From Founder/Builder to Manager/Leader After I spoke at the Startup2Startup event last month, one of the people who sat with me at dinner emailed me and asked: I was curious–how did you make the transition from CEO of a startup to manager of a medium-sized business? I’m great at just doing the work myself and interacting with clients, and it’s easy for me to delegate tasks, but it’s hard to have the vision and ability to develop my two employees into greater capacity… I’d be interested in reading a blog post on what helped you make that transition from founder/builder to manager/leader It feels like the answer to this question is about a mile long, but I thought I’d at…
Category
Management
What Gets Said vs. What Gets Heard
What Gets Said vs. What Gets Heard I’ve been on the edge of a few different situations lately at work where what seems like a very clear (even by objective standards) conversation ends up with two very different understandings down the road. This is the problem I’d characterize as “What gets said isn’t necessarily what gets heard.” More often than not, this is around delivering bad news, but there are other use cases as well. Imagine these three fictitious examples: Edward was surprised he got fired, even though his manager said he gave him repeated warnings and performance feedback Jacob thought his assignment was to write a proposal and get it out the door before a deadline, but his manager…
The Gift of Feedback, Part III
The Gift of Feedback, Part III Last week, I posted about my new development plan. I thought I’d also share a “team development plan” that we crafted this year for the entire Executive Committee at Return Path (basically me and my direct reports), coming out of all of our 360 live reviews taken as a whole. Push each other harder and be continuous in our effort to provide the team and each of us feedback and further develop: Improve ability to handle conflict as a group; Drive this work deeper into the organization; “Eyes/ears/mouth open;” Explore how to better serve as role models to the rest of the organization, especially our direct reports/the next level of management; How do we…
The Gift of Feedback, Part II
The Gift of Feedback, Part II I’ve written a few times over the years about our 360 feedback process at Return Path. In Part I of this series in early 2008, I spelled out my development plan coming out of that year’s 360 live review process. I have my new plan now after this year’s process, and I thought I’d share it once again. This year I have four items to work on: Continue to develop the executive team. Manage the team more aggressively and intentionally. Upgrade existing people, push hard on next-level team development, and critically evaluate the organization every 3-6 months to see if the execs are scaling well enough or if they need to replaced or…
Hertz Giveth, Hertz Taketh Away
Hertz Giveth, Hertz Taketh Away For years, I’ve hated all rental car companies for forcing me to scramble and find a gas station to fill up on the way to returning a car at the airport or get faced with an insane refueling charge. I never understood why one smart company didn’t decide to just do away with that moronic policy, figure out another way to make a profit, market the heck out of it, and endear themselves to customers. Finally, Hertz jumped in a few months ago with just that. Return a car without refueling? No problem. A modest $5 surcharge and market rate for the actual gas required solves the problem. Brilliant! They were even marketing it to…
Charting A New Path: Focus is Our Friend
Charting A New Path: Focus is Our Friend When Return Path turned six years old a few years ago, I wrote a post on my personal blog (OnlyOnce) titled You Can’t Tell What the Living Room Looks Like from the Front Porch. The essence of the post is that flexibility is a key success factor in starting and growing a business, and sometimes the business turns out different than what you thought when you wrote that business plan. At the time, I was commenting on how different Return Path turned out – operating five businesses – than we did when we started the original ECOA business in 1999. Today, the message rings more true than ever. On the heels of…
Entrepreneur’s Perspective on Non-Competes
Entrepreneur’s Perspective on Non-Competes (Note: I just found this post in the “drafts” folder and realize I never put it up! It was written months ago, although I just updated it a bit.) Bijan Sabet kicked off the discussion about non-competes by asserting that they are a barrier to innovation and that they are unenforceable in California anyway, so why bother? Fred continued the discussion and made some good assertions about the value of non-competes, summarizing his points as: Non-competes are very much in the interests of our portfolio companies. But the non-competes need to be tightly defined and the term of the non-compete needs to be paid for by the portfolio company if the employee was forced out of…
Executive and Closed Sessions
Executive and Closed Sessions Brad has a good post up about what he calls “closed sessions” in Board meetings — time at the end of the meeting reserved for a conversation with Board members ONLY, no other observers or non-Board management. While we differ in terminology, I agree completely with the sentiment and with his logic. We call the part of the meeting that Brad describes the Executive Session. We’ve always done them. And the Board and I find it incredibly useful, and a good practice, even if there are no contentious or puzzling issues during a meeting. Not that our Board holds back much, but the Executive Session is a good time for us to connect 100% freely about…
The Gift of Feedback
The Gift of Feedback My colleague Anita Absey always says that “feedback is a gift.” I’ve written in the past about our extensive 360 review process at Return Path, and also about how I handle my review and bring the Board in on it. But this past week, I finished delivering all of our senior staff 360 reviews, and I received the write-up and analysis of my own review. And once again, I have to say, the process is incredibly valuable. For the first time in a long time this year, I got a resounding “much improved” on all of my prior year’s development items from my team and from the Board. This was great to hear. As usual, this…
Book Short: Chock Full O Management & Leadership
Book Short: Chock Full O Management & Leadership I just finished The Better People Leader, by Charles Coonradt, which was a very short, good, rich read. It was a pretty expansive book on management & leadership topics — 100 short pages of material that are probably covered by 1,000 pages in other books. What separates this book from the pack is the rich examples from non-business life that Coonradt sprinkles throughout the book. They include the tale of a special ed kid who became a mainstream student within a year because his teacher had the courage to ask his fellow students to treat him normally, and the story of how Korean War POWs died in massive numbers not from physical…