Diana Khramina is the Chief of Staff at Gorgias, a series C startup with 250+ employees, and previously a McKinsey consultant.
As your organization experiences rapid growth, managing the right company cadence becomes a challenge. You need to ensure alignment among diverse stakeholders, streamline retrospectives and OKRs (Objectives Key Results), and effectively communicate with your employees. This is especially important if you grow fast, start to have more than 100 employees or are dispersed across various locations and time zones.
Here are some key principles and strategies for establishing an effective company cadence.
Start by analyzing your current operating model.
To set the stage for a more effective company cadence, it is essential to conduct a thorough examination of your current operating model. These are some elements that you can find by speaking to your employees:
• Lack of Synchronization: Some teams may find it challenging to synchronize with the existing cadence, as they depend on other teams’ OKRs. For example, teams like recruiting may not set hiring targets until alignment is achieved between the executives and the finance team on budgets and potential hires. Likewise, the data team may set their OKRs based on other teams’ objectives as they are helping other teams to prepare datasets, and run insightful analysis.
• Delayed OKR Rollouts: Often, OKRs are introduced late in the quarter for individual contributors (ICs). Critical discussions on OKRs at the executive level might commence a few weeks before the end of the quarter, resulting in delayed rollouts, sometimes extending into rollouts happening three weeks into the quarter. In some instances, planning discussions continue into the third week of the quarter.
• Insufficient Buy-In: The absence of sufficient time for managers to challenge the executive team and reach a solid plan may lead to demotivating goals for teams. This, in turn, can result in quarters where individual contributors would rush to meet quotas or quarterly objectives.
Moving forward, craft a more effective cadence.
To address these challenges and create a more effective cadence for your company, consider the following strategies:
• Tailored Cadence: Vary the cadence based on management levels. Ensuring the CEO aligns with other executives much earlier can allow other executives to align with their managers.
• Diverse Team Cadence: Not all teams need to adhere to the same cadence. For example, the G&A (General & Administration) teams should follow a different schedule than the Go-To-Market (GTM) and Product & Engineering (P&E) teams, as they provide support to other teams and often require input from those teams to create their OKRs.
• Goal Buy-In: Incorporate time into the cadence for achieving buy-in on goals for the upcoming quarter.
• Balanced Time Allocation: The new cadence should be spread over a quarter, with a conscious effort not to spend more than 20% of your time on planning. The primary focus should remain on execution.
After conducting an extensive workshop with all executives, a mutually agreed-upon cadence can be established. Here’s an example I created of a revised cadence.
• The CEO communicates revenue targets to the executives mid-quarter during the executive offsite where execs can align on next quarter priorities.
• The GTM and P&E Executives align with their managers on OKRs 3 to 2 weeks before the end of the quarter, with the CEO reconciling the final goals with the executive team 2 weeks before the end of the quarter.
• OKRs are rolled out to GTM and P&E ICs the first week of the quarter.
• The G&A teams follow a different cadence, aligning their OKRs once the GTM and P&E teams have set their OKRs. For instance, The data team starts to align their OKRs during the first week of the quarter, relying on the GTM and P&E teams to finalize their OKRs before proceeding.
Consider these practices to implement a new cadence.
Selecting the appropriate cadence for your company should be a deliberate process. Consider your operating model, team locations, company size, and management levels. Involve your team members to foster a high level of buy-in and consider their daily experiences.
To successfully roll out these changes, consider the following practices:
• Gain buy-in from your executive team and involve them in reviewing the proposed changes.
• Widely communicate the adjustments during a company meeting to ensure understanding and alignment.
• Send calendar invitations to teams, helping them acclimate to the new cadence and integrate it into their daily schedules.
• Utilize an operational calendar, such as a Gantt chart, to highlight the most critical events in your company’s operational timeline.
As your company scales, avoid excessive planning and, instead, maintain a steadfast focus on execution, aiming for no more than 20% of your time devoted to planning activities.
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