Henry Schuck - Creating Ambitious Teams at ZoomInfo - EP.266

Look, I don't know enough about the issues at Boeing, but I'm relatively certain that it's a culture issue. Look, some problems — this is a learning I've had over the last two years. Some problems you can solve with process, where you show up and you go, 'Oh, we did this thing poorly last time, so now let's build a process around it to make sure nothing ever falls through the cracks again.' But some problems cannot be solved by process. And if you try to solve too many problems by process, you just end up with all this crazy process crap basically. That's because a lot of problems need to be solved by culture, not by process. I'll give you an example. I got super upset about a year ago because people would post something on Twitter or LinkedIn and they'd be upset with us about something or trying to get support and they weren't getting it. And inevitably I was the one responding. I would see it, respond to it, and say, 'Hey, no problem. I'll get you connected to support. This thing's going to get fixed.' And I went internally and told the team, 'Hey, it's kind of BS that it's just me responding to upset customers out there.' And they said, 'Okay, no problem. We're going to create a process. We're going to create this rotating list of people who have to check Twitter and LinkedIn every 30 minutes, Monday through Friday, and then Friday through Sunday, we're going to create a rotating shift.' It's like, that's not how you fix this. This is a culture problem. A product manager should care what people are saying about ZoomInfo online because that affects the work they do. And the leadership in content and the people on social, they should feel like owners of this business and feel a responsibility to check. I'm not asking them to ruin their weekend. Nine out of ten times nothing is on Twitter. Just when you go on Twitter on the weekend, put ZoomInfo in the search and see if there are pissed off people you can respond to. And care about it. You could build process and process and process, but that process is going to break down. Someone's going to be at a wedding or in a movie, and what you want to create is a culture that cares to solve that problem, not more and more process. So my sense is that you could go into Boeing and do one of two things. You could add lots of process to make sure doors never come off the plane again, do this process and that process and 62 other checklists, as if the checklists that existed already were not enough. I don't think that solves Boeing's problem. I think you have to solve the problem with culture.

You know, my CEO friends want to solve problems with culture. They also happen to be founder CEOs, so they're very comfortable solving problems with culture. And I'm not trying to say there's no place for process. There is. But process is also a very comfortable place for people to go in corporate America. When I come at you and say, 'Hey, there's a problem. I need this fixed,' it's very comfortable to go, 'Got it. This is how I'm going to fix it: process, process, process. I talked to 50 people. Here's what they said we should do.' And I build this whole process. It's a much more comfortable place to be than to try to solve it with culture, because culture requires you to be slightly inspirational. It requires you to lay out principles that are important to you and your team. It requires you to manage to those principles and make sure that everybody in your team believes in and drives to those principles. We have a bunch of corporate values, and I wrote them originally in 2015. I remember where I was. I was going through an airport and got super frustrated that every time we rolled out a change at the company, people would be like, 'Oh, another thing, another change. You guys are always changing stuff.' And I was like, listen, changing stuff is actually part of our culture. That is who we are. We're going to constantly experiment, we're going to get things wrong, and when we get things wrong we're going to change. That's who we are. I realized I need to codify that into a document: we're going to change fast, we're going to change a lot of things, we're constantly optimizing. And a whole bunch of other values that I want people to know ZoomInfo stands for. I wrote it in 2015 and shared it with everybody. In 2023, I went back and read it and it was like, oh, eight years later this thing got watered down. Every time a new head of employee value branding showed up or some new person in content showed up, they took this thing that was specific and created ideals, and they took a little bit off the edge, then a little bit more, then a little bit more, until at the end it just reads like every other company's culture and values and principles. I started doing these roundtables with our employees. I asked, 'Hey, do you know our values? What are our cultural values?' And nobody knows any of them. They only know one, which is 'get 1% better every day.' Somehow that one stuck. It's memorable. But none of the other ones. So I rewrote them. Today there are five: be entrepreneurs, be innovators, be a team, be relentless, be experts. Every time I talk to someone or go into a situation that I don't think is living up to those ideals, I will tell people: this is not us being relentless. This is not us being entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs take risk and move fast. This is like 10 months of process to do something an entrepreneur would do in three weeks. This is not us being entrepreneurs, innovators, or relentless. Then I went around and said, 'Cultural values and principles are fine. They're important, and I've outlined them in a way that I think is more authentic, but people also don't know what being relentless sounds like or looks like at the company, and they don't know what being an entrepreneur sounds like or looks like.' So then I went through and gave everybody a bunch of examples of what being relentless looks like and what being an expert looks like and what it sounds like. I told people, if you were blind and you came to ZoomInfo, what would you hear that would let you know this is a company that takes being an expert and being an entrepreneur as a serious principle? Then we wrote those down for our employees. I want people to say, 'This is who we are. You come to ZoomInfo, you give me more of your waking hours than just about anything else in your life. More than you give your family, your friends, yourself. You should understand who we are as a company. You're on the team. What do we stand for?' I want people to know what those things are because they can either align to them or say, 'That's not really me. I'm not relentless. I'm not an entrepreneur.' Great. There are lots of companies where that's not a cultural principle. They don't even want it. Boeing doesn't want entrepreneurs and big risk-takers, and they probably don't want innovators. They want something different, safe, risk-averse. That's great. But if that's you, you shouldn't come to ZoomInfo. Making sure people understand those things helps us get the right group of people who are aligned culturally to do the work.

Look, first, Alex, I'll tell you I don't buy into that premise. I don't think it's impossible; I don't think it's that hard to scale a business and continue to keep that type of cultural value and principle at the forefront. Have a lot of companies done it? No. And does it get watered down along the way? Yes. It does take you showing up constantly and reminding people that these are the types of people we look for and that we should be screening for those types of people. I think Netflix does a really nice job of this. It's very clear what Netflix's cultural values and principles are. If you don't meet them, Netflix doesn't want you to be there. They'll give you a severance and show you the door. I think they've done a good job of scaling to tens of thousands of employees by maintaining that. That doesn't mean you're 100%, but it does mean it's a central part of how you think about the team you're putting together. Definitely easier at 10 people than at 3,700. But people have to be reminded that this is a priority in the business and it's important. Otherwise, every other pressure in the business to hire overtakes this. I know these things should be screens, but I need to hire 30 account executives in the next three months. If I adhere to this principle, I won't be able to hire 30. I'll only be able to hire 10. The business used to be okay with 10, but you have to agree that it's going to take longer than you'd like. Then you have to be really disciplined about spending the time to get the right people. That's where most of this breaks. You're time-pressured. Performance is being pressured by the lack of this person, so you trade off and compromise on those principles, ending up with less-than-great or less culturally aligned people. I do this thing twice a year where I get together with a group of founder CEOs. We spend a Thursday through Sunday talking about our businesses, what's going well, and what's not going well. Everybody has a unique superpower, so everyone tries to steal that superpower from the others. At our first meeting, I asked everybody, 'If you went around your company and interviewed everybody, what percentage would you rehire? With unlimited time, what percentage of your staff would you rehire?' The answers were between 30 and 60%. I said, 'If that's true, isn't it the biggest problem in all of our businesses? Isn't it the number one issue we should be focused on? The fact that we wouldn't rehire 50-60% of the people who work at our companies?' We talked about different ways to address that. Everybody went back super inspired. I wrote cultural principles, everyone did their thing. I think every CEO, if they ask themselves that question and answer honestly, puts a big spotlight on what has to be the biggest issue in your business: it's a people business.

I think you would go and make sure all your talent acquisition professionals know how to screen for that. They'd know exactly what you're looking for in all your roles. You'd set up a structure that gives you a longer period of time to hire, do better planning so you're never in a crunch, and have the right pipeline of people and time to hire right. You'd go to every hiring manager and say, 'These are critical screens we need to do on every employee we hire at ZoomInfo. I want to know how you'll adhere to them. How will you test for it? Here's how we do it in sales, here's how we test in engineering. You need to figure out how to test in content, marketing, and product management.' You'd force people to live by that construct. That's the only way I think you can do it. At Coinbase, I just read an article that today every hire has to be approved by the COO and CEO. The CEO took over the hiring process and said, 'We're looking for these types of people, and I'm going to approve every single person we hire.' That's happening at a 5,000-employee company. That shows how important it is. But by the way, this is a culture versus process thing. Coinbase is solving it with process: every hire goes through me. I think the solve is a cultural one: make sure everybody understands what you're looking for, build a culture that drives that outcome, and then you don't have to approve every person. But maybe for a period you do it to show people what it looks like and build the culture around it. That is a culture thing.

One of the big things we were doing: we went from 1,000 employees in June of 2020 to 3,700 in June of 2023. That meant we hired a lot of people remotely during the pandemic. To keep people coordinated and aligned, we built all sorts of process: we'd all meet every week, no agenda, just to align. If you wanted to get something done in product marketing, you'd need to talk to your counterpart in marketing, then in sales, then have another meeting with the executive team. It became seven meetings to get a 15-minute decision done. That slows everything down, the opposite of being an entrepreneur. So I've been making sure I share a lot of context about how I'm making decisions with my executive team, and they share that context down to their teams so they can make quick decisions without needing to get context from many people. On incentives, obviously there are comp incentives, primarily used in sales: you hit your quota and you make more money. In other parts of the business, using those types of incentives is less effective because the connection to impact is muted. It's less about incentives and more about aligning to who we are as a team. If everybody feels they're on a team that upholds these principles and everyone around them also upholds them, there's a disincentive to bucking that trend. You don't want to be the only team not doing that.