Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 363: Q & A with Gina Hortatsos

Summary

Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing on Sales Pipeline Radio.

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

If you’re not already subscribed to Sales Pipeline Radio or listening live Thursdays at 11:30 am PT on LinkedIn (also on demand) you can find the transcription and recording here on the blog every Monday morning.  The show is less than 30 minutes, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities.

This week’s show is entitled, “Building, Managing and Leading High-Performance Teams“ and my guest is Gina Hortatsos, Head of Marketing & Community at HackerOne.

Tune in to Learn About:

• • What not to do to make the best decisions for your team
  • How you can foster a culture of trust and authenticity in the workplace.
  • Ways to empower your team and support their growth
  • What you CAN do to transform your leadership approach

Listen Now | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript BELOW: 

Matt: Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. I’m your host, Matt Heinz. Very excited to have Gina with us today in the green room. Yes, there’s a green room. We were both actually physically in together before we did this several hundred miles apart. I was joking because today we’re going to talk about building, managing high performance teams.

And sometimes just to kind of freak people out, I’ll get on and say, okay, what we’re talking about today is zucchini. It’s that time of year when everybody’s out of ideas to do with the zucchini. And I brought up a new recipe we use and you brought up one of my favorites. So I think for those watching today, this is our cold open.

Before we get into real talk, let’s do real, real talk. Explain your Genius Zucchini idea here.

Gina: My Genius Zucchini is the simplest application of zucchini ever. And you actually grate it on the large holes of a box grater. And you saute it in a little bit of butter and olive oil.

You can leave the butter out if you’re vegan. Salt and pepper. And if you like a little parm at the end, just hit it with a little bit of parm and it is perfect. It’s like the perfect vegetable side. Everybody loves it. Great texture, great flavor.

Matt: It really is amazing. I would say that because it cooks down, like you start with a large amount of zucchini, you end up with a little bit.

Gina: Ya, those really big ones and you can get the farmer’s market for like 75 cents because they kind of lose their deliciousness when they’re too big, throw in the pot, grate it up. So good.

Matt: Or the ones in the plant that like the big leave is hiding it. And then you get out there like crap. It’s like this big zucchini.

So, treat it like you’re caramelizing onions.

So nutritious and dense. All right, Gina, welcome to Sales Pipeline Radio. I think you, you mentioned jokingly we could talk about zucchini all day. I think maybe we should make a CMO Coffee Talk where it’s swipe file Friday recipes.

That might actually be fun. But no, today we’re going to talk about high performance teams. So first of all, if you are joining us on Sales Pipeline Radio live today as part of your work day and your work week, thank you for taking time. I promise we’re going to make this more valuable than just amazing zucchini recipes.

And if you are watching or listening live, you can be part of the show. If you put a comment in on LinkedIn we’re going to see it here in our StreamYard platform. We can respond to it. We can put it up on screen. We can talk about it. So questions, answers, rebuttals, rants. It’s good. We welcome all of it.

If you are listening or watching on demand, thank you so much for downloading and subscribing every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. Past, present, future, always available at salespipelineradio.com. Today, super excited to have a Head of Marketing Community for HackerOne, Gina Hortatsos joining us. Gina we kind of did the cold open already but thank you for doing this.

Gina: Thanks for having me and thank you for pronouncing my last name the right way the first time.

Matt: I will say that it was was a little bit terrifying moment because I’ve known you for a long time and I’ve seen your last name a million times and I’ve only just called you Gina. So from this point forward, it’ll just be Gina.

There were so many different topics that we could cover as part of this. And the thing we both kind of caught down to was just teams. I’ve got a small consulting firm where the team is the product, like the team is critical, but it’s no less critical even if you’re selling a widget or a product or anything else. Start with, over your career, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned about some critical elements of building a high performance quality team?

Gina: Yeah. I’ve been leading teams for about a quarter of a century now. And even now I make mistakes all the time. So let’s just first say we’re all human. We’re doing the best we can. And If any good can come out of my mistakes, it’s providing them to this audience so that, perhaps you will avoid some of the mistakes that I’ve made in the past.

So framing it that way, I think the thing that keeps coming up that I still have to work on is never make important decisions about org structure, hiring, or shuffling work around teams if you’re in a state of fear, overwhelm, or exhaustion. Most of my worst mistakes that I’ve made when it comes to building leading high performing teams have been decisions I felt like I had to make under duress of some kind.

Most of the time they were wrong and caused a lot of pain and a lot of stress that would probably would have been unnecessary if I just had the managerial courage to admit that I was not in a headspace to be able to do these things. I’ve made some bad hiring mistakes because I was just desperate to get someone in the door and in seat because I needed a human to do stuff because I couldn’t take it anymore doing it all by myself.

So just as in every other situation in life, I was talking to a friend of mine that had to renovate an old house and she said, the worst decisions I made were the ones that I made toward the end when I was so worn down and it just appeals here. Huge lesson learned. Sometimes when the decision is in front of you and you feel like you have to make it and you’re just not in the right headspace, if you can possibly sleep on it, ask someone for help or otherwise get the support you need so you don’t have to either make the decision alone or don’t have to make it when you’re in that headspace.

I think that’s the number one piece of advice that I wish someone had told me. You know, oftentimes you have windows for hiring. You don’t want to lose the budget. Oftentimes there is some emergency thing that happens that shifts your market or your business and you’ve got to figure out how to get the work done.

Putting yourself in a calmer state and actually like trying to solve for the issue in front of you and the place that you need to be in your mind is the best thing.

I think another lesson that’s kind of related to that is the Importance of just being super honest and transparent.

And I know we all say that, right? But one of the things that I learned as an emerging leader many years ago is completely counter to what we tell people to do today, which is when I was in the leadership training courses and some of the companies I worked at, back then the very prescriptive advice we received was don’t show vulnerability, especially if you’re a woman. Don’t show weakness. Don’t show emotion. Do not ask people about their personal lives or if they’re okay. And under no circumstance, do you tell anyone, do you offer details about your personal life? If you’ve got to go to a kid’s doctor’s appointment, just don’t say anything.

That was actually how we were trained. And so one of the areas of development that I continue to work on is still unlearning that training and I have to say that with, with modern workplaces and the modern ethos around bringing your authentic self to work, it has been so freeing for someone who was, when my kids were little, I would have loved to be able to share a little bit about the stresses I was feeling and the pressure and the guilt and everything.

I couldn’t say anything back. And now just being able to work with team members and foster an environment where they can feel like if they got to go to a school play or if they have to take care of an aging parent, that they can either tell me or not tell me why. But having a high trust culture and allowing them to feel like that psychological safety of, I won’t be judged if I do say anything. And if I don’t, you know, this person trusts me to get my work done and I’m good.

That is worth its weight in gold. It’ll drive loyalty. It’ll drive a high trust culture that means that we we kind of tease out problems before they become huge issues. And it’s something that quite frankly, if I had that when I was in my younger years, more junior in my leadership career, I think I think I could have could have done a lot with that concept.

Matt: That’s such great advice. I really hope that people are listening and taking notes. And some of this is easier said than done, but when you’ve been through the ringer on these, you realize how important that is. And, you know, if you want to build a high performance team, you need to have a high trust team.

You need to have a team that trusts you as their manager and trust each other that you’ve got your backs that knowing that not every day is sunny. Not every day is perfect. That is hard to do a lot of what we’re doing. If you’re doing go to market, B2B marketing right, you’re embracing the suck sometimes of how complex it is. You have a team that trusts each other.

The trust is foundational and it leads to the performance that you’re looking for, not the other way around.

Gina: Exactly. I agree. I worked with a colleague a couple years ago who, I’m going to steal this phrase from him, and he said, “As leaders, our job Is to give people the chance to do the best work of their lives at the best place to do it.”

And so yes, of course, there are a lot of leadership implications, but also the workplace in which you choose to go work has to also foster that culture. We, as leaders, they don’t work for us. We work for them. Your success, their success.

Matt: Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Gina Hortatsos. Hey, I’ve said your name again, last name again.

She’s the Head of Marketing Community at HackerOne There’s a bunch of follow up questions I have, and you mentioned earlier, trying to create that calmer state and put yourself in a calmer state to make the right people decisions. And that’s not only when you hire someone, but also as you’re managing those people, you know, one on one performance reviews, professional development on an ongoing basis, like bringing your full self and not bringing the emotions that can cloud some of that.

It’s one thing for you and I to agree on this and for us to work hard to be good at that. How do you train and teach and empower your people to do that as well? Right? So it’s not just you hiring someone. You may have a direct report that is desperate to fill a seat and just needs that one body as well. And how do you help enable people to have that same mentality?

Gina: Yeah. I think there are two things that come to mind right away. One is the framework of jobs to be done. First of all, list out the stuff on a whiteboard, on a Miro board of the work that has to be done, and then find the categorization. If it’s a backfill, that’s one thing, but I actually use hiring opportunities as a way ofpotentially rethinking how we get work done.

By focusing on the jobs to be done, it allows you to stick a pin in the emotional people part of it so that you can have a very clear head on the attributes of the person you need to do that body of work before you then start slotting people in to that spot.

So using that jobs to be done framework and making sure that hiring manager has gone through that exercise. So they’re crystal, crystal clear, not only about the work to be done, but what the interlocks are and the critical dependencies of that body of work with other teams and other people.

The second thing I would say is utilize a goal setting methodology. At HackerOne, we use the OKR methodology. I know a lot of companies use V2MOM. There are other goal setting methodologies. I don’t have a lot of prescription on what that is. But whatever that goal setting methodology is, make sure you allow alignment across teams and up and down.

So we have corporate level objectives and key results, departmental level ones, and then we can use those to help individuals or individual teams set goals so that you can see clear alignment. Both up and down and across. So for focus, prioritization, performance management, I know technically in OKR land, you’re supposed to decouple OKRs from performance management, but it’s kind of hard to, because if you’re talking about work that has to be done and measuring the progress of that work having an OKR method, some kind of goal setting methodology is, again very effective in empowering managers to have those conversations with a clear head and also with compassion to listen to whatever might be happening on the other end.

Matt: Yeah. I love that. We use a methodology called EOS to run our business, has a similar, what they call rocks for the quarter. One of the things I love about it is it encourages individual accountability. So each rock, with each thing you’re gonna get done, there is one person that owns that.

So individual accountability, but collective problem solving. So if your rock is off track for the quarter, you will bring that to the group not so that they say, boy, you suck, but you bring it to say, I need help with this.

So other people in the room who don’t have accountability for that can provide ideas and guidance and help you brainstorm in a way that doesn’t make you feel bad. It doesn’t say like you don’t have your shit together, but it allows for the clear accountability. I own this, but I know that the team has my back if I need help.

Gina: Yes. And the nature of our work is such that no work stream can really be fully executed without some interlock with other teams.

One thing I talk to my leaders about a lot is solve for the problem, not the person. Because oftentimes if something gets escalated, it might be brought to you with the phrasing around, like, so and so said this in a meeting or so and so I have a critical dependency with such and such team and they haven’t delivered. By doing a little bit of five why root cause analysis, you don’t even have to ask the full five. Sometimes you can get it in two or three. You can actually tease out the root cause of the problem, which might have very little to do with a person’s individual performance, drive or ability.

Matt: Right, and it allows the team to coalesce a little bit, right?

A high trust team wants to succeed and wants their peers to succeed as well. And even if I don’t have expertise or accountability in something, because of that, I might have some right angle thinking or idea that could unlock helping with that and I think to create that culture… you used words vulnerability, empathy, grace, to have that team sport mentality to doing this, to say each of us individually has things we need to achieve and be accountable for, but we will not be successful unless we all are in this together.

You have to really reinforce that environment and show that you’re going to do it when on good days and bad.

Gina: Agreed. I also think that particularly if you work in a small business or startup life, there is a gravitational pull because we’re very fast paced. There’s a lot of scope creep because our business pivots all the time and we have to be able to respond.

It’s very tempting to really want to just circle the wagons. And that’s when silos happen because people just draw a box around their job. They’re like, I’ve got so much to do. I can only think about this right now. I do think it’s a leader’s responsibility. In fact, a lot of the responsibility, like time and space to think about and help teams create space for having those conversations so that when a problem is brought to the group, there is not a reaction of like, well, that’s your problem. You have to go fix it because I don’t have time to deal with that right now. That is a very common problem in startup life. I do think that the combination of having goals and a high trust culture, the goals will help to guide focus and prioritization and the high trust culture will allow for people to feel safe in bringing up stuff without worrying about being judged or being viewed as incompetent, all those ingredients have to exist or the whole thing doesn’t work.

Matt: Absolutely right. But every day a well meaning person becomes a manager of people for the first time. What are some recommendations you have for them in terms of either lessons or where to go learn or who to learn from? We all make mistakes as leaders all the time, but if someone wants to really invest in themselves as a leader of people, what do you recommend?

Gina: I recommend leaning on your peer group first. And showing that vulnerability yourself with your team. Leading by example and by modeling is very important. Asking for help when you need it. Find a peer group. We have the CMO Coffee Talk community. There are a few other communities out there for our group, but no matter what job you’re in, there are some amazing communities out there.

Maria Ross is an author. She just released her second book but her first book is called The Empathy Edge. I think that’s a great read. Leaders need to operate with compassion first because it is the key route to building and sustaining a high trust culture which creates a high performing team.

So get your read on and never stop learning and never stop being curious.

Matt: Yeah, I think that last point is so important. Be a regular student and know that what you have learned to do will evolve. The workplaces will evolve. What’s expected will evolve. And to your point, what we learned about effective management and leadership, 20, 25 years ago…

I remember working at a PR firm and we had Microsoft was one of our biggest clients and going at meetings at Microsoft were terrible because there was always yelling, they yelled at us. They yelled at each other. And you get like, Is this what work is like?

And so you get a sense of maybe this is what it’s like. It’s mean and so like, it’s not like work is going to be fun, but like, there’s a better environment you can create. And you manage one person or 20 or 2000, you have an opportunity to influence that wherever you’re working today.

Gina: It’s such a gift.

Matt: Gina, thank you so much for doing this. If people want to learn more about you, can keep in touch with you, get additional zucchini advice, like where can they go?

They can go to my LinkedIn profile, Gina Hortatsos, just search for me. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one on there.

Well, thank you again for doing this. Thank you to all of you who have been watching live and on demand. We’ll see you next week on Sales Pipeline Radio.

Gina: Take care. Bye.