In this episode of the OKRs Q&A Podcast, Tim Meinhardt interviews Paul Smith about his experience implementing OKRs within his organization. Paul Smith is the Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Public Sector at Red Hat – the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions. Paul leads a team of over 600 employees and is one of the most influential technology leaders today. He has been the face of Red Hat in the Public Sector for over a decade and a half and has won numerous awards and accolades as a technology leader in his industry.
Tim Meinhardt:
Welcome everyone to another exciting episode of the OKR Q&A podcast, also known as the OKR Corral where OKR Insight is the king. I’m your host, Tim Meinhardt, CEO of Atruity, an OKR consultancy headquartered in our nation’s capital. In this special episode, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down and talk with Paul Smith. Paul is the senior vice president and general manager for the public sector at Red Hat. Paul is one of today’s most influential technology leaders. Paul has been the face of Red Hat in the public sector for over a decade and a half. Having won numerous awards and accolades as a technology leader, Paul’s vision and innovative approach to leadership has proven itself time and time again. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Paul and his team over the last 18 months, and I’ve experienced firsthand, Paul’s leadership style and his team’s devotion to their mission. Everyone, please welcome Paul Smith. So Paul, welcome to the program and tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your background.
Paul Smith:
Well, hey Tim, and thanks for having me. I’m very glad to be here of course. Background, I’m the general manager for the public sector region of Red Hat, Red Hat Incorporated, the world’s leading open source software company. So very proud to be here. I’ve been here for 15 years and I’ve got a great group of folks that you know pretty well and just happy to be here.
Tim Meinhardt:
Fantastic. Fantastic. Paul, you were there literally from the start of Red Hat. I remember when you all got started with that.
Paul Smith:
Yeah, I think so. 15 and a half years certainly isn’t the very beginning, but I think it was really the beginning of us becoming an enterprise software company that actually had an open source development model. So certainly from very humble beginnings going back to when this division I was working in was less than five people and now, we’re well over 600. Yeah, I guess you could say I was here from the beginning.
Tim Meinhardt:
It’s been quite a journey. So how did you get started with OKR? What was the introduction like to you and how did you find it?
Paul Smith:
OKR’s objectives and key results have been around for a while. So it’s one of those things that was kind of sitting back there, not on the frontal lobe. It’s like, “Yeah, I’ve heard of that before. I really don’t understand what it is,” and then Dave Axe who’s one of the folks on my leadership team, he and I read a lot of books together. We have a little book club. We have a book club as an example with our entire group. It’s one of our cultural things we do, but he turned me onto this book by John Doerr called, “Measure What Matters.” So it’s like, “Okay. So we’ll read this,” because it’s just interesting to read new management books, right?
Paul Smith:
But he went down this whole concept of OKRs as a management tool for tracking success. Number one, where is it we want to go? That’s the objective. And then the key results are measurements for how do we know when we get there? Right? So we read that and it’s like, “Oh, okay. That was interesting. That was fun.” I had come to subsequently find out that our engineering team, at the time run by Paul Cormier, he used OKRs as part of their metric for measuring success.
Tim Meinhardt:
Sure.
Paul Smith:
So the next thing was, “Well, what does that mean for us? It was interesting book, but how does it get manifested in our group?” Lo and behold, we actually were working with you on other things and we say, “Hey, Tim. Read this book and see if it makes any sense.” Then from there, joined Epiphany’s and so we have to make this real. Then we went on that journey together. [crosstalk 00:04:04]
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah. It’s been a great journey with your organization. Talk a little bit about, maybe share with our audience about some of the challenges that you faced when you decided to walk down this objectives and key results journey.
Paul Smith:
So a lot of it is just buy in, right? It’s getting people to think strategically versus in quarter ticket tactics, which is really hard for salespeople because we’re pretty much measured on what we do quarterly and annually, so kind of get in that tunnel vision. But this was taking a step back and really taking a look at success factors and what that was going to look like. So actually getting the team to say, “Oh, this is something that could actually benefit me,” versus being another readout for Paul to check on key performance indicators. So that was probably one of the largest challenges front on; how do you differentiate from another kind of QBR type of motion versus something that could be a living document that we’re going to review, course correct and track and say, “Hey, this is kind of binary”?
Paul Smith:
“Zero or one?” Did we succeed or not? If we did, great. Then what’s the next step? If we didn’t, what do we need to change? So it really became something. We turned that challenge into an opportunity, which was, was this something that was going to mean something to be meaningful to the rank and file as a tool to track their success? And if it was, great. Then we’ve got everybody kind of bought in to what do we define success at a very high level? And then how does it relate down into my group and how do we measure that? So we’ve got that awareness, we’ve got that vision and we’ve got that joint shared goal, so to speak. Pretty cool stuff.
Tim Meinhardt:
Absolutely. You’ve done this at your sales kickoff meeting. You did it at Kingsmill and you shared your longterm objectives, the mission statement that we rewrote, particularly for your organization. The feedback that I got and that you got was terrific. People finally saw, “Hey, we can see this,” you know?
Paul Smith:
Yeah. We really just broke it down into three long term goals, which really are very high level objectives. One was focused around financial aspirations, and not in terms of like getting to some numbers, some Amazonian number, so to speak. Hey, wow. But really, it’s really about a mind share with customers and getting to that level where we’re actually relevant. So we have some objective. One was really around financial aspirations. What does success look like? What do we need to do in terms of market share or wallet share with customers to be a relevant part of their organization? The second one was really around the customer. So we have a objective set up around focusing on customer mission. Are we actually essential to their business or in my case, to their government agency mission?
Paul Smith:
The third one, it was really around our associates, our employees. How do we build an organization where we can retain people, help them feel successful, give them the career path and have all the things in place that actually give people a good work life balance? I’m feeling successful. I’ve got someplace to go. I’m contributing. My voice matters. So the really cool thing about that was it’s just three things. Everybody can relate to it. Everybody understands it. They know what it means at my level. They know what it means at their level. And it’s easily articulated. If you ask anybody in our group what success looks like, I would almost guarantee you they could talk to one of all or three of all those objectives at some level of relevance at what they’re doing at their agency or work they’re doing with their other customers.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, absolutely. To dovetail on that, I was going to ask you, Paul, what do you think has been your greatest success with OKRs?
Paul Smith:
Well, at a very high level, the challenge became the success. We’ve got the entire organization doing it. Three levels of management of some 56, almost 60 people are actually involved on a monthly basis and actually reading this out to their team. So that buy in is really there. That’s hugely successful because now, they’re part of the process. Especially in this time of COVID when we’re doing a lot of work from home, it actually is another instrument for us to actually maintain communication and make sure that we’re on track. There’s real excitement around it, which has fascinated me. It was actually a little bit of a surprise as to how much people were as or more excited than I was about using this tool.
Tim Meinhardt:
Well, it has been exciting. When the call comes out to somebody that, “Hey, we’re going to be added to the OKR list.” They were so excited, “I can’t wait to be a part of it. It’s fantastic.” The collaboration with everybody as they help develop each other’s objectives and key results for the quarter also led to that anticipation, that would they be next in line as we slowly move this throughout your organization? How about advice for a second, Paul? You and I have been doing this now for a year and a half or more, and yet there are folks out there that say, “Well, I don’t know. I got a lot of things on our plate.” What advice would you begin to walk them through or give them if an organization was considering something like objectives and key results?
Paul Smith:
Yeah. Well, we rely a lot on our culture here at Red Hat. Open source culture has a couple of tenants that really play well in this process, which is about collaboration, it’s about transparency, it’s about participant participation. So the advice I would get is when you have a book like John Doerr’s book, which is actually based on all the concepts that Andy Grove built at Intel decades ago, but when you have this book that everybody will read into and actually buy into, you have this shared language. So you have a shared communication tool. Then by virtue of creating these OKRs together, you’ve created a collaboration. You’ve created trans parents see in terms of how do we define success? How do we know when we’ve been successful? And you’ve actually contributed to this whole concept of meritocracy where folks actually know exactly what contributions they’re making to the greater good.
Paul Smith:
So the advice I give is read the book, number one. Create that kind of shared language, and then start in small groups and it will grow from there. It was kind of kind of grow in a natural type of way, and don’t be afraid of failure. Little failures will happen and they’re learning points for everyone. Catastrophic failure’s bad, but these little failures are actually points of learning. So just to just be tolerant of that. Be a little bit of patient with the process. It will take on a life of its own from the bottom up. Once folks, I believe, really feel like, “Well, this is really helping me organize in a way that I didn’t think of before.” So there’s a lot of concepts in this that have been out there for a long time. This is just kind of a neat package to organize it and to institutionalize a way to communicate.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah. Terrific. Okay. I’m going to hae two small last questions. First one, a burning question that you had about OKRs and what answer did you find?
Paul Smith:
Yeah. I talked to that a little bit, which was, will this add value to the lives of the people that are actually participating? So many times a week, we get involved in some systems, the very beginning days of CRMs, customer relationship management tools. If they’re not used to their full extent, sales people will say, “Well, this is just a forecasting tool for upper management.” OKRs, if not deployed correctly, it could look and feel like that. So when it becomes an instrument for the folks actually using it to really figure out where they want to go and how they’re going to get there, then it just kind of bubbles up. So the burning question was, “Will the folks in my charge…” I’m careful how I say that too, not that I’m in charge of, but that I give care and love and feeding to, “… will they actually find real value in this for themselves?” The answer was yes.
Tim Meinhardt:
All right. So I asked you, is there any last bit of insight that you’d like to be able to provide our audience with regards to objectives and key results?
Paul Smith:
After we first got into the book, “Measure What Matters,” I did a little bit more homework on the origins of this whole concept. It was really born out of Andy Grove and his engineering organization called Intel. He caught a fight that too in high output management, which was written a long time ago. But what really kind of worked for me was this is kind of a science. There’s an art of course, but this is kind of a science. These are proven types of ways that really make things simplified, so that it’s clearly understood up and down the organization as to what we want to do. By the fact that our engineering organization was using it to drive real complex product management issues in the industry and so forth and Andy Grove was using it and built a very successful and great culture type organization, I said, “Why wouldn’t I use this? Why wouldn’t I use this in a sales model as well and bring some science into the process, which people could understand and really appreciate?”
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah. That visibility aspect of it, Paul, where everybody can see what everybody’s doing-
Paul Smith:
Yeah.
Tim Meinhardt:
… conversation’s changed and we see that even at your upper level in your management team.
Paul Smith:
Right on. That transparency aspect is huge because there’s no hiding. People always want to know what we’re doing. Right? But more importantly, they want to know why because that’s what really feeds passion. It’s like, “Oh, I get this. I understand why this is important. And now, I understand how I can measure that.” The measurement is really back to the stuff… We also all have learned eons ago, around just building objectives that are SMART, S-M-A-R-T, SMART objectives. At the very end, they’ve got to be tangible. They got to be achievable. They’ve got to be measurable. They got to be time bound. Oh, time down. No, that’s a good one. I was like… Because you set it out there in the ether. It’s like, “Well, wait a minute. Is this something we would call a success after a month or after a quarter or after a year?” so all that stuff. \.
Tim Meinhardt:
Good. Well, Paul, first, I want to thank you again for joining us today. Our audience will have a lot to take away from this conversation. I wish you the best luck in Q3 in finishing up your first year, not only as in calendar year with Red Hat, but with the IBM team as well. So with that, I want to say thank you so much and have a wonderful day.
Paul Smith:
Thanks, Tim. But I got to tell you just as the back end of this, that we couldn’t do this by ourselves. The discipline and the excitement and the energy that Atruity brought to the process was a big part of the success. So this is something I could do on my own, but it’s much easier to do with a profit from another land because the conversations change a little bit when people feel like they have a trusted advisor with your company they can talk to, and kind of work things up and down the chain. So thank you for the partnership. [crosstalk 00:16:56]
Tim Meinhardt:
Oh, thank you. Yeah, that was wonderful. Well, listen, have a great week and we’ll speak soon.
Paul Smith:
Right on. Thank you.
Tim Meinhardt:
You got it. Bye now.
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