Category: Leadership

Back in 2004 I was at a prospective customer’s office in Buckhead down by the old Roxy Theater pitching our product with my lead developer. As an excited entrepreneur I was talked a mile a minute going through the minutia of every little feature in the application. The lead developer, proud of his creation, would answer some of their more detailed questions and I would interject with my spin on the response. This continued throughout the meeting and by the end I was proud of myself for answering all their questions. Little did I know me speaking over the developer and cutting him off was disrespectful and poor leadership.

Later in the week the developer approached me and told me what I had done and how frustrated he was with me. Wow, it was a big wake-up call for my lack of respect and leadership. From my point of view I was passionate about the product and wanted everyone to know how much I loved it. I was a poor leader. I didn’t respect his contributions and his passion for our product. I quickly apologized for what I had done and learned a lesson that I still keep with me to this day.

Leadership is not speaking over others. Leadership is being respectful and valuing the contribution from team members. When a team member speaks now, especially in front of a client, and I have the urge to say something that I think might sound a tad better, I bite my tongue and remember that everyone needs to contribute, not just me.

What else? What are your thoughts on leadership and letting everyone speak?

At last week’s EO Strategy Summit we spent time on a number of topics and one of the areas was around mission, vision, and values. EO does a great job with these and should be commended. Here’s a definition of each and EO’s position:

• Mission – purpose, reason for being, the “why”
  EO mission:  Engage leading entrepreneurs to learn and grow.
• Vision – where we’re going, aspirations
  EO vision: To build the world’s most influential community of entrepreneurs.
• Values – non-negotiable rules of the road
  EO values:
  Boldly Go! – Bet on your own abilities
  Thirst for Learning – Be a student of opportunity
  Make a Mark – Leave a legacy
  Trust and Respect – Build a safe haven for learning and growth
  Cool – Create, seek out, and celebrate once-in-a-lifetime experiences

Mission, vision, and values are important and I recommend entrepreneurs spend time working on them for their startup.
What else? What do you think of mission, vision, and values?

Recently I was meeting with an entrepreneur (I usually talk with 5+ in a given week) and we ended up talking about what our companies do well and what areas we’re lacking. After talking about our companies, I later began to think personally about my individual strengths not unlike the Unique Ability question.

Here’s what I think I’m good at as an entrepreneur:

1. Building a strong corporate culture – it took me many years to appreciate the value of this but now I hold it as the most important thing I do in my company
2. Getting stuff done – this might seem cheesy but I don’t get bogged down by all the details or unknowns necessary to make a decision and I can figure out what works and doesn’t work quickly
3. Translating between the business and technical world – communicating with business people and technical people comes naturally to me and I help connect the two

Notice I didn’t say my strengths were raising money, writing code, or selling software. Early on I would have said my strengths were working crazy hard, not having fear, and being blissfully ignorant but I didn’t really understand what it takes for a successful startup. Hopefully these three entrepreneurial strengths shed some light on what I’ve found to be valuable to me.

What else? What are your top three personal entrepreneurial strengths?

Talking with many entrepreneurs I get a sense that too many of them are managing too much to an arbitrary number and not enough to the opportunity at hand. Some categories of numbers I’ve heard:

• Company value at time of exit
• % of revenue allocated to sales, marketing, or some other function
• % difference from projected budget
• Required cost to acquire a customer

Entrepreneurs I talk to are most often at the idea or seed stage and don’t have enough operating history or scale to know what their business will become. There’s no crystal ball. I believe it’s much more important to build an agile, data-driven company that stays close to the customer as opposed to correctly guessing in advance the value of a number. Startups are about testing hypotheses, learning, making changes, and doing it all over again. Learning quickly is much more important than guessing perfectly.

What else? What are some other examples of managing to a number instead of an opportunity?

Curiously, I know an entrepreneur just starting out that believes it’s best to delegate everything even with two employees and a small amount of angel funding. To him, it’s imperative that he always be available to answer questions and act as traffic manager for the different projects in motion. That’s right: with no customers, no product launched, and no business yet being an entrepreneur is about managing and not doing to him.

I don’t know about you but the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve met are the kind of guys and gals that roll up their sleeves and make stuff happen. It’s in their blood — they can’t help but be productive.

Here’s another aspect of entrepreneurship that isn’t talked about: you should learn enough yourself to be dangerous so that you can manage someone else doing it. How many times have you heard a sales rep complain that the sales manager doesn’t know what they are doing because they’ve haven’t been in sales themselves? How about software engineers complaining that management doesn’t understand technology? When you learn it, and especially if you master it, you become a much better manager of it.

Entrepreneurs are often a jack of all trades, master of one (not none) type person. Being able to pick up a variety of different skills so that you can make better decisions and be a better manager helps out tremendously. Entrepreneurs often have one thing they’re good at and spend a decent percentage of their time doing it (e.g. sales, marketing, product management, engineering, etc). Now, you should still play to your strengths and not spend too much time on your weaknesses (your unique ability). My recommendation is to get dirty and learn as much as you can. You’ll be better off for it.

What else? What other thoughts do you have on learning stuff so you can manage others doing it?

In thinking about startups, the ability to learn quickly and make decisions fast are two of the most important attributes of success. Whenever a colleague of mine stops by to tell me about a meeting, call, or event, my favorite question to ask is: what did you learn. The idea is that, yes, outcomes and results are critical, but learning from the experience is equally important.

A culture of learning, as opposed to purely minimizing mistakes and CYA, provides these benefits:

• Team members are encouraged to experiment without fear of reprimand
• Iterations are done quickly with the goal to learn and make another decision, as opposed to extensive planning to make the perfect decision absent information (perfect is the enemy of good)
• Focuses internal hiring on people that are smart and get’s things done as opposed to exclusively requiring ones with extensive experience

My recommendation is to develop a culture of learning and incorporate it throughout the startup.

What else? How important is learning to a startup?

After talking with several technology startups in town I realized that some of our core strategies, which I believed most others would employ, are in fact fairly unusual. Of course, each company has their own strategy and approach, and it’s important to experiment. Here are a few items we do that aren’t as common:

• Spend 1/3 of our sales time making cold calls
• Provide a LCD scoreboard in our lobby with our quarterly goals including financial info
• Require that all potential employees write a two page essay as part of the process (five short answer questions)
• Conduct Quarterly Check-ins where we answer four quick questions about ourselves (what did you do, what are you going to do, how can you improve, and how are you following the values)

I’m sure there are additional unique items we do on a regular basis but this is a good start. My recommendation is to continually try new initiatives, keep the ones that are working, and throw out the ones that are stale.

What else? What are some core strategies you employ that are unique?

One of the best practices that took me several years to learn is that of repetition. I always assumed that I’d only need to say something once and that was it. It isn’t that people don’t hear or understand it but rather that there are so many things going on that create noise.

Here are a few tips around repetition:

• More important items need to be repeated more often (e.g. core values, corporate culture tenants, etc)
• Different methods of communication like in-person, email, and voice should be employed to resonate with different team members
• Only after you’re annoyed with repeating something so many times have you actually started to build recall in the minds of your people

Repetition doesn’t come naturally to me but I’ve found it to be critical to reinforce key messages.

What else? What other thoughts do you have about repetition as a leadership tactic?

With the new year right around the corner it’s time to start thinking about New Year’s Resolutions and goals for 2011. For me, I like to create goals in several buckets: family, personal, professional, and community. Some of my goals are specific (e.g. X amount of revenue) and some of my goals are really habits (e.g. exercise twice a week).

Here are a few previous posts to get you thinking about goals for 2011:

• Knock Three Annual Goals Out of the Park
• My Goal to be on the Inc. 500
• Thinking About the Three Year Goal
• 3 Year Life Plan
• Some Personal Life Goals
• Goal Setting
• SMART Goals
• Company-wide Goals and Tracking

What are your goals for the new year?

One aspect of growing a company that I didn’t consider 10 years ago is building a leadership pipeline. The idea behind a leadership pipeline is that a startup can only grow as fast as its people grow and managers need to grow with the business. Think about the following:

• Co-founders working together
• Managing direct reports
• Managing managers of direct reports
• Managing executives who are managing managers of direct reports
• Managing executives who are managing managers of managers of direct reports

So, the goal is to promote from within whenever possible, so some front-line employees need to be groomed into managers, and then managers need to be groomed to be managers of managers or executives, and so on. My recommendation is to consider building a leadership pipeline as your startup grows.

What else? What other considerations do you have about a leadership pipeline?