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Leadership

Leadership

The difference between being right and getting the right answer

October 29, 2016 Leave a comment
Entrepreneurs can be a hard headed lot. It takes courage, determination, a lot of luck, and sometimes just old fashioned, bull-headed persistence to create a company but as a result entrepreneurs don’t always listen well.But even if you know you resemble this description, ask yourself – is it more important for you to get to the right answer, or to be right?

You want to be right because your team wants to follow someone who knows what to do. You want to be right because it’s more efficient, and it increases your confidence, and if you’re right more often than you are wrong you have a good chance of winning. And if you believe you are right you are more likely to take risk.

But your potential investor wants you to be more interested in getting to the right answer than being right. When you are building your company you cannot predict what’s going to happen. You may switch markets, your customers may show you a different direction, the company may almost die more than once, you are certain to make some bad hires along the way. It is almost guaranteed that your journey will not be smooth.

As a result, it is much more impactful as an investor to work with entrepreneurs who are seeking truth, seeking to understand, seeking the right answer. These entrepreneurs ask questions, question themselves and try out ideas without fear of being wrong. As an investor you can dig in and problem solve with them. It’s more fun, it’s less frustrating, and you are more likely to get to a great end result together.

So when you are talking with potential investors, or even potential senior team members you want to hire, ask yourself how strong is your need to be right?

Leadership

Are your investors double dipping in your startup?

August 8, 2016 1 Comment

I’ve been working with a number of small companies this year. I’m on a mission to help CEOs, especially women, figure out how to grow their businesses, manage their investors and boards and to create a level playing field for themselves.

But as I have spoken to some of these CEOs I’ve seen several data points which are very worrying, and which I hope don’t make a line! These data points are investors putting money in to companies, and then taking the money back out for services – so effectively reducing the cost of their investment. Double dipping.

For example…. The professional service provider:

This is the case for a small software company, lets call them W. W has developed a software technology to improve building management, and so reduce insurance costs. It wasn’t an easy company to raise money for and in the end the CEO raised from angels, one of whom invested $480k. Nice.

But he then turned around and sold W the development service to create the product from the technology for $490k. He didn’t require it, but it was “expected”. Assume a typical margin of 50% then the service cost for the angel to deliver is $245k and he has a profit of $245k. So he got $480k worth of equity in W for $235k. And to make matters worse, when the product delivery was not to the satisfaction of the CEO she found it very difficult to push back on him in the way she would have been able to push back on an independent contractor. It’s awkward to say the least, but I think it’s what in a public company would be called a related transaction – it is simply not independent and so has the potential for conflict of interest.

The investors with a side business:

Another small app company, raised money from an angel group. The angel group has a strategy of creating an ecosystem from their companies, and providing services to them to drive the market adoption. But, unlike the old school VCs like Mayfield and KP, or even the new large scale guys like Andreessen Horowitz, this group turned around and charged the company (which had only raised $1.5M) $11k/month for marketing. That’s $132k per year – which could have been spent on another engineer or a lot more marketing consulting from an independent.

The board member who wants a salary:

This time a technology company in the security space. Killer technology, but a turnaround from a prior (not-well-run) incarnation so raising money was hard. In the end money came in from a PE firm. But after the close the PE firm put in an executive chair to “help” and insisted he be paid $180k a year for a few days a week. Now I am supportive of a board deciding a CEO needs some help and adding in an exec chair if the CEO agrees (or even if she doesn’t if it’s really needed) but to pull a salary out of a company that is not profitable is very tough on the company. And in the end it’s not in the best interest of the investors; it doesn’t make sense.

I wonder if I have seen a few outliers and this is not the new normal, or if this is a new trend? Is it a result of the number of angel groups out there who are not professional investors (and so to give them the benefit of the doubt we could assume they don’t realize the impact of what they are doing), is it a result of the tightening of investment (and so they can get away with it) or it is a result of the simply huge number of startups and first time CEOs who can be taken advantage of? If you have an example in  your own company inmail me on LinkedIn.

Boards, Leadership

Why you need a CEO on your board when you are the CEO

July 20, 2016 Leave a comment

One of the first decisions an entrepreneur needs to make once she has raised money for her great new idea is to build a board.

This is a conscious act. Yes, your investors probably have board seats, at least the lead investor will. If your investors are angels maybe 2 or 3 of them have demanded to be on your board. But beyond this crew you owe it to yourself to step back and think about who do you want on your board to help you build your company.

It is entirely reasonable for you to put one outside director on your board, and it’s an unusual set of investors that will not allow you to bring one new director on. And when you do, you want to bring on a current/former CEO.

Why a CEO? Why not a technologist, or a family friend, or your cofounder? Fundamentally, a current/former CEO is going to have seen your movie before and will bring a wealth of unexpected advantages to your board and your company.

Independence
Your board has a duty to represent all your shareholders, but more than that they have a responsibility to care for the company first. For your employees, your reputation, your probability of success. Having a board member who is truly independent of the investors can help bring a broader perspective to the board discussions. I have seen investors who are so focused on their own issues they lose sight of what’s best for the company. An independent director can take her role – as the one person who is not worried about the timing and size of liquidity but is instead worried about the long term success of the company – very seriously.

I met with a big time PE partner (let’s call him Adam – not his name) recently, who is sitting on a private technology board. As we talked he told me the CEO was dealing with the issue that he, and the other big time PE firm on the board have different agendas. One is a long term investor, one is interested in liquidity sooner, and the difference is a strategy problem for the CEO. The investors are balanced in ownership and the CEO is caught in the middle. I asked Adam “Why is this the CEO’s problem? Surely the CEO’s responsibility is to grow a great company and create the greatest value he can, not worry about negotiating between the two of you on the timing of an exit. It’s a ridiculous waste of his time”. Adam (figuratively) took a step back and agreed. I’m not on this board, but I can still make the case for the CEO not being distracted!

Resources
You’re going to need advice as you build your company, great advice. Yes your investors may know a few people, but you want to be referred to people who are not looking to your investors for future referrals, again who are truly independent. You’ll need lawyers (you want a pit bull in your corner unless you have truly world-class VCs), recruiters, marketing consultants etc. etc. And when you hire them you want to know they are loyal to you, not back channeling to your investors. An independent CEO should have a quality network for you to tap into.

Working for you
There will be times when you need to get something done but you are out of time and need some sleep. You can use your CEO/director to give you capacity. Maybe you need her to build a model for you, maybe you don’t know how to present an issue to your board and your director can build a sample presentation for you to help you frame the issue. At a minimum your director can do deep reviews for you of your own presentations, legal agreements, offer letters, compensation plans… with the eye of someone who has done it before.

Role experience
A high quality former CEO will bring experience of what the job really entails. What are you truly responsible for vs what decisions your board can make (which is very few in reality)? What does it take to build a world class team? What does it take to close your first few big deals? How to focus. Only someone who has done the job for many years really knows what it takes, and there are many investors out there who like to give you advice, but have never been in the role. Your director can be a sounding board for you in the role of CEO.

Being the bad guy
Your CEO director is not your friend, and sometimes she may feel like your enemy, but because her only reason to be there is to help the company, you can trust her even when you hate her. I’ve always had a former CEO on my boards, and sometimes it’s been absolutely maddening.

For example, the time my director attacked me in a board meeting and took me to pieces for a plan I proposed. Afterwards I asked him what the hell was he thinking coming after me in a board meeting? He humbled me by telling me he could see my main investor was winding up to attack and so he decided to attack me first so I did not get into a fight with my investor. He knew me well enough to know that if attacked I would attack back, and hard, and that could damage my relationship with my investor.

And for example, the time my director had a one-on-one with me and decimated my forecast. Destroyed my faith in every deal. Ripped every one of my sales campaigns to shreds. His motivation? To wring every piece of optimism out of my forecast so I knew the worst case and could then focus on what needed to be done to bring the probability up on each campaign.

Daily coaching
There are times when things go well, and then there are times which are rough. Raising money can be one of those times. Having someone you can call every day to review how things are going is so very helpful, and you cannot be calling your investors. You need a safe place to call. Someone who has no other agenda but to help you and the company succeed. And someone who has been there. That is a current/former CEO.

You may be thinking “well that’s self-serving of her given she’s a former CEO who sits on boards”. Yes, probably right, but right now I am meeting with many, many interesting entrepreneurs and I am hearing too many worrying stories of entrepreneurs who need better board advice and support.

Photo:  © 2016 Penny Herscher and from Buzzfeed

Leadership

Responding in the age of the Cyber Attack!

May 17, 2016 Leave a comment
The NACD (the National Association of Corporate Directors) held a discussion afternoon in San Francisco in late April designed to make directors smarter about current events (not hard to do since so much is always changing!)

The agenda was politics, a cyber attack simulation, CEO succession planning, and the economic outlook. All interesting, but the cyber attack simulation was chilling.

The simulation was run by Mary Galligan who was with the FBI for much of her career. She’s an expert in crisis management having been the supervisor of the FBI investigation into 9/11 and she was the commander on the ground in Yemen following the attack on the USS Cole. She’s now at Deloitte.

The simulation was an attack on a pharma company that sells generic drugs online and through stores. The attackers, #Hackme, gave the management team 11 hours notice before they would release confidential information (personal information of the directors and executives). They took down the stores and the web site 9 hours into the notice period; the company could not stop the attacks, or meaningfully respond within the notice period. It was on headline news before the notice period was up because it leaked. It was based on a real case. The simulation was the executive team (all drafted members of the audience) trying to figure out what to do against the deadlines.

And so… the learnings were led by Mary Galligan at the end.

What Directors should now understand about cyber attacks and how to respond:

1. You must have a plan
– do you have a plan for how to respond to a cyber attack?
– do you have a plan and has the management team practiced it?
– who will run the response, who will run the company?
– you must assume you will not get enough information in the time you need it to respond, so you must have a crisis response plan
– you should also assume you will get incorrect information, even from your own IT who will be scrambling
– map out “what will happen if” so you have response scenarios for the things you can imagine, but also have a process to respond to the things you did not imagine. Don’t only do scenario planning because the type and scale of attacks is changing fast. Enough companies have paid of Ransomware now that it has grown exponentially in the last 60 days
– the tail of a cyber incident is very long, prepare for how you are going to trade off the stress between team members

2. Know the stakeholders
– who do you need to notify and in what order?
– board, major customers, insurance, investors etc.
– what should be escalated to whom and when?
– keep it to the top (execs and directors) – must assume if ANY employees know it will leak – this is human nature (stressed this applies to all crisis management). The existence of a cyber attack typically leaks within 2 hours.

3. Directors responsibility
– to have done their duty to ensure the company has prepared
– to ask questions, review the plan, ensure management has practiced it
– review the bill going into the senate that would require every board have a cyber expert on it – but it mat not pass because there are not enough cyber experts in existence today to implement it so pay attention to the SEC’s opinion on the issue.

4. Extortion events are on the rise and are increasingly not about money but about moral/ethical issues. “hacktavists”
and most events fall into one of five types:
1. Stealing information or IP
2. Disrupting operations
3. Ransomware
4. Destroying software and hardware
5. Releasing confidential/personal data (of the directors and management team)

Altogether eye opening and a rapidly developing area to watch! These photos are from the simulation.

  original video delivering the notice of the attack and the deadline
 defacing of the drug company’s web site (before the deadline)
television reporting on the news well before the deadline – 
it leaked before the web site was hacked

Leadership, My Personal Journey

SPLX IPO 15 Years Later

May 3, 2016 1 Comment
15 years is a milestone I think. Short enough that I still remember, long enough that is seems far in the past.We took Simplex public 15 years ago today. May 3, 2001. It was the culmination of a wild ride, and the beginning of another. Going public is a rite of passage. It’s not a birth (founding a company), it’s not a marriage (M&A), it’s not a death (shutting down) so maybe it’s like a bar mitzvah or confirmation – a rite of passage into adulthood. You take a company public when you are large enough that you want to fund the company into the next phase of growth on the public markets, and you want to provide liquidity to your investors. In 2001 that meant revenue of about $50M was needed, profitability, and steady, predictable growth which we had. We loved our company, and we were proud of our technology and our customer relationships.

With the Simplex IPO we threaded the needle between two significant market crises. In April 2000 the dot com bubble burst. We were not a dot com, we were a real company in the semiconductor space selling very nerdy software to chip designers. We filed our first S1 on September 11, 2000. Yes, 9/11 but a year earlier. (Actually we sent the docs to the SEC on Friday Sept 8 but we missed the cutoff so the filing date was 9/11).

Even by Sept 2000 there was little appetite on Wall St for a tech IPO because everyone had been burned by tech valuations based on a faddish bubble. But by late March 2001 we still needed cash to keep growing (we were opening international offices and hiring people behind our growth). I met with Larry Sonsini and Frank Quattrone (both kings of the Valley at the time) and we all believed we could price the deal. So we went on the road.

One of the most intense experiences of my life. 3 weeks of meetings 7-8 meetings every day. Paris, The Hague, London, New York, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas and finally Houston. I drank too much vodka and took smoking back up for the 3 weeks (I did quit again at the end thank goodness). I lost 12 lbs in 15 days because I was not eating much. It seemed as if I was always presenting over breakfast and lunch so when was I going to eat?

And then, on May 2, in the late afternoon in Houston, we priced the deal, sold 4 million shares to CSFB, brought in $44M in proceeds for Simplex and hopped on the private jet to New York to be there for the market opening the next day. I slept on the plane, but not much when I got to New York.

May 3 was a round of interviews. Radio, Bloomberg TV, CNN’s finance network at Nasdaq, and time on the floor with the CSFB trader who was making the initial market in SPLX stock. We opened at $12 and closed over $21. The book was 11X over subscribed and we were one of the very first tech deals to get done successfully in 2001, opening up the market for many more that had been waiting. Maybe we priced too low, maybe not, there was no way to know because the market was so skittish.

But, of course, we were only public for 4 months before September 11, 2001 hit. The market collapsed, our customers delayed orders and our stock dropped to $8. A violent roller coaster is too gentle a term for what this felt like. The gripping stress of how to make sure the company, our employees and our customers were OK. When Cadence approached us to buy us in January 2002, a deal we eventually closed on June 2, 2002 for $300M, it was the right outcome for the company. As one of my board members told me “there’s a war coming, you are too small to survive it”.

Paris – walking around jet lagged the first evening

 

Walking around Paris on Sunday, relaxing before the whirlwind starts (with Luis Buhler, CFO)

 

Agent Herscher, on a helicopter very early one morning headed to
New Jersey from Manhattan for a presentation

 

 

The view of Manhattan from the helicopter

 

 

 Showing Melanie and Sebastian the private jet at SFO

 

 

How I often spent my time on the jet – not so glamorous!
Our typical ride around New York

 

 How Aki (Aki Fujimura COO) and Luis would often spend their time in the limo
Getting used to the cycle of meetings and flying – don’t we look smart!

 

My classic pose, talking to our lawyer (Bob at WSGR) or the bankers. I loved that flip phone.
Signing the docs to sell the shares to the bankers
Hugging out the tension with Aki once it was done
The team including Richard and David from CSFB

 

Headed to NY to watch the market open and celebrate

 

Watching the SPLX stock start to trade

 

The stock hits $20
Doing a TV interview back in Sunnyvale in my office –
the success of the IPO was Silicon Valley  news – maybe the market hadn’t died (yet…)
Leadership

The new self-help book for entrepreneurs “Build Something Great!

February 4, 2016 Leave a comment

Thinking of starting your own company… or you’re already in it? There’s a fun new self-help book out for entrepreneurs called “Build Something Great!: Fifty Best Tips for High-Tech Startups” that is a must read and excellent reference book for anyone wanting to win the first time.

Written by two of the Simplex founders, professors Resve Saleh and David Overhauser, it boils down valuable startup advice into 50 tips on how to build your own successful venture.

And yes, I admit I’m biased since Resve and David hired me to be their CEO. But we learned a lot together as we built a world class team and important technology family into a really fun company and a very successful IPO.

The book is full of useful and easy to consume advice on the steps you’ll take in building your company. As Aki Fujimura, who was on our team and COO at Simplex, says in his foreward:

“There are a thousand ways to fail and only one or two ways to succeed.
Trying to learn what not to do from a failure only makes it 1/1000th
less likely to fail again. We all make plenty of mistakes of our own. We
can learn from failures in real life without reading a book. The only
way to learn from a book is to learn about what leads to success. The 50
tips here will guide you to help make your company more likely to
succeed.”

The book is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats.

The authors in January 1996 (before we were introduced).
David is on the left, Resve is second from the right.
Leadership

5 Reasons to Put Yourself in the Line of Fire as a Leader

December 1, 2015 1 Comment

My post in Inc a week ago:

While sitting at a restaurant in London Heathrow airport yesterday, I found myself between the unfortunate cross hairs of a helpless server and his useless manager. At noon, while the restaurant was full of customers from around the globe, the credit card machine stopped working. Many patrons, myself included, did not have enough British pounds to pay for our meals as we were on our way out of the country.

The waiter explained that I would need to pay my tab in cash. I opened my wallet to find scattered pounds, euros and dollars, and I knew it wouldn’t be enough. The waiter suggested that I wait the 30 minutes it would take for their system to come back online, but I of course told him that this wouldn’t be an option as I had a flight to catch. The waiter then left me to “talk with his manager.”

Now the fun started. The waiter walked the six feet away from me to where his manager was standing. I watched as the 40 year-old manager told his barely-20 year-old waiter what to tell me. The waiter returned to my table to reiterate his manager’s suggestion and I pushed back again. The poor waiter went back and forth as we tried to get close to the price of my bill counting the few pounds, euros and dollars that I had with me. I could not make the whole amount, which also meant no tip. During this entire exchange, the manager remained where he was, six feet away, and would not look at me or help the waiter by talking directly with me, the disgruntled customer.

As my gate was across from the restaurant, I continued to watch as the same encounter unfolded with other customers and the manager was still immovable to intervene. The young waiter was trying hard and I remained appalled by the lack of support and leadership from the restaurant manager to appease his customers or find solutions given the situation.

 The encounter was a prime example of one of the many ways managers can fail at their jobs, which should, at their centers, be to claim any and all responsibility.

When something goes wrong with a customer do you automatically step in front of the bullet for your team?

Should you? I think so… and here’s why:

1. You need to take responsibility. 
You’re the leader, which means you should be out front and center, leading your team. When something goes wrong, you need to make sure the customer looks to you for the fault and not to your employee. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is so that the customer respects you when you take ownership and will be more likely to work with you to find a solution than if you hide behind your employees. Second, this helps your employee become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. A rare exception to this rule is when your customer thinks an employee of yours is the problem. If this is the case, you need to listen carefully and help your employee with a get-well plan, if at all possible, but you may have to separate the employee from the customer. Either way, this is still your responsibility.

 2. It’s a teaching opportunity. 
Part of our responsibility as leaders is to cultivate and prepare the next generation of leaders. What better way to prepare the future of your company than to show them how to deal with a difficult situation? Lead with purpose and communicate your process when showing them how you step in front of an issue. If you lead by example and explain to them why you took the approach that you did, then they will learn how to do it for their own teams.

3. It’s a learning opportunity. 
Most of us never learn true humility, especially in the superman-driven world of high tech. As leaders, we often struggle to hear and see the truth. Employees won’t tell us things we might need to hear, so we must keep charging on, regardless of our performance. So when a customer gives us tough feedback–“Your product is too slow, too expensive, low quality,” or “You missed your committed deadline”–it’s a moment in time for personal learning, humbleness and to be reminded that the customer is always right.

4. Don’t blame your employee. 
 This can be hard, especially if you are frustrated with a situation where your employee executed a task poorly. Yes, maybe give them tough feedback. Yes, maybe use it as a teaching moment. But never place blame or point fingers. 99 percent of the time, your employees are trying to do the right thing. When you blame them, you are probably missing the real issue.

5. Don’t project weakness. 
Maybe you don’t care if your customer or your employees think that you are a weak person, but if you are an ambitious leader, you probably do. And when you hide behind an employee rather than taking charge, you are acting weak.

Leadership, My Personal Journey

Why I’m stepping back from being CEO

November 17, 2015 Leave a comment

I’ve loved being a technology CEO. It’s been 20 years, and the CEO journey has taken me from pride to humility, from exhaustion to exhilaration, from courage to fear and often all in the same day. It’s a fantastic job and a huge responsibility and I’m honored to have been trusted with the job not once but twice and in two very different markets. I’ve worked with talented executives, loyal investors, and customers who’ve become friends over the years.

And I’ve also always been incredibly conscious of the role I play in making it possible for other women to be high tech CEOs by simply showing it can be done in a world which is so biased against us.

But it’s time for me to step back. This has been a tough decision – and those of you who know me well will know what kind of war has been going on in my brain for the last 6 months – I’m not without ego after all! But I am very conscious that over the last 20 years I’ve traded so much as I focused on my career. Of course, my challenges are every working person’s challenges. Enough time with my children, supporting aging and dying parents, not enough sleep, not enough personal time. But I’ve become so much more aware of time passing since my mother died and now my father is 84 and far away and so I’ve decided to make different choices with my time. I feel very fortunate that I have that choice.

It’s hard, but balance is a myth if you are CEO (as I blogged in 2007). Every company deserves a CEO who is on 24/7. One who lives and breathes every aspect of the company, the future of every employee and the success of every customer. That’s just what it takes to succeed.

We’ve built a fabulous technology platform at FirstRain and one we’re proud of. It’s used by some of the biggest companies in the world and our customer engagements just keep getting deeper. I am truly delighted that YY Lee is going to take over from me as CEO – she has been with me every step of our 10+ year journey together at FirstRain. But more than that, she’s worked with me on and off across 3 companies over the last 23 years and I know she more than has what it takes to lead FirstRain through the next stage of growth. I could not be prouder of her. And I’ll be there to help her and the Rainmakers. I’ll stay involved as an active chair, work on strategy and continue to do the part of my job I love the most: working closely with our large customers.

And with the rest of my time? I very much enjoy my public company board work, and of course I’ll keep on coaching entrepreneurs and women (which I love to do), and being a feminist and a blogger. But more importantly I’ll spend more time with my father in England and with my family.

It’s not all perfectly clear to me but I’ll figure it out as I go along. I’ve been an obsessed CEO for so long now I can’t imagine too far ahead yet. But I’m sure I’ll work it out.

Leadership

5 ways not to talk about yourself as a leader

November 6, 2015 Leave a comment

My latest post in Inc.

Have you ever listened carefully to the language your leaders use when they talk about their plans and accomplishments? It can be very revealing, if you listen to the subtlety of their speech. There are leaders who are all about themselves and there are leaders who are all about their team, or their dream, and these two types of leaders sound entirely different from each other.

A few weeks ago, I was talking with a group of executives from a large company and I was struck by how often they used “I” in their speech. These leaders even took personal credit and responsibility for accomplishments made by their respective companies, simply inserting “I” or “my” into their statements. Two different people said “my shareholders,” and “I have set expectations at XYZ.” Both executives implied that they were “the man” (and neither were the CEO!).

Revealing isn’t it? For example, there is a huge difference in how you think about a business unit or project leader based on whether they say “my customers” or “our customers.” “My customers” sounds ego-driven and possessive, yet “our customers” sounds supportive and amplifies that the leader has a team behind her. Or consider “my strategy” vs. “our strategy” – there is a different set of implications between the two.

So here are five things to watch out for when using “I” in your speech:

1. Give your team all the credit.
When a project goes well, you win a customer or hire a great person; giving credit to your team for the win will earn you their loyalty. In this case, deflecting the attention away from yourself and shining the spotlight on the team doing the real work, will not go unnoticed. Saying, “The R&D team truly raised our quality over the last six months,” or saying, “Julie went above and beyond to help our customer,” will be so much more appreciated by your team and over time they will become loyal to you knowing you are going to make sure they are given credit where credit is due.

2. The future is shared.
You don’t own the future and you certainly can’t create it without your team. You can create a strong sense of shared destiny if you use “we” or “our” for your future plans. Try saying something along the lines of, “We are planning a new, magical set of features which we will release in beta this June,” or, “We are committed to turning a profit by the end of the year.” Your team will know they are part of your vision for the future.

 3. No one admires a boaster.
It’s so transparent, and yet so many mediocre leaders do this: they boast about their accomplishments, name drop, remind you about their education, and some even feel a need to tell you how smart or important they are. It’s boring and it means nothing to the listener, so don’t do it. The only exception is when someone specifically asks you to tell your story. Otherwise keep your mouth shut and win their support based on the merit of your ideas and your work.

4. Don’t cross the line by over sharing.
Yes, a certain amount of sharing is OK, it makes you human. However, “I did this and I did that” again and again gets boring fast. If someone asks you how your weekend was, a short, amusing answer should suffice. I find this one hard because I enjoy sharing and I enjoy entertaining, but I am learning to keep it short. It is very easy to cross the line between the level of detail that is office-appropriate and what can be shared at a later time with friends.

5. A leader should take all of the blame.
This is one of the few places that the word “I” should be used. Don’t be too proud to admit that “I made an error in judgment when I hired Joe,” or “I misjudged the rate at which the market was going to change,” etc. When there is a major problem, you want to take as much responsibility for it as you can. In private you may vent to a friend that so-and-so dropped the ball and you’re paying the price for it, but never in public, never in front of your team. A good leader doesn’t make excuses.

The exception to the rule here is when a very visible leader, such as a large company CEO needs to share vision. “I believe” is powerful and can be inspiring when your deeply held belief helps your team to see the future, or fills them with a sense of optimism about the path you are going to take together. “We believe” feels weaker. So when visioning, go ahead and say I, but when talking about your operations and your projects say we.

Leadership

5 Ways That Leadership Is Like Acting

July 21, 2015 Leave a comment

If you are a leader, you are a performer. You may not be conscious of it, but you are, and people are watching you. Your followers (remember the definition of a leader is that someone is following) trigger off you, your mood, your actions and every word you say. This means that you need to be a performer and an actor to carry your followers with you consistently and you need to do it in a way that is authentic and trustworthy–an interesting balancing act! Here are five ways in which you need to be a star actor as the leader:

  1. You need to be positive. No matter how you feel inside, to lead you need to see the positive and
    find a way through the maze. Some days it is easy because you feel positive, but on the days when you can’t see how to win, or you are exhausted, you need to get so good at personal transformation that your team cannot tell. If you lose faith, they lose faith. If you feel tired, they feel tired. On those hard days, you have to put yourself into character, step out onto the boards and act positive.
  1. You need to carry the crowd.
    As a leader, you are the one in front creating the passion and drive for your group. Being able to project an idea with conviction and charisma is critical to bringing a large group of people with you. Now, you do not have to be as good as Richard Burton or Russell Crowe, but learning some of Marc Benioff’s skills of whipping up a crowd will help you lead and carry your ideas into your
    audience.
  1. You need to stay on message.
    The bigger the company or group you lead, the more you need to be consistent and stick to the strategy message and brand. Whether you are in front of your team, on social media or being interviewed on TV, you must repeat your key messages over and over, and over again (sometimes until you are sick of the sound of your own voice!). Only after several reminders will your audience truly absorb and believe what you are saying, but you cannot afford to let it sound rehearsed. Whether it is the first time you say your spiel or the 27th time, it needs to sound as enthusiastic as the first time you ever said it.
  1. You need to select your cast.
    No one wants to be on stage with someone without talent, and as the leader, you are the director. You have to decide whom to put on stage and who gets the lead role. Maybe you are the lead actor, or maybe your star is your CTO or your top sales girl. As the director, you need to know how to cater to your audience and when to take a back seat. At the end of the day, you are responsible for who is on your team and who is in the performance with you.
  1. You need to pay attention to your body.
    How you stand, how you sit, how you hold your hands (don’t fidget)–these things subconsciously influence how people see you. Hold yourself confidently, stand up straight because someone is assessing how you feel and how much you believe in what you are saying (or selling) based on your stance. Learn confidence poses like the Wonder Women: stand tall, legs in a wide stance, hands on your hips.

If you are in a leadership position, remember that people are always watching you. Grab your script, learn it inside and out, smack on a smile, be consistent, hold a rigorous audition to get the best cast possible and have strong body awareness. Remember, even the best know how to “act as if” or “fake it ’til you make it” as they learn to lead.

By the way, there is a group of kids who probably understand this concept better than you or I ever will. The All Stars Project transforms the lives of poor youth using the power of performance. A kid growing up poor in a violent neighborhood who has never dressed formally or stepped inside an office can learn to show up on time, dress professionally, give you a strong handshake and look you in the eye. This group of kids are able to gain the confidence to change their lives by performing in talent shows and practicing improv. The same applies to you as a future leader.