Pillar Talk: Building Sales Leadership with Rick Smolen
Join Rick Smolen and other seasoned B2B sales leaders on the quest for defining great sales leadership. Learn the pillars of successful leadership, hear stories about what works and what doesn’t, lessons learned, and come away with specific tactics you can apply to your job or career right now.
Pillar Talk: Building Sales Leadership with Rick Smolen
Zen and the Art of Organizational Alignment with Thurman Sneed
Thurman Sneed, COO of Marigold, shares leadership insights focusing on staying calm under pressure, creating organizational alignment through shared data, and building effective cross-functional relationships.
Thurman tells how to stay poised during tense situations enables objective thinking and decision-making
Thurman advocates for creating a "single source of truth" for data is crucial for organizational alignment
Thurman emphasizes the use of regular cross-functional meetings (15-30 minutes) to build essential partnerships
Thurman explains that patience is a strategic leadership quality, not a sign of complacency
Whether you're currently leading sales teams or aspiring to move into leadership, you'll walk away with actionable strategies for creating organizational clarity, building effective partnerships, and maintaining your effectiveness even in the most challenging circumstances. Listen now to transform how you approach sales leadership.
Music by Ben Cina & Ayler Young
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Pillar Talk where we build the foundations of sales leadership success, create clarity in terms of what good looks like for current and aspiring sales leaders. Before we jump in, I like to review what the six pillars are for sales leadership success. First is around talent identification and attraction. A strong leader can identify and attract the talent into the organization, because both are extremely difficult. We cover operating rhythm, mastering the craft. The best leaders know how to help the team win business planning, communication and ownership. Today I'm delighted to have as a guest Thurman Sneed, aka the Thurminator At least that's the nickname aka the Thurmanator at least that's the nickname. Thurman is a sales and operations leader who serves currently as the COO of Marigold, a cross-channel marketing platform. But Thurman has been in a variety of senior leadership roles at companies such as Marigold, at Sierra, wireless, micro Focus and at Intralinks, where our paths have crossed in the past. Thurman, thank you for joining Pillar Talk.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Rick, for having me. I'm excited to join you today.
Speaker 2:So, thurman, the reason I created this podcast is in my continued pursuit to try to identify the good behaviors, the behaviors that lead to success in a leadership capacity. Good behaviors, the behaviors that lead to success in a leadership capacity, oftentimes, like leaders, are evaluated based on the performance of the business, and that's certainly a contributor to that, but it's not the only thing. There's a lot of factors that go into business performance. So you can't just say, oh, if the business performed, then the leader did great, especially in a sales capacity. So I've been on an exploration to try to identify, well, what are the behaviors that lead to the biggest impact that a leader can make?
Speaker 2:And so you've been in a leadership position and I got to say, if I shared my experience working with you, one of the things that I've really admired about your leadership style is your ability to stay very neutral and poised in a variety of like tense situations. Sales leaders and even sales individual contributors can be quite emotional and things can be perpetually urgent, and I think one of the traits that I've observed with you individually is how, by staying poised and by staying sort of like calm, not only is that contagious with the audience, but it allows for, like, objective thinking and objective decision making, which is, as we all know, crucial to success. So I wanted to, you know, dive into that a little bit. Where do you think your ability to sort of stay calm and stay poised developed?
Speaker 3:That is a great question, rick, and something that other people observe all the time about me, but I have to say I don't know where it originated. I think that it's just something that the Lord blessed me to be able to have, and I'll tell you the one thing in my adult life that I think might have contributed to it. It's just, um, being the oldest in the family, right and, and being the oldest in the family first to go to college, first to graduate from college, and things along those lines. I think I had to grow up a little bit earlier than most, um, in in some particular cases, but when, when things were were a little rough, growing up I was just always the calm one. I was always the one that the coach, you know, asked to quiet the team, so to speak, but it was from a not so much, not a not having passion perspective, because I certainly did, always wanted to win, and whatever I was putting, you know, whatever I was doing, whether that was sports, whether I was business, whatever the case may be, but I always realized that there was a long, it was a long run. Nothing was won in the short term, nothing was won in the moment, so to speak.
Speaker 3:And so if we react in certain situations, we may regret our reaction as opposed to being able to say hey, everybody, just calm down. We know the steps that we need to take and we can't make those steps happen faster than what they're going to occur, because there's always another party on the other side and from a patient's perspective, I certainly believe that patience kind of comes through in this sweaty moment, so to speak. So in cells you have, quarter after quarter after quarter of something to perform at, whether that's operationally, whether that's hitting the numbers, what have you. But the patient ones seem to always be able to get the job done, even if it's at 11.59 pm and that cutoff is coming. And so one of the things that I've tried to do is, especially when it's when it sells people, is to encourage them, to guide them through those last particular steps and for my teams that many times have supported them, for them to also stay calm in the moment, because we know what to do, and when you're confident and you know what to do, you can be patient.
Speaker 2:That's interesting, Are you? So you're sort of saying that when you see folks acting with patience and not being, you know, overly reactive, that you'll correlate that with greater success?
Speaker 3:I absolutely correlate that with greater success. And when I say patience, that doesn't mean that we're not pushing until the end, right, it's just. How are we handling those stressful moments?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, of course, and as somebody that many have given you feedback of you know demonstrating poise or coolness under pressure or staying calm when the world is going crazy around you, Do you think you're more attuned when you see higher levels of emotionalism in leaders or peers that you're working with?
Speaker 3:I think that I've seen cases where leaders who are very highly emotional in a negative sense that it causes the team to kind of cave in, so to speak, if you know what I'm saying. So, unfortunately, I've gotten to witness situations where the pressure is on and the leader kind of loses cool, and those people that have, so to speak, been impacted somehow come to Thurman. And I never have been able to figure that out.
Speaker 3:But one of the things that consistently has occurred is for me to be the calming spirit, so to speak, to get them reset back on that path and to encourage them, to let them know that, yes, that was a moment, that was not necessarily the moment that you wanted to be a part of. But how do we stay out of that moment the next time? But to calm them down and let's get the job done still.
Speaker 2:I love it. Yeah, there's a sort of ripple effect from being poised and that is that when there is a storm around, you are the individual that folks will go running to to try to find, to get a piece of that poise?
Speaker 3:Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:So, thurman, you know you've gotten to sit in an elevated leadership position across a pretty large organization, or a variety of large organizations, and we're really looking to explore tactics in leadership as we think about the different pillars.
Speaker 2:Things that might come to mind for me are the way you conduct, or learn to conduct, a high performance operating rhythm, which to me I define as the environment that's created or the systems and processes that's created, motivation, engagement and accountability through a sales team.
Speaker 2:And certainly where we've worked together in the past is in business planning, where how do you work cross-functionally to be making decisions that will come to roost in like six to nine months, versus what more often happens is having to make decisions because something just happened and we're reacting to it. And I want to try to learn from you in maybe one of these areas around how you go about pursuing these today in your role and how your processes or your tactics that you use formed through either lesson learned or experiences in the past. So maybe we can start, just like on your operating rhythm. You act in a COO capacity, which means you have to sit across several functions and pretty big teams, and maybe we can just start about you know what you like best about the way you're approaching the rituals, processes, meeting structures and elements that create high performance across your teams.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I'll try not to go too long on this, Rick, because this is one of my favorite topics, but I love talking about the cadence because I believe that the cadence kind of sets the stage for just about everything and within that cadence, one of the things that I would love people to take away is that you have to have good reporting, single source of truth reports to support that cadence.
Speaker 3:So whether that's sales, whether that's services, whatever. The function is that you're managing and developing that operating rhythm around. Everyone needs to be speaking from the same book, from the same book, and every single company that I've been engaged in at the beginning that book has many chapters, so to speak, and everybody's reading from a different chapter at times, even though they intend not to be right. So, first thing, when we set that cadence and set those agendas for those discussions that we're going to have, is we have to say what is the single source of truth that we're going to use. And not only is it one single source of truth, but it goes from top to bottom.
Speaker 3:So, if we're talking about sales, it might be these metrics at the highest level, you know ELT level. Take one click down SLT level. One click down your first line managers, another click down the reps. The exact same reports, the exact same set of data, so that everyone knows we're all following the same book. Tune right. Sun is gonna come up every morning, moon is gonna come out every night, but on Mondays we do this, on Fridays you do this, and we're to be looking at the numbers that are rolling up from the reps, and so we used to call that rep to CEO type of a cadence. Same thing would happen with services. You just have to define what are those KPIs, what are those things that I need to be checking on a daily, weekly, et cetera basis and make sure that everyone starts to align not agree align to what those things are and what we're going to be looking at on a consistent basis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the prerequisite for a performative cadence or operating rhythm is this sort of dimension of a single source of truth as it relates to data. And it resonates because I do think most times there's cross-functional collaboration. It's a BYOD, it's a bring your own data to it, and so people are talking past each other, looking at different things that don't necessarily have the connective tissue. The famous one in software businesses would be marketing, talking about how great they did in generating leads, while the sales team is complaining about the quality of the pipeline. Correct, yeah, do you have a story about like I don't know? You said you mentioned that you, you know often, will enter an organization and you have this disaggregated dynamic that exists and you know your first step is to try to ensure that we have a single source of truth. Any, you know your first step is to try to ensure that we have a single source of truth. Any you know narrative around how to go about doing that effectively.
Speaker 3:Yeah, many, many times it starts with getting out of Excel first and foremost. So I find it hopefully not in 2025, but it still happens that, whether it's your spreadsheet of choice that is managed by separate individuals in different departments, so you may have a spreadsheet for marketing, a spreadsheet for sales, a spreadsheet for finance, one of the first steps that I like to do is to bring all of those parties together. I actually think this happened at interlinks those parties sitting in a room prep to realize we connect to one another in some way, shape or form all the time, but we're not connecting. So why don't we develop a reporting tool, a reporting system where we know what's coming in from marketing is going to flow through sales? We're looking at the same information there. So the beginning of the sales funnel and then carry on from there Sales what you're managing ultimately has to make its way to finance Finance.
Speaker 3:How about you leverage the same information that this team is using and I like to put it into BI reports, rick, as opposed to, or common Salesforce dashboards or whatever the particular CRM is and literally lift the team up out of the spreadsheets, right? So when we're in a cadence call, it's no more. I'm looking at a spreadsheet that was already obsolete the minute that I sent it out. But we're looking at live information, as close to live as possible within a data warehouse reporting structure. So what allows to happen in that particular situation is, if marketing says something is off, it must be off in the source system. If sales says something is off, it must be off in the source system and they need to go and address the source system. And when you get to running, you can click into that report and you can go address the source system at that moment in time, as opposed to waiting for the next refresh. Right, so that's when you're really running.
Speaker 2:Do you feel, like you know, the world has gotten. You know, now every company has a ton of applications. Applications have narrowed their focus to a specific area within a specific function, but yet the flexibility of software has gotten better. Do you feel, like the dynamic of creating, like the starting point of this disaggregation, the lack of a single source of truth? Like the starting point of this disaggregation, the lack of a single source of truth? Do you think it's gotten easier to correct or harder to correct in recent years? Like, if you take your most recent, you know onboarding? Like there's a proliferation of BI tools, there's ERP systems that finance is working out of I mean Salesforce is ubiquitous. Erp systems that finance is working out of, I mean Salesforce is ubiquitous. So, like, do you see the same issues place to place or is the variance high? And then, is the corrective measures gotten easier or harder?
Speaker 3:Like I actually don't know how to think about that. I would say both, depending upon the situation, rick. So I have seen it every single time. There has not been one time in my many places and experiences that I have not seen it as a gap to start with. Typically, there is a major improvement within the first six to nine months, and that improvement comes from getting cross-functional teams into a room together, right. So as long as you have that willingness from a cross-functional perspective to address the known gap or when I say known, once you have presented it as a gap and that there is a better way, it goes faster when there is resistance from any of those functions, that's when it can be heated. Right.
Speaker 3:So this function is picking these systems and saying that the data doesn't work that way. Right, this team has this other. The data doesn't work that way. So first you got to get everybody on the same page, as you know what we're going to come up with, a taxonomy, and you might think that the data over here is not the same. But by the time we get done, you will realize oh, we have a good data mapping to where we've effectively made it the same and put it into the data warehouse to where you don't feel it anymore. So when we're having a conversation, you see the same thing, regardless of the fact that this field over here says something different than this one in the source system.
Speaker 2:What are the common reasons? You see resistance.
Speaker 3:Sometimes it's just a lack of awareness. So one of the things that my team teases me about I have a few of those sayings 80-20, crawl, walk, run but a big one is if you're sitting in your seat, whatever function you are, try to look two steps to your left and two steps to your right. Right If you're. If you have never done that, then you just don't know from your upstream partner you're causing pain or downstream partner you're causing pain, right? So it's just literally a whack, a lack of awareness of knowing I'm causing pain to my fellow employee or I could be providing a service to my fellow employee if I were able to shift how I provide information to them or how I think about the information that I'm providing. Most of the time it is not with any level of intent, it's just lack of realizing. Oh, we could work together and make this a lot more efficient.
Speaker 2:Do you come into a situation that we've been talking about with a prescriptive sense of what the metrics should be and the challenge is how to get accurate reflections of what those are and from where? Or do you find in each organization you've been a part of the actual determination of what the variables should be, is part of the decision making, and I'll just tell you a quick story. Part of the decision making, and I'll just tell you a quick story, I mean my current organization. We wanted to build a go-to-market scorecard and we wanted to look at it, even with the CEO, on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly basis, whatever frequency made sense, and what I found in that exercise was a lot of time was spent trying to figure out what the variable should be.
Speaker 2:Well, what does this actually mean? You know be how much pipeline over what period of time. I found we got caught in the mud in variable definition and my fear, in a cadence off of a single source of truth, is that the actual metrics that you're looking at might have a lack of insight coming out the other side and that I just I struggle with that because I don't believe that every company should look at the same things. Every company's got some nuance to it. So how do you approach those, those dynamics?
Speaker 3:Being inquisitive, first and foremost, you, naturally, because we're human, we come into certain situations thinking being inquisitive, first and foremost. Naturally, because we're human, we come into certain situations thinking that we know what it is and there are some basic ones. So there's some basic things that you already know if you're working in a SaaS company, especially that if these are not there, you've got to put them in. However, as you say, every company, every situation is different, and that's where you go and you just start asking questions, or at least that's how my team approaches it. Start getting a better understanding of what are the drivers, to the end points that you're trying to get to, what are the true drivers.
Speaker 3:But what I would also say is that not to be in a frozen state, so you make me want to bring up my crawl, walk run. You don't have to get to perfection with those metrics. You can start with the ones that you know and then start to build to the walk phase with ones that you learn as you're going. So that cadence that you're talking about doesn't have to be reviewing absolutely everything. Review the ones that you know and every month that you pick up better knowledge, add the next one, add the next one. You'll look back in six to nine months and then you'll have what you were looking for from the jump.
Speaker 2:Thurman, do you feel like being in a COO position? I mean, certainly it uniquely qualifies you to be inquisitive and look across functions. A lot of organizations, and maybe even smaller ones, don't necessarily have a full fledged COO. They've got functional leadership, symptoms of why the BYOD dynamic forms Like, like. What should an organization that doesn't have a COO, who's basically translating across functions, to develop a single source of truth? How do they get there without like, like? How should they even think about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great question, Rick, and it actually goes back to kind of my journey, my own personal journey. So I actually started off in finance, as you know, years and years ago, and the most fun part about my young years of being in finance was I was unbiased. I was not within any of those functional groups, right, but in a small company, fp&a got to be in between and I started doing serving that function.
Speaker 2:So may not be that Like what's an example of where that happened. An example of let's say I have when you start serving that function.
Speaker 3:So yeah. So my one of my first jobs out of public accounting happened to be for one of my clients and I went into an FP&A position and in that FP&A role because I was of one, even though it was a public company there was a manufacturing group, there was a marketing group, there was a sales group. Well, someone is looking at everything still, because ultimately it comes back to the financial expense, revenue pipeline forecast, all of those types of things. It's identifying someone or some function that is unbiased to bring the different data elements together, elements together. Not necessarily a COO could be an FP&A analyst that gets assigned to, hey, create the playbook, so to speak, for how we're going to help conduct an efficient cadence. So what? I would encourage people it doesn't have to be a certain position, it needs to be someone that has curiosity that is not within any of the functions themselves, to bring that unbiased opportunity to present to all of them.
Speaker 2:Right. Their incentive shouldn't be based on the number of MQLs. That's right. All right, I love that.
Speaker 3:Keep going there, you just have no idea how funny that is, but for me right now.
Speaker 2:I've lived it. Um, so any best part, like like just sort of wrapping up on that, this topic, like any best practices on um, you know, on the metrics that you are finding like the world's changing we're now in, like are there any new themes? Or like hey, the Thurman playbook of key metrics for organizational health, that would drive a cadence, like what are the top of mind things that come for you as it relates to best practices in doing this?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know if I can state it in specific metrics. What I would state it as is focus on your 80-20. So many times we get into, oh, we need to measure these 10 things when only two things actually matter Focus on the two things that actually are driving the 80%, not the eight things that make you spend all the time. Um and it's only going to drive your business. You know, an incremental step right.
Speaker 2:Uh, to bring it to life. Like what's an example of? Uh, you know you were going to talk about services, but like what's an example of of how that those determinations got made of? Like hey, why don't we just focus on these and not everything? Yeah, so if I use an example of how those determinations got made of, like hey, why don't we just focus on these and not everything?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So if I use an example related to services just for one quick moment, rick, we can talk about utilization, we can talk about billing per hour, we can talk about a lot of different metrics, right. But if you're going into a situation and you know that you're just stepping into that crawl phase, pick the one that is going to allow you to speak to every level of the organization. For me, at a certain experience, it was simply making sure that they reported time. Like, are you actually reporting your time, that you are logging in a customer and I'm being literal about that, right, so I could get into what's my utilization rate, what's my chargeable rate, and X, y and Z below that. But ultimately, if they weren't logging the time to begin with, it's not going to help me very much. So if we're going to enter a crawl phase, let's look at are we reporting time on time, first and foremost, and then we'll catch up to the others later, because I can be off and make a bad decision on utilization rates if that's not the root of the first problem.
Speaker 2:Right, because in the absence of having that time logged, it's what? Is it just anecdote or assumption? It's anecdote assumptions.
Speaker 3:You can just be off Exactly and you see that sort of extrapolated across many functions where it's like the source data is the issue, and so what they actually are reporting on isn't representative of like what's impacting the business what the actual truth may be right and if and if you have a root and using that as one example, but if you have something that you're seeing is a big issue at the top, find that first root of the concern. Narrow, narrow it, you know, rule it out first and then go to the next one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And again, that's where your patience and not being in a rush and really understanding, and then you know, starting to make progress and then build on that progress. I mean, frankly, one of the things that I think this is both individual and organizational is the checkbox desire, like, let's get something done, get it done, all right, done, we did it, and then move on to the next thing, let's go fight the next fire, and what I'm hearing is like a purposefulness about a longer term play and making incremental progress along the way, but starting with foundational, like do we have the raw material to build the house?
Speaker 2:That's right, and like picking out the windows when we haven't even gone and measured the you know foundation.
Speaker 3:That's right. We might say we want to reduce time to value by 20%. What's your denominator? What's your base? What's your baseline?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I live this today. You know we got a high performance organization, we're doing great things, but we have not done a good enough job of a holistic view of the actual variables that we think drive the business how, what's the source of that and do we all agree on the right source? What is the presentation of that for company consumption, and then what business conversation or decisions need to be made on the back of them? A lot of companies will lean on where the most. The one source of truth is what's in the RP. So for us, netsuite the financial's in there. That is what's in the RP. So, if you know, for us, netsuite the financials in there. That's what's getting audited, that's what we're using Um, whereas, like Salesforce ends up being the data within there, ends up being the sales BYOD type of thing you know it's interesting which is which is why you have to have the cadence and, matter of fact, that cadence needs to be cross-functional too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is where I want to kind of move to next, the cross-functional. I think one of the biggest challenges that I continue to experience is I know already that my first team is not my direct reports, that the first team is my cross-functional peers, and yet my days are very busy supporting the organizations that roll up to me and I find it to be, I don't know, it's like the river's flowing one way and you're going to paddle down it. But to actually like, build and sustain strong cross-functional relationships, it feels like you have to actually paddle the opposite way and go against the tide. Cross-functional relationships it feels like you have to actually paddle the opposite way and go against the tide. And I think for a business to succeed you know I talk about business planning and it's often is the cross-functional partnership between sales, finance, rev ops around, like making decisions. I'll give you an example. I mean, one of the things that I'm always trying to do is like forecast attrition in a certain area so that we can proactively backfill.
Speaker 2:The worst thing in a high growth software company is to have someone leave and at that point create a wreck to backfill, then go interview, then go hire, then wait for them to join, then train them up. I mean, we're talking from a quota capacity. We're talking six to nine months out the window. So if you wait for something to happen, you know you're dead, at least if high growth is your motivation. So the only way to sort of get in front of it is to be aligned with your financial stakeholders, your HR, business partners, your folks that need to be on the same page. It's not as clean. We're not hiring because Sally left. We're hiring because we have a growth goal and we need a quota capacity and we expect likely outcomes to happen. And you know there's this nuance to this type of thing. So how do you, what like what would you teach others to how to foster these cross-functional relationships from the get-go so that these conversations can happen in a productive and, you know, effective fashion?
Speaker 3:yeah and this is this is gonna sound so simple, but I don't. I think it's very hard for a lot of people to do. I would love to say it's setting those objectives and key results at the top level of the company. Everybody does does those things. However, I think it's simpler than that.
Speaker 3:I think it is having your Monday or Friday afternoon chats 15-minute, 30-minute chats with your cross-functional teammates and making that a priority, as opposed to assuming that they know what you need at all times, actually sharing what you need at all times and also sharing what you've learned and sharing your successes. Right, hr may not know that the last rep that they helped you hire is absolutely fabulous, or the opposite. Did that feedback actually occur in a constructive way? So that the next time through you do the same? You make corrections, whatever the case may be? But I actually think it's about the individual peer-to-peer conversations that allow them to also apply that going downward, and when they see you working well with your cross-functional teammate, they will want to do the same things, whatever those functions are. I'm using HR as one example.
Speaker 2:So how do you do it today? What's your Monday Friday chit-chat schedule and is there structure to the meeting? What's the practice on approaching?
Speaker 3:this. I've gotten to the point to where I don't have to have the meetings but my cell phone just rings right or someone else's cell phone rings right. But before, earlier on, you know, years ago, it literally was. I almost had a one-on-one with everyone for 30 minutes, typically on Mondays or Fridays. I have no idea why it happened to be Mondays or Fridays, but typically Mondays or Fridays. Sometimes it was a debrief after pipeline forecast type calls, right. What do we actually need to do? Corrective actions. Other times it was a end of week debrief, right? How can I help you? Many times we especially me being in a function of operations. It is just that simple question. How can I help you?
Speaker 2:My fear is there you're going to get a long, long list.
Speaker 3:Not all the time, not if the rest of your cadence is going well, right. You start to get to the point that if the 80 is being managed through the cadence, right, you get to actually focus on the exceptions and deal with how do you keep the noise down with those exceptions?
Speaker 2:You're advocating for a simple approach, right? Like, who are your key cross-functional peers? Are you making sure that you're chit-chatting with them, in this example, on a monday and or friday? Yeah, um, do you like one of the fears that I might have around? That is like people are trying to protect their calendar. They're trying to make sure that their working hours are productive without structure in the meeting.
Speaker 2:Um, you know you might end up talking about the kids, or you know not that there's anything wrong with that or other topics that aren't business related. Is there is the Thurman playbook, that it's like they don't need that structure. It's the consistency of communication. There's enough issues to talk about. Like, if I'm meeting with HR, how do I know what's going to be valuable for them to know? If I'm meeting with finance, how do I come prepared to have the right things or ask the right questions? So, any recommendations about how to approach that? If, yes, I can have those meetings, but when people say, well, send me the agenda, you know like people aren't necessarily wanting to. You know chit chat, uh, so you know what I mean. Like, how do you just?
Speaker 3:I do, I do, I do. Do you know what you mean? Um, when I have some of these, let's say, sales leaders, we don't have an agenda. But the agenda is the deals and we know that it's going to be the deals. Hey, thurman, this, this and this is going on right, we need your team to do A, b, c and D. We just know that that's going to be the conversation, so it's a little bit more defined, but not written down on paper, because that's why we know we're having the conversation Right With HR.
Speaker 3:I would set an agenda and I would set that agenda, especially if I'm hiring Right, to be able to say hey, how many, how many qualified resumes did we get this week or over the last two weeks, depending upon the time frame of your cadence. Right, and I'm not talking about every week. Typically these things are biweekly Right, it's not something that you have to do every single week, but it would be. I need to recruit, I need to replace Right, I need to up level. What are the things that we jointly work on and how are they going?
Speaker 2:Right, I'm almost hearing you say, like the volume of like. Show me an organization where functional leadership is in regular communication with each other, and I'll show you an organization that's focused on the right things.
Speaker 3:Absolutely focused on the right things. Cause they will. The leaders will leave those meetings and typically I typically do not leave any of these meetings without an action, as you say, but I take it and I explain to my team what happened, especially if it was something, if it was a gap that we're trying to feel, and I try to explain how do we avoid having to feel this same gap again. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So cross functional teammate raise X, y, z issue. First of all, was it a valid issue? Yes, it was a valid issue. Okay, how could we have proactively prevented getting into the issue situation to begin with? And so you use that as a repeat, continuous improvement type cycle until you start to get those things that cause frustration, those things that cause people to call me for that poise, for that calm down moment. How do we prevent having more of those Right?
Speaker 2:Thurman, you're exposed to a lot of leadership, a lot of levels of maturity of leadership across many functions. What are you seeing right now, that's like behaviors that are driving the biggest positive impact, and where are the areas that you think mentorship in this moment is most necessary?
Speaker 3:great question, rick. Um, I think mentorship is needed to help people understand where they're trying to get. So a lot of times people and I'm going to use another services analogy, but not necessarily but in a services or support function you could just become a ticket answerer.
Speaker 3:I'm addressing the ticket. The issue of the moment right, but there's a bigger picture, right? So in the moment of addressing that ticket, if I have 20 of these same tickets, then I step back and think about the fact that, wow, if I was to tap the door of my teammate to my left again, I might have only gotten 20 of these tickets. I mean one of these tickets out of 20. But because I'm living in the moment of I'm just answering tickets, maybe I never go knock on that door To show someone, to teach a manager.
Speaker 3:Ask your people are they dealing with the same thing all the time? Do they feel comfortable raising up and saying, hey, I shouldn't have to be still dealing with this after a year or two years and then being comfortable with raising their hand and saying you are the expert, right? We don't want you to be in that situation. We want you to be having the opportunity to come up with an idea, to add value, to learn something new, to refresh yourself, to keep you energized. That folks fall into that narrow I'm just addressing the ticket and they never get to have the opportunity to say, wow, this is how I could actually impact the business.
Speaker 2:Regardless of what role they're in. No-transcript.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but but empowering the management team to empower the employee to actually recognize where they are and that they have the best recommendations most of the time and that they have the best recommendations, most of the time Not management but the one that is answering the ticket.
Speaker 2:Typically has. Finish your thought please.
Speaker 3:It's typically the one that has the best idea if you would let them step out of it on how to do something better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what I heard you say there for leadership effectiveness is one an ability to identify common problems, like problems that aren't just limited to one person, but more commonly available. Commonly available, and the way to do that is through effective communication, which is actually creating an environment where people can share those types of ideas or feel empowered or responsible to share those. I always use this concept of trying to get information from the edges, like what's actually going on, what's actually going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah and so good. Leadership effectiveness is an ability to actually foster an environment where you get the right answers.
Speaker 3:Right and when you're mentoring, to your first question when you're mentoring is you're mentoring people to get comfortable by doing that Right and asking their folks those questions right and for them themselves to ask themselves that question why am I even getting asked this question about that metric on this report, the why behind it, what is the real why? Many times we don't take the time to explain the why.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think you're spot on. I think the only other way I come at this is that often and again, I deal with the salespeople pretty frequently and you get highly emotionally charged feedback and that is a little harder to process. And it's also a big, big focus on recency bias because the feedback on their last call must be ubiquitous. This is everyone, but it just happened, so it has particular emphasis. So there is also a filter of digesting what you hear. That is required to identify those common problems.
Speaker 2:Thurman, I really want to thank you for joining. What is the best way if folks want to reach out to you? What's the best way to find you? That's a great question LinkedIn.
Speaker 3:Yeah, linkedin is the place. All right, thurman Smith, that's where you find me.
Speaker 2:We covered some great stuff here. It starts with the data. It starts making sure that at an organizational level, you are figuring out how to keep functions aligned. In doing that, if you're able to do that, the cadence that you can put together the processes, the meetings, the way we can all speak the same language, we can actually get to a more positive place. And just the simple tactics of if you want to succeed, you've got to build strong cross-functional relationships and, as wild as it sounds, the best way to do that is just the forcing mechanism to actually consistently talk to those folks and a lot of good things can happen. Thurman, thank you for joining Pillar Talk. Can't wait to talk to you again.
Speaker 3:Thank you, rick, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Reflecting on the conversation with Thurman Sneed. You know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I first started working with Thurman Sneed. You know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I first started working with Thurman more than 10 years ago and all these years later, thurman is still the voice of reason and the voice of calm that people are really drawn to. And, as a leader, what are you trying to do? You're trying to have access to information, you're trying to know what's going on, and people are generally a little bit hesitant to share bad news. But when you are the voice of reason and the voice of calm and someone that can be helpful when the going gets tough, well you find out about things faster. And so I think about myself. Well, I'm a pretty aggressive, I'm pretty passionate, I'm high energy, but maybe fairly emotional because of that aggressiveness and that passion, and so there is like positives around that, but there's also the potential to not be the person that people want to go to when the going gets tough or things get difficult or the pressure builds. You know the pressure builds. So I think one of my reflections on this episode is around how that poise that Thurman consistently demonstrates, can be an aspiration to be the type of person that is more approachable as a leader, and I think Thurman really is the model for what that can look like.
Speaker 2:Thurman also talked about the single source of truth. He talked about the importance of that as the baseline for the operating rhythm or the cadence of how the business is actually managed. You know I'm thinking about Sam Jacobs, the CEO of Pavilion, recently posted on LinkedIn and I'll quote every department lead doesn't deserve their own data. Every department lead doesn't deserve their own data. He also said quote every executive meeting shouldn't be a battle of spreadsheets prepared by underlings in a long-term war to assert a self-serving narrative that the reason the company isn't doing well is somebody else's fault and definitely not yours. This speaks to me about the prevalence of the issue of that BYOD bring your own data that Thurman and I discussed, and a takeaway for me is to improve this for my own organization so we can make better decisions and ultimately be in a better position to win.
Speaker 2:Lastly, I have to admit I've been thinking about how to establish better relationships with my peers. I have high regard and high respect for my peers and I want to work more collaboratively with them. I want them to know what I'm doing and I want to know how I can be supporting their success. And Thurman's recommendation of just a consistent 15 to 30-minute meeting weekly where we share what each other are working on is such a simple, simple recommendation that even someone like me can action. So I'm going to try and attempt to put that into place and I can't wait to see the results on the other side. So, thurman, I want to thank you. The Thurmanator strikes again. Thank you for joining. Pillar Talk Really appreciate it. Thank you, listener, for joining. We will see you on the next one. I also want to thank Ari Smolin for producing Ilo Young and Sons of Summer for the tunes. This has been a great episode and we will see you next time.