Grant Halloran: Felicia, all of the success factors that one can think about in running and business, any organization, I truly believe that culture is the most important factor. The reason I believe that is that your culture helps you sustain your performance through all the highs and lows of running an organization, right? We're living in a very dynamic world; lots can go wrong inside your company, and there's lots of things that are happening outside of your business or it's geopolitical or supply chains or pandemics, or new competitor comes along. Whatever it is, these are extremely unpredictable factors that we live in and running an organization.
So our best-laid plans often get pushed aside. And I think what's most important is you have to try to be the most successful you can be given the conditions you're operating in. And I truly believe that your culture is what ultimately helps for that. And I'll just say throughout my nearly 30-year software executive career, I've been searching for that silver bullet for so long, like what's the silver bullet that makes you stand out and be really successful, and I would say in the last 5-10 years is when I truly discovered that it was culture.
Well, let's talk about Planful. Because it's easy to talk about culture from a high level, but I'd love to learn from you. How did it begin to cultivate at Planful?
Grant Halloran: So we could spend a lot of time talking about the history, but I'll do the near terms, so the private equity backers of Planful acquired the company at the end of 2018, and I joined the company six months later, I'd had some experience in this software category and was fortunate enough to be appointed the CEO, mid 19. So the culture was quite different before Grant, and compared to what it's been afterward. And I would say our culture has continued to evolve and grow and improve in the five years that I've been here as the CEO. And I think this is perhaps a little obvious to your audience, but it's worth making the point that, of course, it's gonna be different because when we talk about the changes that we made here at Planful, it's all about the people.
So when you bring new people into management and you bring a whole bunch of new folks into the company over time, your culture will, by definition change because it's your people's beliefs and behaviors that are going to ultimately form your culture. And I think what we'll talk about today is how you can be very intentional about creating the right type of culture- a structured way of thinking about it versus just having a whole bunch of random things happen in your company. So it has evolved quite a bit, and I'm really keen to talk about our culture today and some of the things I've learned in my career.
Felicia Shakiba: Well, let's dig into that a bit.
Were there any specific actions you took or behaviors you were conscious of displaying on a regular basis to reinforce and communicate the company's culture? Because many people are looking at executives to set the example, and so I'd love to learn: What did you do?
Grant Halloran: First, this, I think is a very important point. It started with vision from me. I had a vision of the type of culture that I wanted in the company that I was going to lead and to just give you some idea of that I wanted intellectually honest culture, no BS, no bad politics. I wanted a fast-paced culture in terms of decision-making, lack of bureaucracy. I wanted a culture that was intensely focused on winning. That means they hated coming second, and third, which happens a lot.
Felicia Shakiba: Competitive nature.
Grant Halloran (04:57): Competitive nature, right. So it's loving winning and just not feeling great when you lose- that's a good thing. So long as and a culture, frankly, where people can pay each other the greatest compliment, which is to show up at work and be yourself, I think that's a fantastic that one of my ways of thinking about diversity and inclusion is let's create an environment where people can show up and be themselves. The caveat to that, though, is so long as these people buy into our core beliefs, core values, and try as hard as they can to exhibit the ideal behaviors that live those values, right? So we want diversity, but I don't want diversity of culture; I actually want a fairly- as our company culture, if that's not clear.
I wanted our company culture to have a commonality across it, and we've invested a huge amount in that I think we can talk about some specifics of how we evolved to this place. But the first specific I would give you is, I had that vision, but it wasn't written down- It was just- knew it, I saw it in my head, this is all these different activities in a business. I knew how it was to look and I saw the types of people that I wanted in the organization. So, the very first thing I did from an action perspective was I brought in the top leaders, the top executive leaders of the company that I knew fit that vision very specifically. These are folks that I've worked with in my career, in some cases many times in my career. So I had a head start if your like and getting the culture moving in the right direction.
What about hiring outside executives?
Grant Halloran: Yeah, we've hired quite a few, so in the first year or two, we brought on upwards of 35. If you look at the executive and VP levels, 35 new people. So not all of these folks had worked with me before; some of them had, and of course, some of the folks I brought in then brought in some folks that they had worked with before. But again, it was very clear to everybody that we wanted certain types of people that were going to really enjoy this type of culture that we wanted. So I think you've got to build a culture, if you want to change a culture, you need to start at the top, I really believe that. So the second specific action, back to the question is, we went through quite a lot of change in the first 6-7 months when private equity firms buy a new company, often your mandate is: Hey, we've got a vision about what we want this company to be, and time is critical. So we went through quite a lot of change and fairly dramatic business improvements. Obviously, a lot of new folks coming in, we then reached a period where we could breathe a little bit more of a sustained period of stability, if you like.
And that's when we created our culture in a formal way that we call 'The Planful Way. And we actually wrote our book, this is our culture book, and every employee gets a copy of it, when they join the company, it's very big part of our onboarding, big part of our recruiting, I think we will talk about that as well.
And what that book does is it explains our five core values and unpacks in a narrative. So it's not prescribing exact types of behaviors but it gives lots of examples of the types of behaviors you see when people are living out those values. And I say this not to boast or anything, but just I think it's an important point is I wrote a lot of book, especially there are whole parts of it. So it's a full, the introduction is fully written by me and not edited by anyone else, I wanted people to just hear directly from me what I thought about it, and that's not to any arrogant perspective, it's more that I truly believe that culture begins to the CEO of the company. And if the CEO is modeling the right behaviors- and I don't get it right all the time, of course- then you've got a very good chance that others will start to model those behaviors, and it starts to ripple through the company. Now I do want to point out one point: So, how did we come up with the values? Now in your experience, Felicia, and many in the audience, will you bring in consultants and you go through that values, little card deck and there's always different techniques.
Felicia Shakiba: So many different ways, right.
Grant Halloran: So I'll tell you what we did that we found very effective. So we got a group of leaders together, I can't remember exactly, it might have been 15-20 leaders together. And what we did is we got in a room, we said we're not leaving this room until we feel good about the outcome we get from this.
Felicia Shakiba: I hope you had a good delivery.
Grant Halloran (09:20): For DoorDash, whatever- It might have been- a bottle of wine or two later on involved, who knows? But so what we did is we just did a very simple exercise. We asked everyone in the room, think of the people in the organization that you've worked with here, and maybe anywhere else. I want you to think of specific people that are super high performers and everyone loves working with them, right? So they're consistently high performers and everyone loves working with them. You'll know the person; the audience can think of people right now, right? I'd say to people, you'd feel like it was a crisis if this person came to you and said, "Hey, boss, I'm leaving, I'm going somewhere else" We'd be like, "Oh, no!" These are the people that you really want the company. Everyone loves them, everyone loves working with them. Everyone wants to be on their team or their project- those sorts of people. So we got a list of people together, and we wrote them down, and we put up their faces on the screen and then we said, Okay, what is it about these people? What, how do they behave? So we said, what are the specific things they do? And we just got people to tell stories, 'Oh, this guy, like he would just work till midnight sometimes if a project just has to be done and whatever else. That's just one example, right?
And so we got out these examples, then the third part of this was we then said, 'Okay, what are they exhibiting? What is the behavior? Yeah, and one example, one of the sort of core behaviors for us is being an environment shaper, not an environment taker, right? So these are people that say, 'We need to go and change this process.' So we need to make this happen- who wants to come with me and go and make this better versus environment taker says, 'We should be doing this, we should be doing that'. They're just whining about it, and they accept the current situation, and they're not truly going and leaning forward with an action bias. That's just one example that we started to see these themes emerge, behavioral themes emerge amongst all these people. Once we had that, we said 'That's our book', that's our book, these people are like, truly passionate; they'll always do the right thing for customers, they humble themselves, they put their team ahead of themselves, when something great happens. They're always like, they always talk about the team.
It was the team that did great and they always defer the celebration and the praise to somebody else. When something bad happens, they say, well, I could have done this better, I gave bad instructions, I didn't give enough clear direction, it's not my Chen's fault; it's my fault. They're just examples. And then that's how we evolved the value around teams, and then the narrative, unpacked that in the storytelling way, that's how we got to it.
So look, that's a long winded way of saying these are some of the specific actions of how we got to a the abstract concept of culture and bringing it into some concrete form where you can recruit around it, you can nurture those behaviors, you can celebrate those behaviors, you now have a construct where you can say, 'Hey, you're behaving a certain way.
This is not in line with the sorts of behaviors that we have in this company. Can you see what we're talking about? And you're sort of depersonalizing it, people say, 'Yeah, actually, you're right. I'm sorry about that. I'll try to do better do this behavior. So hopefully that answers your question.
Okay, so you figured out how to originate the culture, something that's abstract and conceptual, and now you've identified those behaviors and organized the communication in such a way. Now, what do you do?
Grant Halloran: You have to leave it. And there's, I think the easy way to answer this question is to say, well, once you've got your culture, you expect everyone to just go out and behave those ways, and just hope for the best. But I think you actually have to be very intentional with how you make that happen or try to make it happen, or at least it doesn't happen all the time, right? So this is something you have to keep investing in some examples.
So when I start my weekly ELT executive leadership team meeting, we spent the first 10-15 minutes going around the room where every executive is asked to tell, name a person and tell a story about what this person did to live our values last week, and often, and we encourage this often, it's somebody that's not in their department, right?
So that's my little way. It's my little way of demonstrating to my executive team, how important I think it's like I'm willing to invest the first 15 minutes of a 90 minute meeting in that topic. And then I encourage them to do the same with their leaders when they are having their meetings, right?
We have tons of shoutouts; we're a very real-time company. We use Slack messaging system. Shout-out slack, I think it's fantastic tool.
Others might debate me, but it works great for us. There's a lot of shoutouts happening and a lot of engagement from the leaders in the company around those responding to people, 'Oh, that's awesome!' and 'That is really cool!' Because there's this constant stream of celebration, and calling out the specific values that the person exhibited, right?
Some other examples are we have quarterly awards winners for values, so we have people do the nominations, and there's voting on that. And then we have annual awards winners, so the people that throughout the year consistently did that.
The annual awards winners go to our Presidents Club. So in a lot of software companies, the President's Club has traditionally been reserved for the domain of salespeople, people with a quota they hit their quota, they get to go to P club, we just had a fantastic event in Lake Como in Italy. We go to exotic places like Mexico, and it's a very prestigious thing, all expenses paid, bring your partner; it's a fantastic thing and it's always been the salespeople. And I said, 'Well, no, our performance as an organization just in sales is a by-product of everyone's effort, building great product and doing great marketing and hiring fantastic people and recruit. It's the whole company together. So we extended that, now it's only half of the folks that go to the P club are the salespeople and the other half of folks from different departments, key contributors, and the five values awards winners, the annual awards, winners get to go and bring their partner or plus one to that event. So again, we're putting our money where our mouth is the right expression. There's just some examples of how we do it out each day. The final thing I would say is that the book itself is a living document, so we're up to version three and it's actually on me, I'm meant to be redrafting, one of the chapters is a longer story about how I've done that and then left the laptop somewhere and hadn't synced it up, and I've got to rewrite it.
Felicia Shakiba: I love that you've wrapped the values and behaviors around recognition. And it's not just recognition in a small portion of the business. It's everyone sees it everyone sees how they behaved or what they did, what they accomplished. I think that speaks volumes to the dedication that you have and the executive team and the business, the people in the business have to those values.
How do you keep people accountable? For example, performance management is often viewed as a cultural driver, because they provide you have to do finish OKRs your goals. But there's also those soft skills and those values, do you weave values and behaviors into your performance review? What does that look like?
Grant Halloran (16:31): First, we're a continuous performance review company, so we don't do the formal annual reviews. I'm sure that's a hot debate for a lot of people in your audience. But I just found we think of performance, we're a very metrics-driven company. So at the end of the day, you need to perform for your stakeholders and those are all measurable results. So those are not lost. One of the misnomers, I think, for folks that are perhaps earlier in their careers, they think about culture as all this fluffy stuff and, Oh, yeah, we've got such a fun culture and all that stuff. At the end of the day, the culture is there to serve the stakeholders in terms of helping you achieve the best metrics, the best results. So back to your question, the values how people show up and behave are just implicitly written into our managers, how our leaders engage, and engage with and evaluate their employees, right? That is a huge part of it.
Recruiting, so we use a form of behavioral targeting interview techniques, where we ask people to tell stories about what they've done in the past, just as part of our overall recruiting process.
And so I personally will spend a lot of time focusing on things like, tell me about a time where your team had a huge outcome, a huge result. That was amazing. And I will then spend 15 minutes unpacking that whole story around- what actually happened- who did what, and I'm looking for, I can tell after many years of doing this, whether that person truly is humbling themselves and giving a lot of praise team, and then I'll ask the converse question: Tell me about a time where you guys created a mess and unpack that story, and again I'm looking for them to take responsibility. So in recruiting, this is a very big part, and we try to teach our folks, getting people to do consistent recruiting techniques, interviewing techniques is more challenging than people might imagine, but we try our best to systemize that through our interviewing system, just things like that. In terms of making it very tangible as well, we do quarterly engagement survey, and we have an employee NPS score.
We track that very intensely that's probably my number one metric that I try to track and we see that I'm most interested in. And then we unpack that with specific scores for these, probably 6 or 7 very specific culture questions. We have a positive culture score your thing, I feel that I can show up and be myself at this company, those types of things. Then we've got all the HRIS data that I think are proxies for whether your culture is good average tenure, things like attrition, regrettable attrition, all those sorts of things that maybe in your audience would probably already be tracking, I might actually have a mail our Chief People Officer, wrote a blog on this just to share with folks what we do around that. And then we have recruiting, which is a little bit more our employment brand.
But I think it's also if you have a great culture, you can recruit more easily, because you get if you get people who you can reach the people and our recruiters are incredible.
And one of the reasons I say what caused you to want to talk with us, l say your recruiter was so amazing, and you bring them in but then what's the experience like of meeting the clients for folks, right? That is such a huge factor in whether you can attract the great talent that you want to accompany. Too many organizations make employment, your employer brand, but this really esoteric thing. At the end of the day, we're all brand ambassadors for our culture, and if we saw it the right way, then we've got a much better chance of recruiting really great people.
Felicia Shakiba: I think that's a smart way of thinking about it, I think employer brand is so- it's a such an investment to make, but it really works for you, right? I mean, there's a lot less pull and a lot more high performers looking around for those great cultures and they do check. They go to Glassdoor, they ask around they ping people on LinkedIn that work for your business. And that's how they find out whether or not they're even going to apply. And then that could be the deciding factor between what your company and another have when they work there. And then that's a lot of time and investment that you're taking to woo those top performers. But when you have a great employer brand, it really does a lot of the work for you. And it's really stems, like you said, the culture internally, you can't make an employer brand without having that match, whatever is going on in the business.
Grant Halloran (20:56): Yeah, the rubber has to hit the road at some point and that is when the candidates are engaging with your people at the company. So you can spend an ordinate amount of money- the example I started my career in banking, I remember one of our competitive banks did this huge campaign where this was targeted at that customers. But the same principle applies and it was all these happy, wonderful people in the bank. This is back in the day when people actually went in for bank branches. And everyone was so happy, and the service looked so amazing and it was like all service with a smile and all that sort of stuff. But the reality is when you walk in to one of the branches, it was horrible, right? And so I'm like, why are you spending all this money on millions, tens of millions of dollars on these stupid ad campaigns? And then the promises is never delivered. And this is the other thing that I will say to you: you're gonna ask me a question about how is this tangible in terms of results?
Just while I talk about the bank story, I think I can use this really interesting story for people to think about how employee culture like company culture impacts your business in a very tangible way. If you go into a coffee shop, or you go into a restaurant, and those employees are happy, and they're having fun, they're doing great work. They're making great coffees, they're bring you fantastic cocktails, and food and everything else and you can feel the buzz and the energy. You can immediately tell this is a really great place like this to work. People love working here, they're engaged with each other, they're smiling, they're happy and it projects to the overall ambiance and service that the customer gets. Guess what? I'm willing to go back to that place forever. And I'm gonna spend more money there than I will anywhere else at those places.
So don't tell me people tell you know, it's like anyone wants to tell me that your employee culture, your company culture doesn't have a very tangible outcome on your customer experience and having repeat customers, and then spending more money with you and getting more value from you just think back to that story. And then in a software company, it's the same thing. We've had customers join us come and work for us, many, many of them, because they come to our music conference events. And they get to rub shoulders with 100, maybe 1,000 other people and they get to experience these Planful people and they're like, I wanna work there, right? So it has so many incredible economic impacts to your company, if you can create a culture where people love the show up to work, and they want to be there for each other. They're there shoulder to shoulder, helping each other. I think that is everything we should strive for.
I think your retention rate should be in a good place, if that's the case, right?
Grant Halloran: It's the best it's ever been for us.
Felicia Shakiba: That's good to know.
I do have one last question for you: What advice would you give a startup founder, or even a longtime CEO looking to either create or refresh their company culture?
Grant Halloran (23:57):
I think you have to begin, like I said earlier, you have to begin with a true vision. What I mean by that word is being able to close your eyes and in your mind's eye, see the culture. So if you're a startup founder or somebody that has just joined a company or feels like they need to renew the culture, go away for a few days, go into nature, whatever and just spend time uninterrupted time really visualizing it.
You would hope that the CEO is perhaps the most visually capable person. Often, that is the case where the CEO is meant to be a bit more visionary, less operational. So, truly see it. What do you see? What do you feel? What do you hear and just own that, feel that emotionally, right? And then once you've done that, you've allowed yourself that time to just wade in that pool for a while, then you can go and be a bit more concrete, start to write it down. What are the words that you would use to describe your vision? And then I think many many companies have done this differently, but the advice you're asked, because you're asking me, I'll tell you what worked for us, which was a lot of what I've talked about is we knew what we wanted and we were able to get the right people to come in to exemplify that vision behaviorally, and then just built from there, then we codified it. So now it's scalable, okay, and then we nurture it, we nurture it, we give it life, and we modify it when things aren't working. And Felicia, we make mistakes, it would be remiss of me to not say we've made mistakes as well along the way.
And I think the most common mistake that we've made, there's many, but the most common one is where we let for want of a better expression and anti-culture people stick around too long. They're good performers in the company, and we let them stay too long. And one example is on recently, it was a really high performer, we thought, well, let's coach them, let's coach them and eventually, they just lost their team. The team truly felt that they, that this person was only interested in themselves and not the team. They were being selfish. And that is antithetical to our core value of teams, humbling yourself, putting your team ahead of yourself. So that's when we finally were able to say, okay, this person, you're gonna be happier somewhere else, right? So let's go on that journey. And then of course, everyone's relieved, and we realized we should have done it quicker. So that's just an example of having a concrete culture, a truly tangible culture, if you like, enables you to course- correct when you're getting it wrong, as well. So yeah, that's the advice I would give the people. So, hopefully, that's helpful and people can reach me on LinkedIn if they want to know more, check with me directly.
Felicia Shakiba: Grant, that's fantastic advice. I love how you brought through all of the intangibles and shared how you make them tangible and what CEOs and executives roles are in spreading and nurturing the values of the business and upholding them. So thank you so much for your time. Thanks for being here.
Grant Halloran: It's a pleasure. Thank you Felicia.
Felicia Shakiba: That's Grant Halloran, Chief Executive Officer at Planful.
