OKRs Q&A Podcast Ep. 67: A CEO’s Viewpoint On Implementing OKRs With Atruity | Patrick McAdams, CEO and Co-Founder of Andiamo
In this exciting episode, Tim Meinhardt interviews Patrick McAdams, CEO & Co-Founder of Andiamo, a data-driven information technology consulting and recruiting firm headquartered in New York. Tim and Patrick discuss why Patrick chose to use OKRs and what drove the decision to choose Atruity to help Andiamo implement OKRs. They also discuss Andiamo’s biggest challenges, what it was like getting OKRs launched with the help of Atruity, and how the organization is adapting to the new methodology. This is a wonderful podcast for leaders that are looking to hear directly from a CEO. Patrick and Tim discuss what the beginning of an OKR journey is really like and what to expect as you roll out OKRs to your executive leadership team. Andiamo is currently in their first quarter of an OKR implementation and exciting changes are happening already.
To learn more about Andiamo, check out https://www.andiamogo.com
To download a free copy of Atruity’s free e-book The Seven C’s To OKR Success – click on this link: https://atruity1.com/seven-cs-to-okr-success-e-book/
If you are interested in working with the Atruity team or have a question you would like addressed on the show, please email contact@atruity1.com or visit our website at www.atruity1.com
Tim Meinhardt:
Welcome everyone to another exciting episode of the OKRs Q&A Podcast, also known as the OKR Corral, where OKR insight is the king. I’m your host, Tim Meinhardt, President and CEO of Atruity, an OKR consultancy headquartered in our nation’s capital.
Before we begin, if you’re an OKR fan and enjoy our podcast, please subscribe, leave a review, and explore our website at www.atruity1.com. And finally, should you have a burning question you’d like addressed in future episodes, please drop us a note at contact@atruity1.com.
In this exciting episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Patrick McAdams, CEO and Co-Founder of Andiamo, a data driven information technology consulting and recruiting firm headquartered in New York. Patrick is a true leader, and in the short time that I’ve spent with him, I can really tell why his folks truly enjoy working with him. Patrick and I talk about how he decided to make the leap into OKRs and what drove their decision to choose Atruity to help them implement OKRs. We also discuss Andiamo’s biggest challenges and what they found as a result of using us and getting launched with the help of an expert, and finally, how the organization is adapting to this new methodology.
This is a wonderful podcast for leaders that are looking to hear directly from a CEO. We discuss what the beginning of an OKR journey is really like, and what to expect as you roll out OKRs to your executive leadership team. Andiamo is currently in their first quarter of an OKR implementation, and exciting changes are already happening. So, everyone grab that cup of coffee, put in those earbuds, and enjoy my wonderful discussion with Patrick McAdams.
So, Patrick, welcome to the program. Tell our audience a little bit about yourself and of course, Andiamo.
Patrick McAdams:
Yeah, so about myself. I am a father of four, married and live in northern New Jersey. My kids are a bit older, so there are two—one is out of the house, one’s leaving the house. And I’m the founder and CEO of Andiamo and have been for the last 18 years. Andiamo is a about 150 employee company today, about 50 million in revenue for 2022. We specialize in technology staffing so we’re a technology staffing company. Started, headquartered in New York. Used to be intensely focused on New York market and have since grown outside of that but stayed within tech. And we primarily work with large global technology-driven companies, helping them build their technology teams. A couple of other major areas of focus that we have is that we spend a lot of time and attention and have a division that’s focused on helping companies create more diverse technical teams and then also have a vision called Women Impact Tech dedicated to gender equity in tech. Oh, and I founded the company 18 years ago with my identical twin brother and best friend, Daniel.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right? Yeah, I had to ask you that, Patrick.
Patrick McAdams:
Yeah, you know as well.
Tim Meinhardt:
When you said what you said, I said it certainly looked like that.
Patrick McAdams:
Yeah, it’s always a highlight that I forget because it’s been so normal for me, the fact that we’ve worked together for so many years.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right. It’s just a wonderful story. So, tell our audience a little bit about how did you really learn about the OKR methodology?
Patrick McAdams:
Well, I’d seen OKRs, I’ll say, like on resumes from time to time, right? So, I knew the acronym. I knew what it stood for, generally. It was actually when we were hiring a new senior leader in the company, Paula Ratliff, who’s the president of the Women Impact Tech Division. And she hadn’t worked with OKRs in the past, but she’d worked with a colleague previously who’d had a lot of success scaling her business using OKRs. And that was, you know, I had a conversation with her about the challenges that every company faces and that we were facing in scaling, growth, and wanting a methodology around that would help us scale. And she’d mentioned it to me, and she mentioned and introduced me to you and really just thought that the concept and the methodology would work well for us given her experience with colleagues.
Tim Meinhardt:
So, Patrick, thanks for mentioning that. I do know that. And obviously I wanted my audience to know that, that you were a referral through an organization that had adopted OKRs earlier. And the woman that Paula was referring to is Amy LaScola. She’s actually on one of our podcast episodes—six, and Amy is a huge advocate of the OKR program.
Patrick McAdams:
Yeah. So, it was brand new to me, by the way. I like the concept, and the idea was something I’d never, prior to that, every even heard of, but it was the right time and the right thing for us.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, I know. It’s been the right time. I mean, your organization put it right here at the end of the year, moving into to 2022. So why did you decide to use OKRs within your organization, and what were those motivating factors, Patrick?
Patrick McAdams:
Well, so I spent a lot of time researching it, reading about it, you know, from our work together so far that I kind of pride myself on being a student, and I really love organizational psychology and, you know, business development methodologies and so forth. So, I did spend a lot of time looking into it. We’d experienced pretty tremendous growth over the last five years, about 50% growth each year and 100% growth in 2022. And so we were at a point, especially among the senior leaders in the company, where we knew that in order to continue to scale at the rate that we have, and we expect to, we were expected to grow 100% this year, that we knew we needed a system for setting objectives, communicating our strategy, our objectives and key results, across the organization and beyond just senior leadership, which is what we’ve historically done because as we grew, you know, the percentage of the company that went beyond senior leadership got larger and larger, and the importance of us communicating became more and more important.
In addition to that, though, I mean, we knew that if we were going to grow, like I mentioned earlier, about 150 employees today, we expect to grow to about 500 in the next four to five years. We knew that we needed to create a system, or we needed to embrace a system, whatever system that was, that will allow us to have different divisions, setting goals, and those divisions being business units that that often have different objectives, different goals that need to tie in together to what our collective organizational goals are. And oftentimes different divisions have different customers, different leaders. And so, we needed a system across 500 employees that could scale with us, but also create an infrastructure for how we communicate and how we set goals. So doing the research on it, reading the books, did that throughout our conversations and decided it was right for us, and I’m glad we did.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, no, you all have embraced it wonderfully, and it’s a great compliment to not only you and Daniel, but to the entire organization as a whole. And we’ve worked with many organizations, but I just love the way that your organization has bought in and is beginning to adopt this as a way of managing people and you know, you mentioned a very interesting concept here that that we see from time to time where organizations need to tie together, you know, different types of goals but all come together cohesively to really form that team of teams approach to be able to then lift that organization up to the next level, and I think your organization is doing a wonderful job with that. You know, before we began implementing OKRs, tell us a little bit about what were some of the biggest challenges that you and your organization were facing and why were these challenges important for you and your organization to fix?
Patrick McAdams:
So, there’s a couple of challenges that that we faced that I think are inherent with any organization that’s growing. And, you know, they go beyond the typical challenges that exist in any marketplace, certainly exist within volatility that sometimes happens within staffing and beyond, like finance, and sales and delivery. And those challenges are—at least they were for us—were things are like hiring, training, and retaining a growing workforce and then having that happen across different divisions simultaneously and trying to create a structure where we could do that as we scaled and as we grew. I think one of the biggest challenges that we really began to identify towards the tail end of 2021, because we grew 100% in 2021, was old communication systems and processes that worked at one point for us, right? They served us well at 20 employees. They were stretched at 50, you know, and we had to adjust and tweak and change them so that we could continue to operate and function. But we knew that going forward some of those old systems, communication, or systems of bringing goals together just wouldn’t work anymore. So, and then, you know, to throw on top of all that, all the challenges that exist within business already.
One thing that was particularly appealing to us about OKRs, and I think it aligns to one of our challenges, is that it functions well at any company size and that it particularly functions well when a company size is changing and particularly for us through growth. So that was a challenge that we continue to face, and then like I mentioned earlier, you know, there’s when you have different business units with different leaders, different services, different customers, you want to be able to recognize how objectives can align laterally across the organization. We didn’t have a system for that prior, and that was a big challenge.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right. You know, we speak of alignment all the time. It’s one thing to have vertical alignment in organization. And Patrick as you’ve seen the other thing is to have that horizontal alignment, which I think is really sometimes the secret gem to when they speak of having your organization aligned. Everybody just normally, the first thing to think of is well I’m aligned to the person above, but really sometimes that alignment is also, you know, horizontally among various business units and sometimes whether its operations, could be legal, it can be finance as well, so that everybody begins to work together and support each other. And having that social contract where everyone can see what everybody’s doing, I think it’s very powerful because, number one, you’re showing everybody what I’m doing. But at the same time, they’re getting to learn about what’s important to you and how you then can better work together with that particular person that may not be, quote unquote, vertically aligned to you, and I’ve seen that right now with your group.
Patrick McAdams:
Yeah. And we’re starting to see already some of the benefits of how this system works with that kind of alignment across an organization. I think I mentioned to you, even when we’re meeting last week or maybe the week before that we were able to share across the entire organization. We have meetings every quarter. Well first we have our divisional meetings and then we have our quarterly meeting across the entire organization where we share. You know, we’ve been doing this forever. 40 quarterly meetings in a row. I think we’ve been doing this for the last ten years. And this time around, we were able to articulate our mission and the reasons behind the process by which we created that mission statement, our long-term objectives, our annual objectives as a company, and then break those down on a divisional level for us or business units. And then people were able to see how they were tied into that transparency and that kind of inherent agreement about how we’re going to work together naturally comes out of it. And then we’ve seen that already.
Another quick example, Tim, about how that worked and why for us early on, was that we had a new employee start with the company, and we had a group of about ten start even this last week. I was able to start off with them from here’s where we want to be in five years. Here’s some of our objectives in the next quarter about how to get there. Here’s how that’s going to translate next year. Here’s our mission. And then go into here’s a history of our company and the trajectory we’re on and tie that all together for them. And there was a different energy in that meeting with those people and the same thing happened a couple weeks back and be able to fine tune that kind of buy in share, you know, to demonstrate to people we’re transparent about what we’re trying to do was powerful.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right. Well, you know, Patrick, and you and I even touched on this was, you know, that’s the kind of thing people coming into a new organization. Gosh, what better way to be able to explain what your organization is all about? Because they begin to better understand at some level, “Gosh, this is how I’m fitting in.” You know, “This is how I feel empowered, and this is what I can add to the organization” where, you know, organizations that aren’t like that, they lose that perspective—that’s where good employees stay. That is about what you said about that hiring and retaining those good people is giving them that broader understanding of where we’re going as an organization. And here it is written down, and here it is that we’re presented, and we’re evangelizing this, and we’re living this, okay? So, we’re not just checking the box and moving on, but we’re living this. And when it comes from you—first off, it’s got to be very prideful. I will tell you, that it has to be prideful to be able to share that with people confidently, to know that and to know that this has been collaboratively agreed upon with your entire leadership team, which, you know, we sometimes forget that OKRs were about…when you all did this collaboratively with your team, I thought it was a wonderful exercise. And, you know, and they will then all, they themselves have bought in. And if that employee might happen to ask another senior leader, it’s going to get the same consistent message. And I think that’s a huge advantage to an organization.
Patrick McAdams:
Definitely. And there’s two things there, Tim, that I have seen throughout my experience as a leader that are really important, that are addressed, I think in the OKR system really, really well. And one of them is around vertical alignment that you mentioned. So, you’re not creating silos in an organization, so you don’t have kind of communication or responsibility silos or people who don’t see how what they do in their division effects other divisions and how there should be a symbiotic relationship between those divisions and where the whole company is going. And then you’ve stressed the second, which is you have an individual employee who wants to feel, really needs to feel like they’re connected to the mission of the organization more than just being told it, and understanding it, but knowing what they’re doing in the next two weeks, in the next quarter, in the next year, and then hopefully as they grow in their career and how that aligns with what the company’s trying to do. And that’s a powerful thing. That’s an empowering thing for an employee. And it’s hard to be able to do that without an intentional structure where you’re continuously communicating that, and where they actually feel like they’re part of it.
Tim Meinhardt:
Before we continue with the interview. We’d like to tell you a little bit about Atruity.
Stephanie Meinhardt:
At Atruity we understand the challenge of implementing a successful OKR program. While the methodology may be straightforward and easy to understand, the implementation and execution of the program can seem daunting. Your team is concerned because you’re unsure how to properly implement or manage your OKR program. You are not alone. This is where Atruity comes in. We know how to implement an OKR program and are experts in OKR implementation and management. By using our proven methods and implementation structure, we can help you to successfully implement OKRs within your organization in as little as 30 days. If your organization is considering implementing OKRs or struggling with the management of the program, do not hesitate to reach out to us at contact@atruity1.com. Remember, no plan succeeds on its own—execution is everything.
Tim Meinhardt:
It’s a very prideful thing, as an owner of an organization, as the CEO, to be able to say this, knowing that everyone knows this, we’re just introducing you to where we stand as an organization. It’s a very powerful thing. Patrick, let me shift something here briefly. So why did you choose…why did you choose us to help your organization implement OKRs?
Patrick McAdams:
So, as you know, we met many, many times. Some of the great things that you suggested to me early on was reading and really investigating. So, I spent a lot of time, I read Measure What Matters, I read Radical Focus, I read articles online. And so that was really like should we be using OKRs and really bought into the concept. They’re seeing companies that have grown and knowing that it works at Google size organizations or when Google was very early on. And so, knowing that it can work in organizations that move quickly, that was powerful to me. There was a point early on, and this is maybe when we’d spoken maybe a time or two when I thought to myself, “You know, isn’t this supposed to be a simple system? And can I just do it on my own?” You know, that was the thought I had.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah.
Patrick McAdams:
And my first—there’s kind of a couple of responses I had to that, and this is through conversations with you and building trust with you as the right facilitator for this program, which I realized then and has been proven to be very, very true, is critically important. One is that if a system like this has value in your business, there’s huge value getting it right and even if you have great leadership and good intentions, it’s very, very easy to get it wrong even if you’ve read all the books. And so actually I’ll share with you, there was an example early on, you mentioned earlier that we implemented this in late 2021 and we were able to see a little bit. So, I’d read Measure What Matters and read Radical Focus. I read some stuff online and put together a structure and we had a meeting that we have every year with senior leadership in the company that was prior to this starting, and it was just prior to us engaging with you formally. And I get to see how, how hard it is, like how genuinely difficult it is even when you have a structure to go through a system of asking the right questions. So, you’re listening to the right responses, you’re thinking about things. We actually ended up going way too granular and we did it kind of as a test in a small area and still realized how hard it was, so that was kind of the third thing. And then also just knowing in things that I researched and looked at, that knowing that how often they fail and knowing how important it was [unintelligible] that it was successful, knowing that—and I can’t remember the statistics and what I read or how often they failed but didn’t want that to happen.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right? No, and they do. They do, unfortunately, more of them fail than do succeed. And I think the other comment I think somebody made from your organization was, “Oh, he’s not going to get all this done within a given timeframe.”
Patrick McAdams:
Well, that’s the only thing.
Tim Meinhardt:
And we did.
Patrick McAdams:
There were many, many meetings—this is early on. So, like this is when we’re creating the mission statement, the long-term objectives, this is when we were doing the annual, I mean, I said it out loud a couple of times and many team members did. We’d be in a two-hour meeting where we’d have a ton of stuff on the whiteboard. A lot of people sharing really openly, transparently, what their thoughts were around what how we could articulate our mission. And we’d have maybe 45 minutes left to go. There’s no way we’re going to be able to get this. And then the funny thing is, all of a sudden, it’s like, boom, yes, okay, we agree on that. That is, everyone feels really good about this. Yes, we, wow, that really is it. And to be able to go through one, two, three, four, five long term objectives about where we want to be as an organization, as leaders, you know, five years out. We were able to do that, and it was meeting after meeting it was surprising until it wasn’t surprising anymore because that’s just how it works. So yeah, for sure.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right. You know, sometimes people—and you mentioned it—”oh, we’ve got 2 minutes left and we’ve come to a conclusion” and I just think that, you know, sometimes good facilitation allows that to take place because you want that brainstorming. You know, you want everybody coming out with their thoughts, put it on a table, and then begin to prioritize and then begin to gain consensus and then look and tweak those things so that when it’s over, Patrick, that was the beauty of your group, was that when it was over, everyone had contributed and everyone kind of gave that, “Aha, yeah, this is good. I really like what we’re doing,” and that’s a powerful message. And a powerful thing to accomplish with senior leadership.
Patrick McAdams:
Yeah. And as you know, there’s people on that, on that team. There’s a group of eight of us who initially met, which is large group to facilitate for sure when you’re working with leaders with different divisions and responsibilities. But we’ve worked together, many of us have worked together for more than a decade, and so there’s a lot of trust there and there’s a lot of historic strategy that we’ve built together. And to exit a meeting where you’re surprised and feel like a sense of wow and a bit of wonder about like, “Gosh, we really were excited about this after having worked together for ten years.” That was really cool. And even [unintelligible] who’ve been with us, maybe two, three or four years felt the same thing and were all aligned around that with the sense of like, you know, kind of you get some really exciting marching orders that everybody agrees. It’s very cool.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right, and they’ve chosen their own marching orders based upon that. And I think that is what’s really, you know, gives those senior leaders the freedom. You’ve hired great people. You work with them for a while, you trust them. So, building in that, that even when you put a new management system in, giving that area of trust where failure is not you know, it’s not something that’s a fire-able offense if you want to take a big shot at something. And, you know, we always talk about, you know, people uncomfortable a little bit taking shots and stretching things a little bit. And but yet you guys embraced it for the most part when we got started. And I think as we continue to move forward, people are going to take bigger and bigger shots. And one of them, we even had to adjust because they did so well, so fast, so early. They said, “Hey, we’re going to raise this key result,” which I love.
Patrick McAdams:
Yeah, there were two—it’s interesting, just our meetings, we’ve had three, we’ve gone through three, three meetings so far. We’ve really delved into measuring what matters: our performance. The interesting thing was the very first KR that we had kind of downgraded and said, “Gosh, I don’t know if we’re able to achieve this” this quarter is actually the first one that we have gone and turned back up the dial and said “No, this is a nine out of ten. We’re really doing great here.” And then the other one was one where probably one of the more critical ones to our first objective we hit out of the park early on, and next quarter there’s going to be a level of comfortability to saying, let’s really swing for the fences. I mean, there wasn’t any sandbagging going on, but there wasn’t as much of a level of confidence yet for this structure going to work if we’re not hit. So, yeah.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah. You know, Patrick gets uncomfortable at first, you know, that social contract, the putting it all out there, people like, “No, I don’t want, I don’t want to look, you know, I still want to look good.” But as we move forward, people will take bigger and bigger shots at this. And I think that’s the fun and the beauty of this that, you know, a good key result, as I’ve mentioned to you, should kind of frighten you a little bit, but excite you a lot—get you up in the morning and get your team going and get you to that really, really, you know, wonderful accomplishment over a given quarter.
Patrick McAdams:
I love that. Be a little bit scared and a lot excited. I love that. Yeah.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, yeah. And so how would you describe your experience in working with us and what your team has thought about the implementation process of objectives and key results?
Patrick McAdams:
It’s been…I’ll say the word surprising. And the reason I use the word surprising is because going into it, there are a couple of things that I had going into where I think this might be somewhat common in anybody who takes on any new initiative, that’s going to be a time consuming but valuable one, or I’ll say at the end of the day, truly wonderful. Really, really. But initially, the experience was “Oh this is going to be a lot of meetings,” that I remember, you know, I don’t know that I shared that with you, but going, “Okay, this is gonna be an investment,” right? Like that knowing that it was important, but having a hard time mentally initially dedicating the time of all the important leaders as well across the company to say, well, this is something that we’re, you know, we need buy in. And there was also the heaviness of the task. You know, for us being a business that’s been around for 18 years and particularly the last five, have grown at rate we are, there was the heaviness of the task is saying “We’re going to sit down and in a few hours over the course of a couple different meetings we’re going to define where we want to go in the next five years.” The heaviness dissipates very quickly because of the facilitation, because it’s a fun thing to undertake.
And so that was one of the maybe the first things that surprised me was that it was, it was a lot of fun and that when you have that lightness to how you approach it, you end up getting a lot better results from the people who are there sharing more authentically what their thoughts are, and where they wanted the business to go. The other experience was the surprise from, and I mentioned this earlier, having a whiteboard full of ideas in every corner of our organization that were all relevant and all coming from people who were sharing their either their experience, their opinions, and then very quickly being able to synthesize those is something that was meaningful for us. That was surprising because as many people know, in larger meetings with a lot of leaders from different divisions or backgrounds, that’s a challenging thing to achieve. So that was a surprise. It was delightful, though, because at the end of the day we were able to put them together that was powerful for us.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah. So, I’m going to leave with one last question here. Any last bit of unique insight or experience that you would like to talk to our audience about that you’ve learned since you’ve implemented objectives and key results?
Patrick McAdams:
Yeah, I would say one thing is, and I think we’ve been able to achieve this well so far, and that is the importance of buy in, particularly from the folks who were starting this in the beginning. It’s something that you shared with me and I knew was important, but seeing how it’s played out so far and as we go into the next stages of bringing this out across the organization, the insight that I would have is ensuring that you have that foundation of buy in from the very beginning, so that when you’re starting to stretch people, starting to communicate, starting to set these meetings, that you have people who are committed to going through the process and that’s a hard thing to do. And we actually had a number prior to working with Atruity and prior to OKRs. That was something that we didn’t even realize was holding us back a little bit. And it wasn’t necessarily people who didn’t agree, it’s just they didn’t maybe understand the entire reason behind it, the power of getting it right, if we were to get it right, in different initiatives we had in the company in the past. So really starting off on the right foot with buy in from everybody is critical and if we can achieve it perfectly, that you’re getting everybody to really go into it with an open mind, go into with the best intentions and then figuring out, “All right, is this going to work” and then it quickly shows that it does and it starts to prove itself out early on.
Tim Meinhardt:
Very fascinating. And Patrick, I want to thank you so much for doing this with us today.
Patrick McAdams:
You’re welcome.
Tim Meinhardt:
This is this has been a delightful discussion. And I’m going to have you back here again after we’ve got it rolling even and see more steam coming out of the engine and it really cranking along.
Patrick McAdams:
Let’s do it.
Tim Meinhardt:
But I felt that what you’ve accomplished, what your organization has accomplished, and how you’ve been able to do this so successfully, I wanted to be able to share with everyone. And I’m so glad that you took the time to share your thoughts as well.
Patrick McAdams:
I’m really happy to and really have enjoyed this conversation. And I would love to, you know, six months, a year to say, “all right, well, this is how far we’ve come.” Even listen back to this and go, “gosh, there was so much that this did for us that we weren’t even aware of earlier on in the process.” So, I’m sure that will happen. I’m feeling confident that will be the storyline at that point. So, I’m excited to hop on here with you again.
Tim Meinhardt:
Wonderful, Patrick, thanks so much and have a wonderful day.
Patrick McAdams:
You, too.
Tim Meinhardt:
Thanks so much for taking a few minutes to listen to our OKRs Q&A Podcast. You know, OKRs provide such an excellent, agile framework which is critical for today’s business needs. It’s such a pleasure to have such wonderful people share their stories and journeys with us. Please, should you ever need assistance with your OKR journey, do not hesitate to reach out to us and contact us at www.atruity1.com, and make sure if you have a minute, to rate our show. Have a great week. Stay healthy. And of course, stay happy. Thanks, everyone.