I hosted a CEO roundtable dinner the other night, and someone in the group asked me what my favorite question was to ask in interviews. I kept thinking about something I read years ago, that the late legendary Zappos founder Tony Hsieh used to ask, “do you consider yourself a lucky person,” about which he said, “Lucky people approach the world with an open and optimistic mind that enables them to see unexpected opportunity more readily.“ That’s a good thing to find in a future team member of course, but the question is a little too indirect for me. My favorite question (ok, it’s a compound question) is to ask someone “What are you great at? What do you absolutely…
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Business
Book Short: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
This was a catchy title I caught in our shared Kindle library at a moment when I wasn’t connected to wifi and had nothing to read. Thanks to Mariquita for buying it…it was a good read. The book is funny, irreverent, and deep. It speaks a lot about pain and failure and how those can help create resilience. It is also chock full of great anecdotes including a particularly memorable one about Pete Best, the original drummer for the Beatles who got fired by the rest of the band on the eve of their becoming famous. Here’s one particularly representative quote: Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible,…
Learning Loops
The last couple weeks, I’ve written about tools in the CEO toolbelt that I learned with my coach Marc years ago in a workshop called Action/Design — Inquiry vs. Advocacy, and The Ladder of Inference. The final post in this series is about Learning Loops (or Double Loop Learning if you prefer), popularized by Chris Argyris a couple decades ago. Here’s the graphic on it: What’s the tool in the CEO toolbelt here? It’s that every time you’re analyzing a result, you need to analyze it on two levels. Level 1 is the more obvious learning — “What happened…and what do I do next time to produce the same/a different result?” Level 2 is the less obvious learning — “Why…
The Ladder of Inference
Last week, I wrote about Inquiry vs. Advocacy, an important principle I learned early in life and then explored more deeply in an Action/Design workshop my coach Marc took our whole leadership team through years ago. This week, I’ll continue to riff on the theme of communications tools in the CEO toolbelt by talking about The Ladder of Inference (detailed article here). This is a great graphic from the article: Any time you’re struggling with opinions vs. opinions or people are jumping to conclusions based on a narrow set of evidence, this framework is your friend. The best way to start any tricky conversation with those characteristics is to start “at the bottom of the ladder,” meaning you start by…
Inquiry vs. Advocacy
My Grandpa Bill used to not want to talk about himself at dinner parties. When one of us asked him why one day, he said, “I already know what I have to say. What I don’t know, is what the other person has to say.” There are a few principles I learned years ago in a workshop that my coach Marc led for us called Action/Design. I’m going to try writing a few posts about them, and you can find some articles on them here. Inquiry vs. Advocacy is simple. Understand the balance of when you ask and listen vs. when you speak in a given conversation. Both are important tools in the CEO tool belt. My rule of thumb…
Bring People Along for The Ride, Part II of II
Last week, I wrote about Bringing People Along for The Ride by involving people in the process of ideating and creating change in your organization. That’s the most important thing you can do to make it easy for people to handle change. But what about the people you don’t or can’t bring along for the ride in that way? If you organization has more than 10 people in it, there will inevitably be people where you’re IMPOSING CHANGE ON THEM. And honestly, even people who are involved in designing change still have to live through its impact. Today’s post is about managing the actual impact. The best thing you can do as a leader in helping your organization navigate change…
Bring People Along for The Ride, Part I of II
One of the CEOs I mentor asked me the other day asked me this question: I need to start making my organization think differently – more like a startup that needs to scale and less like a project. People need to start doing more specific jobs and not swarm all over everything. How do I get people to “get” this without freaking out? Every CEO faces dilemmas like this all the time. One of my management mantras over the years has been, “You have to bring people along for the ride.” Fundamentally, that means two things. I’ll write about one of them here today and save the other for next week. First, bringing people along for the ride means you…
It All Starts With Self-Awareness
If I had to pick one human trait that is the single most impactful in one’s ability to have positive and successful interpersonal relationships, there’s a hands-down winner: Self-Awareness. This is true no matter what kind of relationships you’re talking about — parent, manager, executive, friend, partner or spouse. Someone shared a framework with me years ago that helps explain why this is true, which I’ve been meaning to blog about for a long time. I found this image, which is close enough to the 2×2 that was once drawn for me on a whiteboard. The framework is at once incredibly simple and incredibly complex. Having true self-awareness and the ability to be reflective, to take in input and feedback,…
When to Hire a Chief Customer Officer
(Post 1 of 4 in the series of Scaling CCOs) Very few startups start life with a Chief Customer Officer, even though customers are the lifeblood of every startup; instead, you’ll likely start your customer service organization with a “jack of all trades” account manager position. You’ll have one person who handles all customer issues from basic support all the way through to true customer success. Sometimes these functions will be handled by the product team but most often they are handled by a customer service team. Specialized roles and multiple teams (e.g, support vs. professional services) with their own managers can emerge quickly in the life of a startup and these roles will usually come before a full-time CCO,…
5 Things Successful Founder Operators do Differently
I am fortunate in my current job to spend a lot of time talking to other founders and CEOs. I mentor and coach them, my company and I help counsel them on executive and board searches, and I spend time with them at conferences and seminars. Even when I am giving them advice, I always take time to learn what they’re doing, what works, and what doesn’t work. I’ve noticed a consistent set of behaviors and practices common among the successful founder operators – the ones who go on to lead their companies through multiple chapters of growth and sometimes never hire the “seasoned operator” to come in and take over. #1 – They are students of the game. It’s…
The myth of the “playbook” in executive hiring, and how to work around it
I help mentor CEOs on executive hiring all the time. One common refrain I hear when we’re talking about requirements for the job is about something I like to call The Mythical Playbook. If I only had the exec with the right playbook, thinks the hiring CEO, all my problems in that executive’s area would be magically solved. I once hired a senior executive with that same mentality. They had the pedigree. They had taken a similar SaaS company in an adjacent space from $50mm to $250mm in revenue in a sub-group within their functional area. They had killer references who said they were ready to graduate to the C-level job. They had The Playbook! Suffice to say, things did…