsales Leaders on Variable Comp Plans, Too.”

Not every employee is a fit for Financial Ownership (or Functional Ownership, for that matter). For those who are, there are infinite ways to pay employees in ways that are related to results. However you do it:

1. Provide a meaningful (to them) stake or Financial opportunity. If it's too small, they won't care. It could be through bonuses, profit sharing, equity, commissions, variable comp plans, or other avenues.
2. Train employees in what Financial Ownership means: How does the stock or commission plan work? If a person is confused about how it works, the ownership doesn't help! Whoever designed the Financial structure will vastly underestimate how complex it may appear to salespeople and employees. Earning 10,000 shares of stock might sound like a lot to a new employee, but they may not understand that it's only 0.01% of the company, and can easily end up being worthless depending on strike prices and liquidation preferences.
3. Publish accurate results so that employees know exactly where they stand in relation to their compensation and ownership, and see the “cause and effect” on their finances. What were the revenues this month? Attrition? Collections? Accomplishments and disappointments?
4. Educate employees on business, financial, and sales basics so that they better understand what drives revenue, profit, and growth, and can get a handle on where they can best make a difference in them.
5. Involve them in helping decide how Financial Ownership should work at the company. Give them a voice and respect it, whether it's related to how programs work across the whole company, or specifically with that single person.

When your company is newer, growing fast, or going through a transition, compensation and Financial Ownership programs may need to change, and change, and change again until you nail it down. The more you involve your people in the process of transition, even though it might slow the process down, the better the result for the company and all its stakeholders.

Remember, No Surprises: unless it's an unforeseen bonus, no one enjoys getting a new comp or profit-sharing plan sprung on them out of thin air.

Move People Around

You need to shake things up with yourself and your people: both (a) where people physically sit and (b) what they do for their job. Your office manager. Your top salesperson. A great collections person. A product manager. Maybe you.

We understand why you think this is a terrible idea at first glance. When an employee excels at a job, you want to keep them there.

You feel a little (or a lot) dependent on them, because you simply trust them to get the job done. And it's hard to imagine someone else doing it as well or even better. It's easy to see what you could lose by moving them. And hard to see what gains you might get from exposing them to other parts of the business. Look, if you're going through intense growth or change, maybe you shouldn't move people around until things settle down.

But otherwise, here's the paradox. By keeping them doing what they do best (today), they'll excel in that job (today). But if they get stuck there, at some point it's going to stifle them and you'll miss out on who they could become and how they could contribute in even bigger or broader ways.

If you have an office, a simple way to do this is to simply change where people sit every three or four months, including moving employees so that they sit next to new people. Don't change desks so often that people always feel unsettled, but often enough to ensure healthy variety for everyone. By sitting next to new people, everyone's networks, culture, and learning will be broadened and strengthened. And this is simple.

At Salesforce, I obsessed over the seating chart and how to sit new people next to veterans, and center team leaders with their subteams.

Have multiple people in one vertical division (like Financial Services) sit near each other while that industry is nailed. Once the learning slows down, break that group up and move employees to sit with experts from other industries, to learn from each other.

If there are remote workers in your company, find a way to get them together in person. However well Skype works, there's no replacement for face-to-face meetings.

Other Ways to Shake Things Up

• At in-person events, ban employees from sitting or talking to teammates, rather than meeting new people
• Internal social media sites and wikis
• Job rotation
• Apprentice, mentoring, and shadowing programs
• Pull a Freaky Friday executive switch, such as having the heads of sales and marketing switch jobs for X days
• Bring nonessential employees to customer visits
• Have employees conduct interviews around the company to identify problems and suggest solutions

Get employees to understand how the whole business works, not through slide presentations or reading, but by experiencing it. Your employees will develop empathy for others' functions. Have more powerful internal and customer conversations. Or at least appreciate how they fit into the big picture.

The Four Types of Employees

If you're all excited about the prior chapters and how you're going to get everyone on board and fired up with this new idea, hold on! Not everyone's going to embrace them. And that's okay.

As an owner, it's unfair and unrealistic to expect every employee to want the same things you do, in the same way and at the same time. And it's not the way to get the most out of them.

Not everyone is meant to be an owner or an entrepreneur; sometimes people are meant to be helpers. Someone needs to enter the data, punch the clock, dig the ditch, or follow up on the reminder. And even in those jobs, there is honor, variety, and a place for individuality and ideas.

You will have, you should have, variety in your workplace. Appreciate it and work with it, rather than trying to fight it. Help people find their individual strengths, desires, and genius, to work together as a group of talented individuals, not clones. Yes, even in what you may believe are clonelike jobs, like data entry, support, or in call centers. It's not the job that defines people; it's your culture, management, and expectations.

To help you focus your energy where it can make the most difference, we've laid out four (+1) types of employee attitudes. These aren't unchanging personality types, but a snapshot of how people are thinking and appearing to others at any one time.

We are not categorizing employees by how they think and feel inside their heads, but only by how they appear to others, based solely on their actions (or lack thereof).

The Four Types (+1)

Axis 1: Motivation (Ambition + Passion): What's the total amount of energy regardless if it's from ambition or passion that an employee demonstrates?

Axis 2: Agitation (Frustration + Communication): This isn't how agitated that person gets, but how actively and constructively they agitate for change.

1. Mini-CEO: This is your natural internal entrepreneur, who isn't afraid to take charge of a program and push it forward. They are naturally frustrated by most everything, because they can see how much better it can be and want to act to make it so. These employees can be a pain to manage but can also create big breakthroughs. They may or may not be long-term employees, depending on how far they can take the opportunity they have with your business.

   What to do: The bigger the challenge you can give these employees to bite into, and room to maneuver with it, the better. Being independent spirits, they may resist what they perceive as a waste of time or nonsensical, like complex budget planning, consensus building, and so on. Rather than demanding they comply, spend the time to educate them on why they are important.

2. Careerist: These are people who are content to climb the career ladder. Capable. Problem Solving. Trusthworthy. Dependable. Usually easy to manage. Once they have a lot of experience, or are senior at a big company, they are in danger of turning into clockers, unless they regularly refresh themselves.

   What to do: They mostly self-manage, as long as you keep up regular goal-setting and progress conversations, coming up with new opportunities for them to own, and challenging them where and when they need a push.

3. Clocker: Someone who is there only for the paycheck, clocking in and out and doing little else. A single parent who needs to get by and just pay the bills, and has no extra energy. A senior person who's just doing their time and keeping below the radar. A twenty-something struggling to pay rent, but putting all their extra energy into side passions like yoga classes, consuming hours of YouTube, or date-app surfing. Clockers are valuable to keeping things running, but don't expect anything extra out of them until they come to you asking how they can contribute more.

   What to do: Clearly define job expectations, and don't avoid hard conversations about meeting them. Check in occasionally to see if and when things change, and they either want to leave or are ready to tackle more.

4. Complainers are great at identifying problems, but either don't know how to fix them, make excuses, or are just plain stuck. They get just as frustrated as a CEO, but while a CEO will doggedly persist in finding a way to improve things, complainers … don't.

   What to do: There's nothing you can do for a real complainer except nod, smile, and do your best to solve the “actual” problem. “The leads I get are worthless” could be a real problem, or a complaint. You have to dig for truth to know. Every complaint doesn't need to be resolved, or resolved right away.

A fifth type: Toxic. A small percentage of people are sociopaths, psychopaths, chronic liars, or just plain toxic. They are abusive to work with or for. There's nothing you can do to change them. You can either (a) suck it up, or (b) quit, to find a nontoxic manager or team. If you manage one, you need to find a way to get them out of your company. If you work for one, get out.

There's nothing wrong or right about any of these types. It helps to better gauge what expectations you should have with them. Expecting a Clocker or Complainer to act like a mini-CEO is just going to annoy them and frustrate you. Expecting a Toxic person to start telling the truth or stop making excuses will result in chronic disappointment (in work or in love).