Using Rypple to get ongoing, actionable feedback is something that thousands of leaders do everyday to learn fast and reveal their blind spots. But many people who are new to Rypple want to know; what types of questions should I ask to get the most helpful feedback?

Here for your viewing pleasure are 17 role-based questions you can ask right now to help you on your way!

(Note: many of these questions are based on the “Make one thing your super power” principle)

If you’re part of the corporate leadership

• What’s one thing the senior management team can do to provide you with more visibility into how our business is being run?

• What’s one thing the senior management team can do to more effectively communicate organizational changes to you?

• Please share your thoughts on the recent [organizational event/economic changes] and how you feel it has impacted life at [company name].

• Would you recommend [company name] to a friend or colleague as a great place to work? What’s #1 reason why or why not?

• What’s the one thing you like most about your job? What’s the one thing you like least?

If you’re a manager

• What’s one thing I can do to be a more effective manager?

• What are the top 2 blockers or distractions you have in your role that I can help clear for you?

• What key strengths do you have that you feel you are not leveraging in your current role?

• What’s one thing we can do to ensure our weekly team meetings run on time and stay focused?

• How can we best recognize success and performance in non-financial ways?

• What are 3 key characteristics you admire in a manager?

If you’re a team member or individual contributor

• What’s one thing we can do to communicate more effectively as a team?

• What’s one thing I can do to communicate more effectively with you?

• What qualities do you value most in a team mate?

• What’s one skill you feel I should focus on developing over the next month?

• What can do I to take my game to the next level in my role?

• What’s one suggestion you have for me to enhance the way I interact with customers?

In my next post I’ll share a whole bunch more function-based questions you can put into use right away!

The new model of selling software as a service is uniquely well suited to Canadians.

That’s a pretty bold statement coming from a country better known for meek apologies than declarations. Screw that. We’re throwing down the gauntlet: if you’re picturing Dudley Doright then you’re picturing the old Canada. Get with the times: Canadian startups are kicking ass at the new web.

Some might say we’re biased, but we’re pretty damn proud to be Canadians. That’s not a position you’ll hear a lot of our compatriots express — we’re a nation often defined but what we aren’t rather than what we are — but it’s the truth. We’ve always been known for things like human rights, peace keeping, and health care. Those are certainly feathers in the national cap and reasons in and of themselves to be proud, but they’re only one side of the story, especially for Canadian entrepreneurs.

Canadian companies have long sucked at sales and marketing. We have an extended history of building amazing technology companies that fail the test of building hype in markets. With a few notable exceptions (Cognos, Taleo, Workbrain, OpenText) – we have not built sales and marketing machines. The reasons are varied and very cultural. Founders don’t have deep personal networks in corporate America. We’re not naturally self-promotional; we cut down ‘tall-poppies”. We’re not aggressive enough and we’re too damn nice. We stink at, well, lying. All polite sizzle, no meaty steak (except, maybe, in Alberta). Those are fundamental truths and fundamental truths don’t change too easily. We might have been doomed to generations of technically strong startups finishing last in the business world, but luckily the rest of the world has caught up.

The web has changed how sales and marketing are done. Sales and marketing used to be about endless budgets, trade show booths the size of small mansions, whirlwind trips around the world, hunting elephantine clients, perks, tchotchkes, and boondoggles. It was top-down selling. You used to be able to get away with generous porcine lipstick application to cover up a crap product with brilliant marketing and sales. As long as your sales reps could dazzle a small group of buyers with flashy demos and dinners, you got the deals. Those days are gone.

Smart companies — including Rypple — are happily relocating their cosmetics, er, marketing budgets into product development. We would much rather build an honest, well loved, awesome app that we can be proud of, a position well supported by our customers. Some have even called this new model “Sexy Enterprise” software.  The time spent “marketing” is now time spent doing what Canadians do well.

It turns out that this new model of selling is particularly well suited to Canadians. Bottom up selling is organic, all about building wholesome relationships by being helpful and empathetic. It’s about making a great steak, and setting out samples for people to try and get value from. New marketing is about building trust because you’ve done something genuinely good and helpful for your buyers, not because you’ve sold them flashy vapour-wear.  Canadian web-marketers let their customers toot their horns and tell others how awesome they are via the social web. Bottom up selling is a collaborative model that means working closely with your end-users to design and build your software.

So, why is this new “selling” welll-suited to Canadians? Well, we’re natural collaborators and people who compromise to find win/win: a nation of peace keepers. We have extremely strong engineering schools, a very high broadband penetration rate, and are one of the most socially networked countries per capita. We know how to make friends over the web. It certainly doesn’t hurt that our cities are some of the most multicultural in the world. That cultural mix is awesome when you sell to the entire globe over the web. We’re also famously good at saying “sorry”, which is great customer service and an essential skill for all entrepreneurs. If you’re not breaking stuff, you’re not moving fast enough, so you better be prepared to break first, apologize later. Most importantly, our inability to bullshit people has turned into an asset. When people can try your software over the web and talk to their friends who have used it they don’t want to be fed bullshit anymore. They want people they trust. And Canadians, hell, we’re trustworthy!

The startup communities in Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo, and Montreal are killing it and thriving in this new environment. We’re going to kick ass and build some outstanding companies over the next five years. There’s already a whole world of software companies who started up in the Great White North — bet you’re surprised by at least one of the entries on this very incomplete list (in no specific order):

• Freshbooks
• Flickr
• Plenty of Fish
• Shopify
• SWIX
• Flowtown (honorary mention: go Dan Martell!)
• Hootsuite
• Clio
• Sprouter
• iloverewards
• Firmex
• PeerFX
• Radian6
• Unbounce
• Protus
• Idée/TinEye
• Tungle
• Jostle
• Dayforce
• Well.ca
• Kontagent
• Oanda
• Status.net
• Stumbled Upon
• Bumptop
• Locationary
• Get Satisfaction (honorary mention: Lane is Canadian
• NowPublic.com
• Kinaxis (check out their awesome Suitemates series — now that’s marketing for the web)
• BlueCat Networks
• Contractual.ly
• Polar Mobile
• CommunityLend
• TribeHR
• PostRank
• Mozilla (honorary mention: Mozilla has a big office in Toronto! With lots of awesome people in it!)
• Brainpark
• Learnhub
• Asigra
• Graboid
• Primal
• SnapSort
• ProductWiki
• Desire2Learn
• Wishabi
• TinyHippos
• Techvibes.com
• TeamPages.com
• Weddingful.com
• Miovision
• Tucows

(Did we miss your awesome Canadian startup? It’s not personal, honest! Let us know in the comments.)

Check out StartupNorth, StartupIndex, NextMontreal.com, and DigitalPuck.ca for many more and the latest news about all of them. The recent GROW conference, held in Vancouver, was a great showcase for a number of our hottest Canadian CEOs and leaders.

Most of you will remember the recent Winter Olympics, also hosted in beautiful Vancouver and Whistler. They were the kind of massive, International event that we’re not using to hosting or even finding ourselves in the limelight of. They were not without their controversy, to be sure, but they marked a sort of turning point in our search for a Canadian identity. A strange, somewhat foreign emotion bubbled up while watching the closing ceremonies: national pride. And it felt pretty good. Soon, Canadian will feel proud of a slew of incredibly innovative, entrepreneurial companies who kick ass at selling and marketing over the web.

What’s your story? Tell us why you think Canadians are (or aren’t!) kicking ass in the comments.

Dudley Doright from Wikipedia. Poppies by Keven Law. Sorry by Florian Boyd. Olympics by s.yume. All licensed under CC.

The Diverse Workplace

The data shows that employers need to move quickly to redefine an employment relationship that makes sense for the realities of today’s environment – before it is defined for them in ways that compromise their competitiveness and sustainability over time.

This new relationship must be grounded in three organizational dimensions:

• Fostering self reliance on the part of employees
• Creating greater personalization in how the employment deal is defined and delivered for various segments of the workforce.
• Building more flexibility and agility into the organization’s structure and processes, talent and reward programs, and the HR function itself.

Think of this new deal or employment value proposition (EVP) as the art of the possible. Creating a synthesis of both traditional and novel approaches to workforce management. Having the best of both worlds is wanted by most people. The overall framework provides a structure and focus for decision making.

Today’s workplace is truly diverse in ways few companies can ignore, whether they operate globally or in one location.

The full study is available on the Towers Watson site.

I’ve talked about why organizations should care about employee engagement and 3 tips to get yours back on the engagement train. Thing is, employee engagement is a tricky animal and most organizations see the early operational symptoms of an engagement issue before they see the greater problem.

Here at Rypple I’m fortunate enough to work with some pretty amazing organizations, all of whom come to us with the same end goal; to engage, motivate, and align their teams. However, the operational symptoms they come are sometimes different. To help you determine if you might have an engagement problem, here are 3 warning signs I see most often.

1. Your people say they want more feedback

I’d be a rich man if I had a nickel for every time I heard something like this:

“A recent organizational health survey revealed that our people want more feedback that we’re giving them now”.

This phenomenon is definitely not surprising. Changing workforce demographics means that organizations now have to contend with a larger number of GenY/millennial employees than ever before. These employees not only come with a greater sense of entitlement than previous generations, but they also think about feedback differently than they do. Like many of us, they crave smaller bits of actionable feedback they can put into practice quickly! Gone are the days where people are content with a once-a-year grade, rank, or score. Unfortunately many organizations struggle with providing their people with the volume and frequency of feedback they crave. As employee performance experts Zenger-Folkman point out in a recent study, if you aren’t in a position to help them get ongoing and continuous insights and coaching on their performance, they’ll find someone who can!

Solution: help them source as much feedback as they want as often as possible. You’ll never be able to provide it on your own.

2. Your people hate performance reviews

Hating performance reviews is certainly nothing new. In fact, in a previous post I summarized 3 key personal reasons why they simply to jive in the culture of many of today’s organization. However, the larger issue is that people simply don’t see them as an effective way to motivate and engage their teams (in fact, some believe doing them has the exact opposite effect).

Rebecca Doerr, HR Manager at Miovision, explained it the best when she said,

“We have a great culture and relationships within our people here. Our managers and our coworkers are our friends. Why would we sit down and have a once-a-year conversation where we act totally differently?!?”

If the goal of employee engagement is to bring your employees closer to the corporate bosom, to motivate, and align them with the corporate culture, then instituting a process that distances them from you is pretty much the worst thing you can do.

Solution: ditch the reviews and try promoting the social behaviors that drive performance (the topic of my next post!).

3. Your team isn’t hitting their goals

People can be challenged to achieve goals for a number of reasons; some operational, some motivational. Regardless, assuming their goals were somewhat reasonable to begin with, not hitting them can often be chalked up to lack of engagement and focus. Most of us actually want to excel in our jobs, but we sometimes struggle to focus on the specific actions and activities that will lead us to success.  The result: goals are missed, morale is deflated, and spiral of disengagement continues.

Solution: help your team stay focused and engaged by setting aside a few minutes each week to chat with them 1:1. Not only will they feel more connected to you and the business, but you’ll ensure the things they’re working on will help them hit their goals.

Hi everyone! I’m Steven Chung, a Computer Science/Business Option and Three-Year Geography student at the University of Waterloo. I just started a co-op term at Rypple. Yeah, my designation is mouthful, but I enjoy learning a variety of things. I’ve transferred a few times and know what it’s like to be unsure of what career path to take. After jumping around, I found an interest in design. I read about it almost every day — you can follow along on my Google Reader feed if you’re interested.

I learned a ton of stuff during my last co-op term at Xtreme Labs and I wanted to see what other start-ups are up to. Rypple attracted me because I read a blogTO post that featured Rypple. I also wanted to stay close to home, I can’t picture myself going to California permanently yet. Plus, the commute is surprisingly one of my better commutes from Markham.

During my first week at Rypple, I’ve been setting up my development environment, learning about the code, reading up on the frameworks and fixing bugs. I’ll be honest: they aren’t the most fun things in the world, but you gotta learn them somehow. Plus it’s been really interesting getting up speed on the app and how the dev team here works.

My goal for this term is to learn about website design. Whether you want to design a user interface, craft some code or do some marketing work, you’ll get to see many aspects of a startup during a co-op term. And with weekly one-on-one’s, I get to clearly express what I’d like to do. The team has shown clear motivation to move me towards my goals, starting with weekly user testing on Wednesdays.

To me, all of my six co-op placements had their own special thing. So far, I think Rypple’s magic comes from its people. The people at Rypple are the most enthusiastic co-workers I’ve had. You can always ask for help whenever you’re stuck and someone will be glad to lend a hand. Your concerns are taken into account whenever you speak up, which kinda makes sense considering that Rypple is about employee feedback software. The next best thing is the perks. You get free snacks and subsidized gym membership! I also get to work with three monitors in front of a window with a nice view. Weekly group lunches are awesome and we just got a PS3 on Friday.

And that’s my thoughts on working at Rypple so far! I look forward to seeing more and hopefully learn lots about design. Stay tuned for more updates.

Staying Competitive

We are at the earliest stages of a significant workplace transformation that will profoundly affect how businesses approach people management and how individuals approach the workplace.

The big question employers are thinking about is: Will companies face greater challenges as they compete for talent on a global basis?

In mature economies there are few signs this will be a widespread issue in the short term. In fact, Towers Watson tells us that the next “war for talent” is likely to be waged inside organizational walls. The picture is quite different in the emerging economies – competition for talent in the external market is already heating up.

More Key Findings

• People need security in good times as well as tough times.
• The challenge for employers not is to find creative ways to help people build their own sense of security.
• In a world made smaller by technology and a more homogeneous global consumer marketplace, we’re not seeing a corresponding homogeneity across workforce attitudes and behaviors.
• Employers’ need to be better understood workforce differences and create a more customized work experience to fully draw out people’s discretionary effort and performance potential.

The basic emotional connection people need to form their jobs may be harder to sustain in the virtual environment, but they are all more important given the instability prevalent in the rest of the work environment today.

Equipping employees with the capabilities and tools to secure their own futures will not only help retain and engage, but also eliminate the kind of personal stress that can affect productivity.

The full study is available on the Towers Watson site.

We’ve had a great run of our Rypple Leadership Series webinars, featuring the likes of Marshall Goldsmith and David Allen. September will continue that trend with an appearance by Brian Halligan, our much-anticipated host and the CEO of HubSpot.

Brian’s going to address Creating a Post-Modern Business Culture:

Mad Men has provoked many vibrant discussions among marketing thought leaders. What’s changed since the 1960s? What’s the same? Join HubSpot Founder and CEO Brian Halligan for a talk about how he has built a unique, post-modern business culture at HubSpot, inspired by a Mad Men-style thinking. Brian will discuss how he has applied lessons from inbound marketing strategies to foster a creative and productive work environment that emphasizes transparency, experimentation and innovation.

Join us for this free webinar on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 1:30 pm ET. You can register here. See you on the 15th!

This week’s Funny Friday comes from Ted Goff, accomplished editorial cartoonist. Ted was also the pen behind last week’s Too Busy for Performance.

Anxiety About the Future

Many employees are currently sacrificing advancement for job security.

The need for security and stability trumps everything else right now.  We can see this in the workplace today – young job seekers applying everywhere to find any job. The study shows that 76% of the respondents want a secure and stable position above anything else – and only about half think it’s achievable.

Most expressed doubts about their own ability to take responsibility for ensuring their futures and their long-term financial and physical health. Roughly half agreed that they were up to the task. The focus of people in the workforce is on practical aspects of the deal – the pay and flexibility in work arrangements. These effects are being shown in the most mature economies.

Only one in 10 of the respondents use social media for business purposes and just one-third think social media improves their productivity right now. Staying connected and in touch  in a more virtual workplace is increasingly important. Being connected with a network of people in your business allows you to stay aligned and effectively connected. In a world today where almost everything is on the web, using social media for business purposes can and will benefit us immensely.

More Key Stats Inside the Data

• Today, as many employees want a job for like as want to be “free agents”
• Half agree their senior leaders are effective at leading the company
• Just 38% think their leaders have a sincere interest in their well being.
• 47% think their leaders are trustworthy
• 61% question how well managers deal with poor performers.

The full study is available on the Towers Watson site.

Luckily, most people aren’t. The problem is that most of the systems we use everyday — everything from vacation tracking to traffic signals — assume that all of us are. There’s a pretty simple way to de-scumify, as you’ll see below. The missing ingredient? Trust.

Our first instinct when faced with the threat of losing control is to immediately tighten the control we have. Consider employer vacation policies. Most Western employers allocate their staff a fixed number of paid vacation weeks and a handful of sick days. The meter’s running, so you better save them up for something really special. As Dan Pink’s recent Telegraph article explains, there is a better way. Look no further than corporate-culture-poster-child Netflix and their ‘radical’ re-imagining of vacation policy. It’s radical in its simplicity: don’t track it. People use as much or as little as they want as long as their work is covered and their manager knows where they are. It empowers people, treats them like mature adults, and fosters a relationship of trust. I love this quote: “To paraphrase one Netflix executive, the company doesn’t have a clothing policy either. But – so far at least – nobody has shown up to work naked.”

Design for trust

The key is to design for trust instead of deviance. It means letting go of our distrust and innate fear of getting screwed over. That fear is pretty useful in the wild, especially since most things you don’t know are out to eat you, but it’s a lot less useful in the ‘civilized’ world.

eBay is a classic example: a system that wouldn’t even exist if Pierre Omidyar hadn’t designed for trust. Buyers and sellers in face-to-face auctions can exchange money for goods in a safe switcheroo. People doing that over the Internet in 1995 were either the most trusting people on the planet or in for a lifetime on the business end of the bait and switch. Omidyar designed eBay around the belief that the vast majority of people could be trusted and he was right. The inclusion of a reputation system based on data reported by fellow buyers and sellers closed the trust gap even further, resulting in a remarkably fraud-free environment given the potential for abuse.

Design for the center, solve for the edge

None of this is to say that people won’t abuse your system. We’re an opportunistic species and that means we’ll find loopholes you didn’t even know existed (especially if there’s money to be found). You need to realize that opportunistic behavior is the edge case — a problem to be solved rather than a critical design decision. Clay Shirky, author of the excellent Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, as summarized by Dan Pink:

…when we design systems that assume bad faith from the participants, and whose main purpose is to defend against that nasty behaviour, we often foster the very behaviour we’re trying to deter. People will push and push the limits of the formal rules, search for every available loophole, and look for ways to game the system when the defenders aren’t watching. By contrast, a structure of rules that assumes good faith can actually encourage that behaviour.

Traffic signals are one of the best examples of this behavior. Driving is not a higher intellect activity — we’ve all blearily buckled in at home and suddenly found ourselves at work with no real recollection of all the in-between bits — and so it’s not surprise that most traffic systems treat as as automatons who react only to red, yellow, and green. The very design of the system dehumanizes us, turning otherwise normal, caring people into road-rage infected demons. Witness the eternal battle of Mr. Walker and Mr. Wheeler:

Motor Mania (1950) — skip to 3:20 for the bit about traffic signals

It’s hard to imagine roads without signals, especially if you’ve grown up with a traffic light at every intersection. People feel the same way about vacation tracking — we do it because we’ve always done it — but it doesn’t have to be that way. Enter Hans Monderman, Dutch traffic engineer. If there’s one thing Monderman hates, it’s traffic signs. His core belief: Build roads that seem dangerous, and they’ll be safer. Speaking about one of his intersections, which lacks any form of traffic signs, Monderman says:

“Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can’t expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road.”

In the same way that removing vacation tracking re-humanized vacations, Hans has found a way to re-humanize drivers by designing for trust (see the excellent Wired article all about Hans, Roads Gone Wild).

The ‘perils’ of anonymity

Anonymous feedback was the first feature we ever built at Rypple. From day one people told us it wouldn’t work because (other) people wouldn’t be able to resist the siren song of anonymity and would surely use it for evil. Two years in, the jury has unanimously decided in favor of trust. We’ve never had a comment from any of our customers about abuse — only piles and piles of “love” and “awesome” and “culture changing”.

How do you design for trust? What are examples of systems designed for trust?

Photo of Pierre Omidyar by Joi Ito.