This week on the OKRs Q&A Podcast, Tim Meinhardt interviews Nancy Bohannan. Nancy elaborates on her favorite aspects of OKRs, how she connects her OKRs to numerous teams and how her team overcomes challenges to achieve their Objectives. Nancy is the Vice President of SLED for Red Hat. Her previous roles include Vice President of Cloud and Software at IBM and Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Microsoft. Nancy’s passion is making clients successful and helping her customers to meet their objectives!
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Tim Meinhardt:
Welcome 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 and President of Atruity and OKR Consultancy, headquartered in our nation’s capital. In today’s episode we are delighted to have a chance to speak with Nancy Bohannan. She is a Vice President with Red Hat, managing the national SLED organization. Having an accomplished career, not only with Microsoft and IBM, she has over 30 years of in depth IT management, technical, and sales experience. Nancy’s a proven winner and a difference maker, bringing her contagious enthusiasm to any organization and customer. She’s a true leader and an innovator. You’re going to truly enjoy our discussion. Please welcome Nancy Bohannan.
So Nancy, welcome to the program. And for our audience Nancy, tell everybody a little bit about yourself.
Nancy Bohannan:
Great, sure will Tim. So I’m Nancy Bohannan. I run SLED, that’s the State and Local Government and Education for Red Hat. I’ve been in the industry a long time, had tenure at Hughes Aircraft, and Microsoft, as well as IBM. So I joined Red Hat about five months ago.
Tim Meinhardt:
So tell our audience a little bit about Nancy your first impressions about objectives and key results.
Nancy Bohannan:
So I have an engineering background, so they resonated well with me. And I’m all about accountability and cross-team collaboration. And this was just a super black and white way to meet both goals. How do you communicate with others to let them know what you’re doing, as well as how do you hold yourself accountable and other teammates? The other thing that I thought was really important is that bottoms up, tops down combination of here’s what I think I should be doing, this is what I think we should be doing as a team, and us talking about those metrics, and discussing what those metrics were so we could be one team going after one goal.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right. In watching you do your meetings with your team, I think you’ve brought together a lot of disparate pieces within the organization to really begin to formulate a total SLED package. Maybe you want to touch a little bit on that. And you walked in, and what’s everybody doing? What’s everybody’s sales motions? What are they all doing? And you had a chance to see some of the OKRs, but I really like what you’ve done in pulling everybody together. And maybe you could touch for a minute on how that all came together and your thoughts on that?
Nancy Bohannan:
Sure. Well first of all, I walked into an awesome team. Half of life is about timing, and I feel like I walked in at the right time. And there was good collaboration, but just we could take it to the next step up. And so I think I’ve worked really hard making sure… Of course on my org chart I’ve got my four sales leaders, but I also have my functional leaders who don’t hard line into me, but they’re dotted lined. But they’re dedicated to SLED. And so I treat them as a hard line, and make sure that what the OKRs, or what the four sales managers want. So if the channels thinks they’re delivering X to the sales managers, we’ve got to have the sales manager pick up X and run with it in their territory or the channel person will never be successful. They can do a whole bunch of channel programs, but if the field doesn’t care about those channel programs, you can’t be successful.
So, it’s a lot about making sure our functional leaders who are superstars, and I can go use names. I won’t. But I could use names: our solution specialist leader, our solution architect leaders, our marketing folks. But in the end, when you have four sales leaders, and east, west, the S30 states, and mid market. If they’re not collaborating and leveraging the programs your functional leaders put together, you won’t be successful. So good old matrix organizations, which I’m a firm believer in, like to lay in a matrix organization, you all have common goals and key objectives to make it all work. So the structure you’ve put in place Tim is fantastic because it really allows us to make sure that cross collaboration is happening. And it’s black and white. You can sell, did you do six virtual EBCs?
Tim Meinhardt:
Yes we did.
Nancy Bohannan:
Now, did we hit… Yeah, yes or no? So did we hit that number? And do we have all of our employees trained on this BCA? So it’s really black and white. And if one of those is yellow, as a team we can discuss what are we going to do differently? So the sales person could say, “I think I’m doing everything I can do as sales leader.” And, “Functional leader, I need you to do more of this to get this to green.” And it’s one team working toward common goals. So that’s why I like them so much.
Tim Meinhardt:
Terrific. What would you tell our audience that the biggest challenge that you had in getting started with objectives and key results?
Nancy Bohannan:
Well, the objectives made so much sense because one’s about the numbers, one’s about your people, and one’s about your customer. So first of all, I’m glad I walked into that kind of structure, and it wasn’t just trying to figure out what my objectives should be. So I walked into some pretty good structure.
The key results I think [inaudible 00:06:11] the key results. And in those three categories we worked on key results. I’ve got to make sure if I as the SLED leader are putting key results is to do six virtual EBCs, that somebody in the field has got two, somebody else has got two, and somebody else has got two, or I’m not going to be successful. So I think one of the challenges as the overall leader is making sure what you’re doing is filtering down, or what your folks on the West may have a little different results what you want them to have, because maybe not everything goes up to your level, because the maturity of that org may need something special. So it’s allowing people to have the freedom to have their own, but having a holistic approach that matches out.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, terrific. All right, so reverse that. What do you think has been maybe the biggest success story, or the thing that you’ve found to be most enjoyable with the OKRs today? And I’d like to tell the audience you’ve only been doing this now. This is like you’re rolling into your second quarter. So when I said, “Things are fresh on your mind,” we’re just really getting started. And we’re getting better. It seems that not only every quarter, but we get better every meeting with things.
Nancy Bohannan:
Yeah. And I think that our biggest success is the recognition that we need to do these together and really agree upon them. We can’t have orphans out there, meaning that I’m saying it’s real important for us to have executive sponsorship in our top 10 accounts, but my sales leaders don’t have that. And so I think having no orphans has been one of our successes, that I think there’s traceability. And I’ve had to change some of mine. I’ve had to change some of mine because the team didn’t buy into them. Like, “Hey I don’t think we should do that.” Or, “Nancy, you’ve got eight key results. It’s too much. We need to prioritize.” So the key success is those conversations. The fact that we have those conversations, get aligned, I compromise, they compromise, and that we’re creating a SLED leadership team that we’re better together.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, fantastic. How about advice? So some organization might want to consider OKRs, or are looking into it. Any advice that you might give them as they begin to consider this or get started in the program?
Nancy Bohannan:
Well I think advice is the top leadership has to believe in them. They really do. So as you know my boss Paul Smith believes in them, and he asked us. I think if we’re missing on something we can track it and say, “Do we need to create an OKR on that?” So I think if you use it as your North Star, and adopt the system and believe in it, and keep yourself accountable, I think it really, really helps meeting goals, and having cross collaboration, and having everybody on the same page. In the IT world you got tons of smart people, and you got to let them go do their smart things, which we all want, but we all want to be on the same page. And that really pulls it together. But having a leader that believes in them, holds us accountable has been very helpful.
Tim Meinhardt:
Fantastic. So was there a burning question that you had about OKRs when you first heard about it? And if so, what was the answer that you found?
Nancy Bohannan:
I guess the burning question is, is this just an exercise we do for the fun of it? Is this something that is really going to be… Is it mandated and we just do it as an exercise, or is this something that really helps us enable the business? And I definitely think here at Red Hat we’re using OKRs to enable the business. And I think it’s a great structure and great process.
Tim Meinhardt:
Fantastic. So I always leave with one other question. And the last question is, so if there was anything else that you wanted to tell our audience about OKRs, any insight, any guidance, is there anything else that you might want to mention?
Nancy Bohannan:
Yeah, I think doing them together and getting buy in. I know I went off and created mine and handed them down the first couple of times. And we all had said it’s time to do OKRs. And my group had already been doing that. I was a new person, and I just started looking what is an OKR, and trying to figure it out, versus bringing my core leadership together and saying, “What do we think is important to hit these objectives?” So I really do believe doing that cross collaboration at the beginning, and deciding for us the objectives are the same. That’s great, but the key results, et cetera, I think is really, really important to do them together the first time around, no doubt about it.
Tim Meinhardt:
Fantastic. Well Nancy, I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be on the OKR Q&A Podcast. So thanks again. And I look forward to talking with you tomorrow. And I hope you have a lovely day. Thanks.
Nancy Bohannan:
Great. Thanks Tim. I really appreciate it. Have a good day.
Tim Meinhardt:
You too. Bye bye now.
Nancy Bohannan:
Bye.
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