Fewer things done better

In an ideal world, how many priorities would you have? One. One priority leads to complete focus. In a perfect world, you’d have one singular objective to measure performance, one clear target audience to serve, one value proposition to offer customers, one value to guide decision-making, and so on. The fewer things that you establish in terms of being important, the easier it is to understand, act upon, and achieve success. It’s the business equivalent of every one marching to the beat of a single drum.

Of course, we don’t live in a perfect world. We find new opportunities for growth, we manage unforeseen obstacles, and we face competitive dynamics. To complicate things further, people often become consumed with the idea of complexity. That they need to do more. That they need to communicate more. That they need to offer more. Somehow we equate more with better. Smart people have a tendency to optimize for hard and complex matters because it provides them an opportunity to show how smart they are. It's human nature. The problem is, when scaling an organization, the enemy manifests as complexity and the tyranny of more.

A simple way to understand your priorities is to ask yourself the question, if we could only do one thing, what would we do? For instance, if we could only build one billion-dollar business, what would it be? In 2009 at LinkedIn we went through this exercise to help codify Talent Solutions as the center of the bullseye. And the first concentric circle around it was Marketing Solutions, our nascent ads business, and the second concentric circle was Premium subscriptions.

As a result of that exercise, we began prioritizing accordingly -- our managerial cycles, our hiring and resourcing, our understanding of the relevant landscapes. Over time, there’s a natural inclination to want to draw resources from the bullseye and into the next concentric circle. Everyone wants to do more. But how much success will you have if you start to invest in the next business, before establishing critical mass in the first? That core business can easily become vulnerable to competition that is just waiting for your focus to shift. 

As CEO, when you focus your attention on one thing, you can ensure it gets done well. The more priorities you add, the less time you can invest in each one. We encourage early stage startups to draw their concentric circles, starting with their bullseye, i.e., their core. It’s great to dream about the vision and what’s possible in adjacent opportunities, but it’s critical to stay laser-focused on the core until you’ve reached a meaningful scale.

Communicate the right info to the right people at the right time

Communication is the lifeblood of any organization. Knowing when to communicate, what to communicate, how and to whom to communicate becomes an invaluable skill-set. For instance, when to email vs. call; when to speak up at a meeting vs. when to sit tight and listen; when to share information at an All Hands vs. withhold to a select few. Ensuring you have the right venues, the right meeting cadence, and the right people around the table, becomes absolutely essential to communicating the right information to the right people at the right time. 

As organizations are just starting to reach scale and hyper growth, should they be under-communicating or over-communicating? If you were going to lean one way or another, which way would you prefer? Speaking from first-hand experience, it's no fun to be surprised. I like to hear bad news, even before it's happened. If you feel like something is potentially going to go amiss, bring it up sooner rather than later. It may give you an opportunity to course-correct, but at the least, you will better manage your colleagues’ expectations.

Over-communication is a good goal to strive towards, but as you start to scale an organization, if everyone is over-communicating, then what happens? Communication overload. You have too much information coming at you. Too many emails, too many status reports, too many weekly summaries, too many meetings. There is too much of a good thing. So you have to strike the right balance, and you can do that by checking in with the team regularly. 

You also want to make sure you understand with whom you need to be communicating. For example, who is in the “To” line of your emails? This may sound mundane. It's important who is in the “To” and who is in the “cc”. It's both figurative and literal. If everyone is in the “To” line, who's going to respond to your email? Everyone. Who's then going to respond to everyone's email? Everyone else. Now you’ve got a lot of email you're sifting through. Be clear about who you're sending your email to, and who simply needs to be kept informed as a “cc”. Additionally, be clear about when you expect a response -- specifically how quickly you expect one. In general, when I send you an email, I want to hear back within 24 hours. But if I send it to you on a Friday, maybe I’m OK waiting until Monday. Just be clear with people in terms of your expectations. Getting this right becomes absolutely fundamental as you grow the team.

Speed and quality of decision-making

At the end of the day, companies maximize long-term value creation based on one factor: The speed and quality of their decision-making. That’s it. With regards to fewer things done better and effective communications, those are means to this end. When you're focused on fewer things and you're able to do those things better, you're able to make better decisions faster. When you're communicating the right information to the right people at the right time, they are equipped with the context that enables them to make better decisions faster. 

Decision-making doesn't just happen. Most people rely on implied processes. They fall back on guesswork and assumptions in terms of who's responsible for what and how decisions are going to be made. At LinkedIn, we adopted the RAPID framework to clarify the roles in decision-making, and we created Five-Day Alignment to ensure we had a consistent process for conflict resolution.

The RAPID acronym outlines the roles of participants in a decision: recommend, agree, perform, input, and decide. It was designed by the consulting firm Bain & Company.

• Recommend is the person responsible for recommending a decision or action. At LinkedIn, this was the most important part of the process. Most people think it's decision-maker, or “D”. But if the decision-maker is doing their job and empowering the right person, it's usually the “R”. The Recommend is often the hub of the wheel in the process, responsible for pulling it all together. As a result, they have a lot of influence.

• Agree is the person or people responsible for formally agreeing to a decision. Their perspective must be included in the final proposal -- especially if they disagree. Ideally you have as few “A’s” as possible, because the more people who must agree with the decision, the more time is generally required to get to a decision.  

• Perform is the person or people responsible for executing once the decision is made. Best practice is to involve these people early in the process to ensure they have context and a say in the decision.

• Input is the person or people who provide their opinion on the matter (ideally to enrich the proposal) but whose views do not carry weight to the decision-maker. That is,  whether they agree or not does not matter in this specific case. But they tend to have a unique perspective, expertise, or experience that will help improve the quality of the recommendation. 

• Decide is the person (note: singular!) who is ultimately responsible for the decision and committing the organization to action. 

RAPIDs take time to work. You need to be diligent about educating employees about the importance of clarity in the decision-making process. For RAPIDs to stick, you have to be consistent and repeat with multiple examples. For major cross-functional decisions at LinkedIn, we included a page on the RAPID in the materials to ensure everyone knew their roles. When there was ambiguity, we used that as an opportunity to clarify the framework and educate the team. 

RAPIDs are a powerful tool if done properly, but like anything else, they can have unintended consequences. If all you are doing is developing RAPIDs to determine who is on a RAPID, run for the hills. The process is there to help, not hinder, your speed and quality of decision-making.

Five-Day Alignment and Clean Resolution

A decision-making framework like RAPID can clarify the roles and responsibilities of folks involved in the process. But far more often than we’d like, the decision-making timeline lingers. At LinkedIn, we heard of weeks-long and in some cases months-long delays in getting to key decisions. As a result, we introduced a concept called “Five Day Alignment”. We expect alignment within five days. If there's no alignment within five days, we expect clean resolution.

What does it mean to be out of alignment? It means there is some disagreement in the process and path to a decision. For instance, employees may disagree on the objectives, the process, the timeline, or the options to choose from, among other things. This should not be confused with five-day decision making. Some decisions, especially type 1, irreversible decisions, will take much longer than five days. You need to conduct experiments, you want to learn, you want to see how things unfold. But if on the path towards making those decisions, the team is misaligned and that misalignment goes longer than five days, that's too long.  

In those cases we encourage “clean resolution”. First, identify a final decision maker. With that person you will share a unified story to describe the nature of the misalignment so that she can make an informed final decision. It’s not a one-sided story. It’s a joint process. You are completely transparent about where the misalignment is occurring and allow for the decision-maker to hear it all together at once. The decision-maker clarifies the path ahead and reinforces “disagree but commit”, a mantra borrowed from Amazon that ensures we have alignment even after non-unanimous decisions. 

In the earlier days of LinkedIn, some misalignments weren’t resolved in five days, or five weeks, or in some cases, five months. It's one of the most disappointing things to see as a leader. It is completely counter to the notion of speed and quality of decision-making. The good news is, it’s all tractable through focus. By doing fewer things better and communicating the right information to the right people at the right time, you will have a better chance of increasing the speed and quality of your decision-making. And as a result, you can and will maximize the long-term value of your company. 

For more on Focus, please visit our LinkedIn Learning Course, “Leading Like a CEO” by Jeff Weiner.