Over the last three months, we’ve explored hiring, management styles, and the necessity of goal alignment. When you look at them in isolation, they’re just “business functions.” But when you weave them together, they form the blueprint for a high performing team…that actually likes each other (yes…it can be done!).

So before we step too deep into April, I thought it would be the perfect time to look back at the ground we covered in Q1 and synthesize the most important lesson learned so far: getting the best work out of your team isn’t about pushing them harder; it’s about building a system where excellence is the natural byproduct.

High Performance Starts Before the First Interview

Everything - and I mean everything - starts with who you let in the door. If you don’t take the time to hire excellent people, you won’t achieve excellent results. This doesn’t mean putting candidates through 16 rounds of interviews until you only find “stars.” It’s more about engineering a system where excellence is the only logical outcome. Over the first quarter, we deconstructed this architecture into three critical phases: preparation, selection, and integration.

Preparation is 80% of the Battle

Hiring usually fails because it starts in a state of emergency. Instead of rushing to fill a gap out of desperation, start with a “Scorecard of Outcomes.” Define exactly what a “win” looks like in the first six months for that specific role. When you hire for tangible results rather than a rough idea of responsibilities, you stop searching for a “type” of person and start searching for a contributor. This preparation ensures that both the manager and the candidate are aligned on the definition of success before the race even starts.

Data Over “Vibes”

The “gut feeling” is a manager’s greatest liability. It is often just a mask for familiarity and unconscious bias. To foster a culture of true autonomy, the selection process must be clinical. By using structured interviewing (asking every candidate the same questions and grading them against your predefined outcomes) you prioritize evidence over rapport. This shift allows you to hire for character and competence, ensuring you can trust your team to hit the ground running the moment they sign the offer. You aren’t “taking a chance” on a hire; you are executing a plan based on proven data points.

When hiring subject matter experts, ask yourself if you would trust putting them on a customer call or a Board of Directors meeting on Day 1. (We’ve literally done this. Multiple times.) When hiring entry- to mid-level hires, ask yourself if they have the characteristics you need. Skills can be trained. Characteristics like being hard working, tenacious, etc. can’t.

Whenever interview candidates have asked me if there is a micromanagement culture at the company, my answer has always been “The reason why this interview process is so rigorous is because we want to make sure we’re choosing the right candidate, so that we don’t have to micromanage you. No one has the time for that.”

The Bottom Line

When you treat hiring as a disciplined process rather than a roll of the dice, you create an environment where trust is the default. By shifting from subjective “gut checks” to objective systems, you empower your team to hit the ground running with the autonomy they need to do their best work.

Related Reading

• Hiring is 80% Preparation

• Stop Hiring by Gut Feeling

• The 14-Day Countdown

If You Don’t Mean It, Don’t Offer It

Once you have the right people, the quickest way to ruin the momentum for excellence is to offer any kind of fake autonomy, or as ChatGPT once helped me come up with - “performative collaboration.”

We’ve all been there. A leader says, “I want you to take the lead on this project. Use your best judgment.” So, you spend forty hours pouring your heart into a proposal, only for that leader to come in and say, “Actually, I think we should do it my way.”

I’m getting fired up just thinking about it! 🔥

The Consequences of Performative Collaboration

This is the death of engagement. I’ve seen teams that either never had autonomy or had it stripped away, and the transformation is heartbreaking. People stop bringing their best ideas. They stop staying late to solve a problem. They stop caring.

I’ve had coworkers tell me point-blank that they are “striving to be mid.” Why? Because when “mid” work and “excellent” work result in the same outcome - the manager changing everything anyway - there is no incentive for excellence. Striving for mediocrity is a defense mechanism against a culture that doesn’t actually value your input.

However, autonomy isn’t a “free-for-all.” In a previous discussion, we looked at the “Goldilocks” of management. This is the reality that sometimes, your team actually wants to be told what to do.

What to Do Instead

There is a fine line between empowering someone and abandoning them. If a project is high-risk or the team is venturing into new territory, they don’t want a “figure it out” shrug; they want clear guardrails and a decisive direction so they can do their best work.

The key to navigating this is radical honesty:

• If you already know what the final decision is going to be, just say it. Don’t pretend it’s a collaborative brainstorming session if you’re just looking for someone to agree with you.

• If you are giving someone autonomy, give them the right to be wrong. If they make a choice that isn’t exactly what you would have done, but it still gets the job done, let it stand.

  • 💡 Pro-Tip: If you truly disagree with a decision that is being made and the buck stops with you, you should put a stop to it. It’s how you put a stop to it that is key here. Continue with radical honesty, have open and honest conversations, make sure to explain why your decision is different, and, most importantly, make sure they feel heard.

  • 💡 Bonus Pro-Tip: For the love of God, if you’re going to disagree, your decision better make logical and reasonable sense. If not, you’re in for a world of resentment from your team.

True autonomy means the leader’s job is to define the “what” and the “why,” while the team defines the “how.” When you blur those lines, you create a culture of second-guessing.

Related Reading

• The Goldilocks of Management

Goals: The Infrastructure of Trust

You can have the most talented people in the world and a culture that truly empowers them, but if they don’t know where the finish line is, they’ll just run in circles. High-performing people hate wasting time. If they feel like their effort isn’t moving the needle, they will find a place where it does.

At the start of the year, we talked about the difference between vague resolutions and actionable goals. Most companies set “resolutions” - abstract ideas like “increase efficiency” or “improve culture.” But as we detailed in our “Goal Setting Outs for 2026”, we have to be more clinical than that.

To get the best work out of your employees, the goals must be:

1. Visible: If the goal is buried in a slide deck from January, it doesn’t exist. It needs to be the heartbeat of every 1:1 and every team sync.

2. Measurable: “Better communication” isn’t a goal. “Reducing the internal email volume by 20% through better Slack hygiene” is a goal.

3. Aligned: Every person on the team should be able to draw a straight line from their daily task to the company’s North Star.

When goals are clear, autonomy becomes safe. You don’t have to check in every hour because you’ve already agreed on what “success” looks like. If the Retail Insights Manager knows the goal is to identify three key market shifts by the end of the month, I don’t need to tell her how to run her customer calls. I just need to make sure she has the resources to hit that target.

Related Reading

• Goal Setting “Ins”

• Goal Setting “Outs”

Looking Ahead

As we wrap up this recap of Q1, the takeaway is simple: Management is the art of removing obstacles.

• Hiring the right people removes the obstacle of incompetence.

• Creating true autonomy removes the obstacle of apathy.

• Setting clear goals removes the obstacle of confusion.

If you spent Q1 feeling like you were dragging your team uphill, it might be time to look at which of these three pillars is leaning. Did you hire for gut feeling? Are you offering fake autonomy? Or are your goals so vague that nobody knows if they’re winning?

Looking forward, my challenge for you is to focus on the “Strategic Reset.” Let’s look at our teams not as machines to be operated, but as ecosystems to be tended. When the environment is right, the work doesn’t just get done…it gets better.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article! Some food for thought to leave with you:

• Where is your company currently practicing “fake autonomy”?

• If you gave your team a “pop quiz” on the company’s top three goals for the year, how many of them would pass?

• What is one “character trait” you will prioritize in your next hire, regardless of their resume?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!

Christine

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I am reading another Stacy recommendation: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain!

🍿 Watch of the Week: This week, I binged the heck out of The Pursuit of Jade, a 40-episode historical Chinese drama on Netflix, because it was everywhere on TikTok. 😅 It was a great watch and I was really pleasantly surprised at how far special effects and action sequences have come in Chinese cinema!

🎧 Song of the Week: Since I’m in a very Chinese time in my life, I’ve been listening to some Chinese oldies. If you’ve never listened to Chinese music before, here’s a classic for ya!

Can’t believe we are already on the last day of March and, just like that, Q1 2026 is complete. Today, I thought I would wrap up the quarter with some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way when we were still in “building” mode at SupplyPike. These are the mindsets that literally became part of the language and culture at our company.

Let’s hop to it! 🦘

Startups are often described as “building a plane while flying it,” but let’s be honest, there are moments where even that might be too subdued. In reality, it’s more like trying to assemble a Lego set while someone is occasionally setting the table on fire, the instructions are written in a language you don’t speak, and the “investor” in the corner is asking why the Lego man doesn’t have a better hat yet.

Feel familiar? Yeah…hi, join the club! 👋

If you’re coming from a “Big Corp” background, the transition can feel even more like a fever dream. In a large company, there’s a process for everything (including the process for requesting a new process). In a startup, there is no process. You are the process. And if you don’t shift your mindset, you’re going to burn out before the Series A dollars even hit the bank account.

To survive, and maybe even thrive, you need to rewire your brain. Here are the three mindset shifts that kept us on track.

🚲 Shift 1: The Bikeshed Effect

There is a psychological phenomenon called Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, but in the startup world, we just call it “Bikeshedding.”

The concept is intuitive: A committee tasked with approving plans for a nuclear power plant will spend ten minutes on the reactor design but three hours debating what color to paint the employee bike shed. Why? Because the reactor is terrifyingly complex, but it’s easy to have an opinion on paint.

In a startup, bikeshedding can be the ultimate silent killer. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself deep in a 90-minute “emergency” meeting arguing about an email CTA…while the GTM channels that actually drive the business haven’t gotten any attention.

The Trap of the “Smart Person”

Ironically, this gets trickier the better your team is. If you’re doing your job right, you’ve likely hired high achievers - folks who are wired to jump in and solve things. When presented with a vague or hard problem (like “Why does our churn rate look like a ski slope?” 🙃), most people don’t want to stay in that uncertainty for long. It feels better to reach for something that’s more concrete or that can feel like it’s more fixable. Suddenly, the team is “solutioning” for a problem they haven’t even defined yet.

I’ve found myself in this more times than I’d like to admit.

The New Rule

Before you let your team go down a rabbit hole on a solution, you have to be the annoying “Why” Person. Stop asking “How do we fix this?” and start asking “Is this a ‘Bike Shed’ or a ‘Nuclear Reactor’?” Then, guide your team accordingly.

💡Pro-Tip: Being a leader doesn’t exclude us from bikeshedding ourselves. If one of your team members is calling you out for this, listen to them and switch gears! I can’t stress this enough: If you’ve hired the right people, trust them to handle the small stuff. I have been on the receiving end of being endlessly questioned about something inconsequential by a leader in a leadership (aka expensive) meeting. Despite my efforts to take the conversation offline, the leader kept digging deeper. It was not only distracting and a waste of other leaders’ time, but it made me feel micromanaged too.

Your job is to make sure nobody is wasting their genius on the color of a shed while the reactor is melting down.

🏆 Shift 2: The MVP

One of the hardest things for a perfectionist to accept is that, in a startup, “perfect” is usually just a fancy word for “too late.”

We tend to treat our products like they’re our children. We want them to be beautiful, flawless, and capable of playing the violin by age 3. Just me? In a startup ecosystem, your product isn’t a child; it’s a science experiment. And science requires you to blow things up occasionally.

Get “Outside” or Get Out

If you haven’t read The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank, stop reading this and go buy it. (Actually, finish this first, then go buy it 😉). Blank’s whole philosophy boils down to one mantra: Get out of the building.

You will never, ever know what is working until you get actual feedback from the “outside.” Your internal team meetings are just a series of shared beliefs (or delusions?) until a customer actually clicks a button. The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) mindset is about finding the shortest, ugliest path to a “Yes” or a “No” from the market.

The “Ugly” Shift

Nothing will be perfect at this stage. If you aren’t at least 15% embarrassed by your first version, you’ve launched too late.

• The Big Corp mindset: “We need a 12-month roadmap and a 40-page requirements doc.”

• The Startup mindset: “Let’s build the ‘duct tape and a prayer’ version, ship it on Tuesday, and see if anyone complains.”

You’ll never know what clicks until you let the world touch it. Feedback is the only real currency you have. If it’s “ugly” but solves a massive pain point, people will scream at you to make it better, which is great! That’s called “demand.” If it’s beautiful but useless…it’s still useless. 😬

Food for Thought

As SupplyPike became more established and gained more customers, I do feel like it became harder for us to figure out what the new company-wide definition of an MVP was. Back in the startup days, an MVP would literally have been a landing page for folks to sign up to join a waitlist because…there was no product to even sell.

As we gained more customers, while Product still had the principles of an “ugly” MVP, Customer Success and Account Management started pushing back saying that this type of MVP was not enough to keep the customer happy or justify an upcharge. This is where a lotttt of feature release x pricing strategy conversations took place.

I don’t have the perfect answer for what your team should do when this good problem arises, but just be sure to keep Product, Sales, and Customer Success in constant communication to find that balance.

🥷Shift 3: The Blameless Post Mortem (Attack the Problem, Not the Person)

The faster you move, the more things will break. If your culture reacts to those breaks by looking for someone to point your finger at, you are effectively putting a speed governor on your entire company. People who are afraid of being blamed will stop taking risks. They will start hiding mistakes. And in a startup, the mistakes you don’t see are usually the ones that hurt you the most later.

Making Post-Mortems Actually Useful

At SupplyPike, we leaned hard into Blameless Post-Mortems. When a server went down or a project missed its mark, the goal was never to find out “who messed up.” The goal was always to find out “how the system allowed this to happen.”

We even took these discussions to our company all-hands meetings aka our Weekly Roundtables. Discussing a failure openly in front of the whole company isn’t public shaming; it’s a public service. It signals to everyone that it is safe to be human, provided you are also being responsible and learning from our collective mistakes.

The “No-Toxic-People” Clause

A blameless culture only works if you operate under the assumption of positive intent. You have to act like everyone is coming to work to do their best for the greater good of the company.

• The Logic: If we assume you meant well, we can focus entirely on fixing the process.

• The Reality Check: This only works if you have the right people. If you have someone who is toxic, lazy, or playing politics, they need to get out. You can’t build a blameless culture on a foundation of bad actors. (🔌Shamelessly plugging our article on hiring.)

The Shift

Move from “Who did this?” to “How do we prevent this?” Protect your people with everything you’ve got, but attack your problems with zero mercy.

Final Thoughts

Working in a startup isn’t just a job; it’s a temperament. It requires you to be comfortable with the “ugly,” to be obsessed with the “essential,” and to be fiercely protective of your team’s psychological safety.

If you can stop painting the bikeshed, embrace the messiness of the MVP, and build a culture where “oops” is followed by “how do we fix it?” rather than “who’s getting fired?”, you won’t just survive, you’ll be the one building the next unicorn!

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Are there any other mindsets or philosophies that you or your company has found success with? Let us know in the comments or chat!

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!

Christine

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I just finished The Wedding People by Alison Espach based on Stacy’s recommendation and am starting another Stacy recommendation: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain!

🍿 Watch of the Week: I rewatched She’s the Man for the first time in a few years with a few girl friends and it’s still SUCH a top tier movie.

🎧 Song of the Week: I was looking for a palate cleanser and went country! 🤠Currently listening to some Maren Morris!

🤩 Useful AND Delightful

A quick preface before we dive in. Ten years ago, “digital transformation” was the buzzword of the hour. Today, we’re living in its sequel (if I hear “AI” one more time, I’m gonna lose it). No matter what the cool kids are saying you need, here’s the hard truth: your team doesn’t care how “powerful” your software is if they dread opening the tab.

At SupplyPike, our philosophy was simple: the software we build should bring delight to the end user. If a tool feels like a chore, adoption dies on the vine. You can’t mandate excitement, but you can choose tools that don’t feel like a tax on your employees’ time.

Here are the top 10 HR and Ops software solutions I’ve personally used, vouched for, and, most importantly, actually enjoyed using.

🛠️ The “Everyone” Tools

These are the tools used by every single employee at the company. They are the technical foundation on which your company is built. They make everyone speak the same language. If these aren’t seamless, nothing else matters.

1. Google Workspace

Link: https://workspace.google.com/

What it is: The lifeblood of the modern office.

Why it’s special: It’s the path of least resistance. Everyone knows how to use it, and the collaborative nature of Docs and Sheets remains the gold standard for “work in progress.” It’s simple, reliable, and stays out of your way.

Note of caution: File organization might sound tedious, but it’s actually one of the most important steps to moving fast. We set ours up by departments - Ops, Finance, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product, and Tech. Whatever happened within each department was up to the department head.

PS: If you have the budget, I also thoroughly enjoyed using Superhuman Mail. It integrates with Gmail (or Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) and uses a GSD methodology. It genuinely changed the way I worked through emails and helped me stay caught up at all times.

2. Slack

Link: https://slack.com/

What it is: Your virtual headquarters.

Why it’s special: I won’t bore you by going too deep about how to use Slack as most of you are probably already on it, but I’d highly encourage you to check out an unsung hero: Slack Workflows. I’ve built entire sales processes and approval chains within Workflows. It turns a chat app into a legitimate automation engine without requiring a single line of code. If you use it alongside Slack’s Lists, it can become a truly powerful project management tool as well.

Something fun 😀: If you reach out to anyone at SupplyPike about Slack, they’ll tell you about all the Slackmojis we had. It was such a fun way to make a chat platform your own. At the end of each year, we would even give out awards to employees with the “most reactions” or “most Slacks sent.” After being acquired and merging our Slack platforms, the M&A team told us that out of the ~15 other companies they’d acquired, we had the largest number of Slackmojis by far.

Here’s a tiny snippet of some of the custom Slackmojis we added over the years:

Would you like a post about how we organized our Slack channels? Leave a comment and let us know!

Leave a comment

3. Zoom

Link: https://www.zoom.com/

What it is: Video conferencing that just works.

Why it’s special: Again, I won’t bore you with the details about how to use Zoom, but I wanted to call out Zoom Whiteboard as a hidden gem. It is included in a slightly higher plan (Business), but it’s incredibly helpful to keep information in one place and could be more cost effective than purchasing an additional whiteboard tool.

4. Ramp

Link: https://ramp.com/

What it is: Corporate cards and spend management.

Why it’s special: It’s the rare financial tool that employees actually like. The “text a photo of your receipt” flow is truly *chef’s kiss*. It removes the friction of expense reports, which is a massive win for culture and keeps your employees and executives working on things that matter, not creating expense reports. Big shoutout to Ramp’s ability to create complex approval workflows and the ability to create multiple virtual cards at different spending levels.

5. Slite

Link: https://slite.com/

What it is: A collaborative team Wiki.

Why it’s special: Think of G Suite as the place where files go to live, and Slite as the place where knowledge goes to live. It’s clean, focused, and intuitive. In my search for a Wiki-esque platform, I found Notion to be incredibly powerful, but almost too powerful for me to roll out with controls. Slite seemed simpler and more intuitive, so that’s where I started for a team of about 75 people. (I know there are a lot of Notion fans out there, so this is me speaking as someone who has not used Notion before in a business-setting.)

Similar to Google Drive, we organized Slite by department and it was up to each department to determine the best way to organize their data.

• 💡 Early-stage tip: If you don’t have the budget for a full wiki yet, Slack Canvases are a decent jumping-off point to keep notes organized. I also noticed that Google Docs released “tabs” recently. I haven’t done enough research into that to know if it’s comparable, but it could be an inexpensive alternative!

6. Mosaic (Now HiBob)

Link: https://www.hibob.com/finance/

What it is: Resource management and planning.

Why it’s special: It provides a real-time “birds-eye view” of your team’s performance and capacity that spreadsheets usually fail to capture. It helps leadership make decisions based on data, not just “gut feelings” about who is busy. We integrated Mosaic with our CRM (HubSpot), HRIS (Rippling), books (QuickBooks), etc. and really used it to power our decision making. Forecast meetings, leadership meetings, performance reviews, resource planning, budgeting, etc. were all centered around the data we saw in Mosaic.

Since we provided access to the entire company, all employees had data (they were allowed to access) at their finger tips. This was also a great way to put our money where our mouth was when it came to company transparency. Folks made constant comments about how they felt they understood the company’s performance across multiple teams, without having to jump through hoops to access that information.

Notes of caution: Even though the entire company had access to the data in Mosaic, I will say that Mosaic has a higher learning curve, especially if you aren’t speaking in finance/sales terms day in and day out. If you go this route, I recommend creating a company-level dashboard with quick hits for metrics that are digestible and easy to understand. Our RevOps team created these dashboards so employees would still have access to our data without the need to learn the platform.

Mosaic was also recently acquired by HiBob, which generally contained more HR solutions. I’m curious to see if that changes the way Mosaic works at all, but as of today, it has remained the same.

🤝 The HR Tools

HR tech used to be synonymous with “clunky.” These four prove that doesn’t have to be the case.

7. Rippling

Link: https://www.rippling.com/

What it is: The “All-in-One” HR and IT backbone.

Why it’s special: It connects the dots between payroll, benefits, and hardware. When you hire someone, it doesn’t just put them in the system; it handles the “heavy lifting” of the employee lifecycle in one place. Similar to Slack, I wanted to give a special shoutout to Rippling Workflows. Remember the 14-Day Countdown Checklist before your new hire starts? Automated. Shutting off computer access after an employee leaves? Automated.

I could go on and on about Rippling, but no matter what software you choose, the HRIS is probably the most important tool in your entire company. This is your employees’ hub. You want them to be able to navigate it easily. It should not be difficult to figure out things like: How much am I being paid? Where is my pay stub/W-2? How do I apply for time off? Etc.

8. Leapsome

Link: https://www.leapsome.com/

What it is: Performance management and employee engagement.

Why it’s special: I am such a believer in this platform that I actually sat on their Customer Advisory Board! The Competency Framework is the standout feature for me. It embeds employee competencies directly into career conversations, performance reviews, and 9-boxing, making the whole experience feel like a continuous career path rather than a once-a-year “check-the-box” exercise. Rolling this out genuinely changed the way we worked at SupplyPike and allowed us to have more productive conversations between employees and managers.

Similar to Slite, during my search for a performance management tool, while I believe Lattice probably has the higher market share and is clearly powerful, it actually felt a little too complex for me to roll out successfully.

9. Ethena

Link: https://www.goethena.com/

What it is: Modern compliance and harassment training.

Why it’s special: Ethena has achieved the impossible: making compliance training something people don’t hate. The platform is sooooooo easy to use and roll out. I have actually had employees come up to me each year complimenting the courses. Like…literally who does that? 🤯 Such a huge testament to the software and the team behind it!

I’ve also met the Ethena team at Transform and they are truly good people who care about culture and employees. If you haven’t checked out Melanie Naranjo’s webinars and LinkedIn posts, do yourself a favor and follow/sign up. They are a masterclass in human-centric HR!

10. Pinpoint

Link: https://www.pinpointhq.com/

What it is: An Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

Why it’s special: It treats candidates like humans and recruiters like experts. The interface is clean, and it helps you build a hiring process that feels professional and organized from the first touchpoint. It allowed us to enhance our 3-stage interview process without compromising any of our core beliefs. Two really cool features to me are 1) the ability to have customized scorecards for each panelist at each stage of the interview and 2) the ability to integrate with our calendars when sending out time slots to candidates to select from.

Note of caution: If your interviews require people who are constantly in meetings, it doesn’t matter what tool you use, it will never find collective free time. So, I would often have to override the calendar integration with manual entries. This was not an issue with the tool, just our panelist process.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! If you couldn’t tell, this is a topic that I genuinely feel strongly about. I could probably write an individual post on each of these parts of the business. Let us know if there would be any interest!

Are there any tools you have used that you would personally vouch for? Let us know in the comments or chat!

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!

Christine

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I am currently reading The Wedding People by Alison Espach based on Stacy’s recommendation!

🍿 Watch of the Week: I watched Bugonia and Wuthering Heights last week. To both movies, I say a big, giant ”WTF?”

🎧 Song of the Week: Everyone, scream this at the top of your lungs!

Our All-Hands Playbook

Calendar Invite Title

Ours: Weekly Roundtable

I personally prefer a title with a little more pizzazz than just “Company All-Hands” (despite me saying those words like 845 times in last week’s article). “Town Hall” is another alternative. We had a team that had “Monday Morning Mashup” and another with “Weekly Catch-All.”

PS: In case you didn’t know, the name of this newsletter was actually what we used to call our very own all-hands at SupplyPike! We took the name because we thought it perfectly encapsulated what we were trying to accomplish with this newsletter - thoughtful and (hopefully) insightful lessons learned and information to share with our audience…you!

Timing

Ours: Every Friday, 1-2pm

We catered lunch every Friday for the entire team, so we paired the two events together. Lunch from 12-1pm, Roundtable from 1-2pm. Since the purpose of RT was meant to be more social and culture-building, we wanted to create an environment where the team could loosen up. Folks are also just naturally more “checked out” on a Friday anyway, so we felt that we weren’t disrupting anyone’s flow state.

If budget is a concern right now and lunches aren’t possible, I used to intern at Saatchi & Saatchi X - a shopper marketing agency where I learned a lot about building a culture - and they had a monthly “Town Hall” at 10:30 AM. Each month, a different team would be assigned to bring an inexpensive breakfast for the team. One of my favorites was the Cereal Bar where they brought a bunch of different types of cereals and milks. Another team did chicken and waffles where they made waffles for you live and provided syrups. It was always a surprise and a great way to build camaraderie!

Side note: I think Mondays are a great time for team and/or department-specific all-hands because you can set the tone and intentions for the week right at the get go.

Frequency

Ours: Weekly to Bi-Weekly

Weekly worked really great for us for a long time. As the company grew in maturity and size (~150-200 employees), we started hearing feedback that bi-weekly might be better and adjusted accordingly.

💡Pro-Tip: There will be weeks where nothing significant happens and there’s nothing to provide an update on. It’s okay to cancel meetings. Better to free up an hour of your employees’ time than to meet for the sake of meeting.

Duration

Ours: 1 Hour

This worked really great for us because it was enough time to get through many topics, while still giving each topic a chance to breathe. The team had time to ask questions, presenters could provide more color, and it didn’t seem so rushed. We often ended meetings early when topics were completed (and who doesn’t love a meeting that ends early?). We have attempted 30 min increments before and the feedback from the team was that they felt rushed, less personal, and they felt unable to ask questions, let alone meaningful ones.

Host/Facilitator

Ours: Ops Team to facilitate; SMEs to present

The Ops Team (specifically myself and our Ops Manager, shoutout to Matt!) was in charge of putting together the agenda and slides each week. At the actual meeting, as the executive in charge of culture, I would host and make sure we were moving along the agenda, while Matt would timekeep and support.

It’s important to note that we just played facilitators, presenters and SMEs were responsible for actually presenting the information on the slides. We often tried to ask ICs to present instead of managers and leaders.

This structure accomplished a few things:

• Culture-building by the Ops Team

• Acknowledgement of and giving “credit” to the hard work put in by our ICs

  • Managers and leaders would often come up at the end of presentations to extend their gratitude and recognition of the IC and provide the “why” behind their work

• Demystifying “strangers” on teams employees might not usually collaborate with

Medium

Ours: In-person and Zoom

I know, I know, I was just making fun of Zoom calls last week, but in this day and age, Zoom is a necessity. It was strongly encouraged for employees to attend RTs in-person in our “hall” for culture-building. However, as we grew as a team to include more remote employees and developed a “flexible-first” environment, we knew that that wasn’t physically possible.

In my opinion, any hybrid meeting is challenging, so ideally, you should choose one or the other. Where that isn’t possible, do the best you can to make sure both sides feel included. Here are some ways to do that:

• The most important thing - actually making sure that AV was working and they could hear, see, and talk to us.

• Starting RTs with online games like Contexto that anyone online or in-person could contribute to. Whatever you choose, have an extremely low barrier to entry to make sure the organized fun doesn’t feel too forced.

• Keeping the Zoom chats active. Folks online would essentially have their own version of a “room” to interact. We actually had some in-person folks still join the Zoom call just to look at the chats too.

• Asking remote employees to present information to the team and making sure the in-person team can see their faces.

To record or not to record?

Despite being on Zoom, we actually did not record our RTs. The hope was to force incentivize employees to join us live and not have an excuse to skip. I’m sure you’ve heard employees say “I’ll just watch the recording later.” I can tell you with a 99.99% certainty…they’re not gonna watch the recording later.

Of course, as the team grew, we had more employees on PTO or on leave or on a customer call, etc. So, we combatted this by creating a “Roundtable Roundup” doc. (Sound familiar? 🤠) This was a doc updated live by the Ops Team (shoutout to Kayla!) that covered the most important information to take away from RT that week. It was broken up into 3 sections: Personnel Updates, Announcements, and Calls to Action. If any employee was not able to make RT, they’d still get the most important information, just without the fun.

We also had a slide deck for each quarter that was saved in a generally-accessible location so folks could search and view the slides on their own time. 💡Pro-Tip: Be weary of prying eyes! Since our decks were public, we had some employees creep on the slides each week to see what was going to be talked about. If there’s anything that you truly want to be kept a secret until the meeting, don’t add the content until the last minute.

Agenda

Our general agenda looked like this:

• Icebreaker Games

  • We didn’t do this every week, but occasionally we’d play Contexto, Plinko, etc. Sometimes we’d give away branded swag to the winners of these games.

  • At one point, I tried telling dad jokes, but they were truly bad (this was on me lol)

• Exec Corner

  • This was an “Ask Me Anything” section that was typically directed at C-Suite leadership, but would also encompass questions from any manager/team lead. We always tapped the subject matter expert to answer the question without concern for chain of command.

• Personnel Updates

  • New hires

  • Promotions

  • Internal transfers (lateral movements)

  • If applicable, org structure updates

  • If applicable, celebrating interns graduating

• Team Updates/Calls to Action

  • Updates on long-awaited product releases

    • Note: For general feature releases, we had a dedicated time for PMs to go over completed and upcoming releases each quarter called “Product Series.” We would reserve Roundtable time for large epics that everyone should know about. This is not the time to do product training.

  • Team introductions aka “what is it that you’d say you do here?”

  • Non-customer-related team wins (ex: Website launch, big feature deployed, awards were won, etc.)

  • HR Asks (ex: Performance reviews, engagement surveys, etc.)

• Customer Wins/Highlights

  • Sales would highlight recent Closed Won wins

  • Customer Success would highlight recent wins by using our products/services

  • This was a really great way to reinforce the “what” and “why” of the company

• Did You Know?

  • Highlighting anything we thought employees might have forgotten about. Sometimes they were work-related, sometimes they were not (ex: Specific perks or benefits of the company, how to find certain docs, office etiquette, etc.)

• Upcoming Events

  • Reminders for any upcoming events in the company, specifically highlighting qualifying point events (read more about qualifying points here)

A Note on Vibes

It might sound vapid, but you need to be very intentional about the ✨vibes ✨you want to create at your all-hands meetings. At SupplyPike, our meetings were meant to be a dedicated cultural checkpoint for the company. So, yes, there were definitely goofy, impromptu, and unscripted moments that weren’t about “work,” but that was the point! It was a time for all of us to be goofy, impromptu, and unscripted together.

At my internship at Saatchi (also 150-200 people), the vibes were pretty similar to ours. At our parent company, their vibe was much more polished, which makes total sense as a public company with 3,000 employees!

Figure out your vibe and cultivate an environment that is consistent with that!

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments or chat!

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!

Christine

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I am currently reading The Wedding People by Alison Espach based on Stacy’s recommendation!

🍿 Watch of the Week: I watched Hamnet and One Battle After Another as part of my Oscars watch. Hamnet basically broke me. I am SO happy that Jessie Buckley won the Oscar!

🎧 Song of the Week: I started listening to a playlist that I made years ago with all the songs that I’d love dancing to with girlfriends and it’s still a boppin’ list!

Before we get started, I did want to share a friendly reminder about the fundraiser that Stacy and I are doing for Blood Cancer United. Our team has raised over $19K in less than a month, and we’re so incredibly grateful for the support that will go directly to research, patient care, and advocacy. If you’re able to donate even $1, every little bit goes a long way! To sweeten the pot, if you donate $50 or more, you can request a WRT topic for us to write. Link to donate here. Thank you! ♥️

Let’s dive into it! 🐬

Death by All-Hands

All of us have attended company all-hands meetings before. Let me paint the picture. You’re on Zoom. Everyone’s on mute, cameras off, answering emails or scrolling on TikTok in the background. You occasionally tune in between the Slacks you’re getting caught up on to see if the content was actually relevant. Once in a while, a ton of ♥️ and 👏 emojis fly across the screen. You send one too just to prove you were paying attention. 🙈

If any of this sounds familiar, this article is for you!

At SupplyPike, we ran a weekly company all-hands meeting that became a very large part of our culture. Employees looked forward to them, planned their in-person days around them, stayed engaged throughout with meaningful questions, and…most wouldn’t even bring their laptops! 🤯 This article is going to talk about how we built this.

💬 Psst…This specific recipe has been successful for a team size of 50-200 employees. If your team is much smaller or larger, there may be parts of this article that won’t work for you, and that’s okay! While execution might look different, the general theories should still apply.

So…why do all-hands meetings suck?

All-hands meetings suck because they typically showcase the following characteristics:

• They aren’t valuable: For arguably the most expensive meeting at the company, if you’re just providing status updates to the team, it’s probably not necessary (that’s what Slack is for!). This is the format for sharing information that has been deemed important enough for the entire company to know. Additionally, if your team can tell that you didn’t take the time to come prepared, they won’t take the time to care about what you have to say.

• They aren’t engaging: If the format is just presenters talking at your employees for an hour, it’s not engaging or interactive, and just feels like a glorified webinar. It also sends a signal that you don’t actually want any feedback from your audience.

• Your employees don’t care: Zooming way out, all-hands meetings only provide value if your employees actually care about your company. If that baseline doesn’t even exist, you need to rethink your culture as a whole.

How can I make it better?

Here are a few guidelines that we followed at SupplyPike to make our all-hands successful.

The Information-to-Culture Ratio

At SupplyPike, we focused a lot of our energy on finding the balance of information and culture. Without culture, you just have a boring status update that could’ve been an email. Without information, you just have a glorified happy hour that doesn’t provide value.

Since we had Slack, emails, and our regular meetings for the “work” element, we specifically spent most of the time on the human element of our business - celebrating people wins (project wins, customer wins, promotions, etc.), introducing new hires, and even calling attention to any learnings we had from recent “failures” or opportunities. Some employees would literally come with Oscar-type speeches whenever they were promoted to thank everyone who had been on their journey. It was great!

💡Pro-Tip: While you should always be transparent with your team, you should always tie any “failures” and risks back to something productive (for example, how you’re updating a process from a learning or talking about new experiments that your team will be trying). You never want to leave those topics just hanging in the air for your employees to fill the gaps on their own, or leave everyone feeling deflated.

Asked and Answered

All-hands are a great time and space to share information and receive initial questions and feedback from your employees. Before each all-hands meeting, we had a Slack message sent out reminding employees to add any questions they had for the leadership team to the public Q&A board (we used Leapsome). We would start each roundtable by answering those questions first, then opening it up to the audience to ask any other questions they had. Sometimes there were funny ones, but most of the time, folks had genuine questions about the business. We also invited the relevant leaders (or middle managers!) to provide answers/updates. We never wanted it to seem like only 3-4 people knew what was going on. This was yet another way we reinforced the idea that the company belonged to everyone.

During and after each presentation, the floor was always opened up for comments and questions from the audience. Folks online would typically type their questions in the chat, and a member of the Ops Team would monitor the chat and shout out any questions that came in.

By bringing the “open door policy” to life in a live way, it projected confidence, transparency, authenticity, and a non-performative desire for employees to be part of the conversation.

Authenticity Wins Every Time

Employees are the smartest people on earth when it comes to sniffing out BS. Be as authentic as you possibly can be. Your team doesn’t need you to be the most polished presenter. They just want to hear your genuine thoughts on what is happening within the company. If there are specific notes and information that you don’t want to mess up, that’s what the slide deck is there for! Even when it comes to taking advice from WRT, Stacy and I say all 👏 the 👏 time 👏, take the bits and pieces that make sense to you and turn them into something that is most authentic to you and your team!

Never lie. If you genuinely don’t know the answer to a question, say so instead of making something up on the spot. Circle back after the meeting and answer the question at either the next all-hands or in a company-wide Slack channel. When your employees see that you are leading with authenticity and are in this with them, you give them the permission and space to be authentic and lean into the business as well.

💡Pro-Tip: If you are concerned about how a specific message might be received by your team, don’t announce it for the first time at the all-hands. Leverage your leadership team and people managers to soft launch the news with their teams (aka smaller audiences) and gather feedback. Use the information and questions you hear to build your presentation at the company all-hands so you address concerns before they even arise in a larger setting.

An All-Hands Centric Culture

This is gonna sound really obvious but your all-hands should be treated as a very important meeting. Something a little less obvious is that if you want employees to take it seriously, you have to build culture around it. This means having spoken and unspoken rules and behaviors that encourage employees to care. Some “unspoken rules” that we had at SupplyPike were:

• All-hands time is sacred: You shouldn’t schedule any meetings that overlap it, especially internal ones. It was really frowned upon for even customer calls to be scheduled at that time.

• All-hands are strongly encouraged: We never had a “mandatory” culture at SupplyPike, but it was definitely weird if you were not there.

• All-hands are in-person (where possible): The Ops Team would literally walk around the office and herd the sheep to head towards our meeting location. There may or may not have been actual megaphones 📣 involved. (Remember to be sensitive to employees who might have anxiety in large group situations. Gently encourage them to join, but allow for alternative ways to participate.)

• All-hands means ALL-hands: Everyone should be included and involved. Always remember to create space for your interns, your remote employees, your ERGs, etc.

It starts at the top: If you had a manager who thought they were above it all and regularly choose not to attend, trust me, it’ll get noticed. It creates an “if my manager’s not going, then I don’t need to go” mentality and spirals down from there. All people managers and leadership have to be bought into the purpose and lead by example.

Now make it your own!

Sticking to these guidelines might not make you a perfect all-hands meeting, but it provides you with the foundations for a great one. Now, it’s up to you to implement these strategies in a way that’s (drumroll please 🥁) most authentic to you!

👀 Next week, I’ll provide a detailed breakdown on how we conducted our all-hands meetings to provide you with a playbook! From agenda-setting to frequency and location, it should give you everything you need to start (or update) your very own company all-hands meeting!

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! What is the single worst ‘All-Hands’ moment you’ve ever witnessed? Don’t have one? Tell us what your spring break plans are! Let us know in the comments or chat!

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!

Christine

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I am currently reading The Wedding People by Alison Espach based on Stacy’s recommendation!

🍿 Watch of the Week: I binged all the episodes that are currently out for Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette! I have no idea how accurate any of it is, so don’t come for me about that, but as a story, it’s good! I am living for all the fashion and music!

🎧 Song of the Week: Every once in a while, I start listening to the Eagles. Here is me manifesting a Peaceful Easy Feeling kind of week for you!

Today, I’m going to be delving deep into a hot take. 🔥 Your team actually wants to be told what to do. You just have to be good at telling them.

Let’s get into it! 🚗

Throughout my career as a Millennial, “micromanaging” has always been one of the biggest buzzwords in leadership. Even at SupplyPike, we made a point during recruiting events and interviews to tell candidates, “We don’t micromanage you.” And for good reason…no one enjoys being managed that way.

While I think we’ve come a loooong way in improving work-life balance and helping employees actually feel supported in the workplace 🥳, we should be careful not to overcompensate and swing too far into undermanagement (yes, that’s a thing!). When a team is undermanaged, people often feel more lost, less supported, and frankly, checked out.

The goal is finding the sweet spot: clear direction without micromanaging, and real autonomy without undermanaging. When you get it right, your team actually has more freedom to make decisions and more confidence that they’re making the right ones.

When done well:

• The Leader should own the What (the goal) and the Why (the context).

• The Team should own the How (the process).

• As a Leader, if you get into the “How,” you’ve crossed into micromanagement. If you don’t provide the “What,” you are undermanaging.

The Goldilocks of Teams

🥵 Too Hot: Signs of a Micromanaged Team

• The manager requires every decision, every email, every task, no matter how small, to be approved by them, causing delays and bottlenecks in projects.

• The manager dictates how work should be done rather than focusing on the end result.

• The manager constantly monitors their team (digitally and/or physically), where the team spends more time providing updates than doing the actual work.

• The team feels a lack of autonomy, trust, and growth/development, resulting in higher turnover.

🥶 Too Cold: Signs of an Undermanaged Team

• The manager does not hold team members accountable for missing deadlines or goals…likely because there never were any.

• There is no direction, communication, or strategy leading to constant misunderstandings, conflict, and distractions (read: “gossip”) from the actual work.

• The team can only react to situations that arise, rather than being proactive and strategic.

• The team feels frustrated and disengaged due to the lack of actionable feedback, resulting in higher turnover.

🤩 Just Right

• The team is all on the same page about the company and team’s goals and how the team contributes, along with a sense of ownership and accountability for performance.

• The team feels trusted and enabled to make decisions, collaborate, and take initiative on strategic moves that contribute to the high-level goals.

• The team meets or exceeds goals and is empowered to be more innovative in a blameless environment.

• Activity in the workplace is productive, purposeful, and impactful, not based on gossip, frustration, and toxicity. 🙏

• The manager focuses on providing coaching/guidance and removing roadblocks to success rather than specific instructions on how the work gets done.

As someone who has worked in all 3 types of teams, trust me, you want to be on the team that gets it right.

So…how do we do that?

Tell Them

You have to tell them what page we’re on, what the company and team’s goals are, and how employees contribute to those goals. This isn’t just a one-time or once-a-year communication. This has to be the lifeblood of the company/team and talked about again and again in multiple settings. It should be in your goal setting, your onboarding process, your company/team all-hands (article on all-hands meetings coming soon!), etc.

At this point, everything we’re talking about is high-level information. While we are technically telling our teams what to do, we are simply crafting the guardrails, bumpers, bollards - whatever you choose to call them - for your team. Essentially, you are saying, “This is the direction we’re moving in, this is why it’s important, and these are the consequences when the guardrails are hit.” Whatever happens in the in-between should generally be left up to your teams to decide. (This article does assume that you have hired a competent and capable team.)

💡Pro-Tip: Good teams know where the guardrails are. Great teams know what happens when the guardrails are hit. Embed “early warning signs” into the guardrails of your team so that if someone bumps into them, the whole car doesn’t go off the cliff.

Checks and Balances

It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean to let your team go all wild, wild west. There still needs to be checks and balances. Your job as a leader is to be in the know and continually challenge your team to make sure they are making the best right decisions. While we want to tell them what they’re working towards, your job is not to tell them how to get there. At this stage, your role transitions to coaching.

Have regular check-ins with your team to understand progress toward goals and the strategies behind them. If you are not trending toward goals, your role is to coach and challenge them. Team members should have ownership and accountability for hitting their numbers, and should be able to tell you exactly why numbers are or are not where they need to be. Stacy wrote a great article about how to do this from the Sales perspective here.

Consistency is Key

I cannot even begin to stress how important this is. It doesn’t matter that you’re providing guardrails if the guardrails keep changing. This isn’t the Grand Staircase in Hogwarts where the stairs change directions even as you’re on them. Nobody wants to work in a building where the floor might turn into a trapdoor because the vision shifted over the weekend.

Any change should be viewed and treated as a big deal - discussed at length with the relevant people and communicated to the entire company/team as they arise. If you’re currently leading a startup, I know it can definitely feel like the world is shifting beneath your feet at all times. However, please remember that I am referring to high-level goals and strategies. Even if you are at a startup, if you feel the need to change your annual goal or GTM strategy all the time, you need to go back to the drawing board and come back with more conviction.

Another key aspect to be consistent is in what decisions your team actually has the autonomy to make. I have faced scenarios where a manager had told me I had full autonomy to make salary decisions about my team as long as it fit within the guardrails. Upon submitting the in-range numbers to them, it was shut down. Multiple rounds of discussions were then had before reaching a decision. As you can imagine, this led to feelings of mistrust, frustration, and so much wasted energy. If you don’t actually want your team to make certain decisions…you guessed it…just tell them!

Every rule has exceptions

Of course, there are certain tasks that just have to be explicitly prescribed. Anything that is related to legal, HR, or compliance should be followed to the T and be very explicit in what can and cannot be done. Employees and middle managers will and should understand the limitations behind this.

Additionally, I understand that there are also roles that have very defined processes, some might even have literal scripts of what must be said (ex: Customer Support). First, I’d like to challenge you to really reflect on whether or not this is actually true. If it is, then for roles where this level of autonomy is just not possible, you could still introduce levels of autonomy by explaining why scripts/strict processes are required in their roles, periodically asking your team for feedback on the processes (and actually listening), and introduce internal ways for employees to lead changes based on the feedback (ex: tapping members into writing new scripts).

And one more important exception: inexperienced teams. Some roles are intentionally built for early-career talent, like BDRs. If your team is mostly 22-year-olds fresh out of college, it’s not “micromanagement” to provide structure; it’s leadership. They often don’t have the reps yet to know what good looks like, how to prioritize, or how to handle curveballs. In those cases, your job is to give them a strong baseline (what to do, what to say, what “great” looks like), coach hard on the fundamentals, and then gradually loosen the reins as they build judgment. A helpful rule of thumb: be tight on inputs early (activity quality, talk tracks, follow-up, prep), and loosen over time by moving toward outcomes and decision-making. Over time, your conversations should evolve into, “Here’s the goal, what’s your plan?” instead of “Here’s exactly what to do next.”

A Special Shoutout to Your Middle Managers ❤️

Middle managers are truly the unsung heroes at any company. Having been in all three hierarchies of an organization (pure IC, middle manager, and senior leadership), I love and have maaaad respect for middle managers. Everybody, turn to your nearest middle manager and give them a big “Thank you!”

I wanted to call out some specific examples for how you can support your middle managers by “telling them what to do.” From personal experience, I believe this is especially true in the HR/personnel realm. Managers want to know that the decisions they are making are fair and equal in comparison to their peers. It is the responsibility of your HR team to be decisive, fair, and consistent when communicating with middle managers. Getting this wrong leads to a severe lack of trust in the system from both managers AND employees. Trust me, managers talk to each other, so they’re going to figure it out whether you help them or not.

Examples of things to be clear and consistent on:

• The % budget allotted for merit increases during a merit increase cycle

• Hiring and promotion guidelines

• Performance review ratings and what consequences they might hold

• Salary bands for current and incoming employees

Having been on the receiving end of poorly managed HR teams before, getting this wrong just causes so much unnecessary chaos, drama, and risk to the company.

A Goldilocks Scenario

To provide an example of getting it right, here is a real life scenario that your team probably faces at least once a year - merit increases.

• Too Hot (Micromanaging)

  • “You should provide this $ amount to employee A, employee B, and employee C.”

  • Creates frustration, a lack of trust, and can lead to managers giving up (“why bother when the decision will be made for me?”) .

• Too Cold (Undermanaging)

  • “We need to do merit increases this month. Just let me know what you’re thinking everyone should get.”

  • Creates anxiety, inconsistency across teams, and high risk.

• Just Right

  • “We have a 3% budget for merit increases. Here are the performance tiers and salary bands for your team. You have the final call on the distribution as long as you stay within these limits.”

  • Provides the “tell” along with the “freedom.”

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Have you experienced any of the teams we described above? Let us know in the comments or chat!

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!

Christine

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I just finished How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley yesterday, and based on Stacy’s recommendation, I’ll be starting The Wedding People by Alison Espach next!

🍿 Watch of the Week: Did anyone else watch the Traitors finale? We must discuss!

🎧 Song of the Week: You guys, I actually finished a Pokémon game for the first time in my life, inspired by my 5-year-old nephew. So, I’ve been listening to the Pokémon soundtrack lately 😂

In other super exciting news, we gained 3 new followers last week! A very special “hello” to the three of you 👋, we’re literally so giddy that you’re here!

Let’s hop to it!

🙅🏻‍♀️ 5 don’ts for goal setting in 2026

#1: DON’T distract from the team’s main purpose

The fundamental purpose of setting a goal is to provide your team with focus, aka one direction they are driving toward. If you can recall, focus was the number one do in last week’s edition. On the other side of that coin, the last thing you want to do is to pull away from your team’s focus.

No distracted driving here! 🤳

Let’s use the Business Development Representatives (BDRs) as an example. At SupplyPike, a BDR’s primary activity was reaching out to prospects to convert them into demos. Once a demo was scheduled, they would hand that opportunity off to an Account Executive (AE) to close the deal.

In this case, the metric that a BDR has direct control over and, therefore, should be focusing on is the number of demos scheduled with prospects.

🙈 Unforeseen Consequences

You might be tempted to incentivize them based on the number of demos that Closed Won to ensure that they are bringing in good-quality leads. However, they don’t actually have any control over whether a deal closes or not. That’s the AE’s responsibility. If you were to goal them that way, the following scenarios could happen:

• The BDR doubles down on getting the deal closed by bugging the heck out of your AEs during the sales cycle, resulting in lower time spent on their actual focus - calling/emailing prospects.

• The BDR figures out (whether true or not) which AE has the highest closing rate, and fights to assign all their deals to that AE instead of the perceived underperformers, causing friction amongst the teams, uneven deal allocation, and unnecessary drama for you.

• The BDR simply becomes apathetic and unmotivated by the metric because they recognize the lack of direct control and influence they have in actually hitting that goal.

How do we know all this? Unfortunately…we tried it. These examples were real-life consequences that caused huge distractions to the team and, more importantly, adversely affected the pipeline.

We quickly learned that this type of goal wasn’t going to work. However, we still wanted to make sure our BDRs were bringing in high-quality leads. So instead, we added specificity to the BDR’s goal → The number of demos scheduled with qualified prospects. Prospects had to meet certain criteria determined by the leadership team and, again, were within the BDR’s control, to be considered “qualified” and count toward their goal.

Each company’s org chart is different. No matter how you structure your team, keep the fundamentals in mind - tie goals directly to the activities you want teams to be focusing on to avoid distractions.

#2: DON’T keep the goal if the math ain’t mathing

and I both touched on this in our posts last week: you want to make sure that your goals actually make sense and are ambitious but attainable. If you don’t get this right, your team will either not believe in the goal or not believe in you. In most cases, probably both.

Show 👏 Your 👏 Work 👏

As a leader, you owe it to your team to have the numbers to back up your goals. If you can’t even explain the numbers to yourself, why should your team take them (or you) seriously? Best-case scenario: You work with your team’s leadership to determine the goals.

If this is your first year setting goals, use industry benchmarks as your guide and cite your sources. If that’s not available, goal in smaller increments of time (ex: quarterly instead of annually) and track everything so you can be more flexible and adapt to how the numbers perform. I don’t recommend increments shorter than three months to account for seasonality and outlier months. Also, some campaigns just truly require time and patience to perform.

is basically writing the textbook on how to do this on the GTM side. Part 1 was published last week, and Part 2 will be coming out on Thursday!

A Note on Experimenting

When experimenting, think back to your days in Science class where you learned about the Scientific Method. The same rules apply here. You want to change as little as possible, while keeping the majority of conditions the same. If you try to change too many factors at once, whether you succeed or fail, you’ll never be able to confidently say why. If you are early in your journey and don’t have as many resources, you can’t afford the wasted time and effort. Focus on incremental changes that give you the biggest impact.

#3: DON’T fracture from the top line goal

One year at SupplyPike, we were…a little lost. One side of the business set up goals with an OGSM framework, the other side set up other goals with an OKR framework. While using different frameworks at the same time can work, the biggest issue was that there were literally different goals for the same teams at the same time. Woof.

No one had their story straight. No one really knew what they were working towards. Everyone was scared of disappointing the leader on the “other side.”

❌ It was awful. Do not recommend. ❌

To ensure consistency and one voice, make sure there is only one set of top-level goals for the entire company. As you add more dedicated teams to the company (ex: Marketing, Ops, Tech, etc.), each team will want to divvy up the goals based on what they contribute. Teams should be allowed to use whatever framework works best for them.

Here’s what we did. In December of the current year, we would finalize and communicate the OGSM for the following year. After that, each leader would determine goals for their teams based on the OGSM. Every quarter, we would enter all our metrics into a doc with the original OGSM language and send it back out to all the employees for consistency and accountability. We would tag each goal with the owner and status - “On Track,” “Off Track,” or “Done.”

For example, one of our OGSM goals was for everyone to be trained on SupplyPike products. Our Talent Development Team took this goal and broke it down into OKRs.

• Objective: All employees understand SupplyPike’s products’ value and high-level functionality.

• Key Results: % of employees certified in SupplyPike’s products.

• TD activities that tied directly to this goal:

  • Coordinate quarterly product overviews hosted by Product Managers.

  • Build certification courses for employees to assess understanding.

  • Promote, encourage, and follow up with employees to complete the certification courses.

At the end of the quarter, TD would report the % of employees who completed certification in the OGSM report to share with all the employees.

#4: DON’T set and forget

After goals are set, it’s important to keep them top of mind year-round to make sure you’re achieving them. A really fun way to do this is with incentives and gamification. Here are a few ways we did this:

• At the end of 2022, we started noticing a dip in participation and engagement at the office. So, we launched an Engagement Reward every quarter where employees who participated in events, surveys, and professional development could earn points to receive exclusive company-branded swag.
  ➡️ Outcome: Employees went crazy for this. They brought it up at every all-hands, they would plan vacations around our event dates, and a few devs even built a Slackbot to help everyone check on points. Folks were committed.

• In 2023, we started doing annual week-long hackathons that were open to the entire company. The theme each year was SupplyPike’s motto: Get Paid. Get Better. Typically geared towards our customers, we challenged the team to think about it internally. How can SupplyPike increase getting paid and optimize getting better?
  ➡️ Outcome: Some ideas were just for fun. Other ideas were actually implemented and became a core part of the business (like the Slackbot mentioned above)!

• In 2024, we introduced a company-wide incentive based on the OGSM goals. It was a sliding scale where if we hit numbers, the entire company would get a bonus. The higher the achievement, the higher the bonus.
  ➡️ Outcome: We suddenly had non-customer-facing employees show up, be more present, and ask better questions about how we can deliver more value to customers. 🚨 Spoiler alert: we crushed our number.

#5: DON’T be vague about ownership

Some goals are pretty obvious: the Sales Team owns the revenue number, the Customer Success Team owns the retention number, etc. Unfortunately, other goals can be a little harder to set up. Referencing back to item #1 in this post, ideally, you want to tie a team’s goal directly to what that team can do and what they have control over. Sometimes, that can be hard to figure out in the early days of a startup when everyone is doing everything (sound familiar?).

These are some of our own examples from early SupplyPike days:

• Who should own product release announcements to customers - product or CS?

• Who should own building community - people operations or marketing?

• Where should UX fall - product or tech?

There are no hard and fast rules for how your team gets built and structured. I’ve seen many different combinations from many different companies. The best advice that I can give is to:

• Make sure you have those discussions early and with the right people. Pick the best option based on the people and resources you have.

• Be decisive and timely with your decisions. Take the time to really consider your options, but not too long that the team stays in limbo.

• Don’t let the team live in ambiguity. “Clarity is kindness” is very real. Reminder: Nice is not the same as kind.

Following these guidelines will help to reduce duplication of efforts, confusion/friction between teams, and keep your movements fast and precise.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Please leave a comment with one of your hottest takes on goal setting! Let us know a time when goal setting went wrong 🥵!

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!
Christine

Christine’s Corner

• 📖 Read of the Week: Guess what. It’s still Iron Flame. I’m like 75% of the way through, and it’s so good!

• 🍿 Watch of the Week: Stacy and I watched The Housemaid together with another girlfriend! We had all read the book prior to the movie coming out. I loved that it was a little campy and so fun!

• 🎧 Song of the Week: Is there any other right answer than I Just Might by Bruno Mars? We are so back, baby!

In the early days of SupplyPike, I’m not sure we ever had goals that lasted longer than a week. Goals would shift as quickly as the next meeting you were (or weren’t) invited to. You may (or may not) have gotten the memo, but it didn’t really matter, because no one talked about them ever again.

We learned very quickly that this was not a sustainable way to run a business. Too many resources wasted across too many teams, with too many KPIs, none of which were being tracked. If any of this sounds familiar to you, you’re in the right place.

This week, I’m sharing my 5 “dos” for goal setting with your team - these helped pave the way for us to stay more focused and get more done with less.

🔥 5 dos for goal setting in 2026

#1: Focus. Focus. Focus.

In 2020, the SupplyPike leadership team made a mental shift towards focus. We identified 2 metrics that mattered the most to us at the time

1. MRR: Are we making money?

2. GDR: Are we keeping the money we made?

Everything we did tied back to these 2 metrics. Some examples:

• We identified leading metrics to warn us if we were trending off course.
  Ex: Demos booked

• We redesigned our teams to optimize for those metrics.
  Ex: Created a Customer Development Team dedicated to booking demos

• We developed feedback loops to keep ourselves accountable.
  Ex: Weekly rituals to check how many demos were booked

Having this level of clarity and transparency truly allowed us to enter our flow state.

#2: Get your team involved

Have you ever worked on goals that you didn’t believe in or didn’t understand? You probably felt unmotivated, apathetic, and lacked a sense of ownership toward those goals. Don’t let your team suffer the same consequences!

This is what we did each year at SupplyPike for roughly 50-150 people:

⬇️ Start top-down, ⬆️ then bottom-up

As a leader, you know what your team needs to accomplish for the year. If available, best practice is to involve your C-Suite and Board of Directors in these decisions. After the high level goals are established, if you have managers/team leads, this is a great opportunity for them to step up and collaborate with you and each other!

For example:

• You decide “We need to hit $1M in ARR this year.”

• Your customer development lead might say “To hit $1M in ARR this year, we will need to complete 100 demos.”

• Hearing this, your marketing lead might say “To complete 100 demos, we will need to bring in 1,000 website leads.”

💡 Note: If your team is at the beginning of your journey and you do not have historical performance yet, use industry benchmarks to start. It’s still important to make sure your team understands why you chose those numbers.

🎙️ Bring the Team In

Discuss the goals you’ve drafted at your next company-wide meeting. Ask for their feedback and - now this is really important - actually mean it. These are the numbers the entire company will be working towards for the next 12 months, so it’s worth spending a good chunk of time on this.

Pro-Tip: Share a copy of your draft via Slack/Teams for folks to provide more feedback after the meeting. Some folks might need more time to reflect; others might be better writing their thoughts down. Giving your team multiple avenues to provide feedback signals that you actually want it.

It’s up to you to weed out what suggestions do and don’t make sense, but you want your team to feel heard and, more importantly, to understand why the goals are what they are. The intent is to leave them feeling energized and motivated for the next 12 months!

#3: Communicate back WTF we’re actually doing here

This step sounds obvious but you’d be surprised at how often it gets forgotten. Once the goals were solidified, we found it helpful at SupplyPike to have them printed and posted around the office. Having your goals on a piece of paper really signals finality and stability to your team so they can start running.

Here’s what we did:

• Fit your goals in an easy-to-digest 1-pager

  Yes, ONE page. We are creating a cheat sheet for our team to refer back to frequently so this one pager should be easy to read, digest, and understand. Bonus points if it’s also nice to look at (get your designers involved! 🎨).

  PS: If you’re having trouble fitting it all on one slide, that may be a sign that you need to go back to the drawing board to find some focus.

• Print and post them around the office

  We typically printed 3x5 ft posters and hung them up in multiple places across the office where employees could see them even from their desks. I have genuinely seen employees walk up to our posters mid-discussion to reference the “official” words on paper. Words matter.

Here is a real-life (redacted) poster that we hung on the walls. We used the OGSM framework to set up our goals, but you can use whichever framework speaks to you!

#4: Circling back in the new year

Okay, you’ve channeled focus, collaborated on goals, and communicated the finalized decisions with the company.

Phew! Pat yourself on the back, that was a lot of work and we don’t all that work to go to waste. Unfortunately, it can be really easy to lose sight of the actual goals we set as business needs shift and “shiny” new work appears.

Here are some ways we combatted this:

• Keep your 1-pager as your anchor. Always refer back to this.

• Create systems and rituals to continually check back on your goals. We had rituals that were weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually that allowed us to both zoom in and out of the goals and measure performance.

• Have open and honest communications with your teams to see how they are performing and feeling about the goals. Allow for some level of flexibility and pivot resources to channels that are working.

📚 Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows is a great book that our leadership team read together that discusses some of these topics.

#5: Bend, but don’t break

Now, let’s fast forward and say you’re 6 months into the year and you realize the goals you thought of might not make sense anymore. Hey, it happens.

Have open, honest, and transparent conversations with your leaders to decide if you should stay the course or course correct. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to decide your next step:

• Did we put all of our best efforts into achieving this goal or was there an internal performance issue? Are there any incremental changes that could work?

• Is this level of performance typical against the industry benchmark? Is there another channel/activity that is performing well and worth putting more fuel into?

• Is there something else happening in the world that affects our industry? COVID-19 and tariffs are great examples of events that caused major implications to all businesses.

If your team decides to course correct, that’s okay! Re-read the first 4 sections above to make sure you’re continuing to focus, get buy-in, actively communicate, and measure success.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Please leave a comment with either a “do” that has helped you when goal setting or a personal goal you have for 2026! 🔥

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!
Christine

Christine’s Corner

• 📖 Read of the Week: I’m still making my way through Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros. It’s a long book y’all.

• 🍿 Watch of the Week: I rewatched Pokémon the Movie 2000 for the first time in 20 years because my nephew is obsessed with Pokémon…and that movie still slaps.

• 🎧 Song of the Week: I’m a late fan, but I’ve been listening to Olivia Dean lately! Let Alone The One You Love is so good!

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