In this episode of the OKRs Q&A Podcast, Tim Meinhardt interviews Mike Byrd, the Vice President of US Public Sector Channel Sales for Red Hat. You are going to want a cup of coffee and some free time to listen to this whole episode! Mike goes into a variety of topics and provides enormous insight into not only his teams, but his personal journey in adopting and buying into the OKR Methodology.
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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. I’m so excited for today’s program, as we get a chance to spend some time with Mike Byrd.
Mike has an MBA from Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, but his true loyalty lies with his Baylor Bears. Currently, he’s Red Hat’s vice president for the US public sector on channel sales. Over the last 18 months, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Mike and his extraordinary team as they embarked on the OKR journey. Trust me, you will thoroughly enjoy our discussion. Everyone, please welcome Mike Byrd. Mike, welcome to the program, appreciate it. Good morning.
Mike Byrd:
Good morning. Thanks for having me.
Tim Meinhardt:
How are we doing? You feeling good? I know we were just chatting about vacation. Always nice to be on vacation, especially when-
Mike Byrd:
Yeah, and nice to hop on a podcast to talk about my familiarity and comfort with OKR, right after vacation.
Tim Meinhardt:
Terrific.
Mike Byrd:
It’s OKRs that help me go on vacation and not be so sweaty and nervous when I come back.
Tim Meinhardt:
I love it. I love it. Mike, tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
Mike Byrd:
Well, I’ve been at Red Hat now a little over 15 years, about nine and a half years at Sun Microsystems before that. I’ve been in the public sector IT space most of my career, even though a lot of my time at Sun I was selling both commercially and in the public sector space. Always sales, the back two thirds of my career in the channel.
Born and raised in Texas, moved to Virginia and DC a long time ago, so I’ve kind of become a Virginia/DC guy. Hard to imagine that. I’ve got my family here in northern Virginia, and we’re having a great time. The kids are getting old enough to become independent little people and start doing their own things. They’re still in elementary school, but that’s a big, fun part of my life.
Tim Meinhardt:
Terrific. I see the Baylor University shirt on today, too.
Mike Byrd:
Well, yeah, I’m a Baylor guy, so I am from Texas. I tell you what, I may have lost a lot of my Baylor roots being in this area for over 20 years now, but I have not lost any of my Baylor fanaticism. It’s just as strong as it ever was. Maybe even stronger than it was.
Tim Meinhardt:
I love it, that’s fantastic. Mike, tell us a little bit about your initial impressions with objectives and key results.
Mike Byrd:
Oh, yeah. Goodness, that’s funny. We, as a team, Paul’s leadership team … Paul’s my boss. I don’t know how much context I have for the audience listening, if it’s a Red Hat audience or if it’s broader than that, but Paul Smith, my boss, he talked about OKRs. He asked his leadership team, he’d ask us to read a book Measure What Matters. Author’s name escapes me, but I know he was one of the leaders of the investment group that helped create Google into the monster that it is today.
I read that book and I have to say, the first third of the book was exhilarating. Like, “Oh, cool stuff.” The final two-thirds got a little dry and boring. Lots of stories of individual use cases of OKRs. It sounded hard. It sounded like extra work from what I was already doing, and I have say, I was a little negative on it. I thought, “Sheesh, it’s just yet another new corporate initiative for me to do, and I’m not really keen on that.”
But then we had a group session where we all got together. We brought on a facilitator from one of our business units within the company. She had been experienced in working within OKRs for several years, kind of became a leader within the business unit. She guided us through it, and I began to warm a little to it because I thought, “Well gosh, maybe some of the things that I’m doing that are not good enough as a manager,” most days I’m a manager, I just draw distinctions between manager and leader. I thought, maybe some of the things I was deficient in as a manager, maybe these OKRs could help me out. It kind of piqued my interest at that point. That began my personal internal embrace of OKRs.
Hopefully that answers your questions a little bit as to my earlier exposure, but I have to say I was not a fan initially, but over time it won me over, and now as I was still learning, but much more experienced manager than I was initially, I have found OKRs have made me a colossally better manager. It’s been a really great tool to just make me look better, and to make our team work better.
Tim Meinhardt:
That’s terrific. What aspects, Mike, do you think are there that you would say, “Hey, I’ve become a better manager because of this”?
Mike Byrd:
One of the things I think I can do for my team, especially … It’s a fairly large team, we were over a hundred people in that organization. Things can get complicated. Red Hat, we’re not a one product company anymore. We got a lot of different products. We compete in a lot of different markets, and it can be a challenge to know what is the most important thing to do for my day because in my organization, every one of my team could easily become just completely reactive and chase action items that others put on them. That would just create a mess. We’d have no strategic vision.
In fact, I felt that way sometimes, excuse me. But OKRs really, they stem from our strategic vision, and we are able to set for every member of the team, just a few things. If you know these three things, if you do these two or three things today, you will have been successful by the end of the day. We of course do those out by quarter now, and then we extend them out annually if we’re doing a good job of them. We’re still getting better. I think we’ve got a long ways to go to be masters.
To me, the number one value prop is it sets a clear list of priorities that I know, if I’ve got to chase a lot of different things, and I’ve got to be responsive, or if I’m going to be proactive, what do I need to do to answer these few simple questions that my management team is asking of me? In the Red Hat way, OKRs are also a bottoms up as well as a top down conversation.
Tim Meinhardt:
Absolutely, Mike. Your organization has been terrific with these. Walk us through a little bit about what you think your biggest challenge was when you actually got started with the OKR program.
Mike Byrd:
The biggest challenge for me, I would say, was first off the personal adoption of these. I touched on that a little bit already, because I viewed it as additional work. But in truth, I think the metamorphosis that I went through of viewing OKRs not as additional work, additional labor that I had to go through, but I made it my work.
Tim Meinhardt:
You did?
Mike Byrd:
I had some existing processes. I integrated the OKR process into my existing management structure that I created. Slight alterization and customization, hopefully, and some people are purists and they don’t like it when you do that. At least for my purposes, that integration which I believe I did adopt mostly OKR, but I still had some of my own personal structure that I’d created. That was probably the biggest change initially, me going through that personal metamorphosis as well as all of my managers, getting them to go through that metamorphosis.
I had a couple that were onboard the moment I mentioned that I had several, as you know, that were totally opposed, that dug their heels in and said, “We’re not doing this,” because I think they probably viewed it a little bit the same way I did. “This is just yet another bureaucratic thing for me to do. I don’t need that. I just want to get the job done.” Because sometimes, and this is a real challenge, especially for us at Red Hat, in the public sector leadership.
We are a longterm leadership team. We’ve been around for a long time here. Most of us 10 plus years, and some of us have been around since we were a startup. When you’re a startup, OKRs are probably really critically important, but also we didn’t use them initially. We used our gut instincts to drive a lot of decision making, which our guts were generally right. But eventually, you can’t trust your gut and we need to make data-driven decisions. This is what enables us to make those data-driven decisions. This is, I think, difficult for some people to go through that movement from that startup mode to maybe a more data-driven, operational model, even though OKRs were really created with the startup in mind. Hopefully that answers your question.
Tim Meinhardt:
Absolutely, Mike. In fact, having worked with your group now for gosh, a year and a half if not longer, your team especially, from where we started, which we did have naysayers and folks that were not into it, to have everybody turn around and embrace this has been truly unique, and it happened relatively quickly. All right, so move into the segue to the next question here. Biggest success story with OKRs, Mike.
Mike Byrd:
It’s funny. Right off hand, I can think of a program that we’ve launched to drive lead generation and pipeline within our mid-market SLED territories. It’s still a work in progress, so I can’t jump onto it, but that particular program is driven by really creating three fundamental goals and objectives for the organization that we really follow through rigidly.
I don’t know if I had done a good enough job moving from manager to leader here. I don’t know if I’ve done a good enough job as the leader, emphasizing how important my entire organization’s role was and the creation of pipeline was. This was a really high level concept here for us, but when we really began to use OKRs at its best, I think it helped me communicate that importance all the way down to every individual contributor in the organization. Now, I would bet … I really would be very confident that you would go … If I’ve got a hundred plus people on my team, roughly a hundred, which is the number, you could probably get 98 of them to tell you without question, “Our number one priority is creation of pipeline. We have other objectives that we’re facing, but pipeline is number one.”
I think that it’s really great when you can get everyone in an organization to understand what those top things are. I bet they could probably name all three, but just to have them know that about pipeline. Then that’s kind of the high level thing. The next level thing there is that we have now created, because we’ve been asking this question of each other constantly through the OKR process, we have now really refined our pipeline creation process. We’ve asked so many questions and answered so many questions that we have really brought this thing into kind of a science force.
We know what levers we can pull, what dials we can turn in order to generate more pipeline. We know what’s going to create less quality pipeline. What’s going to create higher quality pipeline. We’re tracking new questions. This is one of those, keep an eye on type concepts within OKRs that have become really important. We now know, “Oh wow, what’s our conversion rate? What’s our conversion rate within a certain time period?” It allows us to ask even more questions.
The good news/bad news here is you never really know an answer. You know a lot more questions. It’s allowed us to, instead of staying at a very high level of, “Oh gosh, our new pipeline. That’s a pretty general topic.”
Tim Meinhardt:
Right. Duh.
Mike Byrd:
We didn’t understand the uniqueness of the shape of our pipeline. I’m getting into concepts and terms that the listener here may not really be all that comfortable with, but we really analyze our pipeline, and the funnel, and its shape, and how mature it is. When it gets out of shape a little bit, we look four quarters out. We look one quarter in, or we look for all different timeframes, and product cycles, and customer cycles. It opens up a whole new arena of questions that would never have come up to us if we had continued on the path we were on before.
Tim Meinhardt:
You know, Mike, being in a lot of those meetings with your team, the focus that you mentioned before, the absolute focus and alignment of your entire team, I just find it exhilarating, to be honest with you. What advice would you give any organization that is considering, or possibly looking at objectives and key results?
Mike Byrd:
Gosh, there’s probably two things that jump out right away. Number one is to have facilitation, a third party to help you through the process. That could be someone like you, and you’ve been great for us. It could be an internal champion like we initially had. I wish I could remember her name. She was great. She was from [inaudible 00:13:37].
Tim Meinhardt:
Jen. Jen Krieger. It was Jen Krieger.
Mike Byrd:
Yeah, that’s right. But to have an external person to help you through the process, that is helpful, because I will say initially some of my stumbling blocks were that I was really comfortable with my language of work in my world, but I was really uncomfortable with OKRs. I think that it requires fluency in both languages, so to speak, in order to really adopt it well. At the outset, I’m not going to be fluent in that language, and I will make a lot of mistakes and I will speak the language improperly. I won’t use the right grammar, so to speak. Having that, someone to look over your shoulder and then over time I feel like I get comfortable and then I’m okay. That is one of the biggest things, having the third party person to look over your shoulder, that’s probably the recommendation number one.
Recommendation number two is to be willing to step out of your job, go outside. I’m speaking metaphorically here, go outside of your job and then walk back into your job with a fresh perspective and a willingness to embrace OKRs, because if there’s not a willingness to embrace it, it won’t work at all and it will be negative. It will be counterproductive in my opinion. I think that actually everyone in the organization has to go through that kind of process too. They have to step out of their job, walk back in with a fresh perspective, also have that fundamental OKR understanding as they walk into that fresh perspective. Those were probably the two biggest things for me, because cynicism can creep into an organization really easily when you bring in change like this, and you want to avoid that as much as possible, because it can really kill it. I think that we dealt with that a little bit initially, and then we were able to get through it.
Tim Meinhardt:
We did. I give a little Paul some credit too. You all do the big get togethers, and I had a chance to meet people socially, and begin to evangelize a little bit about OKRs. I think putting it in play and everyone just kind of going with it, everyone slowly but surely not only adopted it, but uses it as a valuable tool [crosstalk 00:16:03].
Mike Byrd:
Yeah. I’ll say Red Hat is an interesting place. Our culture is really unique, I think, in that we have a lot of bottom-up. We have just as much bottom-up as we have top-down, maybe even more bottom-up. But it takes some top-down to make this thing work, too. For us, at least, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t just say, “Hey, let’s do this,” and everybody was [crosstalk 00:16:26]-
Tim Meinhardt:
Everybody was, “Sure, yeah.”
Mike Byrd:
… “That’s great. I’m all in.” It took a little bit like, “Well, we’re going to do this.”
Tim Meinhardt:
Right, “We’re going to do this.”
Mike Byrd:
“So you’re either get on the bus, or you’re going to get run over the bus.” We had to do a little bit of that, but you can’t get away with that and win if a few people feel like they’re getting run over. It’s [inaudible 00:16:44].
Tim Meinhardt:
Absolutely. All right, last question. What was the one burning question that you had about objectives and key results, OKR? What was the answer that you found?
Mike Byrd:
One burning question. For me, I would say the number one thing was, “Is this going to work for me?”, initially. You have to ask me that question at various stages to the adoption for here, really. The first thing was, “Is this going to even work?” Because I’ll be really frank here and tell you that we had taken on a few things in the past, in our organization that we thought, “Okay, this is going to make us better.” And they failed. After a year or so of working on them, we just literally kicked them to the curb. We said, “Forget it. It’s not working. We’re going to move on to something else.”
So I was initially thinking, “We might have to kick this thing to the curb. I don’t know if this is going to work.” Really drawing back to my time in the Sun Microsystems, I remember doing a similar exercise there. I was an emerging leader in my time at the end there, so I was getting a little exposure to that. I saw it, and it was clearly not going to work when I was there. I knew that it was going to be something they were going to kick to the curb. Initially, I was a little frightened by that. That was my initial burning question.
I guess the second burning question I had was, again, assuming this is for an internal … This would be an internal Red Hat audience answer but, “Will the rest of the company embrace it?” I do now believe, as a card-carrying OKR fan, I believe at its best, the entire organization, top to bottom, left to right, the entire box of the organization has to embrace these to get the best out of it. One of my key results right now for my team that I’m measuring is to maintain talent at a certain attrition level, and develop talent to suit the skill levels. That’s really an HR people and brand function.
People and brand is our team name for that, for traditional HR. It’s important to me, and I need to implement the tools that they create to help get that job done. But if our HR organization is following an OKR process, and they’ve got their key results that they’re chasing and I can cascade them horizontally into my organization and then all the way down through, it can be really, really successful. Our business leads, which are indeed using these, so we see successes clearly with them. I do know our HR organization is using them.
I think that we still have some area where we can improve both on the BDU and HR side. Our marketing organization is beginning to look at them. I tell you, I think you’ve seen specifically on our team as we work on pipeline, when you ask those questions that I was talking about earlier, the questions really quickly get you into marketing. Pipeline and marketing lead gen. We quickly got into those sorts of questions, and it really forced our marketing organization and my organization, channel and inside sales organizations, to really get together and start peeling back the onion and asking different questions, and that has been outstanding.
I think that, I’m now telling you a really good thing, but to me it creates opportunities for disparate, previously siloed organizations to work together, because as soon as you ask a question, the answer immediately is going to involve someone else, probably not in your org. Because we did a nice job of having just a few key results in each of these siloed organizations, we found where marketing and inside sales quickly are connected. We weren’t necessarily looking at those connections before, so that really … I went on a tangent there to answer your question, but-
Tim Meinhardt:
No, Mike, that’s fine. In fact, those things, conversations change. Within all through your leadership team, and all the way out through your organization. All right, before we leave just any other final thoughts about objectives and key results, Mike? Anything else you’d like to leave the audience with?
Mike Byrd:
Final thoughts for me are, it’s certainly made me a better manager. I think that I had some basic capabilities that were going all right, but it certainly took me to another level. It doesn’t matter where I sit on the spectrum of manager. I looked at some of my peers, especially who use OKR process and Allison Mason, she’s our marketing leader. She and I had been working together. I watched her, and I watched her respond to this OKR model that we were implementing, and I saw it improve her as a manager. My other peers, my manager peers on the sales side. I saw them get better as managers, even though I felt like some of us were better than others. Nathan Jones, our federal leader, I think he’s just a great, great, great manager. It still made him even better than he was before. You can be a great manager, you can be an okay manager, a lousy manager. It’s still going to help level you a little bit if you buy in.
That was a nice eye-opener for me, because the opportunity for us all to improve is always there. You’re never really good enough, at least in my mind. Maybe that’s me being paranoid. I saw it make everybody just a little bit better. Listen, in our words said there was no inherently competent OKR type of person. We didn’t have anybody like that. The room for improvement continues to grow for all of us. That’s kind of one thought for me.
Another thing I’ll tell you is, it’s not as hard as it seems. I feel like some of these folks that are evangelizing OKR through the books, the Measure What Matters book, it was a great book and I don’t want to criticize the guy who wrote it whose name escapes me-
Tim Meinhardt:
John Doerr.
Mike Byrd:
But it was a long book and it really … It was like, “Oh my gosh, give me the essay version.” I would pay twice as much for an essay on this, as opposed to read the whole book. When you hear the book, it’s all these certain things. It sounds like it’s this really complicated process to get it exactly right, and to be perfect at it. But in truth, there’s some very basic concepts that you need to follow. Internalize them, make them your own, and just wash, rinse and repeat. You will gradually over time adopt these into your everyday management style. I just found that it made me a better communicator of things as well. Anyways, those are some of my rambling thoughts there.
Tim Meinhardt:
No, that’s good, Mike. Thank you. Boy, this was a terrific interview. I’ve certainly enjoyed working, not only with you, but the entire Red Hat team. More importantly, your group, which is a very disparate, a lot of different sales motions, a lot of different moving pieces, we all get together every week and, and we talk through what’s going on. I think it’s very invigorating, and I think it’s really, truly helping your organization, as you all continue to grow and scale.
Mike Byrd:
Your comment there reminds me of one other thing that I will leave folks. It’s more free advice from a junior capable person. I don’t [crosstalk 00:24:29] myself as a senior level here. I’m working on it. This is where I’m going to give great credit. Again, I keep forgetting the name of the guy that wrote the book, Measure What Matters, but he has this-
Tim Meinhardt:
John Doerr. John Doerr.
Mike Byrd:
John Doerr, that’s right, because he actually narrates the book. I listened to the audio version of it [crosstalk 00:24:44].
Tim Meinhardt:
Oh yeah. Sure, yeah.
Mike Byrd:
But he narrates the book. I can remember he said, there’s a line in there where he talks about communication to his organization, and that he believes, and he found evidence to suggest that no one in your organization really gets how important the topic is until they are sick and tired of you repeating how important it is.
I’ll tell you, that line really did stick with me. As you know, because you’ve been in my meetings, you’ve been with me through a lot of this, I do that now. I absolutely drill these concepts home, especially our … There are, I guess, four objectives in my organization right now that we’re working towards, or four key results with [inaudible 00:25:33] keys underneath them, but just four things that we’re asking our organization.
I go through these sessions with my leaders every week, no fail. Sometimes it gets to be a little bit drudgery. We do these meetings, we squeeze them into at one hour. One hour a week is all.
Tim Meinhardt:
It’s compressed, yeah.
Mike Byrd:
I don’t know how many managers I have on the team. Probably about eight or nine or so.
Tim Meinhardt:
16, yeah? No, more than that.
Mike Byrd:
Then if I get the second level managers, yeah, then we’re probably at 15, 16 people there, right.
Tim Meinhardt:
15, 16, right.
Mike Byrd:
We squeeze everybody into that hour. We do it every week, and because we do it every week, everyone understands how critically important it is. My message, my leadership message makes me a better leader as opposed to just the management concept. But this pushes my leadership concepts and what’s important to us as an organization, up and down the organization. We constantly get buy-in.
If I just sneak into one of my second level managers’ meetings, and sit in on the team meeting, I hear the same concepts that I want to make sure they’re talking about. I don’t have to say anything. Up and down, they’re talking about the same important things that I talk about in my leadership meetings. Of course, I take my OKRs, I get my ideas from above me. I push them up, and I pull them down, so we’re really cascading up and down the organization. Of course, that’s where the buy-in comes in.
Anyway, I wanted to add that thing in because it’s that constant drive. You can’t take a vacation from OKRs. You can’t say, Yeah, we’re going to do OKRs this week, and then we’re going to take three weeks off, and the week after that, we’re going to jump in,” because it has to be an everyday thing.
Tim Meinhardt:
It does, it does. Gosh, Mike, this was fantastic. I truly appreciate you taking the time this morning to speak with me. Have a great week, and I’ll speak to you later this week.
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