48 The transformative power of OKRs and leading with empathy with Doug Dennerline | Partnering Leadership Global Thought Leader

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Now here's your host Mahan Tavakoli. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:00:25]

Welcome to partnering leadership. I'm really excited this week to be welcoming DougDennerline. He's the president and CEO of BetterWorks. They help align workforces to the organization's top priorities with their market-leading OKR software. Now I am a huge advocate for OKR objectives and key results.

And most of my own consulting work is helping organizations and teams implement OKR they were first introduced by Andy Grove. Then John Doerr popularized them all kinds of organizations from Silicon Valley powerhouses to the Gates foundation. Bono's One campaign, and the most effective government initiatives use OKRs .

So in the show notes, I will link to a webinar I did for Georgetown University, where you can find out more about OKRs and how you can implement them in your organization. So that's part of what Doug then Align's organization does. 

Additionally, what I find most inspiring about Doug is the kind of empathic leader that he is and has been throughout his career, whether the bulk of his career, where he spent a lot of time at Cisco and the family environment, they had there to then leading success factors, Alfresco. Lots of different organizations that he is involved with and serves on their board of directors and now at BetterWorks.

So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did because in part it's about, OKRs and a greater part of it is the empathic leadership that is critical in leading organizations, including through the transformative power of OKRs.

Now I love hearing from you. mahan@mahantavakoli.com, there is a microphone icon on partneringleadership.com, love hearing those voice messages, keep those coming and don't forget to follow on or subscribe to the podcast depending on your platform of choice. 

Finally, those of you that enjoy these conversations on Apple, don't forget to leave a rating and review that will help more people find these conversations and become more impactful leaders.

Now, here is my conversation with Doug Dennerline.

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:02:55]

Doug Dennerline, welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you with me.

Doug Dennerline: [00:03:00] 

Oh, thank you. I'm glad to be here Mahan. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:03:02] 

I'm really excited, both obviously to touch base with you on your work as CEO of BetterWorks, I'm a big advocate for OKRs. And as I have shared with you, I absolutely adore you're leading with empathy and how you have shown this through the crisis. And can't wait to share some of your thoughts with respect to effective leadership and leading with empathy with our leadership community. 

But before we get to any of Doug, would love to know where abouts you grew up, now I know in Arizona, but how that upbringing in your upbringing impacted the kind of person you became.

Doug Dennerline: [00:03:42] 

I grew up in Arizona. I was born in Phoenix who was raised in Scottsdale. My dad was in the banking industry and was one of five brothers and the only brother that actually graduated college and taught a finance class at night at ASU, and he was working in the banking industry his entire career.

Those are the times when parents were pretty strict. They had high expectations of me and I was going to be a success and be another kid that's going to graduate college. And then there was going to be no other way about it. And so I guess I picked up a pretty intense work ethic. The way I kind of think about it too, is my first role out of college was with a company called Hewlett Packard.

And I had a connection to, in the leaders there that kind of helped me get a role there. Well, all the people that were in my class were all from Ivy League schools. And I'm a proud graduate of Arizona State. And so I was like, "okay, you know what, these guys all might be smarter than me, but they're not going to outwork me." and so I've always had a really strong work ethic. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:04:40] 

And in addition to that work ethic, I know the HP way also had a significant impact on how you view leadership. Doug, what is the HP way? 

Doug Dennerline: [00:04:51] 

It's really great. I mean, I went to Hewlett Packard in 1982 aging myself, but. It was a very kind and very respectful culture.

They were all about the people that were in the organization. It was a very empathetic culture. And if you look out now around the Valley, so many of the leaders are from early days at HP. The culture at Cisco very much felt like HP. It may not be your job, but you go do an effort and help anyways, and you don't complain.

And so I've always taken that leadership with me where I've gone, because candidly, it's kind of who I am. I guess I picked it up to the point where it's kind of my core soul. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:05:32] 

Now, why is it Doug? That , for a lot of people, when they think about Silicon Valley, they understand the drive for innovation and metrics, and they don't see as much of the empathy in some of the leaders that might be celebrated worldwide for their business successes.

Doug Dennerline: [00:05:51] 

It's really interesting. If you look at the Valley, and some of the companies that have been incredibly successful, some of those leaders were very hard driving individuals and they didn't appear to have a lot of empathy. They were out to win a battle and compete and get ahead of everybody else, and win, and, and I guess people are from my perspective, maybe willing to tolerate some of that when the company's doing really well and they're achieving financial gains, the things that make the culture tolerable enough to stick around. 

I've worked for both of those people and that John Chambers tells you upfront. I like to build a family and he wants to know you as a person, not only as employee number.

And I like that. That's where I want to work. I don't want to work in another environment because it takes energy from me. And there is no dress rehearsal in life Mahan, you got to get kind of right the first time. So having worked for both of those people, I've made a conscious effort to say to myself, I want to be more like a leader like John Chambers or Rick Justice, who worked for John, who I worked for are just amazing human beings. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:06:56] 

And Doug, the stories we tell, say a lot about our values and any conversation you were having with John Chambers and John Doerr, actually John Chamber was cut out, so he was not part of the conversation anymore virtual conversation.

And you told a wonderful story about John Chambers, which says a lot about him and what you as a CEO and leader also prioritize. 

Doug Dennerline: [00:07:21] 

Absolutely. And that was just one story about how he helped a systems engineer out of our New York office. He was diagnosed with a very bad brain tumor to the point where he couldn't get a brain surgeon to agree to do the surgery because it was so risky.

And John said, I'm not going to have that. And he got four of the best brain surgeons on a call, sent them all the MRI and said, okay, who's going to do the surgery and a doctor out of Bethesda, Maryland signed up to do it. And that person's alive today because of John's efforts. 

I have another story that is close to my own heart is a woman that worked for me was a valuable player, division one valuable player at Ohio state, an amazing person.

And I had gotten, I'm an early bird. So I got up early one morning at five o'clock and I had heard she had been out of the office for a couple of weeks and that she had a really bad case of the flu it’s what I've heard. So I kind of care about my people I reached out to her over email. And I said, "is everything okay? Is there anything I can do?" And she wrote back and said, "basically I been diagnosed with a stage four cancer and no one will operate and I'm going to die." And I said, well, okay, give me some time. And I contacted John and she was trying to get an appointment at John Hopkins University and was denied that because they said it's interoperable.We can't help.

Well, seven o'clock. At between five o'clock in the morning at seven o'clock in the morning, she had gotten an appointment at John Hopkins University. She had surgery seven days later, she's married with a baby today, because again, of those efforts. 

And those are powerful stories when we tell people and I tell people that work for me, please let me know if something in your personal life, your family or kids, is it going right?

Because there's lots of resources in the world that you may not know about. And an important part of having that is getting to the right resources. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:09:06] 

And that's really important Doug for our audience to hear, because as they hear about your many business successes, it comes with the type of values that prioritize people that you have shown throughout your career.

So thank you so much for sharing that example. Now you did spend a lot of time at Cisco with John Chambers also. And at one point you ran a $9.8 billion enterprise system. And for a two and a half year period, you guys were hiring. 5,000 employees, every 90 days. How were you able to maintain culture in an organization that was growing so fast?

Doug Dennerline: [00:09:51] 

Yeah, it went from 14,500 people to 48,500 people in two and a half years. What we did very outwardly was we told every leader, tell stories, tell stories of what made Cisco, Cisco. And so  as an example, we had a class where we did a simulation of fastest simulation of all the new employees. They come in for a week long assimilation and they come in on Monday morning and I would get up and there'd be 1200 people in this class.

I would open it up and we will tell stories about how Cisco was winning in the world of what we did in the networking world and how fantastic it was. And then John Morgridge was the first CEO and John was incredibly frugal.  John  told stories around not spending the company money or even his own money.

He used to get fraiche long sleeve shirts, and he talked about how you would take them and have them tailored and make them short sleeve shirts or all the elevators in Cisco's buildings were all the push up the elevators, not the one withcable, so it was really slow going up the elevator. And I remember.

Debbie Gross, John Chambers long-time amazing administrator. And she told John, "you need to get an elevator because I spend way too much time in the elevator with all these people going up and I don't know what to talk to them about." We would tell stories like that to get people, to understand our culture. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:11:11] 

And that storytelling is a critical part of what every leader needs to learn, how to do in getting the organizational culture aligned.

It's just impressive that you were able to do it adding so many employees in such a short period of time.

Now you also ended up heading up WebEx. Where there you worked with Eric Yuan and, you did a great webinar with Eric back in July. He actually gave an unsolicited credit to you, in terms of you helping him become a better leader.

Now, why is it in your view that a WebEx was not getting as much traction pre pandemic? And now post pandemic, obviously zoom and virtual technology has gotten off so well. 

Doug Dennerline: [00:12:02] 

Yeah. So when Cisco acquired WebEx, I was involved with that process and the leadership John included asked me to go over and take the CEO role if you will. I was called the GM for the voice technology group, it was called, which include the WebEx asset. 

And we have telepresence capability at Cisco and we had WebEx and, my feeling was wow. I honestly said what's going to happen to industries where we spend all this time on airplanes that is not very effective use of time when we can just held WebEx meetings.

So the culture at Cisco very much became a WebEx culture. We did a lot more sales calls over WebEx, than we did putting systems engineers on airplanes. And I thought the world would really pick up on that. Now WebEx did incredibly well inside of Cisco when we acquired it. I mean, it was a 3000 person acquire into a company with 70,000 people.

So when we took it into all those accounts and we had great success doing that, but it wasn't until the pandemic when people were forced. That didn't necessarily trust people that have meetings over the web or do their work at home, where they were forced into that environment, that they realized the power of this technology and thank goodness for Eric and the zoom team who quickly scaled that capability to meet incredible growing need of people that needed this technology in order to work in order to survive, go to school.

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:13:26] 

And that technology has been really helpful, Doug, and with the transition to remote work, organizations and leaders have taken one of two paths. One path has been a desire for control. So a lot of surveillance software sales have also gone up.

The other path has been a path that sets team members on a way where they can be productive and contribute to the organization's success. And one of the ways of doing that is OKRs, which is a fantastic way of aligning organization and a big part of what BetterWorks is all about. 

So what are OKRs and what role does BetterWork's play in implementing OKRs with organizations?

Doug Dennerline: [00:14:12] 

The term stands for “Objective and Key Results”, and it's a methodology in order to get people aligned around the most important things that a company is trying to accomplish. The reason I'm involved with the company is my lead investor is John Doerr. John Doerr worked for Andy Grove at Intel, and he's the father of OKR.

So. John basically introduced the OKR methodology to every company he invested in, including Google, large users of OKRs today and has written a book called “Measure what Matters”. That's 20 chapter 21 chapters with people in industry and philanthropy that use OKRs to run their businesses. 

And John has this term called just the "F.A.C.T.S". And what's the "F.A.C.T.S". The "F.A.C.T.S"is the "F"stands for focus. It's a technology that makes leadership get into a room and decide what are the top company objectives that we are going to work on as an organization. And, you know, of course every company in the world today does some kind of planning at the beginning of the year, but many of them do that.

They build this incredible plan. They put it in a drawer and they take it out 12 months later and they go, did we achieve it? And in many cases I might achieve something, but usually not what they put into the plan. So get you to focus and say, what are those four or five things that we need everybody in this organization to know are the most important.

The "A" stands for alignment. You want everybody in the organization to be aligned around those four to five objectives that are most important. And so they can look up as they write their objectives to see what their own personal objectives should be, that help the company achieve those top level goals.

It's not about cascading them down. It's about looking up and writing goals that are tied to the top company objectives. And then it's around commitment. And then the commitment is I'm going to make my objectives that I signed up to do. By putting the key results, which are that the O is the what, and the KRs are the, how am I going to do it.

It's another committed through their KRs to achieve those goals, which is going to help the company achieve what it's trying to accomplish. And then that's around tracking. And that's probably what we probably do the most inside of BetterWorks is we're an application that lets you build an OKR framework.

Everybody in the company see the transparency. Everybody else gets to see everybody else's goals. They get to see how they're doing against those goals. Leadership can say, well, we seem to be having a problem over here. Let me jump in and see if I can help you move some roadblocks that are having people not achieve their goals.

And so it's a wonderful thing because now you're not just building your plan, putting in a drawer and 12 months later, did you get there? You're building it all along the way. And OKR should be done quarterly, not annually. So you might have an annual plan, but as what am I doing these 90 days to achieve those goals?

And then the last one is stretch, right? The S in fact stands for stretching. It's important that you make your goals aspirational and culturally what a great culture and OKRs will set very aspirational goals and only achieve 70% of the way there. And you want that you don't want an organization that everybody chooses a hundred percent of their goals all the time, because they're not aspirational enough.

And then another important part, Mahan is CFRs that go with OKRs and that's Conversation is Feedback and Recognition. Conversations are super important. And when we talk about empathy, you know, that's the empathy of OKR. This is the C it's also the superpower. OKRs by themselves, we need to adjust OKRs and you go in and you have to write my goals down and how I did against my goals was kind of work for the person. Right. It's more work. It's a bit of a tax. 

Well, the benefit to them is the conversations that are now going to happen on an ongoing basis with their leader. How can I help you? How are you doing? What are your OKR? Why'd you choose these OKRs. 

You know, and so it's the value of that is greater than the task of doing the OKRs. And we also advise people make one of your objectives, a very personal one. I'm an assistant as engineer one, and I want to be a systems engineering leader. What am I need to do manager, to help me get my career on a path that gets me to where I want to get inside of the organization? And again, creating a great vehicle for a conversation to be had. That's important to that individual. So that's the OKR and CFR format. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:18:28] 

It is an absolutely powerful framework, Doug. I've seen it implemented in a lot of organizations, and it's been transformative when done well, we can spend a lot of time talking about Andy Grove and I am paranoid because of Andy Grove or John Dover, "Measure what matters" is probably the book I gift most to people. So we could have hour long conversations on those, but based on your experience at  BetterWorks seeing OKRs effectively implemented by organizations. What are some successes that you have seen impacting organizations as they have launched on implementing OKRs?

Doug Dennerline: [00:19:10] 

Few of my favorite stories, you can start very differently around, OKRs, you can have add into it. Atticus the CIO of the organization.

When we get OKR it's in his organization around what he was trying to accomplish for the company. And then people got to see what happened to his organization, how aligned they got, how they were achieving very aspirational goals inside the organization. And then they rolled out across all of it, into it, and then they added CFR.

So now they're having conversations around that. So to them, it's part of their culture. Now the conversations they have are all around the OKR methodology. There's a company called Vertiv they're in the data center space. They make equipment for data centers. They were a spin out of Emerson electric, and they had a very progressive CEO and a very great chief people officer who said, "we need to come together and use OKR to help define the organization differently than being a division of Emerson, but being a standalone company".

And they built all of their frameworks around. Define themselves differently than being part of another company. And they were very successful spun out and two and a half years later, they went to an IPO as an example. 

So, you know, what you see is when people get over the hump of OKRs, and there is a bit of a learning curve there to change management process. You see them really aligned in a really interesting way achieved their goals much faster than an organization who doesn't do it. Well, we say that it's almost 2X faster to achieve goals inside of the OKR methodology than all the other ones that kind of exist out there. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:20:46] 

Absolutely transformative, especially underlying finding the empathy with which you approach leadership that OKRs, can be transformative not just as a process, but as a leadership methodology and empathy is a big part of that. 

Now,  Doug, you also, at this time, when you have a BetterWorks, trying to provide this valuable service to clients, You have also been going through the crisis and through the pandemic and leading this organization.

How are you as a CEO maintaining culture at BetterWorks at this time? 

Doug Dennerline: [00:21:25] 

Yeah. It's certainly been a challenge for think all CEOs, we've done multiple different things. One of things is I ask the organization, what do you think we need to do in order to stay close? We've done what I think a lot of other companies I've done and things like. We had virtual happy hours, you know, one day a week in the afternoon. And we've all talked about zoom fatigue. And I do think that's real too. 

And so one of the early things we did is we said, you know what? We don't need hour long meetings in this thing we're going through. Let's try to keep them tightened to 30 minutes.

And so we kind of put a rule out that says, well, I want you to have only two 30 minute zoom meetings before you take a 30 minute window where you don't have anything that you can go do some work. You can go for a walk.  Take care of yourself. Take care of your kids. Work on some homework. We also said let's take Friday afternoons off and just make that around time to catch up on all those things that you can't catch up on.

If you think about it Mahan to mean people, there's no more commute time. You know, you get up you're at work, you tend to work longer, harder hours. And we knew, and it took that into account. We saw the productivity gain that we got from this environment. We've done lots of things like that. We had a Halloween treasure hunt for kids over zoom for the family so we can meet.

And we also have the rule “hey, you’re at your home.” And so if your kids want to be in your lap, when you're in a meeting or you have to feed a baby, or you have a pet, they're all welcome to anything we're doing inside the organization. And  I'm a person that, has always believed it's about accomplishment. It's not about oversight. And so I only measure people's work ethic in terms of, did you get your work done? Not through those tools you talked about where people actually, you know, take pictures of people or look at their keystrokes. And I think that's all silly stuff in my culture anyways. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:23:20] 

And that's again, the power of OKR is where you don't have to track all of those things.

Now at the same time that you are leading with empathy, you're doing such a great job with it. I'm sure your investors expect results from you and the organization, the same way all CEOs are held accountable for leading their teams and organizations. How do you balance that empathy and flexibility that your team members need now with working from home or whatever other challenges that they have with the fact that there are outcomes that your investors, your board of directors expect from you?

Doug Dennerline: [00:24:02] 

Yeah, I think probably the most important thing Mahan is  you have to continue to paint the vision of what you're trying to accomplish as a business. And we do set aspirational goals inside the organization so that,  people aspire to do good work. And we do know what the goals of the organization are.

We make them very transparent. We, as you can imagine, we are heavy users of our own application. Our meetings are around reviewing as an organization where we are against our goals. We do reflections every middle of the quarter and the quarter about what's working well, what's not working well. Where are we changing directions a little bit.

And we just get people to be aspired, to want to achieve what we're trying to accomplish. And we paint that picture over and over again. So people are excited to be part of this thing. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:24:52] 

And what I've seen in you, Doug is the kind of empathy that you lead with is the same kind of empathy that John Chambers led with makes people not want to let you as their leader down, which that by itself becomes motivating for them to get the work done.

When there is a connection to the leader in addition to the purpose of the organization. 

Doug Dennerline: [00:25:18] 

It's a very true statement. And I believe strongly in that  one of the things I do I meet with between three and six people in my company every week. And it doesn't matter where they are in the organization.

And I just put on "it's Doug wants to catch up with you," people go, "what do I need to prepare?" I said, "nothing." I just started getting on the phone. The first thing I do is say. "How are you? How's your environment. You have what you need. How's the health of you, how's the health of your family, you know, are you staying safe?" and we have that conversation.

 And then we talk about what are you working on? Is it working well? And I always say to people, I can't fix what I don't know is broken. So please feel free to Slack me, text me, call me. I don't care. I'm interrupt driven. You don't need to schedule time with me. Tell me what's working, tell me what's not working, you know, and I've proven that it's okay to do that, and some people do do that. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:26:09] 

Now as we're going through all of these changes and the current crisis, eventually at some point there will be a certain level of normalcy. It will be different than what we experienced before. What are your thoughts with respect to the future of work and what it will look like a couple of years from now?

Doug Dennerline: [00:26:28] 

Yeah, I think that's going to depend a lot on the leader.  I think some cultures will be hard back at the office, the epiphany for me and all this is I have really changed the way that I think about leadership. It's no longer about where you live. It's about what are your skills? My own team on my direct reports, one moved to Boise, one moved to Arizona. I don't ever expect them back in the office because I can work very effectively over this technology and that's going to work okay. For me in my environment. 

Now we are probably going to do shared office space because. There are people who need to get together and gain energy from each other, they'd have similar roles and what we're going to do that in a very safe way and not in having an HQ, I'm all about now finding the best talent.

I don't care where they live and having them be brought into the culture. You know, we're having some challenges in the industry we're trying to figure out. And a lot of money's being spent on, including us thinking about how we onboard people more importantly, how do they feel the organization? How do they get the culture through video versus face-to-face?

And we do things like I have a meeting on Friday to talk about our next fiscal year with my leadership team. And I sent them all a bunch of really fun food things to have so that we could all have a meal together as we're working on this event. Like we would do if we went to a hotel as an example. So things like that.

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:27:52] 

So one of the challenges will be, I mentioned maintaining that culture when people are continuing to be remote and some people end up being in the organization eventually,  whether it's a coworking environment or whatever else. 

How do you see balancing as a leader and organization that has one foot in the remote camp and one foot with people interacting in person?

Because I imagine we still develop stronger relationships when we happen to bump into people at the water cooler and go grab lunch with them. 

Doug Dennerline: [00:28:29] 

Yeah. I think that's true. And I think it's going to, we'll all figure it out when we feel more comfortable when the curve is completely flat and COVID is all but eradicated people will start to be more okay going back to an office and we'll see how hard that shift is back. But I will continue to run my company as a hybrid model and let the right organizations with the right culture in the organization, get together every other day in the office or work three days from home and two days in the office and rotate who's in the office, so you don't have a bunch of people in there together. 

And I think that's going to work well for a lot of industries. And some leaders are saying, "well, we're going to be a hundred percent virtual." And I know there's a few companies out there that we're already a hundred percent virtual and there's as the others.

I mean, I won't mention names because we sell to them, but. Boy, this transition was really hard on them. They didn't even have the network infrastructure to support people working for home. So they had to rotate people on the network so that it didn't collapse during the day. And so, I think that the rules are always going to be a different place now.

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:29:37] 

Yes. And as we lead in that different world and in a different place, The way you lead with incredible empathy is a critical part of it. Now, how do you suggest for the audience to find out more about BetterWorks and or connect with you, Doug. 

Doug Dennerline: [00:29:55] 

Well, please. I make it easy. My email at BetterWorks is doug@betterworks.com. Please reach out to me.

There's BetterWorks.com. There's a lot of good information on our website. Probably the best I haven't is just coming to me directly and I'll make sure you get to the right resource inside the organization that can most help you with what you're looking for. And we have some incredible people in the company that are really smart about helping companies learn about OKRs.

Learn to be successful at OKR is probably one thing we do differently than most every other vendor is. We have an incredible change management capability in the organization from our professional services. So we help you through this change management process, which will help you be successful. And we retain 90% of our customers in this space, and that's kind of in the world-class area for implementation of OKR. And so we're committed to help to be successful. 

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:30:46] 

You definitely do an incredible job at better works with OKR is Doug. As I mentioned, I'm a big advocate I've seen OKRs be transformative when done well, most importantly, though, what I fell in love with and what I love about your leadership is that you truly embody empathy in leading your organization and in helping elevate the conversation and OKR.

So I really appreciate you sharing some of your experience and perspective with the partnering leadership community. 

Doug Dennerline: [00:31:21] 

It's a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much.

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