“Good Company Culture Gives You The Ability To Bounce Back” Top 5 tips on successfully leading large teams with CEO Ken McElrath

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ken McElrath, CEO of Skuid. Skuid has been named one of Inc.’s Best Workplaces for three years running, and Ken’s experience building teams as a serial entrepreneur has led to the strong internal and external growth of Skuid.

What is your “backstory”?

I launched my very first “business” when I was about eight years old, using a wagon to give neighborhood kids a thrill ride for 10 or 25 cents, depending on the length. I also invented weird games and held “carnivals,” hiring other kids and splitting the take. I gave that up when a local gang shook us down and took all our money. I think they work for the IRS now.

By high school, I started doing design, painting and carpentry work for neighbors. After graduation, I entered architecture school at Penn State, where I argued with my professors until I transferred to graphic design. There, I argued with my professors until they decided I shouldn’t be in graphic design any more, which was sad, because I really loved design.

Me and my wife moved to Phoenix where I completed two bachelor’s degrees at Grand Canyon University.

I worked in a variety of design and marketing positions until I landed at MicroAge, which at the time was a computer reseller chain. Over the next seven years, I grew with the company as it transformed to a Fortune 500 master distributor and systems integrator company. I started as a graphic designer, but by the time I left I was leading marketing for the company-owned systems integration branches, which drove most of the profit for the company at the time.

I left to help launch a nonprofit, doing various marketing things until I co-authored a book with Bill Thrall and Bruce McNicol. After the book was published, I launched my own business doing marketing consulting for a variety of startups in Phoenix and San Francisco. While I tried to avoid it, eventually I accepted a position with a startup in the East Bay and moved my family to California. When that company got rolled into Chevron, I launched a new company, called Cazabba, Inc., doing technology, marketing and business consulting for various companies in California and Arizona. Our customers treated us very well for 10 years, during which I also earned an MFA from The Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

We moved our company and ourselves to Chattanooga, Tenn. I wrote a business plan for one of my customers, who liked it so much he asked me to launch the business, which was called Skoodat, an edtech company building apps on the Salesforce platform. I also began teaching design at Covenant, eventually taking a full-time position and running Cazabba and Skoodat in my spare time.

At Skoodat, I began arguing with my engineers about design, bugging them about the size of button corners, colors, fonts and other details until they got so frustrated they built a platform to get me off their backs. Actually, it wasn’t all about me. Our Skoodat customers wanted to make customizations themselves without writing code. The platform was called Skuid, an acronym for Scalable Kit for User Interface Design. We had no idea how game-changing it was at the time, but we did notice that we could build beautiful apps in a lot less time, and our customers could customize themselves without writing any code. Turns out we invented something that could solve a huge problem for a lot of other people too. So we spun Skuid out as its own company in 2013, and we’ve been off to the races ever since.

How do you synchronize large teams to effectively work together?

First, we create a rally cry each year. This is the “one big thing” that we have to do that pulls all our objectives together around a theme.

Second, we create no more than five strategic objectives each year, centered on our one big thing. Each objective has a specific metric to measure our success. As a follow up, we do weekly Thirsty Thursdays in each location to give short updates and give “shout outs” to employees for great performance. On top of this, we do a Skuid Sync every month or so, which is an all-hands meeting to talk about progress, celebrate milestones and give out awards for outstanding performance. Each quarter, we do an extended Sync to report out on quarterly milestones.

Third, we continue to support a meeting strategy that promotes 1:1 meetings and weekly team scrums, augmented by deeper dive meetings to discuss cross-functional initiatives.

What is the top challenge when managing global teams in different geographical locations? Can you give an example or story?

The toughest challenge may be to empathize with their challenges. When you sit at HQ, with multiple teams and resources instantly at the ready, you can forget that a team on the other side of the world does not have those advantages. It’s very important to walk a kilometer in their shoes. This relates to my personal top challenge, which is to get to each location on a regular basis. I’m doing fine at getting to our U.S. locations, but getting overseas has proven to be tough due to my insane and ever-changing schedule. Right now, I’m long overdue to visit our London and Zurich offices. I feel it, and so do they.

What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?

Culture is job one. Culture isn’t the so-called “soft side” of business that entrepreneurs often think it is. You may have a fantastic product, but if your people can’t work together, your company will underperform or fail. You can actually have an inferior product and beat your competitors with the right culture. It’s that important. If you build an exceptional product and an exceptional culture, you create a nearly unbeatable combination.

Culture is not morale. You can have great morale in a lousy culture and poor morale in a solid culture. Morale is about feelings, which change constantly based on circumstances. But culture gives you the ability to bounce back — to get back up even after you’ve been punched in the gut.

To cultivate culture, we have to make sure we establish the right core principles, so they can transcend different levels of growth and different circumstances — good or bad. Our principles will be tested at each inflection point, and it’s fine to adjust them a bit over time, but the essentials need to remain intact. A culture is a lot like an app development platform: you have to make sure you have the right infrastructure and tools in place for it to scale. When we created Skuid’s UX platform and our culture, we had scalability and flexibility at the forefront of our design.

Most times when people quit their jobs they actually “quit their managers”. What are your thoughts on retaining talent today?

It’s very true that people quit their managers. It’s just as true for veteran managers as it is for newly minted managers. We’ve started putting together management training, focusing on what it takes to keep communication lines open, have difficult conversations and to resolve conflicts. In some cases, it’s helped a lot. In other cases, it has not. Note that sometimes, it’s a good thing when an employee quits a manager, if the manager-employee incompatibility relates to a necessary change in direction. For example, if a manager needs the team to shift gears to a new strategy and an employee bucks the new direction, it may be best for the employee to leave instead of sticking around and being unhappy. But ideally, we’d like managers to understand how to lead well, so that people understand and decide to follow the new direction.

To retain talent, you need a culture that’s very, very sticky. It’s a lot like retaining customers. Usually, employers assume that if you meet employee and customer needs and they feel like there is an equitable exchange of value, they will stick with you. But when things get tough (and they always do) you need a deeper level of commitment than an economic commitment. Your company needs to have a soul. And that soul needs to connect with the hearts of your people and customers. If it doesn’t, they’ll leave at the first signs of discomfort.

Based on your personal experience, what are the “5 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Manage a Team”.

Here are my top five right now:

Write down the reason your company exists

Fully understand and never stop talking about why you exist as a company. It’s always astounded me that many people show up for work each day just to get a paycheck. I remember in one of my past businesses, customers would ask me to create an app or a website, but when I’d ask what business they were in and why, they often responded like a deer in the headlights. The day-to-day of operating a company can cause you and those around you to forget about why your company exists. People can get caught up in doing a specific job well, only to realize they are not sure how it fits in the big picture. This leads to a kind of fragmentation that you, as CEO, must prevent. So write down the reason your company exists and never let anyone forget it.

Nobody Cares about your company as much as you do and most people could not care less. I’ve personally wasted too much time and concern over people who can’t fully understand our product or strategy or why I keep launching companies. The truth is, most people don’t spend any time thinking about your product or company, no matter how devoted you are to it. You may think what you are doing is changing the world, but most people won’t care unless they can see how it will change their own personal lives.

Create a nurturing culture for your employees so they can take care of your customers

The most important thing right now to focus on is taking care of your employees so they can take care of your customers. Focus on meeting basic needs first, then work your way up Maslow’s hierarchy. Make it your goal to see how fast your employees feel love and belonging in your company, and how fast your customers follow. This is why culture is job one. If your employees don’t feel love and a sense of belonging in your company, your company and employees will never achieve your vision. The corporate equivalent of personal self-actualization in Maslow’s Hierarchy is achieving the vision of your company. But you have to start at the bottom and work your way up.

Business is a living, breathing entity and shouldn’t be treated like a Money Machine

Most investors won’t get it, and that’s okay. I’ve met with so many investors, and so many of them focus on little else but a few metrics. A business is a living, breathing entity that functions much like any other living entity — it is dependent on others for its existence and often subject to attack. Therefore, like any relationship with dependencies, it will have its ups and downs. You don’t walk away from a marriage just because you had a fight. You don’t throw away your kids if they haven’t grown according to some scientific schedule. Every business, like every person and every relationship, is unique. Treating businesses as if they are money machines that need to follow a prescribed path to profitability is just plain stupid, akin to expecting a stock market that never has a downturn.

Get your family and friends committed as you will need them in difficult times

Your most important business relationships are your personal relationships. Before you launch a company, make sure your family and friends are as committed as you are. You’ll need them when the chips are down. And you’ll want them to share your joy when it’s time to celebrate. Likewise, when I interview candidates I often ask what their spouse and/or families think of their decision to work for us. The earlier your stage, the more important this principle is. For example, a great question to ask is, “Why do you want to live your comfortable, secure job at XYZ Company to work at a startup that could be out of business in a month?” It opens up opportunities to talk about the significant risks and potential rewards of joining your startup (even if you’re five years into it), and the potential danger the insecurity of a startup could have on their family or friendships. On the other hand, if the candidate has a strong personal support network who is firmly behind their decision to work for you, fantastic! The benefits of having their friends and family on board cannot be overestimated. In fact, it can be a great recruiting strategy.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I would remove the perceived incompatibility between business and love. Love, rightly understood, should underpin everything we do in business, but during my career, talking about love in the context of business has been a nonstarter. That needs to change if we want to break down the barriers between the public and private sectors, between doing what’s right for the world and doing what’s right for profit.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My current favorite comes from a U2 song: “Love is bigger than anything in its way.” This is so incredibly relevant to leadership, which is often sorely misunderstood. No matter what you say or don’t say, your employees, customers and friends will hear it through a filter, and often those filters can twist your words in strange ways that can lead to misunderstandings and even pain. Every leader has a choice when his happens: You can fight back in anger, disrespect or even hatred; or, you can forgive, show mercy and grace, choosing instead to believe that love will win the day.