Amanda Lannert is the CEO of Jellyvision, a company widely known and respected as an employer of choice due to their innovative people practices, one of which is their “Graceful Leave Policy.” On this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast, find out why Amanda believes they are an employer of choice, how to part ways with respect and dignity, how to attract the best people for your company and so much more.
Follow Jellyvision on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google Plus.
Connect with Amanda on Twitter and Linkedin.
Transcripts:
| Adam Robinson: | Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson. For the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring.
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| Today on the show, Amanda Lannert is the CEO and cofounder of Jellyvision, a Chicago based business that has won, I think literally every award for culture and people process that there is. Amanda is an Uber accomplished founder and CEO, a entrepreneur of the year finalist through the EUI program, accolades for workplace diversity and all kinds of other things that we’re so excited to learn about today.
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| Amanda, thank you so much for being on the program.
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| Amanda Lannert: | So happy to be here. Sounds like my mom got a hold of you with that introduction, thank you for that.
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| Adam Robinson: | She did. She’s sitting here and she said I did a good job.
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| Amanda Lannert: | She’s my hype man, so thanks, mom.
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| Adam Robinson: | Awesome. All right. Shout out to moms out there. Okay. We’re going to talk about the people side of Jellyvision, but before we dive in, give us a little bit of perspective on what you do now and then for the kids at home, what you did previously.
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| Amanda Lannert: | Sure. Jellyvision is a company that makes software that we license to mostly large employers to help them help their employees choose and use their benefits. We’re talking health insurance, the most boring. Our goal is to go to where there’s furrowed brow, where people are trying to do something complicated and boring, but important, and our software talks you through it.
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| We’re in a world right now where Ford spends more money per car on health insurance than it does steel. One in four millennials would rather clean a toilet than think about their benefits. We make software that is delightful and helpful and does the math that people may not know how to do, so they can make really, really good decisions around their health insurance. Despite being a company that is squarely in HR tech, we are the spawn of what was once a gaming company that made interactive game shows in the ’90s, games like You Don’t Know Jack, or Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Whereas that company made virtual game show hosts in a B2C gaming space, we make virtual advisors in the health insurance and HR tech space.
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| That’s the long and windy road of the Jellyvision history, but our platform is called Alex.
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| Adam Robinson: | Fantastic. I think I told your cofounder that I spent an entire summer in 1991 or ’92 glued to You Don’t Know Jack in the basement of my friend’s house in Minnesota, just ripping through disc after disc after disc. I can …
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| Amanda Lannert: | I like to always say thanks for keeping us clothed and fed in the ’90s, we really appreciate it. I want to point out one quick thing. I have been at Jellyvision, this company since we started, but I am absolutely a joiner. There is founder DNA that I am respectful of, envious of, greatly admire, but I will join a company early even on day one, but I’m not that founder. I am a joiner/CEO. Definitely a longtime executive at Jellyvision.
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| Adam Robinson: | Okay. Thanks for clarifying. If listeners want to learn more about what you do, where would they do that?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Jellyvision.com, J-E-L-L-Y-V-I-S-I-O-N, or Meet Alex, M-E-E-T-A-L-E-X.com.
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| Adam Robinson: | Okay, very good. Let’s go back then to those days when you joined early on, talk about the team. What did it look like on day one, way back when?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Utterly different than now. It was largely a group of Harry’s close college friends and a couple people that those college friends knew. It was a very much a start with who you know, and who you want to build a company with, versus a company that was deliberate and intentional in casting a wide net and bringing in different points of view. A lot of people from Brown University and a lot of people who knew Harry outside of college and from his early days in his career.
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| Adam Robinson: | Okay. At what point in the cycle of growth did you put your mark on it and say, we’ve got to do this differently?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Probably somewhat early on. As soon as you get a little bit of traction. I define traction as someone in the market wants to buy what you sell repeatedly, and they’re happy about it. It’s probably like when You Don’t Know Jack started to hit and you realize, you’re going to be making a lot more. Then we had to go from Harry’s closest college friends and friends of those friends, to being able to build a network of an incredibly diverse cast of characters. It wasn’t just engineers, it was writers, artists, musicians, business people, marketers, lots and lots of different flavors. That’s when the process of true outreach of trying to build or creating brand and getting job posts out there, that attract attention, that’s when it really began, probably about 18 months in.
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| Adam Robinson: | Okay. For our listener’s benefit, Harry is Harry Gottlieb, the gentleman who founded the business in 1989.
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| Amanda Lannert: | Super important point, thank you.
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| Adam Robinson: | Yeah. Being intentional about your hiring process or the talent side of your business, it is easy to say it is more difficult to do, particularly when you’re coming from a place of scarcity of resources and budget. How did you make that work in a time when the business model was in flux and growth was happening all around you, and it’s just hard to slow that shift down?
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| Amanda Lannert: | The short answer is we weren’t boring. The long answer is, we understand that job descriptions are commercials. They’re ads. They’re ads where you’re trying to get talented people to give you the vast majority of their waking hours. It is not the place to commoditize and standardize and follow a script. And so, we didn’t. Our job descriptions have always been part manifesto, part autobiography, part war cry, for people who will enhance our culture. We really put a lot of time into a job description.
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| Many people will find them noise or self-indulgent or too long. Great. Please self-select out. We were able to galvanize around an idea and an ethos around humor and respect for individuals and a bias towards productivity, write about it in a job description, in a not at all boring way, put it out into the world, and it stood out in the market of commoditized job descriptions, and we were able to get really talented people to not only apply, but apply with flourish. Really put themselves back into their responses so they too stood out. That helped us get attention in a crowded marketplace and then be efficient in hiring, because those who are going to really like what we’re about and be able to fit in with what we’re about, would hand raise and put more energy back into their own responses.
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| We treat job descriptions as the most important marketing we did, and will ever do.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s excellent. I think so much of recruiting is a selling process, as you said, it’s not administrative, it’s not standardized, it’s sales. It’s a transfer of trust and step one is gaining interest. I guess, I suspect I know the answer to this leading question, but answer it for me anyway. Do you believe that just by design, great cultures are polarizing, not in a negative way, but polarizing in the sense that they attract the right people but absolutely repel folks that would be a fish out of water?
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| Amanda Lannert: | 100%, but so probably do great people. Everyone has a style. It may not be a style that’s a fit for everyone. It’s a two way street. It’s so important that people really understand who they are most make them happy, and are intentional about self-selecting out, because if you want more than just a way to get paid, you want a real career, finding an environment that’s going to allow you to do your best work in the way you most like to work, it’s critical. Two way fit is what you’re looking for.
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| Adam Robinson: | Now that you’ve got the benefit of nearly 20 years of experience, Jellyvision does, of hiring the right people, how do you do that at scale? Take us through this process of, we want to be intentional, we want to sell what’s unique, we don’t want to be standardized, yet we want to have consistency in the decision making process. What leads to a good hiring decision at Jellyvision?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Let’s walk through a little bit of the history of the Jellyvision Lab, the company I ran. I run, actually, as far as I know.
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| Adam Robinson: | As far as you know, yeah.
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| Amanda Lannert: | We managed to spend a better part of a decade, seven and a half years, going sideways. Not really growing, but managing to just not run out of money, to spread near-death experiences. There was very little hiring, very little personnel change, very, very solid stable group of people who kept thinking we were about to make it big, had a common ethos around what was funny, what was to be tolerated, what was unacceptable, and how we got work done.
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| We had much longer than the typical company to incubate ideas of culture, because culture is not statements on a wall. Culture is what’s between us. I mean that between the people, of everybody, what happens in meetings, how you get work done, it’s the people you hire and fire, it’s the process you follow and what becomes policy.
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| We had a long time to figure out how to express ourselves in terms of our job descriptions, to say this is what we’re looking for, here are the perks of working here. Then it all changes when you go from hiring a couple people a year to 130 people a year. Last few years, Jellyvision’s grown over 100 people a year.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s amazing.
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| Amanda Lannert: | The big change is in this, you go from passive meaning you post jobs and you wait for people to hand raise, to actually actively sourcing. A lot of our process and values are around humility, of people showing their work, not just talking about it. We ask for a custom cover letter, we ask people to audition. We ask people to spend a lot of time getting to know a bunch of colleagues so we can determine a mutual fit.
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| It’s one thing if you’re actively in the market, you see Jellyvision, you fall in love with the job description and you feel like after some research, this is a place where you can do some great work. It’s very, very different if your head’s down, loving your job and a recruiter calls you. A lot of the challenges around scale is figuring out how to have a delightful process where you really get to know a candidate as much as you want to, when you’re still in selling mode. The way we’ve tried to back out of it is, we have software where we curate a very, very involved user experience.
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| We’ve used those lessons to go out and build a sales process where we’re talking to customers, that is very, very involved and curated. We don’t drop the ball there when it comes to recruiting. For example, you think about the whole process of, you send your cover letter and resume to a job. Way too often, you have to wait quite a bit of time to get any response whatsoever. There’s a lot of wait and see, and a lot of lack of communication, a lot of darkness. We’re not just trying to just close those gaps there and create a process that is really good communication, and you’re talking to humans and you know where we stand.
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| We try to recognize where you are and show appreciation throughout. For example, one of the things we’re playing around with, is it creepy or is it nice, but after a passive candidate, so they’re not actively looking for a job, comes in for an interview, what if instead of waiting for that candidate to send us a thank you note, we send them a thank you note, that the people who interviewed with them says thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to come get to know us, we really liked learning about your background, in particular this was interesting.
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| We show respect for the time and attention and individuality of that person who took time away from their quite successful job to come talk to us. We’re trying to curate a recruiting experience that shows as much respect for the individual, for the time that they’re investing, for the nerves that get stirred up by interviewing. Interviewing’s the worst. It’s a blind ate without the drinking. We say, how can we show respect for the person in that process and show a little bit about how we are and how we think and how we operate at the same time?
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| The biggest challenge of scale is your process doesn’t always work when you have to go source people, and when you have to move from vetting mode to selling mode, you don’t want to lose your indicators of whether or not you have a fit.
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| Adam Robinson: | How do you get mid level first time managers in a hyper growth organization like yours down with that program? How do you teach them to do this?
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| Amanda Lannert: | I think up down left right top to bottom, this is a company that knows where its bread is buttered. There are companies that have six sigma production processes, there are people who have the ultimate algorithm or machine learning capabilities. We are a company that was, is, and always will be only as good as the people we have, building our software, servicing our software and selling it.
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| Because of the importance of people, of the importance of getting the right people on your team, of seeing the difference between good and great and the value that has in terms of the quality of what we can get done, it’s not a hard sell. I think it’s baked into the bones of the building, that this is a people first culture. A huge part of that is retaining and growing and keeping interested the people who are here, but a huge part of it is understanding that recruiting is an incredibly important part of every manager’s job, always be recruiting, always looking for that talent, always building relationships, because as we grow, you’re going to have more slots, wouldn’t it be great if you already had your next generation talent identified.
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| Convincing managers to care about recruiting and care about their teams is not something on my plate. I feel it’s pretty well understood.
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| Adam Robinson: | One of the things I love about your company’s website is, when you click the team tab on most websites, you get the leadership team. When I click the team tab at Jellyvision, I think this is literally everyone that works at the company, is that correct?
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| Amanda Lannert: | It is literally, because that is how our bread is buttered.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s amazing. I love it.
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| Amanda Lannert: | I get a lot more press and I got to give the speeches if there’s an award won, but culture is not top down at 400 people. Culture is sides, up and down. There’re people making important decisions and evolving the culture of Jellyvision that I have yet to meet. To me, saying it’s all leadership is nonsense. There is such important work being done by people sitting at the front desk, by people working on QA. It is a team sport here, and we just try to acknowledge what we know to be the truth.
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| Adam Robinson: | My favorite photo is Jean’s cup, I want to say that. I appreciate Jean and Jean’s cup on that page. Very cool.
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| Amanda Lannert: | There’s a massage chair, there’s all kinds of stuff. We take the work seriously, we do not take ourselves seriously. That shows up an awful lot.
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| Adam Robinson: | For sure, I love it. All right. The best intentions of hiring the right person don’t always end up with it working out. For a company that’s on the front end, I know everybody wants to do their best possible work, how do you handle situations where people either find out it’s not what they expected, or you learn that it might not be a fit? What’s your approach in wisdom to others that you could share with us?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Oh, we have a whole to do about this. One of our very few policies, we are not a policy heavy company at all. Mostly, our policies, or statements, is they use good judgment, that’s our policy. We actually have a policy called the graceful leave policy, and you get it on your first day, and it more or less, to paraphrase, says welcome to Jellyvision, we’re so glad you’re here, let’s talk about you leaving.
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| What we want to do is start to create an expectation around parting our ways and how to do it gracefully. You’re an adult, we’re an adult, this is a job, you’re getting probably the vast majority of your money, and we want you to have a great career here, but there’re a number of reasons why you won’t, and we want to talk about what we should each try to expect in case we have to part ways. We’re very clear that if we’re in an instance of financial duress, you will not be surprised. You will not be surprised by Jellyvision’s finances.
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| Secondly, you will not be surprised if Jellyvision believes you’re underperforming. We have 30, 90 and six month written reviews mandatory for all new hires, because we found that we can identify performance problems within the first 30 days. We want to service them as quickly as possible.
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| We lay out those two scenarios about whether we’re not making enough money, or whether we think we’re having a performance problem, and then similar, we say, hey, we are who we are, we’re doing what we’re doing, and we’re probably not going to wildly change within the next six weeks. If you get here and find now, or later, that there’s not a fit, what we ask you to do is tell us as soon as you’ve arrived at this conclusion, not when you have a job.
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| Nobody here is redundant, we are very, very lean. We’d like just the respect of knowing when it’s no longer a fit, so we can help you interview and you can help us hire and find your replacement. It basically is a policy around treating people like humans mutually and leading with respect and assumption of good intent. You can say the graceful leave policy is kind of nuts in a two weeks notice world, but we can have very senior, and we had a senior engineer sit down, had a meeting with me, I knew something bad was going to happen, and he said basically I’ve been here my whole career, I need to do something different.
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| I said, okay. What are you thinking in terms of notice? He said, how about 11 months? When you have people giving that kind of notice and working on those kinds of transitions, it’s not only graceful, it’s productive and helpful and kind.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s incredible.
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| Amanda Lannert: | We start talking about breaking up from day one, and try to define guidelines about how to do it openly, honestly, transparently, and mutual respect. We’re very big into written feedback. We are big believers in written feedback, and we work very hard to help nice people have hard conversations. I think one of the challenges of being a really nice manager is that you can get very critical feedback and by critical, I don’t mean harsh or negative, I mean important to hear because your job is on the line.
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| They can get lost in the criticism sandwich of oh my gosh, we think you’re so great, we’re really glad you’re here, hey, your inability to meet deadlines is a super big problem for our whole productivity, and by the way, you’re very creative. That’s great too.
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| You want to make sure that that hey, if you don’t start to hit deadlines, you’re probably not going to have a slot on this team. We’ve come up with something that, it’s not called a PIP or a performance improvement plan, it’s nothing formal, it’s a letter that begins, I’m worried about you. Jellyvision’s worried about you. We’re so worried that we’re going to put this down in writing.
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| Whether you see PIP or red marker, whatever, you read those words and you go, wait, they’re really trying to tell me something that my job might be in jeopardy. We look for all kinds of ways to facilitate tough conversations, so that managers have them early and often, and we try to give people a chance to hear those expectations and improve, and then if people don’t improve and we need to part ways from our perspective, we try to do it with as much dignity for the individual as possible. We do working transitions, which means we don’t tend to walk people out at all, we give them time to wrap up their job, transition stuff over, give them more runway to find a job while they have a job.
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| We almost always provide severance. We allow the employee to control communication, which means people may have been terminated for performance at Jellyvision and you’ll never know because it seems like they’re leaving to go pursue something else or go to have another job. For us, being the bigger person and being generous means allowing people to control the narrative. They make friends at work. They’re real relationships at work. We want to help as much as possible with those relationships to stay intact.
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| Controlling the narrative on the way out is risk we put in to allow the process to be as helpful as possible. Severance is important because we’re showing managers, move on people, we’re going to help them land on their feet. Don’t waste time keeping an under performer on your team, because you feel bad about their financial wellbeing. We’re going to help them land on their feet.
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| Adam Robinson: | You’ve become known as an employer of choice, certainly in the Chicagoland area. Also, receive recognition for the diversity of your workplace. It’s the topic, certainly in technology, nationally, diversity in the workplace. So many companies aspire to it. You actually have achieved it. Would you say that the diversity you’ve achieved or your success in that has been the result of an intentional diversity initiative, like so many organizations try, or is it naturally the result of people first policies that help people be comfortable, that you just describe, that … Some of which I’ve never heard anybody doing. It’s just exceptional.
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| Diversity, does it come from initiative, or does it come as a result of being a good human being?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Yeah, let’s start with the first question, we’re the employer of choice. We’re the employer of choice because we have employees of choice. We are very deliberate in hiring interesting, interested people. It’s more than Jellyvision. You got to be nice, you got to be humble, you got to be hard working. You should probably have a sense of humor to apply here. It’s that insistence on the full board of the individual that come here, and these people are ridiculous. They do great work, they’re hilarious over lunch, and then they go home and make the world a better place in their extracurricular activities.
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| That’s where Jellyvision is an employer of choice, it’s because we have employees of choice. I want to talk about the diversity thing, because I often get asked for lessons. I am so regretful to say I don’t really have them. When we were small, for quite a while, we had about 17 employees, two of which were women. I was one of them. Then we finally found our way, started to grow, became a successful agency en route to finally developing Alex. It wasn’t until we had about 200 people and we were applying for the Crain’s Best Places to Work, it’s something you have to actually fill out an application, they ask you a bunch of questions about the composition of your workforce.
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| It’s only at that point that I realized, we went from two out of 17 women, to about 50% women. It was not deliberate, it was not an intentional strategy, to me, the reality is, we had a female CEO, that’s me. When I became CEO, and we started to hire, there was an obvious signal to the marketplace that women can do well at Jellyvision because there is a woman at the top.
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| We are 46% female and 46% female led, and we are doing particularly well around non-binary genders, where we’re just open to fluidity and flexibility around gender, and because we put a statement on our website. For us, we want anyone to be able to do their best job, but to me, you want to change who’s at your company, unfortunately, you’ve just got to change who’s in leadership. It trickles down, and I don’t want to use a politically charged statement, but who is in leadership becomes who is at your company. If you want to make a quick change, start with your leadership.
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| Adam Robinson: | Profound statement, certainly. What, for listeners who aspire to build a great culture and a diverse workforce for that founder to there that knows they’ve got the wrong three leaders on their team to do that, but they feel stuck because no one else is available to them, or they feel like it’s going to be disruptive to the business, what do you have to say to that entrepreneur out there that says I know I have the wrong person, but I’m scared about losing a great leader operationally?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Good is the enemy of great. Not good enough is worse than nothing. Not good enough is worse than no one. Because it makes you think you’re not in a hole, and you’re in a hole, and at least if you get them off your PNL, you’re saving the cash. You will force yourself to go hire someone else where you may have a chance of getting a better fit.
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| You absolutely, one of the most important things you do, you hire well, but you’ve got to fire well on top of it. You’ve got to be able to part ways. I say that as someone who’s at a business that is dramatically changing. We’ve gone from 200 to 400 employees, we refactored, replatformed, we’ve gone from service to SaaS, a giant change in business model. An awful lot of change. Someone who was great two years ago may not be great now, at our new size and scale.
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| We are constantly having open and honest conversations, because basically, if someone is smart enough, if you’re good at hiring people smart enough, they’re going to at least on some level know that they are not rocking it out. When you have that tough conversation and find a way to gracefully part ways, and that person goes and finds a job that is in fact a better fit, they will by experience call you and say, thank you, I’m much happier now and I didn’t even know I would be.
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| I cannot say a huge part of successful growth, a huge part of successful culture, is holding yourself as a leader accountable to saying, you’ve got to have the right people on the bus, even if that means empty seats for a little while. That is worse than nothing.
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| Adam Robinson: | I think we’ve gotten a sense, philosophically, of your approach to team building. I also noticed on your site, you’re looking for a VP of people.
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| Amanda Lannert: | Yes.
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| Adam Robinson: | You have such a passion for the people side of the business, help me plug this job for you. What do you envision for the future of the talent operation in your organization, and how can you replace what you do on a daily basis, as the keeper of the culture? These are big shoes to fill. What does the next leader of this look like as you hand the reins over to someone whose job it is to own this every day?
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| Amanda Lannert: | I would say, we have a SVP of people now, who told me a year and a half ago that she wanted to be a stay at home mom in two and a half years. Graceful leave at its finest. Mary Beth, who’s our current SVP of people, is helping us hire and train her replacement, so she’ll be here for a long time to help with that transition, but the key thing is, we’re looking for someone who can help nurture our people as we grow. It’s helping to make our training and onboarding more successful when it’s not just one person joining one team, but 20 or 40 people starting at once.
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| How do we train people where they feel like they get personalized attention? How do we better communicate where there are so many different people now, with such different domain expertise, and knowledge of what we’re doing, how do you level communication? How do you motivate self-motivated adaptive learners, but also, have some structure and some curriculum? Then, also, besides recruiting, we’re building out HR as a function, HR as business partners, for all aspects of the business, not just for me. I’ve had Mary Beth as a partner for years, HR has always had a seat at our leadership table.
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| Now, what we’re trying to do is bring HR to all management tables, so that they have a partner helping them thinking through their people strategies, since it’s so key to our business.
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| A lot of it is, we’re not complacent. I don’t sit here and say culture is done, we’ve solved it. As our employees change, as the company size changes, as our goals changes, how do we get better? How do we identify what we’re not doing well enough, and make moves, and then how do we say, this is what we aspire to but aren’t doing well enough yet? They’re to get stuff done.
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| I don’t think of culture as a destination, where it’s like good job, it’s done, but it’s constantly alive and you should always be getting better, which is what we’re hoping this VP of people can help us do.
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| Adam Robinson: | Final couple of questions here. A little bit lighter fare on this one. What book are you reading or have you most recently read, and would you recommend it to us?
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| Amanda Lannert: | I am about 15 pages into Shoe Dog, which I never, ever, ever only get 15 pages into a book and then put it down, but I just happened to pick it up at the end of a flight. Our flight, we were on the same flight, actually. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, and I have to say for a businessy book, it’s better written than I expected. I would recommend it. I can tell you it’s going to be a great book, and I’m probably going to end up committing to a marathon before this thing is over.
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| Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.
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| Adam Robinson: | What you don’t know but listeners know is, I think that is the best CEO autobiography I’ve ever read.
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| Amanda Lannert: | It’s well written, it’s not just inspirational. Whoever, he wrote it or his ghostwriter, is actually quite a good writer.
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| Adam Robinson: | It’s exceptional. You are in for a real life drama about what it’s like to be the entrepreneur doing three jobs at once, growing a family. It’s unbelievable. You’re going to love it. You are going to love this book.
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| Amanda Lannert: | All right. Stranger Things will have to wait again, I’m going to plow this book this weekend.
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| Adam Robinson: | Exactly right. I’m in the same boat, I’ve been wanting to watch that forever. It’s never going to happen.
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| All right. If you were to come back on this show a year from now and tell us about whether or not you were able to complete the most important or tackle the most important issue or opportunity related to the people side of your business, what will you be telling us happened?
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| Amanda Lannert: | I’m going to say the most important initiative I have from a people side is not diversity and inclusion, it’s not learning and development, it’s not embedding HR as a business function, to me, I think right now, what I’ve got to do is solidify and complete the executive leadership team at Jellyvision, so that we are the model of cross functional decision making and teamwork and team based problem solving, because I think that will trickle down.
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| If we can show people how cross functional teams solve business problems and help our customers achieve their goals, I think that that is the model for empowering people even in a big company, to get great work done. I’m all about the cohesive executive leadership team at scale.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s the final word. Ladies and gentleman, you’ve been learning from Amanda Lannert, CEO of Jellyvision. Amanda, could go on this for hours. Thank you so much for being with us on the program today.
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| Amanda Lannert: | Thanks, Adam. Appreciate your time.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s a wrap for this episode of The Best Team Wins, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best … I don’t even know the name of my own book, Amanda. The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com.
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| Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you next week.
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| Adam Robinson: | Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson. For the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring.
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| Today on the show, Amanda Lannert is the CEO and cofounder of Jellyvision, a Chicago based business that has won, I think literally every award for culture and people process that there is. Amanda is an Uber accomplished founder and CEO, a entrepreneur of the year finalist through the EUI program, accolades for workplace diversity and all kinds of other things that we’re so excited to learn about today.
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| Amanda, thank you so much for being on the program.
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| Amanda Lannert: | So happy to be here. Sounds like my mom got a hold of you with that introduction, thank you for that.
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| Adam Robinson: | She did. She’s sitting here and she said I did a good job.
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| Amanda Lannert: | She’s my hype man, so thanks, mom.
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| Adam Robinson: | Awesome. All right. Shout out to moms out there. Okay. We’re going to talk about the people side of Jellyvision, but before we dive in, give us a little bit of perspective on what you do now and then for the kids at home, what you did previously.
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| Amanda Lannert: | Sure. Jellyvision is a company that makes software that we license to mostly large employers to help them help their employees choose and use their benefits. We’re talking health insurance, the most boring. Our goal is to go to where there’s furrowed brow, where people are trying to do something complicated and boring, but important, and our software talks you through it.
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| We’re in a world right now where Ford spends more money per car on health insurance than it does steel. One in four millennials would rather clean a toilet than think about their benefits. We make software that is delightful and helpful and does the math that people may not know how to do, so they can make really, really good decisions around their health insurance. Despite being a company that is squarely in HR tech, we are the spawn of what was once a gaming company that made interactive game shows in the ’90s, games like You Don’t Know Jack, or Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Whereas that company made virtual game show hosts in a B2C gaming space, we make virtual advisors in the health insurance and HR tech space.
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| That’s the long and windy road of the Jellyvision history, but our platform is called Alex.
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| Adam Robinson: | Fantastic. I think I told your cofounder that I spent an entire summer in 1991 or ’92 glued to You Don’t Know Jack in the basement of my friend’s house in Minnesota, just ripping through disc after disc after disc. I can …
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| Amanda Lannert: | I like to always say thanks for keeping us clothed and fed in the ’90s, we really appreciate it. I want to point out one quick thing. I have been at Jellyvision, this company since we started, but I am absolutely a joiner. There is founder DNA that I am respectful of, envious of, greatly admire, but I will join a company early even on day one, but I’m not that founder. I am a joiner/CEO. Definitely a longtime executive at Jellyvision.
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| Adam Robinson: | Okay. Thanks for clarifying. If listeners want to learn more about what you do, where would they do that?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Jellyvision.com, J-E-L-L-Y-V-I-S-I-O-N, or Meet Alex, M-E-E-T-A-L-E-X.com.
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| Adam Robinson: | Okay, very good. Let’s go back then to those days when you joined early on, talk about the team. What did it look like on day one, way back when?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Utterly different than now. It was largely a group of Harry’s close college friends and a couple people that those college friends knew. It was a very much a start with who you know, and who you want to build a company with, versus a company that was deliberate and intentional in casting a wide net and bringing in different points of view. A lot of people from Brown University and a lot of people who knew Harry outside of college and from his early days in his career.
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| Adam Robinson: | Okay. At what point in the cycle of growth did you put your mark on it and say, we’ve got to do this differently?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Probably somewhat early on. As soon as you get a little bit of traction. I define traction as someone in the market wants to buy what you sell repeatedly, and they’re happy about it. It’s probably like when You Don’t Know Jack started to hit and you realize, you’re going to be making a lot more. Then we had to go from Harry’s closest college friends and friends of those friends, to being able to build a network of an incredibly diverse cast of characters. It wasn’t just engineers, it was writers, artists, musicians, business people, marketers, lots and lots of different flavors. That’s when the process of true outreach of trying to build or creating brand and getting job posts out there, that attract attention, that’s when it really began, probably about 18 months in.
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| Adam Robinson: | Okay. For our listener’s benefit, Harry is Harry Gottlieb, the gentleman who founded the business in 1989.
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| Amanda Lannert: | Super important point, thank you.
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| Adam Robinson: | Yeah. Being intentional about your hiring process or the talent side of your business, it is easy to say it is more difficult to do, particularly when you’re coming from a place of scarcity of resources and budget. How did you make that work in a time when the business model was in flux and growth was happening all around you, and it’s just hard to slow that shift down?
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| Amanda Lannert: | The short answer is we weren’t boring. The long answer is, we understand that job descriptions are commercials. They’re ads. They’re ads where you’re trying to get talented people to give you the vast majority of their waking hours. It is not the place to commoditize and standardize and follow a script. And so, we didn’t. Our job descriptions have always been part manifesto, part autobiography, part war cry, for people who will enhance our culture. We really put a lot of time into a job description.
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| Many people will find them noise or self-indulgent or too long. Great. Please self-select out. We were able to galvanize around an idea and an ethos around humor and respect for individuals and a bias towards productivity, write about it in a job description, in a not at all boring way, put it out into the world, and it stood out in the market of commoditized job descriptions, and we were able to get really talented people to not only apply, but apply with flourish. Really put themselves back into their responses so they too stood out. That helped us get attention in a crowded marketplace and then be efficient in hiring, because those who are going to really like what we’re about and be able to fit in with what we’re about, would hand raise and put more energy back into their own responses.
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| We treat job descriptions as the most important marketing we did, and will ever do.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s excellent. I think so much of recruiting is a selling process, as you said, it’s not administrative, it’s not standardized, it’s sales. It’s a transfer of trust and step one is gaining interest. I guess, I suspect I know the answer to this leading question, but answer it for me anyway. Do you believe that just by design, great cultures are polarizing, not in a negative way, but polarizing in the sense that they attract the right people but absolutely repel folks that would be a fish out of water?
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| Amanda Lannert: | 100%, but so probably do great people. Everyone has a style. It may not be a style that’s a fit for everyone. It’s a two way street. It’s so important that people really understand who they are most make them happy, and are intentional about self-selecting out, because if you want more than just a way to get paid, you want a real career, finding an environment that’s going to allow you to do your best work in the way you most like to work, it’s critical. Two way fit is what you’re looking for.
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| Adam Robinson: | Now that you’ve got the benefit of nearly 20 years of experience, Jellyvision does, of hiring the right people, how do you do that at scale? Take us through this process of, we want to be intentional, we want to sell what’s unique, we don’t want to be standardized, yet we want to have consistency in the decision making process. What leads to a good hiring decision at Jellyvision?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Let’s walk through a little bit of the history of the Jellyvision Lab, the company I ran. I run, actually, as far as I know.
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| Adam Robinson: | As far as you know, yeah.
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| Amanda Lannert: | We managed to spend a better part of a decade, seven and a half years, going sideways. Not really growing, but managing to just not run out of money, to spread near-death experiences. There was very little hiring, very little personnel change, very, very solid stable group of people who kept thinking we were about to make it big, had a common ethos around what was funny, what was to be tolerated, what was unacceptable, and how we got work done.
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| We had much longer than the typical company to incubate ideas of culture, because culture is not statements on a wall. Culture is what’s between us. I mean that between the people, of everybody, what happens in meetings, how you get work done, it’s the people you hire and fire, it’s the process you follow and what becomes policy.
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| We had a long time to figure out how to express ourselves in terms of our job descriptions, to say this is what we’re looking for, here are the perks of working here. Then it all changes when you go from hiring a couple people a year to 130 people a year. Last few years, Jellyvision’s grown over 100 people a year.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s amazing.
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| Amanda Lannert: | The big change is in this, you go from passive meaning you post jobs and you wait for people to hand raise, to actually actively sourcing. A lot of our process and values are around humility, of people showing their work, not just talking about it. We ask for a custom cover letter, we ask people to audition. We ask people to spend a lot of time getting to know a bunch of colleagues so we can determine a mutual fit.
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| It’s one thing if you’re actively in the market, you see Jellyvision, you fall in love with the job description and you feel like after some research, this is a place where you can do some great work. It’s very, very different if your head’s down, loving your job and a recruiter calls you. A lot of the challenges around scale is figuring out how to have a delightful process where you really get to know a candidate as much as you want to, when you’re still in selling mode. The way we’ve tried to back out of it is, we have software where we curate a very, very involved user experience.
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| We’ve used those lessons to go out and build a sales process where we’re talking to customers, that is very, very involved and curated. We don’t drop the ball there when it comes to recruiting. For example, you think about the whole process of, you send your cover letter and resume to a job. Way too often, you have to wait quite a bit of time to get any response whatsoever. There’s a lot of wait and see, and a lot of lack of communication, a lot of darkness. We’re not just trying to just close those gaps there and create a process that is really good communication, and you’re talking to humans and you know where we stand.
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| We try to recognize where you are and show appreciation throughout. For example, one of the things we’re playing around with, is it creepy or is it nice, but after a passive candidate, so they’re not actively looking for a job, comes in for an interview, what if instead of waiting for that candidate to send us a thank you note, we send them a thank you note, that the people who interviewed with them says thanks so much for taking the time out of your day to come get to know us, we really liked learning about your background, in particular this was interesting.
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| We show respect for the time and attention and individuality of that person who took time away from their quite successful job to come talk to us. We’re trying to curate a recruiting experience that shows as much respect for the individual, for the time that they’re investing, for the nerves that get stirred up by interviewing. Interviewing’s the worst. It’s a blind ate without the drinking. We say, how can we show respect for the person in that process and show a little bit about how we are and how we think and how we operate at the same time?
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| The biggest challenge of scale is your process doesn’t always work when you have to go source people, and when you have to move from vetting mode to selling mode, you don’t want to lose your indicators of whether or not you have a fit.
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| Adam Robinson: | How do you get mid level first time managers in a hyper growth organization like yours down with that program? How do you teach them to do this?
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| Amanda Lannert: | I think up down left right top to bottom, this is a company that knows where its bread is buttered. There are companies that have six sigma production processes, there are people who have the ultimate algorithm or machine learning capabilities. We are a company that was, is, and always will be only as good as the people we have, building our software, servicing our software and selling it.
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| Because of the importance of people, of the importance of getting the right people on your team, of seeing the difference between good and great and the value that has in terms of the quality of what we can get done, it’s not a hard sell. I think it’s baked into the bones of the building, that this is a people first culture. A huge part of that is retaining and growing and keeping interested the people who are here, but a huge part of it is understanding that recruiting is an incredibly important part of every manager’s job, always be recruiting, always looking for that talent, always building relationships, because as we grow, you’re going to have more slots, wouldn’t it be great if you already had your next generation talent identified.
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| Convincing managers to care about recruiting and care about their teams is not something on my plate. I feel it’s pretty well understood.
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| Adam Robinson: | One of the things I love about your company’s website is, when you click the team tab on most websites, you get the leadership team. When I click the team tab at Jellyvision, I think this is literally everyone that works at the company, is that correct?
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| Amanda Lannert: | It is literally, because that is how our bread is buttered.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s amazing. I love it.
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| Amanda Lannert: | I get a lot more press and I got to give the speeches if there’s an award won, but culture is not top down at 400 people. Culture is sides, up and down. There’re people making important decisions and evolving the culture of Jellyvision that I have yet to meet. To me, saying it’s all leadership is nonsense. There is such important work being done by people sitting at the front desk, by people working on QA. It is a team sport here, and we just try to acknowledge what we know to be the truth.
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| Adam Robinson: | My favorite photo is Jean’s cup, I want to say that. I appreciate Jean and Jean’s cup on that page. Very cool.
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| Amanda Lannert: | There’s a massage chair, there’s all kinds of stuff. We take the work seriously, we do not take ourselves seriously. That shows up an awful lot.
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| Adam Robinson: | For sure, I love it. All right. The best intentions of hiring the right person don’t always end up with it working out. For a company that’s on the front end, I know everybody wants to do their best possible work, how do you handle situations where people either find out it’s not what they expected, or you learn that it might not be a fit? What’s your approach in wisdom to others that you could share with us?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Oh, we have a whole to do about this. One of our very few policies, we are not a policy heavy company at all. Mostly, our policies, or statements, is they use good judgment, that’s our policy. We actually have a policy called the graceful leave policy, and you get it on your first day, and it more or less, to paraphrase, says welcome to Jellyvision, we’re so glad you’re here, let’s talk about you leaving.
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| What we want to do is start to create an expectation around parting our ways and how to do it gracefully. You’re an adult, we’re an adult, this is a job, you’re getting probably the vast majority of your money, and we want you to have a great career here, but there’re a number of reasons why you won’t, and we want to talk about what we should each try to expect in case we have to part ways. We’re very clear that if we’re in an instance of financial duress, you will not be surprised. You will not be surprised by Jellyvision’s finances.
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| Secondly, you will not be surprised if Jellyvision believes you’re underperforming. We have 30, 90 and six month written reviews mandatory for all new hires, because we found that we can identify performance problems within the first 30 days. We want to service them as quickly as possible.
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| We lay out those two scenarios about whether we’re not making enough money, or whether we think we’re having a performance problem, and then similar, we say, hey, we are who we are, we’re doing what we’re doing, and we’re probably not going to wildly change within the next six weeks. If you get here and find now, or later, that there’s not a fit, what we ask you to do is tell us as soon as you’ve arrived at this conclusion, not when you have a job.
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| Nobody here is redundant, we are very, very lean. We’d like just the respect of knowing when it’s no longer a fit, so we can help you interview and you can help us hire and find your replacement. It basically is a policy around treating people like humans mutually and leading with respect and assumption of good intent. You can say the graceful leave policy is kind of nuts in a two weeks notice world, but we can have very senior, and we had a senior engineer sit down, had a meeting with me, I knew something bad was going to happen, and he said basically I’ve been here my whole career, I need to do something different.
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| I said, okay. What are you thinking in terms of notice? He said, how about 11 months? When you have people giving that kind of notice and working on those kinds of transitions, it’s not only graceful, it’s productive and helpful and kind.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s incredible.
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| Amanda Lannert: | We start talking about breaking up from day one, and try to define guidelines about how to do it openly, honestly, transparently, and mutual respect. We’re very big into written feedback. We are big believers in written feedback, and we work very hard to help nice people have hard conversations. I think one of the challenges of being a really nice manager is that you can get very critical feedback and by critical, I don’t mean harsh or negative, I mean important to hear because your job is on the line.
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| They can get lost in the criticism sandwich of oh my gosh, we think you’re so great, we’re really glad you’re here, hey, your inability to meet deadlines is a super big problem for our whole productivity, and by the way, you’re very creative. That’s great too.
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| You want to make sure that that hey, if you don’t start to hit deadlines, you’re probably not going to have a slot on this team. We’ve come up with something that, it’s not called a PIP or a performance improvement plan, it’s nothing formal, it’s a letter that begins, I’m worried about you. Jellyvision’s worried about you. We’re so worried that we’re going to put this down in writing.
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| Whether you see PIP or red marker, whatever, you read those words and you go, wait, they’re really trying to tell me something that my job might be in jeopardy. We look for all kinds of ways to facilitate tough conversations, so that managers have them early and often, and we try to give people a chance to hear those expectations and improve, and then if people don’t improve and we need to part ways from our perspective, we try to do it with as much dignity for the individual as possible. We do working transitions, which means we don’t tend to walk people out at all, we give them time to wrap up their job, transition stuff over, give them more runway to find a job while they have a job.
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| We almost always provide severance. We allow the employee to control communication, which means people may have been terminated for performance at Jellyvision and you’ll never know because it seems like they’re leaving to go pursue something else or go to have another job. For us, being the bigger person and being generous means allowing people to control the narrative. They make friends at work. They’re real relationships at work. We want to help as much as possible with those relationships to stay intact.
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| Controlling the narrative on the way out is risk we put in to allow the process to be as helpful as possible. Severance is important because we’re showing managers, move on people, we’re going to help them land on their feet. Don’t waste time keeping an under performer on your team, because you feel bad about their financial wellbeing. We’re going to help them land on their feet.
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| Adam Robinson: | You’ve become known as an employer of choice, certainly in the Chicagoland area. Also, receive recognition for the diversity of your workplace. It’s the topic, certainly in technology, nationally, diversity in the workplace. So many companies aspire to it. You actually have achieved it. Would you say that the diversity you’ve achieved or your success in that has been the result of an intentional diversity initiative, like so many organizations try, or is it naturally the result of people first policies that help people be comfortable, that you just describe, that … Some of which I’ve never heard anybody doing. It’s just exceptional.
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| Diversity, does it come from initiative, or does it come as a result of being a good human being?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Yeah, let’s start with the first question, we’re the employer of choice. We’re the employer of choice because we have employees of choice. We are very deliberate in hiring interesting, interested people. It’s more than Jellyvision. You got to be nice, you got to be humble, you got to be hard working. You should probably have a sense of humor to apply here. It’s that insistence on the full board of the individual that come here, and these people are ridiculous. They do great work, they’re hilarious over lunch, and then they go home and make the world a better place in their extracurricular activities.
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| That’s where Jellyvision is an employer of choice, it’s because we have employees of choice. I want to talk about the diversity thing, because I often get asked for lessons. I am so regretful to say I don’t really have them. When we were small, for quite a while, we had about 17 employees, two of which were women. I was one of them. Then we finally found our way, started to grow, became a successful agency en route to finally developing Alex. It wasn’t until we had about 200 people and we were applying for the Crain’s Best Places to Work, it’s something you have to actually fill out an application, they ask you a bunch of questions about the composition of your workforce.
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| It’s only at that point that I realized, we went from two out of 17 women, to about 50% women. It was not deliberate, it was not an intentional strategy, to me, the reality is, we had a female CEO, that’s me. When I became CEO, and we started to hire, there was an obvious signal to the marketplace that women can do well at Jellyvision because there is a woman at the top.
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| We are 46% female and 46% female led, and we are doing particularly well around non-binary genders, where we’re just open to fluidity and flexibility around gender, and because we put a statement on our website. For us, we want anyone to be able to do their best job, but to me, you want to change who’s at your company, unfortunately, you’ve just got to change who’s in leadership. It trickles down, and I don’t want to use a politically charged statement, but who is in leadership becomes who is at your company. If you want to make a quick change, start with your leadership.
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| Adam Robinson: | Profound statement, certainly. What, for listeners who aspire to build a great culture and a diverse workforce for that founder to there that knows they’ve got the wrong three leaders on their team to do that, but they feel stuck because no one else is available to them, or they feel like it’s going to be disruptive to the business, what do you have to say to that entrepreneur out there that says I know I have the wrong person, but I’m scared about losing a great leader operationally?
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| Amanda Lannert: | Good is the enemy of great. Not good enough is worse than nothing. Not good enough is worse than no one. Because it makes you think you’re not in a hole, and you’re in a hole, and at least if you get them off your PNL, you’re saving the cash. You will force yourself to go hire someone else where you may have a chance of getting a better fit.
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| You absolutely, one of the most important things you do, you hire well, but you’ve got to fire well on top of it. You’ve got to be able to part ways. I say that as someone who’s at a business that is dramatically changing. We’ve gone from 200 to 400 employees, we refactored, replatformed, we’ve gone from service to SaaS, a giant change in business model. An awful lot of change. Someone who was great two years ago may not be great now, at our new size and scale.
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| We are constantly having open and honest conversations, because basically, if someone is smart enough, if you’re good at hiring people smart enough, they’re going to at least on some level know that they are not rocking it out. When you have that tough conversation and find a way to gracefully part ways, and that person goes and finds a job that is in fact a better fit, they will by experience call you and say, thank you, I’m much happier now and I didn’t even know I would be.
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| I cannot say a huge part of successful growth, a huge part of successful culture, is holding yourself as a leader accountable to saying, you’ve got to have the right people on the bus, even if that means empty seats for a little while. That is worse than nothing.
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| Adam Robinson: | I think we’ve gotten a sense, philosophically, of your approach to team building. I also noticed on your site, you’re looking for a VP of people.
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| Amanda Lannert: | Yes.
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| Adam Robinson: | You have such a passion for the people side of the business, help me plug this job for you. What do you envision for the future of the talent operation in your organization, and how can you replace what you do on a daily basis, as the keeper of the culture? These are big shoes to fill. What does the next leader of this look like as you hand the reins over to someone whose job it is to own this every day?
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| Amanda Lannert: | I would say, we have a SVP of people now, who told me a year and a half ago that she wanted to be a stay at home mom in two and a half years. Graceful leave at its finest. Mary Beth, who’s our current SVP of people, is helping us hire and train her replacement, so she’ll be here for a long time to help with that transition, but the key thing is, we’re looking for someone who can help nurture our people as we grow. It’s helping to make our training and onboarding more successful when it’s not just one person joining one team, but 20 or 40 people starting at once.
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| How do we train people where they feel like they get personalized attention? How do we better communicate where there are so many different people now, with such different domain expertise, and knowledge of what we’re doing, how do you level communication? How do you motivate self-motivated adaptive learners, but also, have some structure and some curriculum? Then, also, besides recruiting, we’re building out HR as a function, HR as business partners, for all aspects of the business, not just for me. I’ve had Mary Beth as a partner for years, HR has always had a seat at our leadership table.
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| Now, what we’re trying to do is bring HR to all management tables, so that they have a partner helping them thinking through their people strategies, since it’s so key to our business.
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| A lot of it is, we’re not complacent. I don’t sit here and say culture is done, we’ve solved it. As our employees change, as the company size changes, as our goals changes, how do we get better? How do we identify what we’re not doing well enough, and make moves, and then how do we say, this is what we aspire to but aren’t doing well enough yet? They’re to get stuff done.
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| I don’t think of culture as a destination, where it’s like good job, it’s done, but it’s constantly alive and you should always be getting better, which is what we’re hoping this VP of people can help us do.
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| Adam Robinson: | Final couple of questions here. A little bit lighter fare on this one. What book are you reading or have you most recently read, and would you recommend it to us?
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| Amanda Lannert: | I am about 15 pages into Shoe Dog, which I never, ever, ever only get 15 pages into a book and then put it down, but I just happened to pick it up at the end of a flight. Our flight, we were on the same flight, actually. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, and I have to say for a businessy book, it’s better written than I expected. I would recommend it. I can tell you it’s going to be a great book, and I’m probably going to end up committing to a marathon before this thing is over.
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| Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.
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| Adam Robinson: | What you don’t know but listeners know is, I think that is the best CEO autobiography I’ve ever read.
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| Amanda Lannert: | It’s well written, it’s not just inspirational. Whoever, he wrote it or his ghostwriter, is actually quite a good writer.
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| Adam Robinson: | It’s exceptional. You are in for a real life drama about what it’s like to be the entrepreneur doing three jobs at once, growing a family. It’s unbelievable. You’re going to love it. You are going to love this book.
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| Amanda Lannert: | All right. Stranger Things will have to wait again, I’m going to plow this book this weekend.
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| Adam Robinson: | Exactly right. I’m in the same boat, I’ve been wanting to watch that forever. It’s never going to happen.
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| All right. If you were to come back on this show a year from now and tell us about whether or not you were able to complete the most important or tackle the most important issue or opportunity related to the people side of your business, what will you be telling us happened?
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| Amanda Lannert: | I’m going to say the most important initiative I have from a people side is not diversity and inclusion, it’s not learning and development, it’s not embedding HR as a business function, to me, I think right now, what I’ve got to do is solidify and complete the executive leadership team at Jellyvision, so that we are the model of cross functional decision making and teamwork and team based problem solving, because I think that will trickle down.
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| If we can show people how cross functional teams solve business problems and help our customers achieve their goals, I think that that is the model for empowering people even in a big company, to get great work done. I’m all about the cohesive executive leadership team at scale.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s the final word. Ladies and gentleman, you’ve been learning from Amanda Lannert, CEO of Jellyvision. Amanda, could go on this for hours. Thank you so much for being with us on the program today.
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| Amanda Lannert: | Thanks, Adam. Appreciate your time.
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| Adam Robinson: | That’s a wrap for this episode of The Best Team Wins, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best … I don’t even know the name of my own book, Amanda. The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com.
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| Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you next week.
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