This is a companion to Hang It on the Wall, which explains the “what” and “why” of a system for encouraging and recognizing employees’ meaningful work. Below is the “how.”
As the leader of a team or larger organization, you are key to the success of Hang It on the Wall. You need to communicate that the initiative matters to you, then reinforce that with your actions. You will do yourself and your people a disservice if you end up participating less than 100% due to “other priorities.” So before proceeding, read what the process entails below and make sure you can see it through.
Also, you need to actually want to hear employees’ stories and respond to them in a positive way. If that seems like a chore, abort now. If it’s something you’d go out of your way to do, read on.
One other thing: You need to have your own story, and it needs to be good because you are modeling what good looks like: engaging, within the time limit, and clear about why the experience mattered. I provide an example story below as part of the example announcement email. Your story does not need to be as “big” as that one. As a contrast, one year I did a story about a slog to fix a business process that was a constant irritant but small enough that people just lived with it. Only after getting that rock out of our shoe did we realize how much better things were.
My career was mostly in product management and product marketing organizations in Internet software companies. In that context, I never encountered a job function or level that couldn’t participate in Hang It on the Wall. I suspect any organization oriented around knowledge work will find the same. Outside that, you will need to judge whether your situation fits. The simple question to ask yourself is whether it’s a reasonable expectation for every person in your org to be able to do something special relative to their job function over the course of a year. “Special” need not mean amazing or massively impactful; something positive beyond the role’s norm is all that’s needed. The blog post gives many examples.
Group size affects how you organize Hang It on the Wall meetings. If your team is very small, like fewer than five people, consider joining with a few other teams of similar size. Roughly 15 stories is a good number for a single meeting. Agree on who will run the meeting and whether that person or each employee’s manager will comment after each story.
The upper limit is defined by how many stories you, the leader, can handle. For example, if your org has 30 people total, no problem. I’d recommend you do two one-hour Hang It on the Wall meetings, with all 30 people present, 15 stories per meeting. You can do a single two-hour meeting, but I’ve found “story fatigue” (for you and the attendees) starts setting in after about 20 in one sitting.
If you have 60 total people, I’d recommend splitting into two groups of 30, each with two meetings. You lead all four meetings, but each group attends only their meetings. Record the meetings so people in Group A can listen to Group B’s stories and vice versa.
How far you can scale up depends on your own level of commitment. I once did it for an org of something like 150 people. And yes, that meant interspersing ten meetings across my schedule for a week. I doubt I could have taken it much further than that.
If you have even more people, consider a hierarchical model: you’d do a Hang It on the Wall meeting with your directs, and they’d be the leaders for meetings with their orgs. This is a concept I haven’t tried, so it is speculative. Without a culture of Hang It on the Wall already established, cold-starting a hierarchical model could be risky. It would rely on all the leaders being committed and handling their meetings well. But if you trust your leaders to take it seriously, maybe it could fly.
Hang It on the Wall makes sense as an annual thing. A year is enough time for everyone to have done something worth sharing, as well as enough time between meetings to keep them special. The end of the calendar year is a natural time, so I always targeted mid-December for the meeting(s). If you have reason to choose another time of the year, feel free.
Roughly six weeks before your proposed meeting date(s), discuss the concept with your managers. I’ll cover this further in “Managers’ Role” below.
Several weeks before the meeting(s), send an announcement email to everyone in your org and also make an announcement at an all-hands for your org. This should give plenty of notice so people can choose a story, make it clear, and practice telling it within two minutes. Managers can help, especially when someone is having trouble identifying a topic or deciding which details to include. The goal is a meaningful story in the employee’s own voice.
The first year, your announcements are particularly important because they will be all that people have to go on. The following year, your org will already understand the concept, so your announcements will serve more as reminders than introductions. Once Hang It on the Wall is established, mention it in your org’s new-hire onboarding process, so new employees are aware.
If you have managers reporting to you, share the concept and timeline of Hang It on the Wall with them first. If the organization has not done it before, do not just declare, “We’re doing this, and here’s your role.” Instead, float the concept and see what your managers think. It’s possible there’s something they know about your org that could raise legitimate concerns. Hear those out. Only if your managers are actually on board (as opposed to yes-ing you) should you proceed. If your managers are not themselves enthusiastic, it will show to their employees and undermine the initiative.
In addition to creating their own stories, the main thing managers need to do is help their employees prepare. That means making sure each employee understands the exercise, picks a good topic, and creates a compelling story. Managers should know that if they’re struggling to help an employee, you can help them or the employee directly. Managers should also help employees avoid sharing numbers or other information that isn’t appropriate for the full audience, including anyone who will have access to the recording. Finally, once Hang It on the Wall is established, managers should be on the lookout throughout the year for ways to give employees an opportunity that could be Hang It on the Wall worthy.
Here is an example announcement email.
From: Steve Krause
To: SK Org
Subject: Prep for 12/19 SK Org All-HandsWe will have a special SK Org All-Hands on Wednesday, December 19th, featuring YOU!
I’d like you each to share a story of something you did this year at work that was particularly meaningful to you. Feel free to interpret “meaningful” however you wish: an impact on the business, helping a customer or a colleague, a moment of professional growth, a hang-it-on-the-wall deliverable, or whatever else made you feel a special satisfaction.
You will have a minimum of one minute and a maximum of two minutes. That should be about 150 to 300 words. If you want to use visuals, you can.
Please take time to prepare beforehand. Ask yourself, how can I best communicate my story? Tell us the situation, what you did, and why it mattered to you. Practice it, if for no other reason than to verify it comfortably fits between one and two minutes. I will have a timer! : )
I have provided an example below, from my Oracle days. It clocks in at two minutes. You can do anywhere between that length and half that length. And don’t worry about your topic seeming important enough. Small things can be meaningful as well. It’s not a competition. We’re doing this for each other, not for any kind of evaluation.
If you have questions or would like inspiration for how to tell your story, please let your manager or me know. We are happy to help.
-Steve
Rising to the “Crazy Demo” Occasion
I’ve been part of many analyst bake-offs, but a prominent firm’s new report on marketing clouds was going to be different. Normally, we got demo scenarios in advance and prepared accordingly. But when we asked the analyst which scenarios to prepare for, he said, “I’m not telling.” We would discover them live.
The sales engineers (SEs) had a collective pit in their stomachs. There were four SEs, each representing a different marketing cloud product, plus me. The products had come from separate acquisitions and were only loosely integrated. Just getting a prepared demo to work cleanly was hard. Improvising a multi-product demo on the fly was uncharted territory.
So we created a bootcamp for ourselves. Across several long prep sessions, I’d call out various integration scenarios and use cases. At first, there was a lot of confusion, breakage, and frustration. But as the SEs practiced handing off to each other in every different way, they learned to improvise workflows across products.
On demo day, the analyst apologized for the “crazy demo hoops.” He asked for many scenarios. Most we’d practiced, but some I hadn’t anticipated. I narrated while the SEs made their moves. Around the conference room, we exchanged hand signals and muted the speakerphone as someone yelled, “I got this!”
It felt like musicians finding the groove. Somehow, we showed everything he asked for.
The instant the WebEx disconnected, a spontaneous “YEAH!” erupted from everyone. One of the SEs was so pumped she gave me a high five that almost took my arm off.
We later heard from the analyst that no other vendor came close to fulfilling his requests like we did; the others repeatedly failed or fell back on canned demos.
It was a great win. We had demonstrated our products’ “better together” promise by working better together ourselves.
To the extent possible, have the meeting or meetings in person. A Hang It on the Wall meeting will bring about connection, gratitude, and support among your people—all of which are amplified when the people are in the same room rather than in little windows on a screen. If you will be doing multiple meetings, it’s worth considering grouping people by location rather than by team if this will result in much greater in-person attendance per meeting.
If some people are remote, request cameras on and no running commentary in the chat. Everyone should be focused on what people are saying, not what people are messaging about what people are saying. I’ll touch on this more generally below, about people wanting to chip in their own thoughts and praise.
In the meeting invite:
A few days before the meeting, send a brief reminder email, saying how you’re looking forward to it. Invite people with last-minute questions to email or DM their manager or you. Ask people with visuals to send them ahead of time to you or your assistant so they can be consolidated to avoid fumbling among screen-shares.
At each meeting, you are the meeting leader. Your two main roles are keeping the meeting moving along and, after each story, making brief comments (30-second target, one-minute max).
I always used a timer that would stay silent for two minutes, then beep. The fact that people knew there would be a timer was enough to keep them disciplined. And in cases where the timer actually beeped at two minutes, people knew to wrap up quickly. This kept the momentum going and prevented people from rambling.
After each story, highlight something you especially liked. It could be an aspect of what the person said or how well they said it. Where it makes sense, amplify the significance of the story by connecting it to other things going on in the business or relating it to more general principles. For example, after a story about sunsetting a complex analytics module, I observed that in enterprise software, successfully retiring functionality is one of the most underappreciated kinds of projects. While it is happening, it just seems like a cost, but when it’s done, the positive impact from not needing to constantly prop up sagging functionality is often greater than the impact of most projects for adding functionality.
Other people may want to chip in their own thoughts. Head this off by encouraging people to talk to or message the speaker after the meeting, when everyone is back on devices. Otherwise, if it’s open season on comments, you’ll lose control of the meeting’s timing, which could cause some people to not get their chance to speak; and you’ll get into situations where one story has a lot of chip-ins and others have none. You want to keep things consistent.
Finally, you need to be 100% focused on the meeting. There is nothing worse for an employee than to share something that really mattered to them while seeing that you are not paying attention. So allow yourself no distractions. This is your chance to connect with each person and to show that what mattered to them matters to you.
Send a short email after the meeting, thanking everyone for their contributions. Send a link to the recording. Don’t try to summarize the content. Just find your own way to bring closure to the process. In my experience, people will be feeling very positive, so it’s a moment for you to add a light final touch.
Remind them that this isn’t a competition for biggest or best story. There isn’t a high bar to clear. It just needs to be something meaningful to the employee. By that standard, I’ve yet to encounter anyone who truly had no story to tell. It may require a little exploration with you or the employee’s manager, but go back to the blog post; it has many examples.
I would not recommend making the exercise optional. You are establishing a part of your culture. It is for everyone.
Also, a purpose of the exercise is to help people get better at communicating about their work. So if someone says they don’t want to do it because they’re not confident in their communication skills, help them understand that (1) it’s not a competition, (2) everyone realizes that people are at different levels, and (3) it’s a safe opportunity to get better at speaking in front of others because everyone wants to hear from and cheer for each other.
If someone says they don’t have time, it’s the manager’s job to help them make time. It is a one- to two-minute story. People have several weeks’ notice. That should be solvable.
If someone has an unavoidable conflict and can’t attend another session, invite them to tell their story to their manager and, at a convenient time, to you.
Hang It on the Wall is about inclusion, so have them tell a story of something they did at their last job (or at school if that’s where they’re coming from). The content may not relate to the work of your org, but it will still say something about the person.
Two things: (1) Avoid topics that might involve sensitive information that would not normally be shared in a larger group. (2) Skip experiences from company-sponsored volunteering, like a community service day. Those experiences are commendable and often deeply meaningful, but Hang It on the Wall is about doing something special in one’s job, and volunteer time is, by design, time away from the normal job.
Feel free to contact me.