You have to align what the business needs with the human strategy.

They sound like the absolute essentials for a true partnership. You could work together without one of those legs, but you can’t be great partners without all three. And obviously the presence of all three of those elements would change the velocity of value created by both the company and by the People function itself.

One hundred percent. Because you can speak a shorthand — if the CEO and CHRO are really aligned on what the business needs and on the value of the People function, and you have mutual respect for each other, you can go through really hard things and make faster decisions. You can execute programs and implement them more consistently.

And candidly, I love this. In fact, I'll you tell an OKR story from our last leadership alignment session. Tina’s leadership team – the entire L2 — were walking through the key results for our employee engagement objective to build a thriving culture at GHX, and the OKR facilitator said, “Okay, what are the interdependencies for your success?” And literally everybody giggled, and they're like, “We're all dependent!” This is just a program, and while I run the program, the leaders have to do the work. When you're rolling out a program like employee engagement, or performance management, or talent intelligence — which is our nine box program at GHX — it requires every leader to be bought in. And if your CEO isn't bought in, the chances that his or her direct reports are bought in is pretty low.

Yeah, it's very very low. That’s a great OKR story because it reflects a real maturity of cross-functional recognition at the level of the leaders just below the CEO. It's amazing and awesome that interdependency is the default assumption at GHX. Especially at large companies, you often find small kingdoms at the top, whose leaders think that they can be successful alone – they don't always see the interweaving of all of the functions, agendas and objectives into the company's best outcomes. Too often the only two cross-functional players, the CEO and the CHRO, are trying to get everybody to realize, “We actually are in this together. You're not each in it alone, tolerating the other people — we have to converge.”

Yes, and after the CEO has brought everyone together again and again and again, the aha! moment when they finally do realize, “oh, we'll actually move faster if we call out and align on where our overlap is. We will have more effective allocation of resources and a common definition of success.” So they stop working like two year olds playing in a sandbox but each doing their own thing, which creates redundancy and inefficiency and and drag on the system.

When you're rolling out a program like employee engagement, or performance management, or talent intelligence, it requires every leader to be bought in. And if your CEO isn't bought in, the chances that his or her direct reports are bought in is pretty low.

Let's talk about OKRs. GHX has been using them for quite some time, starting with defining the CEO's objectives and how they align to the long-term strategy, and then what priorities the organization is mobilizing on. What does that program look like? And then take us through performance management and how you think about it.

This is one of my favorite topics. At GHX we have a very rigorous OKR calendar, and it is set at the beginning of every year. There is a rhythm and a consistency to how we run OKRs. Our L1 objectives are set with the CEO scorecard, then the L2s and their L3s. And then we align at the L2 level, and then we align at the L3 level. All of those are cross-functionally aligned. The functional leaders — sales, marketing, tech, product — come together and debate prioritization, identify interdependencies, and talk about where we have linked or shared KRs across the organization. Then we roll those OKRs out to our teams across the business, and then they can align their OKRs to the leadership's priorities.

These are not “sit back with your popcorn and watch everybody debate” meetings. These are “leaned in, WorkBoard up, get into the nitty gritty around how we ensure the organization is set up for success” sessions. And we have the right people in the right roles focusing on the right work to drive the highest value outcomes.

Now, as you'll imagine, the most challenging conversations are when two people want to prioritize two things that can't exist in the same quarter, right? And we have to have those difficult conversations around trade-offs, et cetera. But we don't just pretend we can do it all — that was a habit we had to break. We don't say, we'll just add 20% more work to everyone's plate and expect that we're actually going to have a good outcome. And that took practice and work and failing and learning and growing and trying again next quarter. The amount of OKRs we had two years ago is very different than the amount of OKRs we have today.

In our most recent OKR cadence meeting, our product function and our customer experience function both had teams working on data quality. And when we looked at CX leaders’ OKRs and product leaders’ OKRs, it was like a Venn diagram where the two circles were touching, but not overlapping. The two circles needed to overlap for the teams to be successful; they had to have some shared key results.

Both leaders came with a deep enough understanding of the problem of the resources needed, and by the time we left the meeting, we had rewritten the KRs and realigned some timing to make sure that both teams could be successful with each other, instead of in spite of each other. If we hadn't had our cadence conversation, both teams would be running in parallel, and predictably in mid-quarter, we would have an escalation and a whole bunch of fire drills. So the disciplined process, along with a good understanding of how to write and measure OKRs, has helped us be really successful.

That's an example of the leadership team actually doing the hard work to work on the business: the deep work of thinking it through, having the compromise and reconciliation discussions, and actually optimizing for GHX outcomes. Doing that work will prevent them from spending the first quarter deep in the weeds working in the business because stuff's gone wrong.

That's right.

It's a great example of leaders operating collectively as a leadership team as opposed to function leaders skipping the hard conversations — or as you point out, just piling on instead of trading off.

Right? And you often hear leaders say, “I wish I could spend more time proactively in the business, but I'm so reactive.” There's this conscious recognition that how I'm spending my time isn't actually the most valuable. And candidly, as a leader, I don't enjoy it, but it feels like there's no way out. We're just sort of stuck in this pattern of reactivity. And I think at GHX, we have learned that the OKR rhythm and cadence and discipline does help us spend more of our time in the proactive on the business than in the reactive.

And when we do have to react — because inevitably, things do happen — we don't have to spend three meetings getting all of the leaders the right context they need to make a good decision, or three months of data, because we all have visibility: This is a project/goal/outcome that we are working on, this is what has gone wrong – now how do we lean in and figure out how to problem solve? So when we have to react, we're better equipped to react intelligently and go faster than those context making meetings where you're trying to get everyone on the same page. And our CEO, who sits in every single one of those OKR alignment meetings, also has the context she needs about what's happening across the business, so when she has to make a decision, it's not the first time she's hearing this project is happening.

At GHX, the OKR cadence and discipline helps us spend more of our time in the proactive on the business than in the reactive.

Yeah, stuff will go wrong; external stuff will happen. And your response time is a source of advantage.

And full transparency. In the early days of adopting OKRs and the OKR methodology, we had to overcome the challenge of spending time proactively while you were still in the pattern of reacting. There was a learning curve on how to do OKRs well. As a People leader, I had a really hard time measuring some of the things I wanted to do; I really struggled with good KRs. I was great at writing objectives using “double shot of espresso” language. But learning to write a good KR on a quarterly cadence took me trying and failing and overextending my team. It was a good three quarters of humility before I finally felt like I “got” it. So I'll say this for folks that are early in the journey: the stick-with-it-ness of our CEO and CFO isn't something that you just decide to do and do well overnight. For us this was a learning: just like any other new discipline or cadence, you’ve got to embrace the growth mindset.

That's right. You don't really have a choice: the business is going to keep iterating, and you're going to have to keep responding. The idea that there's an alternative where you can just keep doing all that you've ever done unchanging and things will go well... they won't. At the tail end of 2019, most people and most companies were really new to the discipline and mindset of quarterly hypothesize/measure/iterate. The world wasn't moving quite as fast — or we could act like it wasn't. Fast forward to today, and most companies do OKRs, at least in some part of the org, if not more broadly across the org. Maybe in 2019, the world didn't actually change every 90 days. That happened in 2020, and it's happened every year since. We became deeply aware of our need to adapt and to think more in hypothesis than in either themes or the rigid view that “the plan is the plan.” It's a different world in which we run companies, run functions and operate as leaders.

One hundred percent. And we’ve adapted our other systems to make sure that they are also supporting this more iterative reality that we live in. Performance management, our compensation philosophy, and talent development also require a different rhythm and different foundational structures in the post-COVID era. A lot of pre-COVID systems had been in place for a really long time – they were the default way we did things. The challenge for the CHRO community is taking a good hard look at some of those sacred cows and asking: Do we need to do them differently?

Performance management, our compensation philosophy, and talent development require a different rhythm and different foundational structures in the post-COVID era.

I'll use some really specific examples. If you want to run a really thoughtful, disciplined OKR process, you start by aligning at your corporate level, and then you translate those OKRs down to teams. This is where I think the magic actually happens: when teams are aligning and prioritizing together, especially cross-functional teams. It's such a clarifying exercise for middle managers, who are often at the heart of the squeeze in an organization. It gives them clarity and direction. And because we're iterating on these OKRs every 90 days, it gives middle managers the opportunity to react and provide timely input on where we're focusing time, effort, energy and money.

But like most organizations, we were operating our business with these quarterly iterating OKRs, while we were still doing individual performance reviews based on goals that were set just once at the beginning of the year. Writing these performance goals felt like a futile paper exercise based on an annual plan that we all knew was going to change. At the end of the year, you pull out that piece of paper to do your review and you realize, oh, nothing I put on that piece of paper is relevant. So why did we waste our time? The behavior we're trying to drive is that everybody knows what their team OKRs are. So now I know what my role is on the team in order to drive the desired outcomes on those OKRs, but individually I'm still being measured on something totally different. That doesn't make sense.

Because we're iterating on OKRs every 90 days, it gives middle managers the opportunity to react and provide timely input on where we're focusing time, effort, energy and money.

And so we fundamentally changed how we do performance management. We don't do a big individual goal setting. We spend our time setting our team OKRs, making sure that everyone has clarity on that. And then what we really focus on in that annual conversation is knowing what your team OKRs are, what your role is, and how those connect to the business outcomes and the strategy of the organization. Great. Now, how about your personal development? What are the skills and capabilities that you want to develop as an individual professional? Is it a technical capability? Are you interested in future people leader growth opportunities? Is there a different product or a different customer set that you want exposure to? You just wanna crush your quota this year. Great. What are your goals? And we write an IDP because those don't necessarily change as quickly.

So we're focusing our annual conversation around an individual's career journey. And at the end of the year, they answer three questions: How well did I perform against my job function? How well did I live the values of the organization? And how well did I perform in any special projects or OKR initiatives that I was asked to contribute to? And those are the questions that we talk about in the annual review, and that's how you get your performance review.

The natural rhythm of the business for most industries is a quarter; every 90 or a hundred days or so, the truth of the market, the competitors, the technology, the internal facts change. So the team is naturally adjusting and optimizing what its priorities are on a 90-100 day cycle. And when the individual’s performance goals — particularly when they're business measures, which is still often the case — are on an annual cadence, it's the most inauthentic thing ever. It's just bureaucracy, and it feels unfair and arbitrary because it's not actually a natural rhythm pace of change.

On the other hand, the growth plan is hard – personal growth does not always happen in 90 day sprints. And in many ways, personal growth plans compete for attention with the priorities of the team and the urgency of the business. You need a longer horizon for those. So respecting and working with the natural rhythms of the business world as opposed to operating in isolation from them has to feel more authentic for people.

100%. I'll cite some outcomes, because I have improved my ability to measure as a result of my OKR journey. First of all: on Glint, our employee engagement survey, our feedback scores – employees saying that they get meaningful feedback from their manager on a regular basis — are off the charts above benchmark. And I fundamentally believe some of the changes we've made in the systems that we've put in place, and the coaching and development we've given managers on how to give more real time feedback and have richer conversations around both business performance and individual development, has really fueled those scores. I think employees feel seen, valued and heard because they know that their work matters, they see the impact it has, and they feel like they're getting their own individual development.

The other key metric that's been really interesting over the last couple of years at GHX: LinkedIn used to be our number one source for filling roles. In the last two years, internal applicants and mobility across the company — not up the chain, although we do have good numbers there too, but the lattice concept where people apply for role in a different function or in a different part of the business — has become our number one recruiting source.

On our employee engagement survey, our feedback scores — employees saying that they get meaningful feedback from their manager on a regular basis — are off the charts above benchmark.

Super interesting. Because you guys are remote first, so it's not because you met Jerry in the lunch line and found out he has a cool job.

Yes, a hundred percent. Here's a great story. Because we disseminate OKRs from the company leadership level down into the teams inside each function, the work that has to be done lower in the organization often has some cross-functional dependencies. And because we can see that, we can really encourage teams to work with other parts of the organization, and we also have a very rigorous talent intelligence process. So you know where your top performers are in the organization, and they write and document IDPs that are shared up leadership. And so when these cross-functional opportunities arise, the leader in product will say, “When we were doing talent intelligence and talking about some of the star performers in the organization, wasn't there somebody in CX that wanted exposure to the data and analytics? Let's publish this job to them and see if they're interested. Let's have these cross-functional conversations and get more exposure across the company.” Because of OKRs, because of the way we do the talent intelligence or nine box process, and because of the cross-functional conversations we're forcing, I think we have people that feel more comfortable moving laterally and embracing something new and different. It's because of the systems that we've built and how those systems play together.

Transparency is pretty magical. And inclusion in the company's outcomes has a potent effect as well. Suddenly you can be a citizen in the larger organization as opposed to just a member of a team.

Let's go back to teams for a second. When a team has clarity on what impact it's going to have and how that fits in the bigger picture and with whom they need to coordinate and collaborate, obviously managers are much more effective in guiding the right behaviors and giving the right coaching on these important things we need to accomplish. Managers live in the middle between company strategy — the CEO's objectives — and an individual's contribution, and their effectiveness is key to the team’s ability to create value. It’s surprising that in several of my CHRO conversations, the potency of team OKRs as a mechanism for translating the strategy locally, creating accountability, and being a basis for coaching on impact, is something that’s never been considered. It's just such a giant misstep, right? Nobody moves a needle alone. Not me, not you, not Tina, nobody — much less Jane Engineer.

We talked about the squeeze — your directors and managers in the middle that are up, down, across — they're managing dynamics and priorities and demands from that 360 degree view. And while I believe it is the most pivotal experience for great leaders to have and to live through, I also fully acknowledge it was the hardest in my career. I coached people who were in it, and I know that that is the hardest place to be. And team-aligned OKRs are a pressure release valve. I'm not saying it's not still a hard place to be, but your conversations are different. It's not triaging the crisis, but rather proactively planning work with your peers, with your boss, and with your team. The conversations around resource availability and prioritization — these folks in the middle of an organization are being asked to do more with fewer resources.

It’s like 20 pounds of work in a 10 pound bag. OKRs gives you the language to say, “Hey boss, you are asking me for 12 pounds, and your peer is asking me for eight, and my peer over here is asking me for five, and the math doesn't work.” There aren't that many hours in the day for the team to get the work done. So we either need to give the team more resources, fund more consultants or reprioritize the work. And we need to bring everyone together to have that conversation.

The other option is to live in the struggle of trying to do 20 pounds of work with a team that has capacity to process 10. In that case, not only does the manager feel incredibly disempowered and ineffectual, the team gets demoralized and frustrated and doesn't feel seen, heard and valued, which ultimately drives down engagement and drives up attrition and all of those things we're trying to avoid.

If teams aren't taking the time to align, you're missing a key pressure release valve for that critical level of leadership where so much execution can get done. And in the worst case scenario, we're making customer and market promises when we commit to that 20 pounds of work with no ability to actually deliver. So then we have to go back to the market and our customers and say, “Sorry, we’ve got to push that go live, or that go to market. We can't meet the expectation we set with you.” That's dangerous to any business. So having teams really take the time to get honest with themselves, their colleagues, and their bosses around the work that they can actually get done in a 90-100 day period really does change the game.

And because we're not trying to do it on an annual basis, if you say, “Hey, we're going to take this five pounds and move it out a quarter,” then I can put it on my roadmap for the next quarter so I know it's coming and can be thoughtful about it. Often that's more palatable than, “well, that's going to have to hit next year, because I don't know how it can hit this year. It's gonna be 15-18 months from now.” I can't go back to my customer and tell them they have to wait 18 months. But before I made a commitment that I have to break, if I can go back to a customer and say, “Actually, we can do that in Q2 or Q3 instead of Q1,” that's a lower stakes, easier conversation to have than “sorry, I made you a promise and now I have to break it.”

If teams aren't taking the time to align, you're missing a key pressure release valve for that critical level of leadership where so much execution can get done.

It's explicit decision-making about what we're going to prioritize and focus on, versus decision by accident or overload — which always results in apologies. People leaders and the HR function can be an important voice for equipping managers in the middle to have a common language for making those decisions, and a common mechanism for negotiating the trade-offs versus the pile-ons. With that common language and mechanism for creating agreements, we also have shared visibility on how we're progressing on those things that we agreed on, which lifts everybody’s ability to run the business and deliver the best outcomes.

There is this deep innate fear that if I deprioritize a body of work, a project, or an initiative, I devalue the individuals who have been doing, or planning to do, that work. There's this fear that I'm going to hurt some team's feelings, and they will feel demotivated or devalued. Those conversations feel really hard, so instead we pretend that we're going to get that work done, and then that team languishes.

So I often challenge leaders by saying that while the conversation may be difficult, if you take the time to plan and provide the data and the rationale for pausing a project, it will be so much better than avoiding that conversation and allowing the team to languish, because they will ultimately feel that they've been deprioritized anyway. And that is often worse than being told up front that their project has been deprioritized.

Having teams really take the time to get honest with themselves, their colleagues, and their bosses around the work that they can actually get done in a 90-100 day period really does change the game.

One is inauthentic, the other is authentic. If you have a rhythm of the business that optimizes near term priorities to optimize a company's impact, and people feel a part of that bigger business strategy, that reduces the sting of deprioritization. Give people honest, candid facts, as opposed to giving non-facts and hoping that they don't notice — they notice!

As one engineer bluntly put it to me, “I have a PhD in engineering. Why in the world are you treating me like a kindergartner?”

Well, he has a point.

He has a point, right? We're not pulling the wool over anybody’s eyes. These are grown adults with life experience, so stop pretending. Instead, People functions can add value by helping teams build the skills, the language and the framework to tell the story around why we deprioritize. Let's have that authentic grownup-to-grownup conversation and trust that we're all grownups and can come to a good outcome, because pretending does far more long-term damage.

That language, the OKRs that define the current progress measurements and the gap to where we want to be, the scorecard that helps me drive the right cross-team dialogue — those tools are all essentials for manager and leader effectiveness. You have an explicit approach to developing leaders and manager effectiveness. Describe how you run that cohort, how you think about it, what you're excited about and what you're doing there.

At GHX, we have defined what we call our Courageous Leadership model — the expectations for how every people leader shows up in the business. It's built on three core principles. The first is inclusive leadership: Are you an inclusive leader? Do you create an environment and an organization where all employees are able to bring their best selves to work? Because we know that is the key driver to innovation, and at the end of the day, we are a software company innovating so that the healthcare community can have the tools and the data it needs to make good decisions. Innovation is most optimally achieved when you're bringing a diverse group of people together where everyone feels like they can provide their best ideas, escalate risk, and have rich in-depth conversations.

The second core principle is purpose-driven leadership. This is where our training around prioritization and alignment falls, because “driven” means that every employee understands the mission and the vision of the organization, can see the strategy we're driving to accomplish that mission and vision, and can then see the work that their team is doing in service to that strategy, mission and vision. That line from mission to strategy to team work can be hard for leaders to draw, but it is what makes individuals feel connected to the purpose, and a purpose-driven organization drives better outcomes for the customers and markets that they're serving. So we talk a lot about what it means to be a purpose-driven leader at GHX, and the skills you need to do that and do that well.

The third component is growth-minded leadership. When you're innovating, you will fail, because you are taking risks. There’s a difference between intelligent and unintelligent risks. You can't just be incompetent, repeating the same mistake over and over. With intelligent risk, you try something new, making mistakes along the way — but you make those mistakes fast, do a retro, learn, and course correct so you do it differently the next time. Really embracing what that means and giving individuals the mindset that I can learn, grow, and take intelligent risks, and that that will be rewarded. That's true in career development, innovation and product development, and whenever we're trying different strategies in the market. How do we help leaders really understand what having a growth mindset means, and then how does that impact the way you give real time feedback? You can't learn and grow and develop if you're not having regular candid conversations about feedback, so how do we make that part of our leadership DNA?

So we have a competency model that says that for each level, this is what's expected in terms of inclusive, purpose-driven and growth-minded leadership. These are the skills you build and hone and grow as you progress along your leadership journey and become more sophisticated in all three of those core principles.

When you go into hard feedback conversations using that clear, compassionate voice; when you feel confident, but kind – the recipient will hear the feedback you are giving as less threatening.

Let’s pull the thread on having hard conversations. You once made the super obvious — but often forgotten — point that hard conversations are hard. We often put the word hard in front and think if we just call conversations hard, they get easy, but no, they're still hard. And you talked about how — even after people are enabled on the SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) feedback structure — when they're worried about having a difficult conversation, it can be challenging to translate feelings into good feedback.

Your observations sparked us to develop the Feedback Helper that is now in WorkBoard. You can type in the frustrations or issues you're experiencing, or whatever is making you nervous about a needed conversation, and the Feedback Helper will unemotionally and instantly give you suggestions for how to give productive feedback. This was such a good generative AI use case because GenAI is so much faster to clear mindedness than human beings are. I use it all the time, and what I’ve noticed is when I see how fast it takes my tense words and transforms them into clear, friendly, compassionate, but candid, feedback, I feel more clear. It’s like the tool is helping me learn the skill of moving faster from the tense thought to the clear thought.

That's amazing. When you read what the tool wrote, you're reading it from a place of curiosity, which reengages the neocortex — that big fat thinking part of your brain — and it moves you out of that reptilian amygdala part of your brain that's producing all the feels, into that place of curiosity. How do I want to show up? How do I want to deliver this feedback? What is the outcome? And that curiosity engages that part of your brain that soothes the emotions so that you can show up without a crackly voice, without a tense tone, without feeling or sounding insecure when you're delivering the feedback. When you go into those conversations, they still might be hard, but doing something hard with confidence and doing something hard with insecurity are two very different experiences, both for the giver and the receiver. When you're using that clear, compassionate voice, not a breaky, shaky one; when you don't appear nervous; when you feel confident, but kind – the recipient will hear the feedback you are giving as less threatening.

All of the brain science behind this is so fascinating. To your point, a generative AI tool can move us to that place of curiosity so much faster and more effectively.

If we can embrace a growth mindset, we will all collectively be stronger as a leadership community.

The Feedback Helper is such a gift to every manager out there who feels the angst and anxiety around difficult conversations. Your idea sparked relief, calm and skillfulness for many leaders - thank you for that one.

I love that. Thank you for taking a conversation and actually turning it into a tool! That's pretty cool.

Going back to people leaders and managers in the middle — they are at the center of every employee's experience. They are also at the heartbeat of whether the organization actually achieves the mission, vision, and strategy. What do you wish every people leader knew?

Being a really good people leader is absolutely not for the faint of heart. It is a hard, ever-changing job as the macro world around us changes and people are going through different life experiences outside of work and bringing that into our offices. I want people leaders to know and acknowledge that it is really noble, important work, but it is not easy work. And you are a human too, going through your own journey, your own set of experiences and your own growth curve, and you will not get it right 100% of the time. It's not possible. You will have a bad meeting. You will deliver feedback in a way you wish you could take back. No human being who does this long enough, does it perfectly. Embrace that humility and that vulnerability and that growth mindset for yourself, and give yourself the grace to learn from the mistakes you make and come back and try again another day with a different technique or a different skill. It is a fight to lead people wholeheartedly, so thank you for having the courage to wake up every day and do it. Have a little grace on the bad days for yourself and other leaders on the journey. If we can embrace that growth mindset, we will all collectively be stronger as a leadership community.

Beautifully said — another gift to managers everywhere. What a perfect way to wrap up: generous of spirit and generous in words. Thank you, Alexis.

Thank you so much.

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