Framework
B players, not C players, kill organizations
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman's view that B players are the silent threat to companies: there are many of them, they're generally tolerated, and they coast as 'passengers' rather than getting addressed like obvious C players.
“Organizations are not getting killed by C players. Everyone knows who they are, and the performance is eventually addressed. The people who kill organizations are your B players. It's a scourge of the enterprise because there are many and they are generally accepted. Often they are seen not as bad enough to fire, but not good enough to keep. They are the ultimate passengers.”
Steal thisAudit your team for tolerated B players and shed the dead weight, not just the obvious bottom performers.
Framework
One metric: compensate the whole company on a single number
Slootman compensated the entire ServiceNow exec team on one performance metric, rejecting the 'balanced scorecard' as the worst idea to come out of academia. Focus, he argued, means deciding what you are NOT going to do.
“People say they want focus, but their actions do not bear it out. Quite the opposite. Focus is hard once you understand what it really means. It means what are you not gonna do?”
Steal thisPick one top-level metric and compensate everyone on it instead of diluting focus across three competing scorecards.
Take
A strong POV attracts the right people and repels the rest
Slootman's argument that taking a strong stance on how you run your company self-selects your workforce: it attracts people who want that environment and repels those who don't. The turnover is painful but it's how you reach high performance.
“if you take a strong point of view on how you're going to run your company, you will just attract the people who want to be in a company run that way, and you will repel people who do not want that in their company. And it will be painful, there will be turnover, but in the end, that's like how you get high performance.”
Steal thisState your company's operating philosophy bluntly to filter candidates before they join.