Individual reviews miss the mark: build high-performing teams through collective assessment.

Welcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

I'm excited to welcome David to the Built by People podcast. David, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

Yeah, so I got into this work. I was a psychology undergrad. I didn't know what to do with it. Luck would have it, we had an IO psych class at my school and one thing led to another and the professor suggested I look into what was HR and IR master's programs. And a lot of them were in the Midwest because of when the National Labor Relations Act first came about, it was all the automotive plants where management teams needed help with adjusting to the future and rules on work and such. And so in any case, my first job was really a manufacturing, like heavily labor setting oil company at an oil plant where the first day on the job was the first day of pattern bargaining. And, you know, essentially the workplace was about to go on strike. We were at a hotel for my first day on the job, or my first day out of school, and there was trucks outside with pickets in them, and they were like handing them out, like ready to go on strike. And I'm like, wow, this is really theatrical and wild. And it wound up being a lot less theatrical and dramatic than what I thought maybe on day one. But I had an itch for more creativity and a little bit faster pace, and a couple mentors suggested getting closer to the tech industry. And through a couple different moves after that, I went from a movie studio into Electronic Arts, into Twitter, where Twitter was like, at that period, a 600-person private company that was chaotic at the time, the fail whale and all that. That was really my sort of trial by fire from like a true, like fast-paced private company where innovation and the talent level was quite high. That really definitely a milestone, a turning point for me that solidified that this is the type of environment I want to be in. So anyways, that's a little bit about me.

David, tell us about a time when you implemented team performance reviews and how it transformed the way your teams operated. What was the before and the after?

This kind of came about by accident and maybe a little bit of frustration or something wrong with the traditional performance review. So at Eventbrite, we were a company going through a major transformation during COVID Our business was completely obliterated. We had to let go half the company and then slowly rebuild it into a very different company, moving from what was a sales company primarily to more of an engineering company. And as we did that, a problem we had that all companies had is you go through these performance reviews and like your mind as a CEO or CFO or chief people officer is, gosh, I really hope this gives me clarity into where we have performance in the organization. Sometimes what you do in that, and the HR listener could know this, is that I create these distributions by function. So the engineering team has X% high performers, Y% low performers. Design has this, finance has that. And I think our CFO at the time looked at that and said, this isn't accurate. Are you telling me that team over here has the highest percentage of high performers? And there's something wrong here. And then this led us to a conversation of, okay, you're touching on team. You're touching on, it's very different, right? This is an aggregation of high performers. As my colleague, AJ Thomas said, would you rather have a team of high performers or a high-performing team? Like this was the crux of it. It led us to like wanting to debate what is a high-performing team at Eventbrite? What's a low-performing team? What are those sort of behaviors that we're seeing? We started to develop a rubric. We developed a rubric because of this challenge we saw with the performance reviews not giving us an accurate picture. And then we said, what if we stack ranked all our teams on this new rubric we created? What high performing and low performing teams, what would that look like? So just mostly out of curiosity, not really an intention at the beginning to create a new way of talking about performance, we stack ranked all our teams. And from that, we had these really interesting insights. I remember the legal team was like one of the highest performing teams, the stack ranking coming from those people who lead a team. In our case, it was like 8 executives, but you could do the 15 most senior leaders or 5 most senior C-suite executives. But from this, we created a visual of the legal team as the highest performing team. And then we investigated, we said, why? What are those things that they're always 2 steps ahead? They come as true partners. They're proposing solutions. They're doing stuff that they're not even being asked. And that's our consistent experience with them as a team. And they're unified. They operate as a team. And then the low performing team was dysfunctional. We don't know what their strategy is. We don't know what value they bring. Can't argue with some of these people in that team being really good, but together as an output, it's questionable what they're delivering. And so I went from Eventbrite and I did a slightly different version of it at my next company at Flare, which had a little bit different use case.

Could you tell us about a specific team that went through this process and how it impacted their performance outcomes? What were some of the measurable results that you saw?

I won't tell you the company, but I'll tell you the function was a product function.. And in the product performance reviews, the head of product would say, all these people are really great and this one person's not so great. Tend towards skewing towards, okay, a lot of high performers over here. Conversationally about the different teams, the CEO was, believed that the product function was our highest performing function. They are our secret sauce. They're the function that's going to save our hides, essentially, as a product function, as the CEO believed. And so when we went through this process, where the leadership team, roughly 12 to 15 people, were able to provide assessments for the highest-performing teams, lowest-performing teams, and then why. So the why is, if they're low-performing, because they don't understand their strategy, because they don't deliver, they're dysfunctional, they're not resourced properly for what we need from them, or they have conflicting priorities, or what have you. The why was really interesting for this product function. The why was the strategy was unclear. It seemed disconnected with what was going on in the go-to-market side of the business., and their process for how they ship products was too loose for all the different dependent teams that relied on them. And the roadmap was really unclear because the strategy was unclear. And when we went through this, the data showed that by far the high-low ratio product had the highest low ratio. They were on the extreme end of low-performing team. And the CEO had to do a double take of it. This doesn't make any sense to me. Why is this accurate? Is this true? What this was to start was almost an exec coaching conversation, right? So this is, okay, I'm coming to you in private, head of product, with some important information, like your team is on the low end, but here's why, and here's what you can do about it. So here's the levers to create a higher performing team. And so what this led to was number one, the CEO being challenged effectively to understand, I need to think differently about how I'm guiding this team. And because this is on me., but also the head of product realizing that all the activities that he was orienting around was not creating the impact he wanted. He needed to be orienting more around clear shipping process, swim lanes. How do we actually ship product? A strategy that is much more clear and probably a link to a vision, and then a roadmap for that that can make sense to people, that could make sense to not just that person, the CEO and like the COO, but the rest of the leadership team. And he committed to that openly in front of others. So the idea of, I'm gonna share with others what I'm gonna do was a lot of the big impact. And so it led to the product team completely rethinking their approach, go-to-market and the G&A teams.

David, walk us through how you've helped leaders transition from individual-focused performance reviews to team-based assessments. What resistance did you face and how

did you overcome it? One piece of resistance I faced was the idea of this could be a shaming exercise. So meaning that, hey, if we do this, naturally you're going to want to share with the entire leadership team, like the stack ranking, right? At Eventbrite, the stack ranking was public in front of everyone. And we were a very high-trust leadership team. So we were okay with it. I would've been the first one to say, I'm okay. If I'm the worst, I'll probably tell you I am too, or my team. But the next time I did this, I realized that there was a little bit less of a high-trust environment, if you will. And the resistance was, are you going to show this? Like, how are we going to interpret this? Like how, this is a lot, this is going to be a lot, this is going to be on them. This is going to be like potentially egg on their face. And I, what I did with that is, hey, this isn't about shame. This is actually about giving those leaders almost like an exec coaching read-up. This is not the performance review. So to be clear, this is not the performance review for the head of product or the head of HR or whatever. This is fuel for them to create a higher performing team. So back to like, how do I pitch this? Starts with a curiosity, like, what is a high performing team? Do we want high performance here? What do we think that entails? Does that entail individuals in these reviews just doing better, or does that entail something else? I want to lead them to the conclusion that they have a desire to better understand how we collectively think of our teams and what is, what are the levers to create higher performance in those teams. What might exist already is this thing called QBRs and MBRs. So every quarter, the product team and the engineering team and the sales and marketing— every quarter we're doing a song and dance show with data that shows in a very complicated format how we're doing. So why would we want to do this? The pitch to this is much more simple. This could take you 30 minutes per person total to just go through and give assessments of all our 15 major functions. And from it, it's going to be a very simple output. It's going to be a coaching conversation more so than in MBRs and QBRs. They got to spend weeks pulling these slides together. Ultimately winds up being this very hand-wavy exercise of things are great, but like, you know, things are not great. And I want a much more simple, to-the-point universal framework as opposed to each of these MBR presentations are looking at different metrics. I want something universal. That we can all speak the same language on.

David, what parting advice would you like

to share with our community? A thing that I'm thinking about recently is just being about 4 months in is I'm in my own head as a CPO oftentimes. I'm oftentimes in my own head thinking about what the organization needs and like my objectives and what we need to deliver on. But we're in roles as people functions to serve and to support other teams. And a really good practice that I've found that I have to credit my, my last head of HR business partners, Nitson, at my last company, coming up with this idea of essentially quarterly touch base with the stakeholders that you support. How are we doing? What's one thing that you want us to do better on? What's one thing that you want us to continue on? What's one thing that you like hope that we prioritize next quarter? I think oftentimes we feel as though we're doing a good job and we're supporting our businesses, but we're actually not. And we don't have a process by which we engage with them and like with the curiosity in mind, ask them there for their feedback. And there's a dopamine or serotonin effect that when someone like in a people function is asking you questions, hey, how could we help you more? What do you need? You have this trust, your trust and respect sort of factor shoots up a lot. No matter what you deliver on next, but what you do deliver on next probably feels as though it's been baked in some level of feedback gathering as opposed to, you did this in your own. So that, that's my sort of reminder is like we need to get in a better mode of quarterly, at least if not monthly, touching base with our stakeholders and asking them how we're doing.

David, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast.

It was a pleasure to have you involved. Thanks so much.