How do you future-proof your culture?

Summary: ServiceNow VP Stefani Okamoto — a former Microsoft “Manager Reimagined” leader — believes managers are the single most important lever for future-proofing company culture. In this interview, she shares how ServiceNow sets clear expectations for every manager: grow self, grow team, grow the business — in that order. For first-time millennial and gen-z managers navigating the age of uncertainty, the lesson is direct: great managers are made, not given the role. They are held accountable not just for what they achieve but how they achieve it, and measured on how they create a future for their people.

“Managers future-proof our culture.”

ServiceNow’s Stefani Okamoto had me at hello with this statement.

In this week’s Managing in the Age of Uncertainty newsletter, I’m sharing what I learned from my conversation with Stefani.

I walked away thinking of Stefani as corporate America’s “champion for managers” — because what ServiceNow is doing with managers is so unlike the endless news stories we read about the demise/overloading/confusion regarding the manager role. And so much of what ServiceNow is already doing for managers today is in-line with my research into the future of managing.

Stefani’s Street Cred: Microsoft

The story of how Stefani became a champion for manager excellence started as she graduated from college with a psychology degree. “I’m still using all that I learned, but just in a different capacity today,” she said.

She started at Microsoft in engineering as a software tester; it was her experience transitioning from an individual contributor to team manager and ultimately to leading the organization creating and delivering Microsoft Certification Exams that forged her career arc. What started as a journey to become a better manager herself helped her discover how to do it for entire organizations.

It’s always amazing when you learn about a company’s culture by the words it uses. So Stefani tells me early in her career that Microsoft had a saying: Your manager can make you or break you.

“I found a huge discrepancy in managers and have many lived experiences with managers who helped make me better and many who tried to break me. It helped me build the passion I have now. I always wanted to figure out a way to make myself and those managers around me better,” she said.

So she volunteered to take on people initiatives in engineering and started a “manager forum” where she and her manager peers could share best practices on people topics to learn from each other. The forum became so successful that eventually every manager in engineering at Microsoft attended each month.

The more she learned about managing, the more she also came to believe that people should become managers for the right reasons. So she also starts an “Aspiring Managers Forum” at Microsoft to help people learn about the expectations of managing and — I find this amazing — to help people decide if the path of managing is even right for them.

Naturally, I ask her what’s the deciding factor in determining whether someone should pursue a manager role or not: “I was lucky. I really wanted to be a manager. I knew that in college. I was intrigued by people as individuals, each with their own stories — and how to put them together to form this incredible team. You have to have that in you to be a manager. Do you find the most value in your IC work or do you get more satisfaction lifting others?”

The short story is Stefani found (and fought for) an important role on the team at Microsoft Global Learning and Development working on an initiative called “Manager Reimagined” as part of call for cultural change at Microsoft by its new CEO Satya Nadella.

Remember when I said you can learn about a company’s culture by the words it uses? So Stefani tells me Nadella’s catch phrase for how he envisioned the new Microsoft culture: From from a company of know-it-alls to a company of learn-it-alls.

The “Manager Reimagined” initiative recognized the criticality of managers in building the new culture at Microsoft — starting with having clear expectations for managers. Ultimately the expectations for managers came down to three words: Model, Coach, Care.

“I knew ‘care’ was not a weak word,” she said. “I knew it would make a difference and change the culture of Microsoft.”

And it did.

So much so that ServiceNow called.

Future Proof Your Culture: ServiceNow

I was lucky to work in senior management at Cisco during the go-go days; so I have perspective when I say Cisco’s growth brought some warts to the culture that later affected the company’s ability to respond when the growth slowed.

What’s so interesting about what I learned from Stefani is how ServiceNow sees its investment in managers as fundamental to its company strategy to stay on top and not let the pursuit of growth change the very culture that got it to the top — so it can stay on top.

“We having a saying inside ServiceNow: ‘Trust is lost in buckets,’” she said. “When you grow quickly that’s when cracks appear and behaviors come to be accepted as part of the growth.”

Back to the words a company uses. It’s at this point in our conversation that Stefani tells me that ServiceNow’s CEO Bill McDermott is invested in this idea: Managers future-proof our culture.

She had me at hello, for sure. I’ve spoken to more than 250 companies in the last decade about their cultures and — literally — I’ve never heard these words before.

This newsletter is about providing insights and ideas about how to manage better, especially for the next generation of talent. There’s so much to share about ServiceNow’s commitment to manager excellence that I can’t cover it all here. (But I will in a future newsletter.)

For managers reading, I think the key lesson or takeaway from ServiceNow is setting expectations for the role of a manager. It’s a good question to ask yourself: do I know what’s expected of my managers or me as a manager? Do those expectations include a set of values and a clear set of expected behaviors?

Stefani outlined the expectations set for managers at ServiceNow, and how they’ll be held accountable: Grow self, grow team, grow the business — in that order.

“It’s not just what business results you achieve as a manager,” she is clear to distinguish. “You’re accountable to how you achieve those goals with your team. Every manager in the company has a ‘how’ goal we measure. How are you creating a future for your people?”

A number of people who used to work for me now work at ServiceNow as managers. I can hear and see their excitement about the investment in them, especially the part about how you “show up.”

“If you ‘wow’ internally,” Stefani finishes. “You can wow your customers.”

Managers as strategy. How many companies in the world see their organizations through the lens of managers, I wonder? Does your organization? Do you?

Manager Thought of the Week

“Every manager role should require an interview.“

No manager role should ever just be given, Stefani told me. It’s a sign that an organization isn’t managing for the future. I know we’ve all been on teams where someone talented at something was given a team to manage to boost their title or salary. “Being a great individual contributor does not translate into being a great manager.” Amen, and thank you Stefani Okamoto, champion of manager excellence, for sharing your wisdom with the readers of Managing in the Age of Uncertainty.

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