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Mr Joe Talks.... C-Suite Alignment with Guest Bruce McCarthy
Ever wondered how top executives keep their teams moving in the same direction? Let's dive into the insights from a conversation I had with Bruce McCarthy, a guru in aligning product teams and executive leadership.
Bruce and I discussed the importance of alignment—not just agreeing for the sake of peace but truly committing to a common path even when personal opinions differ. This approach avoids what Bruce calls the "fish pizza," where everyone gets a little bit of what they want but the outcome satisfies no one. We explored how misalignment can manifest in organizations: projects that drag on, teams that are out of sync, and efforts that fall short of their potential.
One key takeaway is the concept of "disagree and commit," a principle championed by Amazon. It's about making decisions efficiently, even when not everyone agrees. We delved into how leaders can foster a culture where team members feel heard and valued, making it easier to commit to the group's decisions.
Bruce shared practical strategies for executives, like "shuttle diplomacy"—having one-on-one conversations to smooth out potential disagreements before they escalate in larger meetings. He stressed the importance of these strategies in building a cohesive team that can navigate the complexities of modern business environments.
We also touched on the need for CEOs to focus on what truly matters. Instead of getting bogged down in status updates and minutiae, it's crucial to steer discussions toward strategic decisions that address the core challenges facing the business.
To wrap it up, Bruce emphasized that aligning a team around common goals not only drives better business outcomes but also transforms the workplace culture. It turns colleagues into collaborators and, ultimately, friends who are invested in each other's success.
Contact Bruce:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brucemccarthy/
Book - Aligned Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders by Bruce McCarthy and Melissa Appel - https://amzn.eu/d/hCEEb28
Bruce's Website - www.productculture.com
Here are the key moments from our discussion:
[00:00:00] - Bruce's Journey: Decoding Team Dynamics
[00:01:34] - The Essence of Alignment Explained
[00:01:45] - Alignment vs. Agreement: What's the Difference?
[00:02:44] - The Amazon Way: Disagree and Commit
[00:03:41] - Avoiding the Pitfalls of False Consensus
[00:04:25] - Journey Over Destination: The Alignment Process
[00:04:44] - Fish Pizza: A Metaphor for Misalignment
[00:05:11] - Product Leadership: Beyond the Roadmap
[00:06:43] - Visionary Alignment: Crafting a Unified Direction
[00:07:02] - Spotting False Alignment: A Warning for Executives
[00:08:25] - Creating a Culture of Openness and Inquiry
[00:10:59] - Disarming Defense Mechanisms for Better Decisions
[00:15:06] - Facing Problems Together: A Collaborative Approach
[00:15:37] - The Time Investment Dilemma: Quick Fixes vs. Long-Term Success
[00:18:18] - Shuttle Diplomacy: Pre-Alignment Strategies
[00:19:57] - CEO's Playbook: Orchestrating Effective Alignment
[00:20:10] - Shared Objectives:
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Hello everybody. So today I am joined by Bruce McCarthy. Bruce, would you like to, give yourself an introduction and say hello to everybody?
Bruce McCarthy:Thanks Joe. For the last 10 years or so, I've been working with product teams around the world, trying to get the best out of them, trying to help them improve their game. And, one of the things that I've learned is that alignment on goals and roadmaps between the, product team and the executive team is critical to success. You're not going to get what you expect out of your product team. If they and you are expecting different things. and one of the things that I've found that is a precursor and absolutely critical for Alignment there is alignment among the executive team. often I run into companies where actually the head of marketing, the head of engineering, the head of product, the head of sales, they've all got different ideas of what success looks like. And so I've been spending a bunch of time over the past couple of years working to gain alignment and clarity on direction and strategy within executive teams.
Joe Leech:That's good to hear. So for the folks who don't know me, I'm Mr. Joe. I coach CEOs of both tech companies, but also larger businesses today. And why I've invited Bruce here today is to talk really about that alignment of folks within the C suite and what that looks like when it's going well, what that looks like when it's going badly, and effectively how we can achieve that. So my first question then, Bruce, is we talk about alignment, right? And everybody feels like they know what it means, but the reality is, you must have had to dig into that. What does alignment mean? What do we mean by alignment?
Bruce McCarthy:I think it's a really important concept and I'm glad you brought it up. It might sound like a synonym for agreement or consensus, but it's not, actually. It's much more specific. Consensus is when everybody agrees, okay, yes, this is the best thing, best solution, the best, decision we could make. And we're all, we're all going to, make it, work. And if you've ever tried to figure out where to go to dinner with a large group of relatives, you know that consensus is hard to come by. in fact, I would argue it's more or less impossible because the only way you get to agreement is if somebody says, I don't really like fish, but okay, fine. I'll just go along. So alignment is where you openly acknowledge that I like fish and you like pizza, but we make a group decision anyway, and we agree that we're going to pursue and make successful the decision, even though some of us don't agree going in. That's, the Amazon disagree and commit phenomenon right there. But what people also don't understand is there are some necessary conditions to making disagree and commit work. The first is that we have identified whose decision is this. Is there somebody in the group who is the final arbiter of what is the decision, so that when we disagree, it can be resolved, by that person. Second, is that everybody who has a strong opinion has been heard and acknowledged, and has, and feels that their point of view, contrary point of view, has been understood and accepted as valid. Even Though we're not going to go that way. It turns out once, psychologically, once you feel like you've been heard and listened to and acknowledged, you're much more willing to go along and make a different decision work. And that process is non trivial and we often, very decisive executives will just skip to the end and you get people Grumbling, quietly or, or complaining or even doing what's called a pocket veto outside the meeting. A pocket veto is where you don't agree with the decision and you're not going to implement the decision, but you keep it in your pocket during the meeting. And you sit and you nod your head, and try, not to say out loud what you're thinking, but you have no intention of going along.
Joe Leech:Wow. So in essence, sabotage. Or, you, whatever you might do later on, you don't do, you agree to do something and you don't do it later on. That's really interesting, isn't it? So you're effectively talking about alignment as being more of a journey rather than a destination. So if you're a leader, you expect alignment suddenly to happen. It's a thing I want to happen. I need alignment right now. But the reality is you need to go on that journey to get to that point where people have had their say as to what's going on. And I really like your, your dinner analogy there as well, because it's also not about compromise, is it? Because fish pizza is never very good, right? Nobody wants fish pizza. And that's not going to make the fish people happy, and it's not going to make the pizza people happy, is it really? So it's also not about compromise as well. It's about having that open discussion about what you're going to do, listening to the reasons why and why not it should happen, but still coming to a definitive conclusion anyway along, along that journey.
Bruce McCarthy:Sometimes, relating this to, the product discipline, you've got a CPO or a VP of product who's a member of the executive team, and they feel like their job is to go around and pull everyone, from the different, who heads up all the different departments and get a laundry list of. Things they want the product team to execute and put on, the roadmap. And so there's some marketing stuff and some sales stuff and some finance stuff. And we end up with fish pizza. We end up with a little bit of everything and nothing that really. makes a difference for the business. In my mind, the job of product is to make impact for the customers and for the business as a consequence. And if you just giving a little bit to everyone, by, voting or by sort of allocation, that's not a clear strategy that's not moving the company meaningfully in the direction that you want to take it.
Joe Leech:Yeah, that's just, in essence, it's a different, that's, again, appeasement, isn't it? It's a very different thing. Again, it's very, not having that boldness in terms of making a choice about where you want to take it. And I think what's interesting about how you talk about that is you mentioned it's product, but that could equally be any other division in the business from human resources to sales. If again, if you're still, if any, divisions producing fish pizza, something's wrong, right? That, that it's never going to be something that's decisive or it's going to really push the business forward, ends up being just in essence a compromise. So I would. I really like that idea that alignment is about coming up. With something that, it is based around a vision that people are brought into that everybody's happy with that destination. Not everybody feels like they've compromised a certain along the route and you end up with something that nobody really likes that much, but everybody's not that unhappy with it. They veto it. So that's a really nice way to think about it.
Bruce McCarthy:Now there's a few, signs that you may not have achieved alignment that I think it's important that executives watch out for. if you're the sort of person, and I've been this, this sort of person who says, So we all agree, right? and everyone in around the room goes, yeah, sure. then you may be in danger of having what's called shallow alignment or false alignment. and the way you can detect that is, if you learn through the grapevine that after everyone left the room. Some people complained loudly about the process or about not being heard or about the stupid idea that they're forced to go along with, or this happened in one particular, company that I was working with. One executive came out of a meeting where the team had agreed on four objectives and had ranked them in order and agreed that they were going to pursue all of them this quarter. Left the room, went directly to his. Director's meeting, his staff meeting, wrote the four on a whiteboard and crossed two of them off and said, ignore these. so direct contradiction of what they had just agreed to in the previous meeting because they didn't feel safe bringing up their concerns or objections, about the ability to execute on all four.
Joe Leech:I've totally been in situations. I used to be a elementary school teacher. And I remember we were taught very early on to not, if you ask direct questions that to any human, do you understand or do you agree? There's an immense amount of pressure on there on that question for the answer to be right. Even if you don't, there's a inbuilt part of our brain that makes us want to agree and be part of this. So we, and want to seem like we're understanding. So we're very often quite scared to say no in those situations because no is quite a strong word. And so you're right. It's those situations is thinking that you've got agreement as the leader in that situation means you might not have, because you've not necessarily used the right tactics to get that alignment. You need to be asking and questioning, not requesting alignment. You need to be questioning along this, alongside that.
Bruce McCarthy:So you can ask open ended questions like, does anyone have any concerns? Not, are you disagreeing, but are, is there anything you worried about in trying to make this work? or, you could do what's called a pre mortem. You could say, okay, so here's the, we, we've agreed on the plan. Now let's de risk this plan. What could go wrong? If we were to have failed, if we had this meeting at the end of the quarter and we, ruefully look back and say, oh, we failed, what would probably be the cause? And then get people to proactively identify their worries. Or their, contrary opinions, even. if this happened, we'd really be screwed. let's either examine our assumptions and decide, you know what? Our plan cannot protect us against that inevitability or that possibility. So we need a different plan. Or less radically, let's at least work to mitigate it in advance if that were to occur.
Joe Leech:That idea of almost making it like game like or taking people a little bit out of themselves to, so if this were to go wrong, what would it be rather than making that a personal, necessarily, not attack, but because it can often get like that, can't it, in these situations where this is my idea, this is my strategy, this is my initiative, I'm going You know, and for you to disagree, often I can be seen to take that personally. And equally, if I think I'm disagreeing with you, that's me, or disagreeing with the idea, it might come across or I'm worried it's going to come across that I'm disagreeing with you, especially if you're the leader, you're the CEO, right? Nobody wants to be that person that is like that. So by creating a safe space, by making it more of a game or making it more hypothetical, in essence, what you're doing is just removing that...
Bruce McCarthy:We're just gaming this out. It is, as you say, it's a game or it's a hypothetical. The other thing you can do to try to disarm, people's defense mechanisms in order to get them to really say what they're thinking is, suppose you yourself have some concerns or some criticism, of, An idea that someone put out, you don't want to come out and say, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. And you're an idiot. so the first thing is don't talk about the person, talk about the idea. But the second thing is first summarize the idea and highlight the positives. I think what you're saying is this. and therefore that, is that right? Get them to acknowledge that you've understood them. Okay, I can see why you, why you think this is a good idea. It's got this advantage and that advantage and the other advantage. What I think, I am also aware of, so this is yes and, is the risk that over here, this other thing that we haven't talked about. or what you might not know is, insert facts here that the person might not be aware of. Or there is this other consideration, and so add rather than contradict, but start with the summary and an acknowledgement of the positives. When you do that, when someone feels acknowledged and heard, you gain their permission to say what you think, because they, feel like. You gave them the airtime, you gave them the acknowledgement, now they want to return the favor. That again is a sort of a normal psychological phenomenon. We're wired for fairness. And so we tend to respond well in that situation.
Joe Leech:No, I really like that approach. It reminds me a lot of actually the CEOs I work with who have challenging relationships with their board of directors where it can end up becoming like this. And what's interesting as to what I hear, certainly from the people who can make it more confrontational in situations, they're like, everybody's an adult here. We don't need to worry about people's feelings. We're all very senior executives all these times. But the reality is, no matter how old you are, How, much experience you have, those feelings are still under the surface and you, need to respect the human there in terms of doing that. And it doesn't have to be confrontational. All it really ends up being is just like you say is acknowledging what that person said, rather than what they often can hear is your criticism is like the whole idea when rather the reality is it's just this small area of the idea that you maybe you want to talk about in more detail, but just having, choosing, having and choosing the right words in those sorts of can make it so it doesn't escalate into anything that's
Bruce McCarthy:That's right.
Joe Leech:Challenging in those situations. Even if it may not come across like that may be the underlying feeling in the room, which is the last thing that you want.
Bruce McCarthy:The other people in the room, they, as you say, they have all of those emotions. If they really are mature, experienced executives, they may be better than average at managing those emotions, but you can help them manage them by Using these kinds of approaches in communication by making it easy for them to manage their own defensiveness, or attachment to the idea and to enter into a hypothetical game like conversation where we're going to get to a better result. And after all, that is what we're after. When we're moving our team toward alignment is the best decision, not I win and you lose.
Joe Leech:I like that. And so that's the idea that it's not a win lose situation. This is something that is, I'm not attached to my idea or myself being right. I want to make sure that we're doing the right thing. And it's just that subtle viewpoint shift that separating the individual out from the idea, both in terms of the, and conceptually, we might agree with that, but the reality is if the language isn't around that, then it's not necessarily happening.
Bruce McCarthy:There's a sort of a interesting sort of dance that we're doing where that you can actually imagine happening with posture and with how we face one another. if we're ever in argument, we are face to face and I'm like, this is my point. And you're like making a point back at me. And it's like a fight. But imagine that instead, we are both facing toward the problem, and we are cooperating and collaborating to find the best answer. And we're whiteboarding, and then I, put some things on the whiteboard and I hand you the marker, and you, add to that. And we're like, oh, okay, yeah, I see, where you're going with this. And we're side by side. facing the problem rather than facing each other.
Joe Leech:That's a really nice way to think about it. So I've got something here, right? I'm a busy person, Bruce. This sounds like a long process. Can we just do this quickly, right? How do you do, can you do this quickly? And if so, how do you do this quickly? It sounds like this is long. I'm busy. I'm too busy for this.
Bruce McCarthy:Yeah, I, think there's a huge value in spending some time doing a workshop with your team. That's what I do with product teams and with executive teams is we sit down for half a day or a couple of half a days and we map out. their OKRs or their roadmap, and we figure out what, the team cross functionally as a whole are going to agree on. so I, I think that periodically, not every day, but periodically, like once a quarter, you do need to sit down with your whole team and figure out what the plan is and align on it, whatever construct that you use. But day to day
Joe Leech:And whatever level you're at as well, because again, like you say, people, especially in the C suite, I'm too busy for that. But the reality is it sounds if you don't put that effort in to create that alignment,
Bruce McCarthy:right.
Joe Leech:It's just going to come back and bite you later on down the line, right? For the sake of half a day or a day of time, how much time that will save you further on down the process in terms of what could go wrong later on.
Bruce McCarthy:I worked with this one company over two years on, with the executive team on their quarterly OKRs, and, the thing that got them from a bunch of departmental siloed OKRs that really did not add up to more than the sum of the parts, They ended up adding up to less than the sum of the parts because they weren't very, they didn't make a lot of progress in achieving those goals. the thing that drove them to one shared OKR for the entire C suite and much more success in achieving that was spending time together. Every quarter we had a two day, two half days, one after the other, offsite where they all came together. And we spent time together working through this stuff. And, gradually they moved from a bunch of high powered professionals to a team. And that made all the difference in their ability to make the changes that they needed to in their organization for it to succeed. So I want to come back to your point about how do we do this quickly. First, I would say sometimes you don't. Sometimes you really do need to spend the time to form as a team. But then having done that, they can, they, they also have a, a weekly staff meeting and it's, quick and agenda driven. and they've got to try to get through a bunch of things and they've got to make decisions quickly. Number one, you can make decisions quickly as a group if the key people have had some key conversations one on one outside the group first. That's what I call shuttle diplomacy, where somebody who owns something, a decision, say, and wants to, drive that decision and get alignment on that decision through the rest of the team, spends a little bit of one on one time. Maybe only 20 minutes, maybe 10 minutes in the hallway or at the coffee machine. or on a video like this, with the key people who they know will have a strong opinion. Coming to a, mutual understanding, and using the constructs that we talked about, here's what I'm thinking, but I want to understand your point of view, and now I'm going to shut up and let you talk. And I'm going to give you some air time, and I'm going to say, okay, I hear you, and I'm going to repeat back to you, what you said in my own words, and ask you, did I get that right?
Joe Leech:I really like that approach. I like the concept of shuttle diplomacy as well. that's nice because it gives you, you're almost looking ahead for where the problems are going to be or where the challenges may be with certain individuals, cause you know their point of view is going to be different or you're going to need some time with them, or they're going to need extra time with you and you just. You, you offset that really by spending, again, investing some time in doing that.
Bruce McCarthy:And again, executives busy, hard, to get time on the calendar, but, you could have, especially with a little bit of repetition and practice, you could have that quick pre alignment shuttle diplomacy conversation in 15 minutes.
Joe Leech:That's a really great idea. So how, me as a leader, if I'm the CEO, how do I, orchestrate that? How do I make sure that happens? How do I, how can I be sure that my executive team is doing that? What sort of, how can that happen do you think?
Bruce McCarthy:The first thing I think is it comes down to objectives. I talked to a CEO, of a small semiconductor company. They had been making chips for 25 years. He'd been CEO the entire time and they had, just this amazing, consistent 40 percent growth rate every year for 25 years. And I, so I naturally, I was curious. I asked him what was the secret. And the first thing he said was not fantastic technology or, the smartest team in the world or things that you might expect him to say. He said, my executive team shares 80 percent the same objectives. Yeah, there are a few things here and there on the edges, but 80%, the marketing person, the salesperson, the engineering, they all have the same set of objectives. So that forces alignment because
Joe Leech:That's a really
Bruce McCarthy:we've all got the same incentives.
Joe Leech:Yeah. And you're all going in the same direction, aren't you as well? you're going, cause you're working towards the same goals. They're not separate goals or separate ideas or separate objectives that may at some level link together. They're very fundamentally the same things, which is a really nice way to do it. So in essence, it encourages them. It's the carrot way of doing it, isn't it really? If they're all working towards the same thing, there's an encouragement for there to work together rather than the potential other one, which is the stick, which is you guys have just got to align on this, that kind of frustration that can often come that ends up being, what does that mean? How do we do that? And the reality is if everything, people have the same shared objectives. That alignment can happen. That's a really nice, straightforward way to look at it. So
Bruce McCarthy:I really encourage CEOs to, to reserve the substantive discussion for the things that are common across the team, for those shared goals, for the, for that. Let's. Bring together the brain trust and figure out how we're going to solve this problem that faces us as a business that isn't departmentally specific. a lot of executive team meetings that I've been in, they're just a status update on the. on the latest performance, statistics or deliverables for each department. Marketing says we generated this many qualified leads. Sales says this is what the pipeline looks like, et cetera. And I think I'm just so bored with that. and it feels like every department, when they are presenting, all the other departments are bored too. And, And I think maybe we should just jettison that, trust that the departments and their department heads know what they're doing until proven otherwise, publish the numbers in the update as a pre read, and then reserve the actual live group discussion for, okay, Bye. There are these macro trends in our business that are changing and they're driving down our margins incredibly. What are we going to do about that? That's not a, that's not a departmental discussion. That's a company strategy discussion and that's where you want all brains on deck, right?
Joe Leech:You're addressing the things that matter at that point, right? Like you say, it's not a status update. It's not, cause again, that can happen. A handout can be done beforehand. It's really looking at what do we need to align on right now? What are the issues that we're facing out there? What are the challenges that we got? It's, again, it's in essence, small alignment, isn't it? Alignment through these constant meetings. You're making sure that everything's going in the right direction rather than it being, talk me through the numbers. That's a different way to look at it. Oh, I like that. So you mentioned that, I'm going to ask you another question. So you mentioned that, that business is doing very, well. What does it look like then when you have alignment? We've talked a lot about when you don't have
Bruce McCarthy:Yeah.
Joe Leech:What's possible when you do and what do businesses look like when they are aligned? What does it see? How, do they act? What's different?
Bruce McCarthy:Yeah. Oh, let's start with what's, a sign of misalignment. I told you behaviorally what to expect, but in terms of results, imagine you're in a situation where you think you know what your market is, who your buyer is, and and your product seems reasonably well suited to it and you have a high powered sales team and you have a marketing effort and everything. You've checked all the boxes that seem to put this machine into good motion, and yet it's just not really getting momentum. Every, it feels like making the numbers quarter after quarter is such a slog, is such a struggle, and you're always worried right until the last minute of whether you're going to make it, and sometimes you don't. your, sales cycles are longer than they should be. Your conversion rates are lower than they should be. Your retention is lower than it should be. Everything is an uphill battle. That, to me, suggests that there isn't clear alignment among those functions about what the definition of success is, about what the goal is. Let me play out just a real practical example. There was an argument. In this one C-suite between the CMO and the CPO about who is the ideal customer? What is our market and what is the TAM for that market? And the, the CMO said, look, I know I can make my numbers. If we define it fairly broadly like this, I know I can generate the number of qualified leads that we need in order to close business and hit our numbers. I've done all the math back to front. From lead generation and awareness generation all the way through to closed business, and average sale. and that's the only way I can make it work. And the CPO said, that's fine, except that our product, that TAM is so broad, our product cannot really adequately service. All of those diverse needs in that business. And so when we go, when we go for an RFP, we're not going to be able to really compete with the full checklist of the other, companies in that space. And when we actually onboard those customers, they're going to. Be disappointed and complain, and we're going to have churn. and so the numbers might look good on paper, but I don't think we can actually achieve that and lo and behold, that was what was really happening was that they were, their, close rate was low, they had to discount and their retention rate,
Joe Leech:I guess I'm thinking the CMO at that point is thinking, that's not my problem or, at some level, that's what's going on in their head, right? That's your problem, not mine. Yeah.
Bruce McCarthy:The pressure back from the CPO saying, I think we need to narrow our definition of our target market, and he, but his reaction was panic. I can't make my numbers if we narrow it like that. And that's what I'm paid to do. so the only Remedy for that was the CEO stepping in and saying, all right, we're changing the playing field. We're going to agree on a, on a definition of the target market that we can really, compete in and nail and CMO, we're going to change your comp plan and your, and the numbers you need to hit to match that. And then that fixed it.
Joe Leech:Then you have that alignment there, but it's only by that coming out and having those conversations and having the space for that to happen that you see that, Rather than what could, taking that example further, where the CMO is I'm, I'm passing that I'm passing the numbers over. It's, that person, it's that guy's fault that they're not converted. It's not my problem. It's, them. And you can see immediately that there's no alignment there. You can see it because there isn't, it's I'm throwing these, Customer's over the wall to you. If you're not catching them, that's your problem, right? But the reality is, it, that's not the best way to do it.
Bruce McCarthy:And it took the CEO. with a little bit of outside encouragement, stepping in for the CMO, to go to the rest of the executive team and to the CEO and say, I want relief from my quota, would feel like an admission of failure. and he was in a position where it was really hard to ask for that. And,
Joe Leech:Because you couldn't say, yeah, you, it's very hard to say that I don't think I'm going to hit these numbers. I, rather than the numbers being wrong, you worry that the challenge is that I'm somehow not doing my job or something like that. It becomes back to that emotional personal aspect of it that seems to get in the way of this alignment, right? Is that these, the things are operating. We'd love these things to be operating in a tangible human way. Objective way, but the reality is a lot of this stuff happens in a very subjective way anyway, and it takes acknowledgement of that for things to actually change, right? If you don't acknowledge that subjective emotional human element of this, you're not going to get the alignment. You're not going to do it. You're just going to carry on in these sorts of situations where you're living in a different world.
Bruce McCarthy:So I get, I, I get hired by companies to help with things like frameworks with, we need to do our OKRs or we need to do a roadmap, or we need, the team needs some training or we need to hire, a new CPO or something like that. Very easily defined. Technical, in a way, things that, that they need. but in the end, we always end up dealing with the human dimension. That's really what's going on. All these things, like we were not good at a roadmap. It's a symptom of, or of, cultural, organizational, human problems. It turns out the hardest thing in tech is people.
Joe Leech:And that's the reality, I think, of a lot of the world, a lot of this work is all business problems are human problems, right? They are, at the end of the day, because they are, the humans make up the people that deliver it, the people that buy it, the people that sell it, you can't ignore that part of it, however much you'd like it to be a machine, it can never be quite like that, because the humans are the people.
Bruce McCarthy:Yeah.
Joe Leech:intrinsic part of that. I love
Bruce McCarthy:It turns out that if you harness that though, that's where the genius comes from. once, once freed from the constraints of the initial setup, this executive team has become really tight knit. really, they act like friends rather than, colleagues, and that's, what you want.
Joe Leech:and that's, that, that sounds like then, so these are some of the signals you can see when you have got alignment then, or people are working towards that, is that's one of the signs is a strong working relationship amongst the C suites. what are the, other things that you notice when you have alignment? What are the Benefits you get when that alignment's there. How can you recognize it when you have it?
Bruce McCarthy:First of all, I would expect to see an improvement in your business results, because they're, because, you've got the focus and alignment on your team, and you're, so you've got alignment on exactly who is the customer and what is the pitch to that customer, and we can, fulfill those promises, And so your conversion rate goes up and your, your sales cycle goes down and your retention rate goes up. all of that, all of those business things, but those can be lagging indicators. It's going to take some time. The leading indicators would be that you see the executives helping each other out. That is, you see them working each other's problems rather than just saying, I did my part and now I'm done. I, stood up, I gave my update and now I'm sitting down. You have an engaged conversation, first of all, in the executive team, but you see them, You, just hear someone saying parenthetically, yeah, Dave and I were talking about this the other day and we worked out a solution. Somebody from my team is going to spend three months on their team, helping them out, figuring out this problem. And, we're optimistic that the, that these guys can work it out.
Joe Leech:That sounds like the perfect situation, right? If you're a leader and a CEO, that's exactly what you want. The numbers up, people proactively out there encouraging and solving problems. That sounds like it's the answer. Fantastic.
Bruce McCarthy:As a CEO, I run my own small business. The, I keep telling my own team, that. The best thing that can, the best news I can possibly have is we, identified this problem and we figured it out. here's what we've done or here's what we're doing. and I'm like, I have nothing to do.
Joe Leech:love that. thank you very much for your time today, Bruce. I've really, enjoyed our conversation. how can people. Learn more about this particular subject, this alignment approach from you and from in the world. How can people learn
Bruce McCarthy:Thank you for asking. I have just finished, just about finished writing a book. About stakeholder alignment and it's called"Aligned". it's geared toward product leaders, but it's really applicable honestly to any function. It's in my mind, it's the the missing manual for how to get beyond the mere skills of your job to actually being effective by gaining alignment throughout your organization. It's a combination of a business book, with a bunch of tools, tips, frameworks, very practical, very actionable, and a fable, a story about someone new joining an organization at the director level and gradually figuring out their, the landscape, the politics, the hidden landscape behind the matrix, and, working their way up into the C suite.
Joe Leech:That sounds fantastic. Great. And so by the time of publishing this, the book will be out. So where's the best place to go and find the
Bruce McCarthy:Yeah, go to amazon. com and it's called"Aligned Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders" by myself and my co author, Melissa Appel, or, I don't know if you have show notes, but we can provide a link.
Joe Leech:The link to what's, the website where, can people find
Bruce McCarthy:I'm at productculture. com. There's also a landing page there about the book with more details.
Joe Leech:Thanks again for your time, Bruce. I've really enjoyed our conversation.
