Why Leaders Need to Invest in Stay Interviews
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In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with COO and entrepreneur Matt Verlaque on the necessity of stay interviews for the health of your organization.
A few reasons why he is awesome — he is the Chief Operating Officer for the SaaS Academy. He’s been a successful entrepreneur for more than a decade and, up until a more than a few years ago, was a Fire Lieutenant for the Arlington County Fire Department and working in emergency services.
Connect with, and learn more about Matt on his…
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“If you can’t provide value to your direct reports in a call, either you don’t have the right relationship, or you don’t have the right skills.”
Matt Verlaque
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Matt Verlack and here is why he is awesome. He’s the chief operating officer for the SaaS Academy. He’s been a successful entrepreneur for more than a decade. And up until more than a few years ago, he was a fire lieutenant for the Arlington County Fire Department and working in emergency services, which I find super interesting as a, as a lens on the world of work.
And he’s here to talk about stay interviews. Hello, Matt.
Matt Verlaque: Hey, nice to… to nice to be on here, man. Thanks for having me, Russel.
Russel Lolacher: Good. I’m literally having a conversation right now on LinkedIn with some VP of an organization in Europe about the importance of looking beyond onboarding and where stay interviews really get to and exit interviews. So I’m super curious about your take on this and what we can learn.
But before I do Matt, but before I do, I have to ask the one question I asked all of my guests, which is what is your, sir, best or worst employee experience.
Matt Verlaque: So I will tell you my best, People ask all the time when you exit a company what are you most proud of? And so on and so forth. I feel like there’s a lot of right answers everyone wants to disrupt something or change the lives of millions of people. I don’t know if we disrupted anything we, we gave a lot of value as a fair trade for what we charged and we built a cool business.
But the thing that thing that made me the most proud in that business, which led to my best employee experience was creating jobs for people. I’m just, I’m a very team focused leader as opposed to maybe a market focused leader. I just love cultivating teams. And it’s the thing that gives me the most like personal fulfillment.
And and there was one person on the team in my first business who had A lot of the natural predispositions to be an incredible marketer. She really was able to connect with people both through written words and actually she came in through sales. And so she will do it in a one to one and one to many setting.
And so you know, she had actually coached at a gym that my co founder had created before we launched our SaaS company. And to see her go from like selling clothes in the mall to being the head coach of a gym, to coming in as a salesperson, to then running marketing and then having a marketing leadership role post acquisition, and then go on to get another job at a very well known company running an entire business function, just to see that happen and to know that what she learned on the job with us, with my co founder and I was like a small part in her being able to achieve her potential.
I don’t wanna say full potential cause she’s still got a lot more to go. It was just a, when I look at that over a five year time horizon for this person, it was just incredibly rewarding to see somebody win in the cauldron that you created. It’s her win, it’s her thing. Like, she did the work.
But it’s just, it’s nice to be able to be the architect of an environment that brings out the best in people. And so I think I had a couple of ones like that, but you know, she’s the one that came to mind. It’s just seeing somebody grow and win. And like over the, over five years quadruple their earning income, which changed their lives and the kid’s lives and the whole nine yards.
It’s just, it’s a really cool thing. So it’s that.
Russel Lolacher: Thank you for highlighting this. And I’ll, the thing is, it’s so funny because there are unfortunately a lot of bad leaders out there because leadership training is non existent or it’s way too late. And there’s always the excuse of things like I’m too busy this and I’m too busy that and this. But even if you’re just a mediocre boss and you’re thinking you’re too busy to do anything… just be a narcissist. At least think about yourself. If you could help somebody else, you’ll feel good too. And I don’t, I don’t mean you, but you get my point is that it, it doesn’t always about making your team feel good. There are benefits to you as a leader for helping them on their journey and helping them succeed is it’s the, the dopamine for you will take an amazing hit.
Matt Verlaque: It’s honestly, it’s even more than the dopamine. If you want to take like a, an inward looking view of why it’s important, I’ll share this. If you don’t invest in team development, you literally cannot hold a high standard for your team and you cannot make your own life better by having eight players around you if you don’t invest in them, like you are punching yourself in the face as an, as the, as you’re, as an, as a leader, if you don’t take the time to do this, because then all the people around you aren’t going to be as good as they could be. And like shit rolls downhill, man, it’s all comes back to you having to clean up the mess of people who are underperforming around you.
So it’s I don’t understand how you don’t have time. I’m not saying that you spend 20 hours a week building courses. Like I’m not saying that, but right, just the minimum effective dose of making sure somebody is one percent better every couple of weeks when you talk to them, it goes a long way.
There’s a ton of leverage in doing that and people don’t see it. It’s crazy.
Russel Lolacher: I like that you’ve already started the show off with the first t-shirt of the show. You will punch yourself in the face. If you do not invest in your team. I like that.
Matt Verlaque: Yes, that’s good, man.
Russel Lolacher: Good visual.
Matt Verlaque: Bumper stickers are coming out next.
Russel Lolacher: Well, there’s a great segue into our conversation today about investing in your team and the importance of that. A big thing that’s sort of, and I’ve mentioned this hundreds of times on the show is the importance of definitions because we talk about things all the time and we never define them.
State interviews. I actually want to get you to define for me because a lot of people know about onboarding. A lot of organizations invest in onboarding. A lot of organizations are like, yeah, I really should do exit interviews, hit or miss. But stay interviews is this one that seems to really not hit the mark as much. Can you give a your explanation of what stay interview is?
Matt Verlaque: Yeah. And it’s interesting because I don’t use that term in our own business, but you know, I think that if I had to describe it, it’s a, it’s an interaction. A stay interview is an interaction with an employee or a team member that is designed not to help them accomplish the work that they’re working on in the current week or the current sprint or the current month.
It’s a, to me, it’s a career trajectory assessment that covers both the, the job pertinent things, right? Do you have the tools you need? Are you learning? Are you growing, et cetera? But then also the personal fulfillment side of things, like how is your job like overlaying with your life and your goals and where do you see yourself?
Do you still want to be here in six months? Do you want to still want to be here in three or four years? And the interesting thing about asking those questions is it’s a great mechanism to hold up a mirror and see the kind of culture you’ve built. Because if you think everyone is just BSing you and ‘yes, Russel, I love working for you so much. I want to be here forever. You’re the best boss ever.’ If they can give you any constructive feedback or be like, look, I actually want your job or I want to go do this job and I don’t see that position on our org chart and I don’t know what to do about that. If they can’t say that stuff to you, you haven’t built the right cauldron, like I said before and so I think that that the standard view does two things.
If you have a culture of candid communication, then it lets you know where your team is standing and where you’re standing as a leader and do some future planning and investing in them. And if all you get is surface level garbage, then you know what you need to work on in your culture to build the communication rhythms that will then get you the real stuff. So I think it serves two purposes in that sense.
Russel Lolacher: You mention as well that you don’t call them stay interviews. What do you call them?
Matt Verlaque: I call them one on ones. They’re baked in like every two weeks. Every two weeks we do these in some form or fashion. And it’s a, it’s a hybrid between a little bit of the tactical, but also the, the more forward looking things. And then we do them every six months in a bit of a more formalized setting based off of, I like to call them performance assessments because performance assessments happen every day in our company.
It’s just the the doing the work, but you know, we, we level up and take a more holistic view every six months or so. With a, with a rhythm that we’ve built in our people team.
Russel Lolacher: I’ve always hated the term stay interviews because I don’t want employees just to stay. I want them to… So I call them thrive interviews because I’ve always liked the idea. And it’s the same thing. I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re hitting it right on where I’m going, is that we look at them as this thing that should be about helping them nurture through their environment.
But it also, and I’m curious what your thoughts about this is, is it a great opportunity also? I believe it is, but I’m just curious how you approach them for the organization to check in on how they’re doing to support that employee, because we make all these promises, Matt at onboarding that we don’t fulfill in a lot of organizations going, we have the best values. Did I mention our culture is phenomenal? And then we ignore them for the rest of their career. So, these are an amazing opportunity to sort of fix that. How do you approach that connection to the onboarding?
Matt Verlaque: So I do it a couple of ways. So the, the first thing I think it’s worth, cause like I saw you raise an eyebrow rightfully so when, when I said we do these every two weeks. And I think to, to answer the question properly, I’d love to talk about like how I run those biweekly calls and what questions we ask.
And then I’ll talk about some of the other rhythms that we layer on top of it. Is that cool? Cool. And so the the one on one rhythm that I use heavily inspired by Matt Mishari, great CEO within, if you Google him, he’s open sourced all of his writing and curriculum. He’s, he’s killer. He’s one of the best in the game.
So I didn’t invent this, I just implemented it. But so the way that we do the, the one on ones, we start off with wins. I love to build a culture of winning. Cause even if everything in your business is on fire, it like, you can be managing that really well and it can still be a win. And it’s, it’s one of these things where we’re like a players in general are really good at finding all the stuff that’s broken and wrong and opportunity to improve. Like I never have to work on that. It’s all right there, but you know, sometimes we’re too hard on ourselves. So I start off with the wins. Let’s like, what’s good in your world.
It’s like we were doing to say, Russ, what’s up? What’s good in your world. Give me a couple of wins. You talk about a couple of things you’re proud of, be personal. It could be business, company level, your level, whatever. It could be anything. It’s to start off with some positivity. So we both do that.
And then we’ll do a little bit of the tactical, like if you’ve got we work in six week sprints in our companies, if you’ve got a goal that you’re chasing for the six weeks, we’ll, check in on it mostly just to see if you need anything, honestly I don’t want you to leave a call with me being like, Oh, well, this is supposed to be a stay interview, thriving or whatever you want to call it. So I have this project that I really, really need to do, but I’m blocked on it. But this isn’t the right environment to ask the question. That’s crazy to me. So I just, I check in on the big stuff, make sure you’re good to go from there. The middle, like these are an hour long, the middle 40 minutes or so of these calls, I just call it ‘The List.’
And really it’s just, I like to coach my team members to pull from me what they need. I will also push and coach them on specific things that I see, but my best performing team members will come to me with a list and be like, Matt, can you coach me on this? Matt, I had this interaction. Did I handle it? Well Matt, how do you think we should go solve this problem? So the people I love working with the most are pulling from me. So usually there’s a list of coaching topics there. And that is kind of cyclical. I find when I do these this frequently, there’s not always going to be like a full stack. So I like to defer to the team member. I like to defer to the team member. to make sure that they get what they need. And then I fill in the gaps with the longer term questions, right? Hey, what’s your vision for the role? Where do you see this going? What if you had to make another hire right now, who would it be? Why? I just try to layer on all these different questions to try to pull them out of the weeds for a few minutes. I run that up to the 50 minute point and the last 10 minutes we do my favorite part, which is non optional feedback. And so basically I would say if you were on my team, I would say, all right, it’s feedback time.
Like what is one thing in the past two weeks that I did that you loved? And one thing in the past two weeks that I can change to get to the next level. And then, and the important part as the leader is you can’t accept the hugs and kisses feedback that you’re going to get, right? It can’t be just, Oh, everything’s great. I don’t have anything for you. Like you have to explicitly give people permission to nitpick because they’re going to feel like they’re being petty. Dude, if I use a semicolon in the wrong place on a, on a slide deck and it makes something harder to understand, like I want to know about it. Like my goal is excellence, right?
Because I can’t lead well if I’m not performing well. So I want to know all that little stuff. Hey, you look pissed off in this meeting and I’m like, damn, it’s cause I hadn’t eaten in nine hours. But I should probably go have a snack so I don’t look angry and make everyone wonder what’s wrong. As a leader, everything you do, everything you say is through a microphone and everything you do is under a microscope, right? It’s like you’re, it’s there. It all matters. So anyway, I get that feedback from them and then I provide it in that order specifically. So they give me some, then I’ll give them some and we’re good to go.
That’s how I run that call. So that’s like the baseline rhythm. Let me come up for air for a sec there. We do a few other things to bridge the gap between onboarding and ongoing, but but that’s kind of the atomic unit of management for this.
Russel Lolacher: What’s been the benefit to you in, in doing this? I mean, employee retention tends to pop up when we actually take this stuff seriously. But what have you seen personally?
Matt Verlaque: Less surprises I think is the big thing. I think that predictability is an important thing in business, especially in startups because the default operating mode is chaos. And a lot of that is a feature, not a bug. Like in most areas of a startup, if it’s not chaotic, you’re not being aggressive enough trying to build the company.
Like it shouldn’t be predictable when you got 16 members is everyone should have 17 jobs and you’re doing all sorts of crazy stuff. And what like, what am I even doing right now? It’s that’s cool. It’s fun. But people management should not be part of the chaos. If you’ve ever had somebody quit and you were like, Oh my God, I had no idea this person was unhappy.
I had no idea they were looking for jobs. That’s a red flag, right? If you finally ask someone if they’re happy at work and they’re like, no, I’ve been miserable for nine months. That’s a red flag. And so I think the biggest benefit I’ve seen coupled with our value of candid communication and the fact that we actually live that out is I know where my people stand.
I know where they stand all the time. I know how they’re feeling. We do like weekly asynchronous updates where they literally will rate their emotional state from poor to great one to five kind of thing. So if anyone’s a three years or less, I’m going to check in on them and give them a phone call on Friday, make sure they’re good.
I just. My whole job aside from like the creating that I do with my hands. So that’s one bucket. Bucket number two is just making sure the team’s okay. If they’re okay, we’re okay. So no surprises, man.
Russel Lolacher: So, I love that. That’s the benefit it is for you and the organization. How do you know it’s benefiting the employee?
Matt Verlaque: Got it. Good question. The biggest way that I think it benefits the team members is because it gives them an actual outlet to get coaching on whatever they deem is most important. One of the things that we do, and this is even in our culture deck, I can give you a link to it if you want to put it in the show notes.
We took a lot of inspiration from HubSpot and from Netflix. We built last year like a 200 slide culture deck that actually talks through what our core values actually mean. So they’re not just a bunch of crap in a one pager. And one of those things, when it comes to professional development for us and look, season this to taste, it might be a really bad idea for other companies. You might hate it. That’s cool. But for us, it works. We don’t really do formal professional development in the form of like classes and courses and 17 different levels for every job position and all this kind of stuff. Like, the words I use in the culture deck or we get better at our craft on the field of play.
Like we learned by doing. And so, because that’s our approach and we’re about 45 people. We don’t have a full head count for team development yet or anything like that, so we’ve a little bit by necessity, I think if you’re 300 person company or more, this is the different conversation. But for us, this is the outlet.
And so if they’re using that discussion block properly, that it should be more often than not, chock full of things that they want to learn and chock full of things that I want them to learn. And so I think as long as those two things are true, I don’t think by us helping each other learn some new things and challenging each other’s beliefs and double clicking on the work. I can’t see a negative to it. So as long as that discussion’s full and I know that that’s the conduit for coaching, I think the benefits there.
Russel Lolacher: The only piece I’d argue with you on is that I don’t think it does matter the side of the organization. I think these conversations just need to be happening. You could be 10,000 people. You could be more siloed and segmented in how you do it. Because again, we talk about culture and a culture of 45 people is very different because it’s, more one culture, monolithic culture, as opposed to a huge organization where it has probably like 17,000 cultures, even though they put the values on the wall. So I just want to challenge that is that I don’t want to give an large organization a pass for not having to do…
Matt Verlaque: No.
Russel Lolacher: this stuff because, ‘Oh, we’re too big to get that granular.’ I’m like, ‘no, that’s where the secret sauce is people.’
Matt Verlaque: No, I agree with you. That’s that. That wasn’t how I meant that comment. What I meant is that like when you’re at of size, you might have people whose entire job can be creating more formal opportunities to professionally develop as well. That’s the part that I meant might not fit a large organizations that we don’t do that kind of stuff.
And at 300 or 500 people, maybe you do also have some kind of formal development. There is no size organization, from the someone in their mom’s basement to Apple that shouldn’t be having these small unit conversations from a leader to their direct report, like a 100 percent. As soon as you have someone other than yourself, it should be happening. So yeah, we’re on the same page there.
Russel Lolacher: You noted earlier that I raised my eyebrow about the two weeks thing. And I’ll tell you why I did is because to some, that’ll feel like a lot. And to others that will feel like not enough when it comes to checking in. So diversity is such a big piece of this is there’s, there’s a process to, to what you’re doing and a system to what you’re doing, but processes and system can become too rigid.
If you have a staff member who’s could you just leave me alone, I’m trying to do my job. I don’t need another check in. Didn’t we just check in already? Well, others are going, you’re leaving me out to the wilds. I don’t feel like I’m connected. So how do you manage process to ensure it’s getting done and to ensure you’re meeting the mandate of that connection with your staff while also understanding that everybody works different based on their culture, based on their age, all of it.
Matt Verlaque: Yeah. Those are two different problems that I think have two different two different solutions. So for somebody who thinks that they’re too frequent, I would challenge the leader that you’re probably not running the meeting right. Or you don’t have a deep enough relationship with your direct report.
Now there’s a difference between I’m talking to you too often, leave me alone versus I’m crazy busy chasing a deadline, I could really use this hour back, so if that happens occasionally it’s funny, like an example today is I have a one on one with my director of finance and also we’re closing the books today for last month.
So I will still meet with her, but if we only hang for 20 minutes to make sure everything’s good, quick check in, anything you’re blocked on, then she’s look, I gotta go hammer this. I’m not gonna miss my deadline. That’s cool. But the red flag for me as a leader would be someone who says, Matt, I literally just don’t get value from talking to you this often.
Then I’m like, damn, all right, I’m not doing my job right yet. And I would go double click on why that’s true. So I think that, it’s more likely that somebody will push back on this process if you’re too rigid in the way that you run it. So if there are a lot of check boxes and you’d be like, we need to have four coaching items on our discussion list in order to make this a success yeah, get out of here. But if it’s an organic conversation, where you actually have a relationship, not just a managerial obligation, but a relationship with the person then talking once every couple of weeks to make sure they’re good to go and how you can support them should not feel forced or like an imposition or an obligation.
And if it does, your depth of relationship isn’t there, or you have two incompatible humans on a team, which is a real thing. People don’t want to admit it, but sometimes the interpersonal stuff is just hard and it might be right person, wrong seat kind of situation. So that’s that one. If they need more, give them more.
There’s not a, there’s not a cap for me that every two weeks is the floor, but also like I tend to find that you don’t need this conversation more frequently than every two weeks. You just might need a conversation more frequently. Like when I hire someone, I might meet with them three times, four times a week for the first couple of weeks.
And I can, I have a whole framework on that shocker. But a, I might meet with them very, very frequently and then dial back as they need it. So I think that they probably need other, more tactical things from you if they want to meet more often than once every two weeks.
Russel Lolacher: What you’re nailing there is the importance I think leaders need to understand the value of those connections. Like it’s not a transactional thing here. This is about value. And is it not a value to the leader, but is equally if not more so valuable to the employee. I remember having so I had a team for about 12 years.
I actually had the exact same team for 12 years, huge retention. And one of the key things we did was we met exactly how you’re describing of check ins. How are things going? But I really emphasized that it was their time, not mine. Was it your half an hour, your hour? It could be five minutes. It could be the full time, but you dictate that. Not me. I’m just here to listen, support guide, however you need. And I got to the point where I actually almost got rid of it a few times because it was like, is it really getting a lot of value? I mean, I hope it is. And they got pissed at me. If I tried to re try to cancel it, they wanted to reschedule, never cancel because they found so much value in it, as much.
Again, it comes back to that are you providing value because they’ll want to reschedule? You won’t have to push it.
Matt Verlaque: Yeah. And the problem is, and I’m probably gonna make some people uncomfortable, but that’s okay. That’s who I am. If, if you can’t provide value to your direct reports in a call, either you don’t have the right relationship, or you don’t have the right skills. If you’re incapable of coaching your team on something, that is also a data point for you as every leader is also an individual contributor.
So like for you as the practitioner in your role, you might have that hard reality where you’re just like, damn, I haven’t invested in myself in quite some time. Maybe I need to go get better so I can teach someone. Maybe I need to level up. I, I, I laugh. We say this all the time in our company.
We, we borrowed this term from Netflix about talent density. And it’s every hire should increase the talent density. And I want to hire a team that is so good that I feel lucky they give me permission to keep showing up. But then the flip side of that coin, it’s fun to say, but the flip side of that coin is okay, you’re actually not going to one, like one day you might not be able to keep showing up unless you keep getting better.
You have to continuously improve yourself so you can then improve your team. And so if they don’t get value from this and it’s not a relationship problem, not to be that guy, but you just might need to get better.
Russel Lolacher: I think that’s… anybody that feels uncomfortable by that conversation has some self awareness and situational awareness problems. Is that they need to understand that leadership is also a journey of also getting better. Especially considering most leadership, nobody’s getting any training. They have to assume it’s their fault and their problem to fix, or they’re not a leader. They’re just showing up to fulfill a calendar requirement. Yeah, that breaks my heart.
Matt Verlaque: You got to lead yourself first. And that comes from, from everything from, can I wake up when I say I want to wake up? Can I work out when I say I want to work out? Can I whatever the thing is for you, it doesn’t matter the example can you fulfill your commitments that you make to yourself?
That’s the first box to check before you earn the right to lead somebody else. You have to be able to lead yourself. that’s lost on people sometimes.
Russel Lolacher: Well, it’s so funny. You keep hearing a lot. And again, you go down the TikTok, Instagram thing of you have to love yourself before you can love others. I’m like leadership’s exactly the same!
Matt Verlaque: Yeah,
Russel Lolacher: You mentioned this a few times, just sort of sprinkled in around a vision and mission and how do you connect it within a state interview because, Oh, we sure put it on a billboard and onboarding, but how do you operationalize it when it comes to those one on ones?
Matt Verlaque: Yeah. Great question. We, man, we talk about it in everything that we do. So there are other rhythms that are critical to connecting our mission and our vision, not just the stay interviews. And so if I answered that question directly, it would sound like I don’t connect it a whole lot. Cause there’s a lot of implicit connection.
So instead I’ll, I’ll answer it this way. One of the biggest, ways that we connect is with our monthly all hands. We do a monthly all team meeting. And the first 15 minutes of this all hands is all focused on that, right? So we walk through team wins. We walk through customer wins. If any we coached B2B SaaS founders.
If any of them sell their companies, that’s like our North stars when they have their perfect exit is what we call it. So we have anyone who exits, we’ll feature them. Then we’ll book them on the podcast and do an exit interview and stuff. It’s super fun. And all of those things are tied back to our company values, right?
So like our, our first value is customer backwards. And we always start with featuring customer wins above all else. And then anytime we do a team member win, we tie it back to the value that they personified, when they did the thing that we’re recognizing them for us, like you can’t get through the first 10, 15 minutes of an all hands without seeing our values, it’s just not a thing.
So that’s part of it. And then the other thing that we do. is I mentioned this culture code. And so every month I run a culture workshop that is kind of like a deep dive on one of our core values and all new hires rotate through that in their first six months and then everyone else is opt in.
They can keep coming to it and I’ll share a really fun story about this. I was nervous because a meeting is a, a thing, right? It’s no one wants more meetings, and I was like, damn, am I, am I putting more stuff on everyone’s calendar? Is this going to be a waste of time? So not only do people get value from it, which is cool.
And they’re not perfect. I got room to improve them, but we’re getting there. It’s a new thing for us, but we had hired someone and they were maybe four weeks in, and they come to this culture workshop and they leave the culture workshop and they resign. And I’m like, either this was awesome or I just screwed up and I need to go figure out which one it is.
And it turns out we did the exit interview and he was just like, ‘look, I went to this and…’ it was already kind of like a question mark, is this guy going to work out, whatever. And he went to this thing and he was like, everyone’s just really fired up about SaaS Academy. And that’s just not me.
I’m just kind of want to come in and do some stuff and whatever. And I was like, you know what, dude? Awesome. Thank you for self selecting out. And I was just, it was a huge win because I think that if you drive your bus the right way, the right people are going to get on and the right people are going to get off. And I think that having someone self select out instead of having performance that didn’t meet our standard and us having to select him out on our own, and that would have taken another month or two and a whole bunch of headaches and conversations, like so much easier, just had to unapologetically be who you are as a company.
And if that doesn’t jive, celebrate the people who were self awareness enough or self aware enough to leave like it was it was awesome.
Russel Lolacher: Fair. And I mean, those one on one interviews will really help to your point, the no surprises piece, because even if that employee had stuck around and been a rockstar, when it comes to productivity, they still might not be a culture fit. I don’t think people…
Matt Verlaque: Yeah
Russel Lolacher: Understand that there is just cause you’re really good at your job, you may not be moving the culture forward or investing in the culture, because again, you’re just there to do a job. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but at the same time, culture fit, we can’t just be a lip service thing about it.
Matt Verlaque: No, I agree. And I think it’s actually the worst possible scenario when someone is great on production and not bought into the culture. Not because that, not because you’d necessarily fire them unless they’re like being toxic to the culture, which is a different thing. They’re going to be super valuable and you’re going to depend on them because their production and throughput is so good.
And then they’re going to leave because they don’t like the environment that they’re in, and then you’re left holding the bag and you’re like, damn, how did I lose this A player. Somebody who’s not a culture fit and not a great performer. Okay. Should be a relatively easy discussion. Someone who’s both?
Of course, that’s what we’re shooting for. But when you have one or the other, they’re both tricky. If they’re a great culture fit, but they’re not good. Those are the hardest conversations to have because you might love the person and also they might not be a fit for the business. But the other way is the biggest business risk where they’re really good producer, and they’re not a good culture fit because either they’re hurting the culture or they’re just under the radar with not helping it or hurting it. But then they’re going to leave when potentially when you need them.
Russel Lolacher: Fair, great point. So why don’t more organizations do this, Matt? Like, I said off the top, we all seem to be about onboarding. We may be half ass the exit thing, but stay interviews. I can’t tell you the last couple of years, especially since the pandemic, they’re like, yeah, we should really do these stay slash thrive slash interviews.
I’m like, great. Where have you been? But there’s a lot of organizations still trying to navigate this and find value. Why don’t they do it?
Matt Verlaque: Because you can’t measure it. Because it doesn’t show up on the PnL. It’s not revenue generating, right? It’s a gosh, it’s a big ask. If you’re going to take an account executive where every minute of their time, that’s not spent closing a deal, cost the company money and do one of these with them.
An hour of production lost every other week, two hours a month times your entire sales team, just as one example, like that is a, it costs you money to do these in the short term. It builds you a much more durable team of people in your business, which for SaaS and services like people are the business in a lot of ways, right?
So it’s a long term investment with very few short term signs that it’s actually working out. And so it’s really easy to deprioritize it, especially if you’re behind on targets, you’re behind on production and you’ve got a big deadline how could this be more important than so on and so forth? And look like, I’m not saying you should ignore a hot prospect to go do a stay interview. Like you can truncate it, you can move it. Like I’m not overly pedantic about this stuff, but it’s just don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and be like, these whole things are a waste of time because I had this deal this one day last Thursday that I had to go close.
It’s just, it’s, you got to play the long game. You have to have discipline to play the long game.
Russel Lolacher: To just boil it down. You have to be a leader. And that’s the thing is leaders work. Leader is time. Just because you’re delivering a thing. Doesn’t make you a leader. It makes you transactional. It makes you a cog in a wheel. It doesn’t necessarily make you a leader in the health of your organization.
So I always find it funny when it’s I’m too busy. I’ve got these other priorities. I’m like, so you’re not a leader then I guess. Okay. And that’s fine. That’s what, but stop calling yourself that if you’re not willing to invest in the things that actually make you that good leader.
Matt Verlaque: Yeah, I think the way that I connect it is people management only becomes important when the size of your goals exceeds what you can do by yourself. So like if, if I could go close enough deals to hit my numbers without having a really high performing sales team around me, then it’s probably less important.
Not, not on a philosophical level, but on a nuts and bolts. How do I manage my PnL level? My time would be better spent at closing deals. You want to solve that problem, go double your quota. And all of a sudden you’ve really got to have people who were bought in because you need seven people to go do a whole bunch of extra stuff in order for you to have a snowball’s chance in hell at getting your deals done.
Like at that point it’s physically impossible for you to hit your goals with effort. And then you need to switch from effort to leverage. And that is when this stuff becomes unignorable.
Russel Lolacher: So how do organizations that are dipping their toe into this, do you feel, are getting it wrong? We’ve talked about focusing too much on productivity. We focus too much on like just not being a leader and not being too busy. But I know organizations that are trying, but it’s not getting any traction. What are they missing?
Matt Verlaque: Oh man, simple, ask the team members. Ask the recipients of this thing. If they’re, if they’re concerned it’s not giving value to the team, ask the team what they need to make it valuable. The answers exist for anyone listening to this. There is no panacea of like managerial lore that you can go like climb a mountain and find this leather bound book at the top.
Ask the people what they need. It’s going to be different for every team. It depends on the kind of people you hire, their seniority, their personalities, the culture you’ve built, who you are as a leader, like what business you’re in. It’s, it’s very, personal, right? I think business to business. Now it doesn’t mean that the principles change.
You should be investing in your team and coaching them and give them what they need and so on and so forth. But like the specifics of like, how do they get it wrong? Nobody knows how it’s wrong better than the team members who are being asked to come participate in it. So just ask them what needs to be true for this hour of time that we spend together every two weeks to be a 10 out of 10 value for you.
Like what would you need to get from it? And then listen. And write it down and try to go do some of it and you’ll probably have a better time. So I don’t know, it’s just, it’s the team version of talk to your customers.
Russel Lolacher: So what does an organization need to do foundationally? Before they could really be effective at stay. Like I see them getting it wrong and well explained, but then what’s the pre work? What strategically does an organization need to have in place so that when they layer on onboarding, stay interviews, thrive interviews, exit interviews, that they will be more effective?
Matt Verlaque: I, I don’t think there’s a lot if I’m being perfectly honest with you. I think that for me, this is actually the first tool that I reach for when I have a team. If I were starting and maybe the right way to answer this question is if I were starting from scratch and hiring the first couple of people, so let’s say it’s a blank slate and I have nothing, I would do a couple of things.
I would figure out. What the mission of the company is should be relatively table stakes. I’d figure out a couple of core values that I really, really care about. Core values are a reflection of the founder of the founding team. And again, you’re not getting married to him. You can change them if you need to change them, but have some type of North starter point too.
So here’s what we’re doing. Here are the things that are important, I would get those things jotted down in a freaking Google doc. You don’t need any fancy stuff. Just write it down on a piece of paper. From there, I would have my team, I would do these interviews, the exact format that I articulated earlier that I got from Matt Mishari, like just run that model, then modify. Run it out of the box that way, do it for a few months, then tweak what needs to be tweaked.
So I would start with that, and literally that’s it. So I don’t, I don’t really believe there’s a lot of pre work. I think this is the pre work in a lot of ways, because these conversations are what’s going to drive everything else that you need to lead this person to success in their role.
Russel Lolacher: But what if a leader doesn’t know if they have psychological safety with their team? I mean, this could be an, and again, we, we come back to the relationships, hence the name of the podcast… is the importance of those relationships. So as a first time leader, or as a leader, that’s been around for a while, but may not know what their connection is.
That means they got some work to do. But wouldn’t you say psychological safety is foundational or is it a chicken and egg thing? Is it sort of do the stay interviews to…
Matt Verlaque: It’s just freaking annoying to me.
Russel Lolacher: learn if you have psychological safety. You don’t absolutely need it first.
Matt Verlaque: Yeah, that’s my viewpoint on it is the is the latter what you just said, because I don’t think that there is, if you locked us in a room and it was like, build psychological safety, you have five days, right? I don’t really know how to do that. I think that it’s one of these things that comes over time from having real conversations.
But I think if I were to say, like, how should you approach these conversations to build psychological safety? The biggest point of advice I would give a leader is that you have to be vulnerable in your conversations. Every time you mess something up, tell your team about it. People are like, what are you talking about? Don’t I need to be this infallible leader? No, that is the opposite of what you should be. Like, if you think for a minute that you’re going to convince your team that you’re this oracle who’s got all the answers you just think they’re dumb. They’re not dumb. They’re smart enough to see that that’s not true.
So just be vulnerable, right? Talk about what scares you. Talk about the things that are challenging you in the business. Talk about where you dropped the ball and what you learned from it and how you’re going to level up your game so it doesn’t happen again. I talk about the good stuff too. I don’t want to terrify people, right?
But you’ve got to be a vulnerable, real human being and then you’ll be able to see are they going to show up that way in return and when that happens You then have created enough psychological safety where these calls will get more meaningful over time but like you can’t expect someone to lead with vulnerability when you’re also their boss and you have not given any vulnerability of your own first like that’s, that’s bonkers. So I think you’ve got to be twice as vulnerable.
Russel Lolacher: It’s amazing how many leaders don’t get that vulnerability piece. I remember seeing an executive do a presentation. Now this executive was probably pretty introverted. Very, but that came off as inaccessible. That came off as not relatable. And yet then I saw that same executive do a presentation where she talked about all the jobs she didn’t get.
She talked about her imposter syndrome. Up until that date, most executives would just go, Oh, you want to hear about my career? Here’s all the successes I had. Here’s all the jobs I always got whenever I applied. Meanwhile, she’s flipping the script a bit on that. I hate that term, but here I am using it where she flipped it over and said, no, no, no, I’ve actually failed. And it sent me in other directions. The amount of connection, the amount of people that went up and wanted to talk to her because, oh, she’s like me, even though she’s, she’s attained this. That’s a path I want to follow, or I’ve been through those experiences as well. I just find it so jarring when leaders think they need to put up walls or not be human beings.
Basically is what they’re, they’re demonstrating by not telling those stories and not sharing that information.
Matt Verlaque: Yeah, 100%. I spend a lot of time talking about my mistakes. It’s funny when after we sold our first company, my co founder and I, we sat down and actually reviewed all of our mistakes and classified them into buckets of five figure mistakes, six figure mistakes, seven figure mistakes, just so we had and the new kind of like how many were in each bucket.
And it’s just, it’s a really good thing because like you can, you have some examples that you’ve thought through and kind of codified as part of your professional story of man, here, here’s the time like I fumbled really, really badly and it cost me a million bucks. And like you can bring that story to a conversation about someone who’s beaten themselves up cause they just wasted 10 grand on a project that didn’t pan out. And it’s it’s really helpful. And it’s funny because it’s counterintuitive, right? I think a lot of leaders, especially leaders who don’t work in companies or haven’t created companies that have strong cultures and A players, they think that when someone screws up, you got to come down on them.
Now, if you have a high performing team member and they screw up there, there’s nothing you can say that’s going to be harder than the internal monologue going on inside their head. That doesn’t mean you ignore the problem. You set the standard, you reset the standard. Here’s what I expect going forward. Are we on the same page? This can’t happen again. I’ll have that conversation easily, but it’s not Oh, I can’t believe you freaking did this. Like they’re already saying that to themselves. So what I find is you have to actually do the inverse of that, where you have to talk them off the ledge, so to speak, where they’re like freaking out over this thing that they did because it didn’t meet their own standards and be like, ‘Look, yeah, this was bad. But you’re not bad. This was bad. Here’s how it needs to look. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page from a professional standpoint and from a personal standpoint, I’m still excited to go work with you next week. So can we get over this and just do better next time?’ And usually it works.
Russel Lolacher: So you’re a Chief Operating Officer, Matt, who’s doing your one on one stay interviews?
Matt Verlaque: Oh, my my CEO, Johnny Page. My business partner, CEO is Dan Martell. At first, when Johnny was the Chief Revenue Officer and then he took over the CEO role a couple of months back. So yeah, now he and I get to riff every week. We do it every week, which is fun.
Russel Lolacher: Who does his?
Matt Verlaque: Dan.
Russel Lolacher: Yeah. I just want to hammer home this is for everybody. This is, once you get to an executive level, it’s not Oh, that’s another person’s responsibility. I mean, I just, I always get weirded out when we don’t understand that leaders need leaders. Leaders need support.
Leaders need to be… am I still aligned with the culture? At any level.
Matt Verlaque: And honestly, like leaders also need executive coaches. Like most, unless it’s a very like incipient stage company, most of the time, if you’re in the C suite, you’re making enough money where you should take some of that money and hire a coach because there’s also a lot of value in having someone who is an objective, like outside the building doesn’t have any money tied to your company’s performance. Doesn’t care whether you stay or go right. There’s no ulterior motive other than your fulfillment. And so I’ve got a coach for everything, man. Like I don’t. I don’t pretend to have any of the answers. I just, I try to find someone who’s done the thing I want to do and steal as much of their knowledge as I can.
And so I think as an exec, it’s really important to have an external coach that you can lean on to answer some of those really hard questions about, am I still aligned? Do it, does it still give me fulfillment? Do I still want to be doing this in a year or two? Like a lot of the time you can’t say that to the people inside the building.
So you got to have someone outside the building where you can let this out or it’s just going to crush you psychologically.
Russel Lolacher: I hear that, but I also think that there is a lot of value in that open transparency because a lot of people will be risk averse going, I can’t say that the organization I’m like, Oh no, you should be. And maybe think of people that are, I don’t want to use the word hierarchy, but lower on the hierarchy to have those one on ones with because skip interviews are useful.
If, as an executive, why are you not talking to people that are on the front line in that, are we aligned in that sort of thing? I just, I love the idea of the manager/managee, that relationship, but I think we miss the obvious benefits of executive and frontline staff having more of that close relationship where these one on ones could actually be of benefit.
Again, skip reviews or that one where you skip levels. I have those conversations, but I, yeah, I feel like those might not happen enough because we’re like, Oh, if we’re going to do one on ones, let’s just do manager and employee. We don’t think bigger picture.
Matt Verlaque: Yeah, they don’t happen that often and they’re really, really valuable. You know what, one of our core principles and this was instilled in both of us, by Dan early, early on is inspect what you expect, which is different than micromanaging. I want to, I want to delineate between the two, but the principle of inspecting what you expect is getting into the details and getting into the dirt from a, like an, auditing and fact finding standpoint, not from a, I’m going to go crack open HubSpot and start talking to your customers standpoint.
But dude, I look at HubSpot and I randomly look at emails that are going out from our team to our customers every single week I’ll grab three or four emails. And just look and most of the time life is good and every now and then I might just shoot it over to one of our managers and be like, hey, dude check this out.
And I’d be like, heard and, and it does two things. It keeps me in the loop on how things are going. And most importantly, in that example, what our customers are saying back to us. I’m data driven enough to know that it’s not statistically significant. And there’s a good chance I may find an outlier, but that’s fine.
It’s still a data point. But I don’t resolve it myself. I will just resurface it to the person who actually owns the outcome and have them resolve it. But it also lets them know that Verlaque is plugged in, right? Like he sees what’s going on. He’s down in the dirt. Like he’s looking at the customer conversations.
He’s looking at the, the sales notes. He’s looking at the books and the financial reports and whatever. Like you have to get into the details. You can’t abdicate that. I firmly, firmly believe that there’s, there’s no business big enough where you shouldn’t go all the way to whatever the atomic unit of the work being done in every department that you’re accountable for.
And just take a peek around. I blocked two hours a week in my calendar for departmental audits. And I just go cruise around and see what’s up. And some people might be like, damn, that sounds like a huge pain in the ass. You know what? Sometimes it probably is. But I, I think it helps a lot more than it hurts because if you have a problem, it’s gonna show up.
The, just the only question is how fast can you figure it out and can you do it before it shows up in an unignorable way that damages the company.
Russel Lolacher: Well, it just loops back to your original statement about one on ones, which is no surprises, right? It’s the importance of those relationships. So you don’t, those audits could be non existent because you’re getting all the information and the heads up you’re needing already through those one on one interviews. Thanks for this, Matt.
Matt Verlaque: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: I really appreciate your time.
Matt Verlaque: Yeah. Thank you.
Russel Lolacher: Stay interviews. Slash one on one as you call them. Thrive as I call them. I’m going to wrap it up with the last question…
Matt Verlaque: Now this is a lot of fun.
Russel Lolacher: We ask, which is Matt, what is one simple action right now you believe people can do to improve their relationships at work?
Matt Verlaque: One thing that you can do to improve every relationship you have at work is get to know the people on your team outside the scope of the work that they’re doing. You hire the whole person. You don’t just hire the work version and I’m not saying we don’t have boundaries and you can’t log off of Slack and go play with your kids.
I’m not saying that. I do a lot of stuff that’s not work, right? But I get to know the whole person. I want to know what their goals are. I want to know who wants to go move to Spain and how they would get their work done. I want to know who’s excited about starting a family or who’s getting ready to propose to their partner or whatever.
Like I just want to know so we can have a real relationship. And so I think that is the one thing that you can do. I’m not saying treat it like a friendship, but don’t treat it like a transaction. Just get to know the person. And if you can’t answer those questions about Hey, where does this, where does this person want their life to look like in a couple of years? Not just what rank do they want in your company? But like their life. If you can’t answer that question, you have work to do and all of the relationship building you need to do in your company to lead properly will be built on the foundation of actually getting to know someone.
Russel Lolacher: And don’t punch yourself in the face. That is Matt Verlaque. He’s the Chief Operating Officer for the SaaS Academy, which helps businesses build a scalable SaaS business. Thanks so much for being here, Matt.
Matt Verlaque: Thanks, Russel. I appreciate you, man. Talk soon.
