Founder Leadership-Style

Setting Desires & Expectations

Leadership is difficult these days. Trying to get everyone on the same mission and achieving goals is hard. But there are a few things you can do to make it easier, here are my thoughts on the subject.

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Learning From The Past To Create The Future

Throughout my career, I have worked for numerous types of people who took leadership, processes, outcomes, and values from different perspectives. Some of them I agreed with, others I didn't.

I've always found it difficult to answer the question, what do you want?

In most of the experiences I've gone through, it was easier to explain the things I didn't want and through the process of elimination, understand what I did.

What I Didn't Want From A Leader

I've worked at companies where it was all about outcomes, no matter the costs or process in which you achieved them, as long as you closed deals.

I've worked for companies that operated like democracies where everyone had a voice but the group could never agree. The companies never achieved any big goals or strides in innovation because it was being pulled in 100 different directions with hurt feelings when their ideas weren't chosen.

I've also worked at organizations where the owner would yell at people, thinking this was motivating them, and used force and fear to make things happen.

I always learned from these experiences and told myself I wouldn't be like this if I owned a company.

What I Expect As A Leader

Expanding on the ideals above, it is important to have clear expectations about how you want to work. These expectations inevitably create the culture and environment for not only those you are leading but also the customers you work with.

Outcomes Without Consequences

Being outcomes and goals oriented has always been a motivating factor when making decisions. But to be clear, I don't think it should be at any cost.

Too many people want to get rich quickly, and in return, are willing to do anything to achieve success. I believe, if you win that way, you will always know that the only way you won was because you did something that wasn't right and I wouldn't want that weighing on my conscious for the rest of my life.

Democracies VS Effective Leadership

Democracies never made sense to me, especially living in America or working in an organization that's large or wanting to grow fast, there are too many people with different opinions and ways to achieve a particular outcome.

Progress only happens when there is clarity.

If you're operating by democracy, where everyone has an opinion on how things will be done, there will always be people who express an opinion but get outweighed by the majority, usually resulting in them checking out or becoming hostile towards the majority.

Now, I am not saying, as the owner, you need to be a dictator and rule over those you lead. Still, there is a fine line between being an effective leader who honors the opinions of those they work with and gives validation to those working hard versus someone who wants to control everything.

Affirmations & Gratitude

If you think about it, most employees want to be affirmed that who they are and what they are doing matters. Whether that be by giving them the opportunity of owning a part of the plan or affirming them for executing an existing one, that is up to you as the owner, but you need to pick one and make sure it happens.

Someone Needs To Take The Lead & Responsibility

When looking back on my career, the most confusion came when the company acted like the entire department was a democracy and would get the opinions of everyone but then leadership never made an executive decision as to what the group was doing and supposed to focus on.

You then end up thinking, well maybe we are going to do all of this, which then either leads to burnout or certain situations where you either had conflicting ideas or did not have enough budget, and then teams are left wondering what to cut or hack to get it done but then it's not good because it wasn't given adequate resources.

Creating A Clear Environment

As an effective leader, it's your job to create a space that provides clarity around the vision, mission, values, and process in which to get there and then reward those working towards it unless you are explicitly hiring a role where you state while hiring we are looking for your guidance and a take ownership attitude for this role.

Ideas & Plans vs Execution

As the Founder of Contineofy, I make a point during hiring that the team isn't responsible for the plan of action because as a team we determine the playbooks we offer our clients. Sometimes there may be something outside the box, that we'll need to coordinate, but most of the services we offer within HubSpot are predictive and there is a process of doing them with best practices that leads to activities not only being effective but being completed in a timely fashion as well.

A Clear Process Enhances Creativity

Because of this process, the main focus for the team is executing the marketing campaign strategy and being creative in delivering that message. Creativity and execution are what is rewarded, not processes, plans, or who comes up with the ideas.

Hiring The Right People

This also puts the question back on the teammate when they are being interviewed, do they enjoy being the person in "control" of the project and bearing the responsibility of ensuring it's executed properly, or do they want a position where they get to purely focus on creating cool stuff and bringing ideas to life?

As an effective leader, the whole, getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats, is something that will make or break your organization.

When The Plan Fails

As the leader who comes up with the plans, if the plan fails, it's not your team that failed, it's you. These days, I honestly feel the reason why leadership wants to take the democratic approach is it's a shield. It takes the weight of possible failure off their shoulders and gives them an escape to blame the team if things go wrong.

This doesn't give the team an out, if someone isn't living with integrity and doing what they said they would do and the plan fails, that isn't on the leader, but there is a fine line that needs to be completely transparent when determining the difference.

Calm Communications

I think yelling at people, reflects who you are as a leader. If you can't communicate your desires and expectations, in a calm voice, that says more about your maturity than the reactions of those you lead.

You Can Only Grow When You're Being Honest

Lastly, my philosophy is honesty always allows one to grow faster and more effectively than faking it until you make it. If you're never honest about where you are and act like you're further along than you are, you'll always find yourself stuck because the plan you are working from starts from the part you are faking from not where you are.

The Gap Between Reality & Where You Are Stuck

The gap between those two places is where you get stuck. To see growth, you need to admit the truth. This is the same for life and business which is the reason when we run campaigns, we always share the results as they are, good or bad.

If a campaign's outcomes are bad and we manipulate the data to make it "sound good", how does that help future campaigns? By sharing the truth that something didn't work, we can learn from the experience, pivot, and ensure that it doesn't happen again, allowing growth to happen.

Concluding Thoughts

As the leader, many aspects go into play when trying to inspire and motivate your team so they are effective at working with customers.

These are but only a few thoughts that came to mind.

If you follow my LinkedIn profile, I am always sharing my opinions on leadership and creating an effective business from different perspectives of the company, not just sales and marketing.

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