How to Align Your Team With Your Business Goals for Success

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now, let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, host of the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at their job. Tess, I always like to talk about past guess that people should check out other episodes. You can check out David Allen of Getting Things Done. We had him as a guest, Michael Gerber of The E Myth, and many more. There’s so many great podcast episodes. Check it out.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Before I introduce today’s guest, this episode is brought to you by SweetProcess. If you’ve had team members ask you the same questions over and over, and maybe you spent 10 times explaining it, there is a better way. There’s a solution. SweetProcess is actually a software that makes it drop-dead easy to train and onboard new staff and save time with existing staff. I was talking with Owen, one of the owners. Not only do universities, banks, hospitals, and software companies use them, but first-responder government agencies use them in life-or-death situations to run their operations. You can use SweetProcess to document all the repetitive tasks that eat up your precious time and your team’s times you can focus on growing the company. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial. No credit card is required at all. Go to sweetprocess.com, “sweet” like candy, S-W-E-E-T process dot com.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Today, I have Tess Waresmith. She’s a director of business operations at Acceleration Partners. They’re the largest global partner marketing agency in the world. Tess oversaw Uber’s global partner marketing program, which included her working out of Singapore, which is awesome, Tess. She’s created a new team to help evaluate AP, Acceleration Partners, through operational excellence, change management, and more. Fun fact about Tess is she was a collegiate diver at Boston University. Tess, thanks for joining me.

Tess Waresmith: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: A dangerous sport.

Tess Waresmith: It is, but I made it. Doing all right.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I want to talk about starting an operations team, developing and communicating a mission, vision, and purpose to the greater team. We were chatting before we hit record about centralized team versus having an operation person in a department. Talk about the differences and what you came up with.

Tess Waresmith: Sure. I’ll add a bit of context high-level about how our team was created. When we decided there was a need for this team, we really realized that there was some overlapping processes, areas where different departments were connected to others, and that we really didn’t have anybody sitting in a centralized seat that could support across departments and cross-functionally, so when we decided to bring these people together, everybody on the team had one of three things in common, or all three is where we were focused on, tools and systems, processes, or data. As a centralized team, since we came together, we’ve been able to, first and foremost, share learnings. Our weekly team calls are really interesting because we’re working across departments and we’re seeing what works and what doesn’t, and we’re able to share those learnings across departments to create efficiencies.

Tess Waresmith: I mentioned identifying how connected processes really are. We have these different departments, and as a business, it’s really important to see how they are connected and identify opportunities and risks across the company, whether it’s an opportunity to streamline a process or create efficiencies, or it’s a risk where you have multiple data sources of truth. There might be opportunities to reduce redundancy for multiple teams with one project. Those are a couple of things. Then the last thing I would say that’s probably been most impactful for the company is that we’ve been able to, as a group, prioritize projects across multiple departments and make sure that what we are prioritizing really aligns to the company’s goals.

Tess Waresmith: There’s always projects. It’s in operations. There are endless things to streamline and to launch and develop and projects. There’s always something, so it’s really important for us to take a step back and look at the company with a broader lens and say, “Okay, what’s the most important project that not only is going to add value but is going to help us chase down the goals that we have as a business, not just in this one department?”

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: We were talking, Tess, about moving someone back under a department after being centralized. Can you walk me through that example?

Tess Waresmith: Sure. I’ve listened to a lot of different podcasts and learnings and what I always hear is that both work. You can have people operationally focused within a department and then you can have centralized teams and there’s pros and cons to both. I think regardless of what you do, it’s just important to continue to evaluate, is that the right strategy? Does that make sense? As I mentioned, we started this team and there were a lot of benefits right away, the shared learnings, opportunities, prioritization, all those things.

Tess Waresmith: But one thing we did notice is that there was one person on my team that really was so connected to one department, and while they were operations-focused for that department, they really needed to work really effectively with the leaders in that specific department, and that most of our team calls were a little less applicable to that person, so if we hadn’t have been strategically re-evaluating with the leaders at our company and making sure that we’re looking at the operations team strategically and saying, “Yes, this is a new team, but we’re six months in. Does this still make sense?” In different areas of the business, actually, that department head, the chief client officer and myself both came to the same conclusion at the same time that it made more sense to move this person under, and it was the right choice.

Tess Waresmith: I could definitely see as we grow as a business and as an operations team, that the centralized team might not grow that much. We might end up having to put another person under a specific department. Business operations is all about solving problems, and if we’re solving problems fast enough, we might just need to be more strategic about how we’re placing people, and there’s probably going to be more operations opportunities as we grow within those specific departments.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Tess, talk about the just in general, because I know companies have different departments. What are some examples of the departments that you have at Acceleration Partners?

Tess Waresmith: Sure. Acceleration Partners is a global partner marketing agency and we work with all kinds of different brands to grow and refine their partner marketing programs. Our largest department is delivery. That’s the department that actually delivers our partner marketing services to clients, and that’s a majority of our company, probably 75%. Then we also have marketing and sales. Those are two separate departments, but they work really closely together to help get us our clients that our delivery team will support in client services. Then we also have our talent and culture department, which focuses on HR, and of course, finance, who pays for everything. Those are the main departments at our company, but the largest one being delivery, and really, what’s important is that sales and marketing, business operations, finance, talent, culture, we are all in support of that team really, right, because they’re the ones delivering value, so we all exist to help them do their jobs better and to provide them with clients and to help them manage their day-to-day.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: What I liked about what you said, Tess, about the centralized team versus having the person be in that individual department was one of the things you noticed is maybe they didn’t have to be as engaged in the centralized team meetings, they were more in the weeds in that specific department. Are there any other things to look out for to maybe think, “Oh, this person’s on the centralized team, maybe they should be in that individual department”? Were there any other, I don’t know, let’s say, red flags? But it’s not really a “red flag,” but just an indicator that, oh, maybe they belong back into that individual department?

Tess Waresmith: Yeah, I would say that one important thing that I do a lot that I think is really helpful is, well, regularly, you’re connecting with your team, and as a leader, I’m always trying to get a pulse on where the time split is, and so most of my team is able to very specifically tell me about how much time they spend on this project or that thing, and then I can get a good sense of where they’re spending their time and who they’re talking to.

Tess Waresmith: With that particular person, there was value in having him be part of the centralized team, and actually, in the beginning, he used a lot of those skills and learnings his job, and I think that was valuable in itself, but I think especially noticing the people that he was talking to and engaging with on a regular basis, his engagement and overall contributions to our call, he had great contributions, but his focus was just so much more specific and his role, he was actually resourcing and staffing, so really focused on staffing solutions, whereas the rest of my team does a lot of different projects and spans different stuff, so it was pretty easy to see just based on the amount of time he spent really focused on that one piece of our business, it made sense to slide him back over to the delivery team. I think to summarize that a little bit more succinctly, just checking in with your team and being really aware of where they’re spending their time and who the stakeholders are for what they’re doing.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah, no, I like that. When we talk about a starting operations team, part of it is developing and communicating a mission and vision and purpose. Can you just talk a little about Acceleration Partners and the mission, vision, and purpose?

Tess Waresmith: Sure. Acceleration Partners as a business has always had a really strong practice of having a vivid vision. Our founder Robert Glazer’s really focused on our core values. When we just became a team, this was a new team to Acceleration Partners, so people didn’t know who we are, what we were doing, or why we existed in the first place. After having some conversations with the team, we really felt like not only did we want to clearly communicate why we are here and why we exist at Acceleration Partners, but also for ourselves to be really clear on what our North Star is and why we exist and what we should be focusing on.

Tess Waresmith: Operations is about your tools and systems, it’s about processes, and it’s about data, but what are those three things in service of? We had a lot of great brainstorms as a team and ended up deciding on our mission, vision, and our purpose as a team. Where we landed was at the end of the day, our purpose is to make lives easier. That means the lives of our employees, the lives of our clients, definitely our lives, where we can automate processes and make things easier, and that’s really why we’re here.

Tess Waresmith: Identifying that made it much easier to evaluate projects and say, “Okay, does this project, one, does it fit our purpose? Are we making lives easier at this company? Are we creating efficiencies? Are we operating strategically? Then two, are we doing it in such a way that helps us move towards the goals we have as an organization, as a company?” Our purpose was really just making lives easier, as one person on my team said it, “Finding the easy button.” I loved when she said that. That made so much sense, right? Our teams are super busy. They’re focusing on dealing with some really strategic complex clients and we don’t want them to have to deal with stuff that takes away from their ability to be strategic and drive value for clients, so that’s why we’re here, and that really unlocked some clarity for us and for the greater organization.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah, I want to talk about how you came up with the mission, vision. You said you have a team of six people.

Tess Waresmith: Yeah. I’m trying to remember exactly how I came about it. I did some brainstorming. I worked with an amazing mentor who was really helpful in structuring the team and creating the foundation for the team. She helped me work through some ideas and we had a lot of corny metaphors. We’re like, “We want to be like ‘Grease the wheels,'” and things like that that didn’t really sound very good, so we landed on “Making lives easier.” It was simple to the point and we wanted it to be clear why we existed. It was once I worked with her a little bit on the basic high level where we wanted to go, then it was an exercise with the team, and we did some adjusting of words and wanted to make sure that we felt really good about it. Then a big part of that was sharing it with the company, so then we had a call. On a company call, we took some time to go through our why and our vision and what we promise to deliver to teams.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: How do you structure that call? Is it more like an all-hands meeting where you’re announcing it, or are you rolling it out, dripping out certain things ahead of time? How does that meeting …? How do you, I guess, leading up to the meeting and the meeting itself to let the greater team know about what you’re working on?

Tess Waresmith: Sure. We have a regular company call. That’s the first time that I had gone through the mission and the vision, but then since then with every new group of new hires that we have, I’ll also go through why business operations exist. I think that call is really important and valuable. I try not to get too tactical. There are so many small things that we do. I mean, we’re centralized support for day-to-day business operations. We work with tools, processes, procedures. There’s so many different things that we do. But what I really want them to understand basically is we are here to make your lives easier, number one, and our goal is to streamline processes that impact the core of Acceleration Partners. Then the mission, which I haven’t even really shared yet, is really to listen to you, the employees, listen to leadership, listen to clients, and respond with innovative and streamlined processes, tools, and resources that support our stakeholders and make sure they’re informed along the way. Communicating that is really important to help teams understand what we do because we do so many different things every day.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Tess, can you talk me through an example of, because I know you work with a lot of brands, I mean, Marriott, StubHub, Postmates, Adidas, LinkedIn? Give me just an example on what you do as a company, maybe choosing one of these.

Tess Waresmith: Sure. Sure. Yeah, so as you mentioned, we work with a lot of global brands, like you mentioned. We also work with direct-to-consumer brands. What we focus on is growing and refining their partner marketing programs. We do that by creating performance-based relationships with strategic partners or affiliates. These partners and affiliates for the clients and for the brands, they promote that brand’s product or service in exchange for a fee based on how well the promotion performs. The benefit of this is that it ensures the brands are paying for marketing that works.

Tess Waresmith: To break it down a little bit, I can give you a specific example. If you google “top 10 running shoes” and that partner has reviewed some running shoes and decides that a couple of different shoes from Reebok are really beneficial, they might have that descriptor on the top that says, “We might receive a small commission from this.” We work with partners that are honest and are promoting the products that they love, but while they’re promoting them, they want to make a commission, so Reebok will pay them in exchange for performance and more sales. What we do is we create those big partner marketing programs. We try to recruit as many strategic publishers and partners for our brands to help them market their products.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Nice. Yeah, I wanted to talk about that in the context of you’re probably always rolling out different things, you’re rolling out technologies. There was one time period that you rolled out a new piece of technology. When you are doing that with the operations team and communicating everything, I would love to have you talk about when you rolled out this new piece of technology, what worked, and what were some of the learnings from rolling that out?

Tess Waresmith: Sure. Last year, we wanted to find a way to really create consistency across our teams and the way they manage clients. We have all different kinds of clients, and depending on new clients we get and team members, either changing teams or new team members coming into the company, there’s a lot of shifting that going goes around in our staffing from time to time. Because of that, and to make sure we’re delivering the same value for all our clients, we wanted to create some consistency around how we delivered that work, so one piece of that was something we were going to take care of in a new tool that we rolled out.

Tess Waresmith: While I think now that tool is very beneficial and we of reached that goal of creating consistency across a few of the processes in which we manage clients, while we rolled that out, we had a lot of learnings in terms of change management, and really, less on the tactical/technical side of change management and more on the people side. I personally and my team learned a lot about when we are working with team members that have a lot of clients on their plate and a lot of different day-to-day activities, we have to be extra careful about communicating clearly on what the expectations are for the tool, how they’re supposed to use it, being extra mindful of their time. Even if the tool’s the best tool ever that’s going to change their day-to-day and make them super strategic and efficient, if we’re asking them to roll it out too quickly, they’re not going to like it, and they’re not going to want to do that, which is totally fair because their goal is to deliver value for our clients and focus on what they do best, which is better partner marketing.

Tess Waresmith: I think our takeaway from that is to be really, really clear with our communication and make sure if we need to repeat stuff, if we need to do stuff in small groups, more training, whatever it is, clear on expectations and clear on the why, and then not just that, but making sure we’re in constant communication with teams in terms of how much time it takes them to implement this new tool, and if they are challenged because one of their clients has a big project they have to do, how can we work with them and support them to roll this out so that they feel good about the tool and they’re adopting it long-term to ultimately help them?

Tess Waresmith: But at the end of the day, most people don’t love change. You’re in your groove, you’re doing your day-to-day, and everything’s going well, and having someone come in there and say, “Okay, this is the new tool you have to use,” you have to be really strategic about how you do that. I think I’ve read a lot of things, “You need to repeat everything three times.” You need to repeat everything like 10 times and it needs to be clear and your team needs to know that this is in the best interest for them and what’s in it for them and why we believe this is going to be helpful for them and communicating that first and foremost, which we did some of that, we just didn’t do it enough.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. Communicate first what’s in it for them, how it’s going to make their life easier, even though life is not going to get easier in the first week, because it maybe may take them, if there’s a learning curve, right, it may take them two or three times longer to do what they did before, but ultimately, they could do the job in half the time or something like that. It sounds like you roll it out slower so that people get used to the change. Are there any other things that you do differently?

Tess Waresmith: Yeah, one thing we did that was good, and I think we could have even broke it down further, was that we rolled the tool out to smaller teams. That was a strategic decision to make sure that we got as much beta and feedback as we could from that smaller team before we rolled it out to the entire delivery team, which again, for us, is 75% of our company. It’s a majority, so we have to be careful that how we do that, so we really took a test-and-learn approach. But I think the important piece of that is how long is the testing because we did a test and learn and I believe we did maybe a month or two and I actually think probably could have tested a bit longer and found a little bit more information that would’ve helped us more so successfully roll out that tool to other teams.

Tess Waresmith: But then there’s also drawbacks to that. Then it takes you a year to roll out a tool versus ripping off the Band-Aid, so it’s always a balance. That’s why whenever I’m talking about these kind of things at the end of the day, having a clear communication plan where you’re regularly communicating with folks, it might not be a perfect rollout, it never is, but if you’re communicating and they know to expect communication from you on a weekly basis, and they know exactly who to go to when they have questions and they feel comfortable knowing the expectations of how they’re expected to use the tool and by when, that can help you mitigate the risk of not getting adoption for your tool, so I think at the end of the day, as long as you’re transparent and you’re communicating regularly and effectively, any change is going to go relatively well.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah, yeah, so communicating with the team, but then also having the team communicate with the client, saying, “XYZ is going to change. You may see a couple of glitches here, but we’ll iron them out,” and be clear with that communication as well.

Tess Waresmith: Yeah, 100%. That’s something that we do a lot of now, too, is if we are asking the team to make a change, or we’re making an operational change that affects the client, we’ll actually draft that communication for them, so they have an easy template and they can just forward it to the client. Obviously, they’re welcome to change it if they want, but since we know exactly what’s happening and it’s worth it for us to take that extra step to give them everything in a nice box and say, “These are the steps you need to take, here’s the email to send to your client,” and that just makes it much easier and digestible for the team that’s juggling a lot of different things.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Love it. We were talking also, Tess, before we hit Record, about identifying what kind of people you want on the team, and then also hiring a project manager, so I’d love for you to walk through a little bit of about that.

Tess Waresmith: Sure. There are a lot of benefits to having different types of people. I would say the first thing that if you’re starting a new operations team, I’m lucky in that I inherited different types of people that are not strong in the same things. That adds so much value to our conversations and we’ve all been able to learn so much from each other. That’s the first thing I would say is creating intellectual diversity on your team and diversity, in general, is super valuable.

Tess Waresmith: As far as operations is always a combination of strategy and tactical and being able to be strategic and think big picture, but then understand the tactical piece and dive in, that’s a unique skillset, and if you can find people that are able to do a little bit of both, that’s really valuable. I think everyone’s a bit on a spectrum. Some people are going to be really tactical, organized, detailed folks, and then other folks are going to be really highly strategic, so you just want to balance the combination of both on your team.

Tess Waresmith: Then with the project manager, that was a really great opportunity for me to learn the value of finding somebody outside our company with totally different experience and bring that knowledge. My team had all done some project management, and as an operations team, I think in general, it’s just super important to have solid project management skills and processes. But one great thing that I did was I was thinking about we have some people on the team with some project management experience, sorry, in the company in general, and thought about hiring internally, and I was so glad that we hired externally because we found somebody that just had a really different skillset that we didn’t have on the team before and has only been here a few months and really contributed a lot of value from a totally different perspective.

Tess Waresmith: In summation, I would say finding people that are able to be strategic, think big picture, and able to stop and take a step back and think, “Okay, is this the right thing to do? Or are we focusing on the wrong things? Are we out of scope? Are we off track?” You need to have that strategic mindset and, and awareness to take a pause. But then you also need to be able to be technical and execute on a lot of different things, so the combination of those two skills, and then when you have the opportunity, looking internally is great. As a company, we love promoting people internally. It’s one thing that we provide a lot of growth and I love that. It’s a very cool place to be if you want to grow in your career. But there’s also so much value to getting somebody that has totally diverse set of experience than you have on your team already.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: It brings in a new perspective, [crosstalk 00:27:15].

Tess Waresmith: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and so it’s been really awesome to have somebody from a different industry.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Tess, what do you look for when you’re hiring a project manager? What are some of the things you’re looking on when they send you their CV or when you’re talking to them to see if this is the right person?

Tess Waresmith: At Acceleration Partners, the first thing I look for is core value fit. We have three core values at Acceleration Partners: Building relationships, own it, and excel and improve. If somebody has those three things, I’m already interested because that means they’re somebody that’s a self-starter, that’s somebody that’s going to be able to receive and give feedback well, that has emotional intelligence, and is able to own projects and run with them, ask questions when they need, and likes to build relationships. If somebody can do all of those things, they’re going to be great in any job, right, so that’s probably the first thing I look for before I even get into the details is just, what kind of person is this? Are they a core value fit for our company? What can they bring to the table from a general strategic and emotional intelligence, I think, is super important. That’s the first thing.

Tess Waresmith: Then for a project manager specifically, it has to be somebody that’s organized and detailed, but specifically, this is somebody that’s going to be dealing with stakeholders across the company, so they need to be comfortable in pushing back when necessary or asking leadership for certain things. They’re going to be working across teams, so being able to collaborate and sometimes influence authority, right, to get what, what needs to be done done, especially when a lot of times in those projects, those stakeholders have lots of different priorities. The project might be important to them, but it’s not their number one priority, so being a good project manager takes a lot of skills. You got to be detailed and be able to step back and be strategic, but then also communicate effectively with people. I would call it “empathetic communication,” right? Understand what their day-to-day is like and what they’re focused on, but also be able to nudge and say, “I really need this information,” or, “I need this piece of collateral by a certain time,” and being able to push back on people that are most likely above you is pretty important.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Tess, I have one last question. I’m going to ask you your favorite business books and/or management books. Before you answer that, I just want to point people towards more episodes of the podcast, check out SweetProcess, and check out accelerationpartners.com. Two books, obviously, Performance Partnerships is a great one to check out. I actually got it on Audible. It was written by Robert Glazer, who is CEO of Acceleration Partners. Another one you mentioned on this call, Tess, is Vivid Vision by Cameron Herold, who actually wrote the forward for Performance Partnerships. He’s got so many good books, Meetings Sucks, Vivid Vision, and a bunch of others, so check those out as well. Maybe you were going to say Performance Partnerships, but I want to throw that out there first, but what are some of your favorites?

Tess Waresmith: All right, I’ll give you three. I have to plug Elevate. That is the book that Robert Glazer, the founder of Acceleration Partners, just wrote last year. It’s really about pushing your limits spiritually, mentally, physically, and unlocking success in yourself and being a better manager. That book is great because it’s very digestible. I think it’s like 100 pages, but I love it. It’s good reading and it’s not super long and I like that book a lot. My other two favorites would be Radical Candor by Kim Scott. As a leader, I think that book is excellent in terms of finding your voice as a manager and having the difficult conversations. Then the last one would be Multipliers. I’m blanking on the author right now, but I can’t remember her name.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah, Multipliers, I think they made more than one book, too, I think.

Tess Waresmith: I think Liz Wiseman, that’s it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yep.

Tess Waresmith: I think Liz Wiseman, yes. Any manager should read that book. One thing I like about, she talks about how to multiply the success of your team versus diminishing and how you can be trying to do something and actually overdo it and that can negatively affect your team. She talks about toxic positivity, which I think is a mistake that well-intentioned managers make a lot, but yeah, those three books are excellent.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Love it. Yeah, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. Liz Wiseman with Greg McKeown. First of all, Tess, thank you so much. Everyone, check out more episodes, and everyone, have a great day.

Tess Waresmith: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Process Breakdown Podcast. Before you go, quick question: Do you want a tool that makes it easy to document processes, procedures, and/or policies for your company so that your employees have all the information they need to be successful at their job? If yes, sign up for a free 14-day trial of SweetProcess. No credit card is required to sign up. Go to sweetprocess.com, “sweet” like candy, and “process” like process.com. Go now to sweetrocess.com and sign up for your risk-free 14-day trial.

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