(Post 4 of 4 in the series on Scaling CMOs – other posts are, When to Hire your First Chief Marketing Officer, What Does Great Look like in a Chief Marketing Officer and Signs your Chief Marketing Officer isn’t Scaling) Similar to interactions with all CXOs, you’ll have to capitalize on your moments but there are a few ways I’ve typically spent the most time or gotten the most value out of CMOs over the years. One of the key ways to engage with the CMO is to include them in meetings with the rest of the go-to-market (GTM) executives as a group, not in a silo. While of course I have always had 1:1 meetings with my CMO, I…
Category
Management
Book Short: Must-Read for CXOs
Lead Upwards: How Startup Joiners Can Impact New Ventures, Build Amazing Careers, and Inspire Great Teams, by Sarah E. Brown, is an amazing book – and one that fits really well with our Startup Revolution series, in particular our book Startup CXO. I kept thinking as I was reading it that it was the other side of the proverbial coin…that Startup CXO was about the details of each executive job in a company…but Sarah’s book is about the things common to ALL executive jobs – how to get them, how to succeed at them, essentially how to BE an executive. I read it front to back in a single day one weekend and loved it. Some of the most insightful…
My end of year routine (Taking Stock, Part III)
I have an end of year work routine that’s a pull-up and self-assessment. I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve written about its evolution in Part I and Part II of this series. I’ve always taken a few minutes at this time of the year to ask myself these four questions: Am I having fun at work? Am I learning and growing as a professional? Is my work financially rewarding enough, either in the short-term or in the long-term? Am I having the impact I want to have on the world? If I answer at least 2.5 of these questions as yes, I feel like things are on track. If I am below that, or even at 2.5 sometimes,…
Best and Worst Practices (Plus FAQs) for Layoffs
Short of declaring failure and shutting down your company, laying off employees is the worst thing you may have to do as a startup CEO. I’ve had to lay people off on three separate occasions. It was difficult and emotional—those days were the worst of my career, and probably rank in the top 10 worst days of my life, period. This isn’t firing for cause—employees aren’t being asked to leave because of their own failings. They’re being asked to leave because the company can no longer afford to keep them. It’s not their fault. It’s a truly awful process. Some CEOs will fall into the trap of thinking that because it’s invariably messy, it doesn’t matter how you do it….
Double Book Short: Framework of Frameworks
I love me a good framework. And Geoffrey Moore is the kind of good product/marketing frameworks for technology companies. Moore’s Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption is a must-read for anyone managing a larger technology organization (start reading it when you get to 200-250 people – it’s never too early to worry about disruption). More important, it’s really a companion book or coda to Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past, so if you haven’t read that one, start there and read both sequentially. Zone to Win is quite short and punchy, and it doesn’t disappoint. I can’t believe is that I never blogged about Escape Velocity before since it…
The Evolution of Feedback in Our Organizations
Across 22 years and two companies now, our system of giving performance feedback has evolved significantly. I thought I’d take a pass at chronicling it here and seeing if I had any learnings from looking at the evolution. Here’s how things evolved over the years: Written performance reviews. The first year of Return Path, we had a pretty standard process for reviews. They were more or less “one-way” (meaning managers wrote reviews for their direct reports), and they only happened annually. Written 360 reviews. We pretty quickly moved from one-way reviews to 360s. I wrote about this here, but we always felt that being able to give/receive feedback in all directions was critical to getting a full picture of your…
What Men’s Rooms Can Teach Us About Leadership and Management
I hope this post doesn’t gross anyone out or offend anyone. I admit it’s a little weird, and that it’s more accessible to men. Hopefully everyone can get my point, even if men get it a bit more. I’m channeling Brad as I write this. So bear with me. Here is a picture of a men’s room with floor mats under the urinals. The difference between using a men’s room that has floor mats and using a men’s room that does not have floor mats is profound in multiple ways. I’ll leave out the specifics, but you can imagine the comparative experiences if you haven’t had one or both. A really good floor mat, from a quick scan of Amazon…
Our Operating Philosophy – the Mostly Self Managed Organization (MSMO)
Last week, I wrote about the concept of the Operating Philosophy, and how it fits with a company’s Operating Framework and Operating System and defines the essence of who you are as a company…what form of company you are. While we had a loose Operating Philosophy at Return Path, we never really crisply articulated it, and that caused some hand-wringing at various points over the years, as different people interpreted our “People First” mantra in different ways. So this time around at Bolster, we’re trying to be more intentional about this up front. We have labeled our company a “Mostly Self Managed Organization” or MSMO (pronounced Miz-Moh). We made those up. Our Operating Philosophy – we are a Mostly Self-Managed…
The Concept of the Operating Philosophy
I’ve always been a big believer in the Operating Framework and the Operating System as two of the management underpinnings behind every well run company. The Operating Framework is the company’s Mission, Vision, Values, Strategic Objectives, and Key Metrics. Companies have all sorts of different labels for this, from Balanced Scorecard to Salesforce’s V2MOM to Patrick Lencioni’s 6 Questions. It’s what you have to define up front, refresh annually, and tweak quarterly so that people in the company are aligned and know where you’re going. The Operating System, as I wrote extensively about in Startup CEO, is the collection of practices, meetings, mailing lists, routines/rhythms, and behaviors that your company and team use and depend on to run the business…
Giving Away Credit – Added Rationale
I just finished up a coaching call with a late-stage CEO client, and we were talking about a situation where he helped tee up a couple successes for a new senior executive on his team and then promptly gave the exec credit for the successes. That’s good form as a leader – you take the blame when things go wrong but give away credit when things go well. But my client articulated a selfish reason to this that goes beyond the “good leadership form” argument that I’d never thought of before: “When you give them the credit, you win twice.” What he meant by that is that you get your first win when you bolster the person on your team…
Second Lap Around the Track
I wrote a little bit about the experience of being a multi-time founder in this post where I talked about the value of things like a hand-picked team, hand-picked cap table, experience that drives efficient execution, and starting with a clean slate. The second lap around the track (and third, and fourth) is really different from the first lap. Based on what we do at Bolster, and my role currently, I spend a lot of time meeting with CEOs of all sizes and stages and sectors of company, as they’re all clients or prospects or people I’m coaching. Lately, I’ve noticed a distinct set of work and behaviors and desires among CEOs who are multi-time founders and operators that is…