In leadership, when you step up to a promotion to lead others, you may want to evaluate if “what got you here” to your current position is still the right skills that’ll “get you there” as the leader. Now, you become the coach, the mentor, the leader. Your mindset shifts from “knowing it all” to “teaching it all.”
Consciously think about the culture you want to create on your team. How you will drive that change?
When you take over the team, it’s an opportunity to redefine the culture. You will be leading people on a journey to the new vision you have for the team. Creating a set of tactics that are different actually demonstrates the shifting culture—such as celebrating the small wins.
You may also want to think about the rate of change your team can absorb. What are the specific new tactics? What are the so-called “bite-sized chews” your team can implement as part of their shift to the new culture you are consciously creating?
When you think about the Golden Rule, it has you in the center—doing unto others as you would have them do to you. Think about the Platinum Rule, where the arrows point outward and you are thinking about your audience—your team members—and what they are listening for. What messages do they want to hear? Think about the Golden Rule and combining it: the Golden Rule is treat others as you would like to be treated. The Platinum Rule is treat people how THEY want to be treated.
Are you trying to create a group of strategic generalists? Investment experts who can operationalize transformation? How do you define success for the team? How are you capturing and assessing the external patterns of what is happening out in the market? Are you comfortable making decisions in ambiguity with incomplete information? Is this a skill to develop in the team? Do you gravitate towards uncomfortable new things so that you are learning, as opposed to trying to do the easy things that are in your old comfort zone? As the leader, are you collaborating as a peer or leading as a general? Sometimes you have to be the general. Sometimes you need to be the cheerleader for your team—collaborating as partners and peers.
For your own professional effectiveness, you have to think about how you create more bandwidth. Are you making time to take care of yourself—your health, your fitness, your sleep, your family—as part of your own effectiveness and personal time management?
As a leader, your courage will need to increase. You must be decisive. Your humility will increase because you have a lot to learn. If you are humble, this means, “I have a lot to learn.” This means your team will feel listened to.
You also need to make sure that your team pushes you up and elevates you so that you can have time to strategically lead. If your team is not capable enough, and they constantly require and consume all your time, then they drag you down and you don’t have the mental and emotional cycles to think about the vision for the team and how to help the team elevate their capabilities.
If you think of the “high potentials” on your team—by definition—they free you up. They are not “net takers” of your time. Your low performers are net takers. You need to be thoughtful as you assess the mix of executives underneath you. You need to be intentional in how you construct the team. You want to create alignment around the same goals, but you do not want everyone to think in the same way. You want diversity of thought and ideas. Nobody has a monopoly on all the smart ideas.
You need to develop a strategic mindset to look around the corner.
You want your team to be a mosaic of different people. You need to orchestrate this and accept the fact that some of your team members may spike high in different areas. You might have team members who spike high in external customer/partner market relations. You may have team members that spike high in operational excellence. You may have team members who spike high in detailed, thoughtful analytics and diligence. When you construct a whole team, it will be a mosaic of different superpowers. You want to help everybody realize their potential while putting enough tension into the system.
Don’t hire people that are all just like you. You want to draw on the historic strength and success of everybody’s thinking while also opening the creative doors for some innovative and disruptive thinking. As the leader, you will have to monitor the balance to choose the right time to challenge your team members and the right time to support them.
Just as you will build your personal network and professional network intentionally, the same is true for your team. Encourage your team to develop their networks. Additionally, just as you will build a Vision for your team and a “Purpose”, you will want to be sure that you as the leader are also spending time on the things where You are passionate and where you have your own superpowers.
You will want to have specific values—such as always being candid. Always come forward when you need help and have problems. It’s OK to be vulnerable. There’s no punishment for making mistakes.
If there’s bad news, bring it right away. Bad news is a meal that should always be served hot. Bad news given too late—and hiding things—is something that should be discouraged because there’s no opportunity to recover or remediate. Bad news is good if you serve it hot. You can’t change it.
Deliberation and decisiveness are somewhat opposing concepts, but are critical to blend. You need to make decisions. It’s OK if they are not right—if you course-correct quickly. Being indecisive at a certain point is a decision. The market moves forward.
One of my favorite new acronyms is G.S.D. (Get Shit Done).
Think of your favorite word. Mine is courage. What is yours? What is the favorite word of everyone on your team?
Who inspires you? Who inspires them?
Together, let’s build an extraordinary version of you as the leader. You are the force multiplier to maximize the talents on your team—(or make the decisions about where people stand and where they don’t)—have the courage to forward build when necessary. Have the candor to coach those that have an opportunity to improve and recognize those who may be a better fit in a different spot.
It’s critical to always have empathy, vulnerability, and be an active listener. If your team knows you care about them, they will care about you—and they will follow you into the burning building of change and uncertainty.
Together, you will be able to cohere and weave a fabric of extraordinary growth and incredibly satisfying results.
In Summary:
The FIP is a “Formerly Important Person”. This person is often a CEO who has just left their role where they were an imperial CEO. A leader who didn’t have high EQ or whose role enabled their ego to be unchecked for too long.
While this FIP is an outlier example, many of us have experienced a version of this behavioral phenomenon.
I’m speaking about what you do when you have someone on the board who’s used to being in command and control. The FIP is used to a hierarchical nature where anything he/she says is considered absolute/incontrovertible and should be immediately acted on. It is very hard for the Formerly Important Person to make the transition to learn how to be a good board member.
Entrepreneur, board member and corporate governance expert, not to mention a former three-time CEO, Betsy Atkins is a very smart, very accomplished, very successful woman. She shares her life lessons with Susan Armstrong.
As directors think through the learnable takeaways from the collapse of SVB, there are a couple of very clear learnings for me, and I am sure for all of us.
We all need to spend more time on enterprise risk management.
Identify the top 5 biggest existentialist risks to your business.
Public companies are subject to significant regulation and, as such, do ERM risk reviews in their audit committee and look to management to propose mitigations for each risk.
Private companies are no subject to the same regulation and, as such, often do not do enterprise risk management exercises.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a catalyst for huge change in the way we all live and work. Many companies had to quickly pivot to a work from home model. This resulted in an acceleration of technology adoption / digital transformation by 5-10 years.
Before 2020, the US was experiencing a 40-year decline in entrepreneurship. The pandemic has resulted in a huge entrepreneurial boom. From 2019 to 2020 the number of new businesses created grew by 24%.
Each and every one of us has a unique set of experiences, skills, and values that shape how we approach the world in which we live and work—how we operate both personally and professionally. That is what you want to communicate in creating and promoting your personal brand when you are branding yourself to try to join for your first board of directors.
As a director who has often come in after a major corporate crisis to clean up and reinvigorate the board. I share a few thoughts. After a crises boards realize they need to embrace change to mitigate further corporate vulnerability. I think it’s time for us to go “back to basics” and learn from the Southwest catastrophe and visit our crises management approach.
Reciprocity is an important concept in all aspects of life, but it’s one that is often undervalued, overlooked, or scorned in the context of business. However, many people, including us, have found a great degree of success in their careers by using reciprocity both for their own benefit and the benefit of others.
Helping and doing favors or good deeds is one of the basic teachings we learned as children: “Do to others what you would have them do to you.” Doing good deeds has also been proven to release endorphins, which means these acts of charity and kindness make you feel good. In fact, perpetually kind people have 23% less cortisol (the stress hormone) and age slower than the average population.
The role of the board has expanded significantly from the 1970’s traditionally less engaged oversight model where directors provided “rubber stamping” of management recommendations. A modern board must be a competitive asset and an accelerant for the business.
Directors must not only perform oversight, but they must add a perspective that helps move the company forward.
As a new director, you may be wondering how you can quickly come up the learning curve so you can begin contributing and adding value.
Leading company’s in a recession requires grit, perseverance, and determination coupled with IQ/EQ and real time problem solving skills.
As boards look to coach their CEOs and executive leadership teams, I share a few practical / actionable ideas along with a philosophy and approach for consideration:
In times of great uncertainty, it is very important for CEOs and leadership teams to be present, in person, in front of employees.
I believe it is valuable that the CEO is spending a very significant amount of time sharing the vision for the future with employees across geographies and regions.
Layoffs / financial austerity and restructuring are part of the tools many companies will use. Employees need the reassurance they are part of the go forward team.
Employees need to hear the vision and what to expect going forward as the CEO shares the plan and more importantly on the EQ soft side, galvanizes the company around the company’s mission and creates cultural connectedness.
In these difficult times, employees look for positive points of reassurance.
Recognize your employees who are high performing in these difficult times. Employees want to know they are appreciated, valued and that as they tighten their belts and lean in to do the really hard work of getting through this difficult cycle. Find ways to celebrate and recognize incremental small achievements as well as big ones. Perhaps there is a new product feature being released, or a metric being achieved. Think about how you can more regularly celebrate the team’s achievement and recognize your top performers.
On the practical side, creating morale and esprit de corps is key.
Having regular all-hands meetings as well as out in the field in person meetings is very impactful. Think of how you engaged with your team in the early days of Covid.
You may also consider, are there any inspirational motivational outside speakers that can be part of a rotation on all hand’s meetings.
At Wynn ResortsWYNN the company created deeply emotive and powerful internal videos celebrating the Wynn culture.
These videos were very effective, and they showed the wide range of diverse people and diverse roles and functions across the organization capturing the individuals authentic and genuine feelings creating a esprit de corps reinforcing what is special about your culture. Perhaps there are similar video artifacts you can create.
Employee engagement is key to getting through this tough cycle. Look at delegating some authority to managers and look at giving them a budget so they can give small recognition awards to their team members. Small things can range from hats, gift cards etc., but delegating the authority to the manager and giving them a budget is very effective.
Not everyone on the team has the skills, background and resilience to handle both the growth cycle and the current recession cycle.
You may need to make the hard choices of who is not going to make it through the recession cycle.
You need the team members who are motivated for the long term and fired up to go through this tough time.
You may want to ask management to review the employees with the lens of who are the right people for this cycle and to make the hard call of who will not make it early.
Another important thing to ask your CEO and leadership team is to identify the top performers who really “move the needle”. This would be a time to lock them in with differentiated equity and long-term incentives.
Those that are your most important “life boat picks,” should be rewarded and retained in a differentiated way.
Customer Acquisition:
When looking at functional groups in the company in a recessionary cycle, one of the learnings that is often cited from other downturns is the importance of customer acquisition and retention.
I think it is worth doing a very deep dive on some of the actual very small tactical things that the best sales leaders like Steve Benson have identified:
It is valuable to look at how you would forward plan the challenges your CROCRO and sales team will be facing in this bad economy, here are some examples from the software industry:
1. Great leaders face a crises and look reality in the eye. In times of great change you need to be action oriented and get an accurate picture of what challenges you think your company will face. Build a plan. Have a positive outlook, involve the team and be transparent about the action plan going forward. Identify your most successful reps and find out their customized playbook they are using. They have figured out how to crack the code. Make that rep the hero and teach those behaviors across the organization.
2. Sales leadership must be very close to every deal and be sure it is getting to the key decision makers. Sales leadership often will need to come in and assist to get the big deals closed.
3. Sales reps will need coaching in the down economy. There are new skills you need to help the team acquire. Assess if your sales leader is spending at least 50% of their time coaching the teams and doing in person joint calls.
4. Maniacally looking at the lead generation and qualified leads in all three sections of the funnel are key. (Understand if your deals are stalling at the middle of the funnel or at the end).
5. Buyers will negotiate tougher terms. Deals may get stuck and not close. It will be important to qualify if the buyer is actually authorized to go forward or if there is a companywide freeze. Deep focus on the sales operations and forecast KPIs so you are sure deals are really progressing to close.
6. Decide if you should change your commission plan. In this time of duress do you want to compensate on revenue, or do you want to compensate on margin? Historically in the software industry reps are paid on revenue. Do you want to consider paying them on profit / margin?
7. Look at upskilling your sales organization on negotiating and retrain the sales organization to sell the benefits of the solution. Plan ahead to defend your margins.
8. Your competitors may well become desperate and do significantly deeper discounting. Some companies will be under such duress they may liquidate inventory. Expect that there will be pressure to give away free consulting or other valuable products/services steal your customers.
In an ideal world you would hope to do one very deep layoff rather than multiple cuts. Given that this recession is new and uncharted for many companies you may be going through the pain of more than one cut. The board should consider the wisdom of encouraging management to do the tough planning to aim for one big cut and to try to avoid doing many frequent small cuts.
I hope reading this list has spurred you to your own tactical learnings and experiences. Think about applying this tactical lens to other functional areas and distilling down the most specific tactical decisions that can be made to move the company from its peacetime growth at all costs cycle to a wartime cash conversation profitability footing.
There is a lot of wisdom your friends, colleagues and board members who have been through cycles can share.
Think about allocating time in your next board meeting for a discussion about what learnings each board member has to contribute having lived through different recessionary cycles. You’ll energize your board by asking them to engage. You’ll be surprised by the vibrancy of the discussion as everyone collaborates to help iterate on which experiences and learnings are most appropriate for your company.