Book Short:  Calm in a Crisis, Explained

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales, is not a business book.  Even though the author says a few times “this can be applied to business, too,” the application is left 100% up to the reader.  But that’s my only criticism of the book, and it’s not a big one at that.  Deep Survival is an unexpected and somewhat odd way to think about how to lead an organization, but it’s very powerful, and incredibly well written.

The author essentially has made a career, or at least a hobby, of studying major accidents and delineating the qualities that separate those who survive from those who don’t. Most of his examples are from extreme sports — sailing across the Atlantic solo, doing highly technical rock and glacier climbs, and the like.  Certainly one easy takeaway from the book is that perhaps one can have a lot of fun and be challenged in life without putting oneself at risk in those ways!

But that’s not the author’s point.  And it’s not even that preparedness makes the difference, as you might expect (in fact, sometimes that hurts).  His point is that the correct combination of rational and emotional impulses makes the difference.  His specific 12 points are:

• Look, see, believe (keep those cognitive functions working)
• Stay calm, use humor and fear to focus
• Think/analyze/plan, get organized with manageable tasks
• Take correct, decisive action
• Celebrate successes
• Count your blessings
• Play…or do other things to occupy your mind’s idle moments
• See the beauty around you
• Believe that you will succeed
• Surrender – don’t let the fear of failure stand in your way
• Do whatever is necessary
• Never give up

But reading those points doesn’t really substitute for reading the book, especially since some seem contradictory!  Thanks to my friend Greg Sands for this great read.

As I mentioned earlier this summer, I’ve been working on a new startup the past few months with a group of long-time colleagues from Return Path.  Today, we are officially launching the new company, which is called Bolster.  The official press release is here.

Here’s the business concept.  Bolster is a talent marketplace, but not just any talent marketplace.  We are building a talent marketplace exclusively for what we call on-demand (or freelance) executives and board members.  We are being really picky about curating awesome senior talent.  And we are targeting the marketplace at the CEOs and HR leaders at venture- and PE-backed startups and scaleups.  We’re not a search firm.  We’re not trying to be Catalant or Upwork.  We’re not a job board. 

To keep both sides of the marketplace engaged with us, we are also building out suites of services for both sides – Members and Clients.  For Members, our services will help them manage their careers as independent consultants.  For Clients, our services will help them assess, benchmark and diversify their leadership teams and boards. 

We have a somewhat interesting founding story, which you can read on our website here.  But the key points are this.  I have 7 co-founders, with whom I have worked for a collective 88 years — Andrea Ponchione, Jack Sinclair, Shawn Nussbaum, Cathy Hawley, Ken Takahashi, Jen Goldman, and Nick Badgett.  We have three engineers with whom we’ve worked for several years who have been on board as contractors so far – Kayce Danna, Chris Paynes, and Chris Shealy.  We have four primary investors, who I’ve also known and worked closely with for a collective 77 years — High Alpha and Scott Dorsey (another veteran of the email marketing business), Silicon Valley Bank and Melody Dippold, Union Square Ventures and Fred Wilson, and Costanoa Ventures and Greg Sands.  Pretty much a Dream Team if there ever was one.

So how did our team and I get from Email Deliverability to Executive Talent Marketplace?  

It’s more straightforward than you’d think.  If you know me or Return Path, you know that our company was obsessed with culture, values, people, and leadership development.  You know that we created a cool workforce development nonprofit, Path Forward, to help moms who have taken a career break to care raise kids get back to work.  You know that I wrote a book for startup CEOs and have spent tons of time over the years mentoring and coaching CEOs.  Our team has a passion for helping develop the startup ecosystem, we have a passion for helping people improve and grow their careers and have a positive impact on others, and we have a passion for helping companies have a broad and diverse talent pipeline, especially at the leadership level.  Put all those things together and voila – you get Bolster!

There will be much more to come about Bolster and related topics in the weeks and months to come.  I’ll cross-post anything I write for the Bolster blog here on OnlyOnce, and maybe occasionally a post from someone else.  We have a few opening posts for Bolster that are probably running there today that I’ll post here over the next couple weeks.

If you’re interested in joining Bolster as an executive member or as a client, please go to www.bolster.com and sign up – the site is officially live as of today (although many aspects of the business are still in development, in beta, or manual).

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 Organization, or MSMO (pronounced Miz-Mo, a term we just made up). The MSMO is the product of years of work, research, practical learning, and thinking on our part.  Self-Management has been important to me my whole career as a manager and leader.  Over the last 15 years, the team and I have studied various forms of self-management with interviews and onsite meetings at Netflix, Gore, Nucor, Morningstar, and Zappos.  While we implemented some aspects of it at Return Path, we are trying to take the implementation a step further here at Bolster from the beginning.

Of all those companies, what we’re doing is probably closest to the Operating Philosophy of W.L. Gore & Associates, which you can find written out online without a name but with the description that “individuals don’t need close supervision; what they need is mentoring and support.” The embodiments of the Operating Philosophy at Gore may be different from those we create at Bolster, but the essence of the philosophies is pretty similar.

Why a MSMO?  We employ smart people, and smart people crave autonomy, purpose, and mastery (according to Daniel Pink) and do their best work when they have those things in alignment.  

So, how do we define self-management at Bolster?  We aren’t going to be a DAO.  I don’t think that model works for a for-profit multifaceted corporation – complete Self-Management is too chaotic.  Leadership and mentorship matter and make a difference in guiding strategy, critical decisions, and careers. Holocracies or other unnamed structures like that of Morningstar are ok, but they are so rigidly ideological that they require an immense amount of work-around, or scaffolding, to be practical.

But we aren’t a traditional fixed top-down hierarchy, either.  We are going to run the business in a way that lets people co-create their work and be responsible for driving their own feedback and development with a support structure.  That’s the ideology we have. Letting talented people loose to do their best work is critical; but leadership, judgment, and experience matter, too. If not, why bother having a CEO, or a VP of anything? Why not just pay everyone the same thing and hope they can all figure out the complexities of the business together?

We believe the MSMO is the best operating philosophy to allow high performers to do their best work. 

At Bolster, we are leaning into things like social contracts, peer feedback, career mentorship, individuals translating our Operating Framework into priorities and work, flexible work streams and team leadership, instead of fixed permanent hierarchies, rotating chairs of key company meetings, and market-level-based compensation.  

What we are steering away from are things like traditional titles, micromanaging or overmanaging, traditional performance reviews linked to compensation and complex incentive compensation structures, and fixed organization boundaries and structure.

We’ll see if our MSMO Operating Philosophy works. If not, we’ll iterate on it. That’s the good thing about adherence to an ideology of philosophy as opposed to an ideology of practices. Who knows – maybe the MSMO concept and even its quirky name will catch on!

7 Years On

My last September 11 as a New York City resident. I walked down to the World Trade Center site this morning as I have each of the last six 9/11s and rang The Bell of the Unforgotten, which is the New York City Fire Department’s port-a-memorial that they bring out for the day. As a long-time member of the lower Manhattan community, the day always bring out a lot of reflection for me. Seeing the memorial flood lights on tonight will do the same and bookend the day.

The main thing I was thinking about this morning was why there’s been nothing really built yet on the site. World Trade Center 7 (which is actually adjacent to the main site) went up in a hurry a few years ago (pictured here under construction four years ago), but nothing else.

My general understanding of the situation is that the holdup has not been around clean-up or pre-construction the last several years, but all about legal, political, and insurance issues. And that smacks to me of a leadership problem. I realize there are a lot of parties involved, and a lot at stake, but it’s just embarrassing to America that we haven’t rebuilt the site — and fast. Set an example to the rest of the world that we react swiftly and don’t let the bad guys knock us down…and keep us down.

It feels to me like a President who actually understood leadership would have gotten all the parties in a room together and not let them out until there was agreement on a plan. Don’t just let “the system” play things out laissez faire, but actually play them out in a hurry so the country and city can move forward. It feels like the kind of thing Reagan or Clinton would have done.

As I reflect on this today, the one thing I’m happy about is that no matter who wins the White House, America will be getting a leadership upgrade.

I haven’t taken a poll to figure out the overlap between people who read this blog and people that bought the first edition of Startup CEO, but I’m guessing there’s a high degree of it. If you are familiar with the book, I don’t want to bore you with a recap of what I wrote, but I thought I would devote the next several blogs to new ideas in the second edition. First, the new cover art from the publisher is kind of cool:

The first question you might have is, “Why a second edition? Didn’t you say everything you needed to say the first time?” The answer to that is, yes, I did say everything I had to say at the time, and the first edition is pretty comprehensive as a field guide. But that was about a dozen years into what turned out to be a 20-year journey, and after we sold Return Path in 2019, I had time to reflect on all that happened. I learned a lot of new lessons between the first and second editions, we had a lot of first-time experiences, we scaled the company significantly, and we sold it. None of those things are, in and of themselves, worthy of a second edition, but collectively they help tell the story of startup to exit and tell it from a perspective of creating a sustainable business over nearly two decades. 

But there are other reasons, too, besides new lessons learned. Eight years is a lifetime in terms of changes to micro-trends, language, business in general, and the world around us. I wanted to update the book to make it contemporary so that it can speak to a new generation of CEOs. The second edition is more than a new cover and obvious updates on the number of employees or revenues. I added topics that reflect heightened responsibilities of CEOs around moral and ethical leadership in an increasingly transparent and socially conscious world. How do you navigate a politically charged and divisive society? For example, the State of Indiana passed a law intended to not force people to do things that contravened their religious beliefs but it had the side effect of legal descrimination against LGBT citizens. It was contentious, with rallying cries in business and society for one side or the other, and those same sentiments were found within our employee population. 

How should CEOs handle a situation that conflicts with their core values? There are no easy answers, but avoiding them doesn’t make the problem go away. 

Whether it’s the #metoo movement, high-profile failures of leadership like airline employees dragging customers off of planes, or something as simple as unconscious bias in the workplace, the best CEOs now need to approach their jobs differently. I didn’t write about that in the first edition, but the second edition has an entire chapter devoted to “Authentic Leadership” and provides guidelines and advice to help CEOs. The book went to press early in the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to all the protests around racial injustice surrounding the George Floyd killing, so nothing in it specifically addresses any of those issues.  In some ways, though, that may be better at the moment since the book is more about frameworks and principles than about specific responses to current events.

I also added a new section with several chapters on the ins and outs of selling a business. Startup exits are the important culmination of the startup experience and something that the first edition only briefly touched on. Obviously, I was still CEO of a growing company and although we had an opportunity or two to sell within those first years, we never pulled the trigger. The first edition talks about that process at a surface level, but the second edition has far more content and detail since we had completed a sale transaction. 

The first edition of the book has sold close to 40,000 copies as of the writing of the second edition, which blew me away when I tallied it all up. I’ve received many notes of thanks from readers all over the world for the book, and I’m glad that the content has proved useful to so many people, noting from some of the more critical reviews on Amazon that it certainly doesn’t scratch everyone’s itch. I hope the changes in the new edition add even more value to the lives of entrepreneurs and startup management teams. That’s really who the book is written for.

Here are some places to go to pre-order the book:

• Directly from the publisher, Wiley
• From Amazon
• From Books-a-Million
• From Indie Bound 
• From BN.com

I have a limited number of free copies of the book that I can send out, and oddly, they are only print copies since the book publishing ecosystem hasn’t figured out an efficient way for authors to distribute free Kindle copies of books yet.  As a bonus incentive for reading all the way to the end of this post, I will be happy to send a free copy to the first 5 people who comment on this post on the blog and ask for one.

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 year’s development items are similarly thoughtful and build on the prior ones, in the context of where the business is going.  Since one of my prior year’s items was “be as transparent as possible,” I thought I’d share my development plan for the coming 12-18 months here on my blog.  If you’re reading this and you report to me, you’ll get a longer form debrief at our next offsite.

1. Continue making the organization more of a Hedgehog, lending more focus to our mission and removing distractions wherever possible.

2. Move the organization’s leadership team from “pacesetting” to “authoritative” management styles by focusing more on :

    a. standards of excellence around employee behavior and performance: develop a more clear performance management system, raise the bar on accountability around leadership and management issues, shift management training from tools to values-based coaching

    b. clear communication loops: balance open door policy with manager empowerment by getting the executive in charge to fix issues (instead of fixing them myself) and/or facilitating stronger manager-employee communication

    c. constant translation of vision into execution: foster clearer context and deeper employee engagement by not just communicating vision, but communicating HOW the vision becomes reality at every opportunity

3. Sharpen elbows further around leadership team: identify key attributes of success, weed out underperformers, re-scope other roles, and clarify “partner for success” opportunities as part of core responsibilities. Make each individual’s development needs public in the senior team (I guess this is the first step towards that!)

4. Make the organization more nimble, inspiring a bias for action through shifts in priorities and cross-functional swat teams where required

So there you go.  If you work at Return Path, please feel free to hold my feet to the fire in the coming months on these points!

Book Short:  a Corporate Team of Rivals

One of the many things I have come to love about the Christmas holiday every year is that I get to go running in Washington DC.  Running the Monuments is one of the best runs in America.  Today, at my mother-in-law’s suggestion, I stopped i8n at the Lincoln Memorial mid-run and read his second inaugural address again (along with the Gettysburg Address).  I had just last week finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals:  The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and while I wasn’t going to blog about it as it’s not a business book, it’s certainly a book about leadership from which any senior executive or CEO can derive lessons.

Derided by his political opponents as a “second-rate Illinois lawyer,” Lincoln, who arrived somewhat rapidly and unexpectedly on the national scene at a time of supreme crisis, obviously more than rose to the occasion and not only saved the nation and freed the slaves but also became one of the greatest political leaders of all time.  He clearly had his faults — probably at the top of the list not firing people soon enough like many of his incompetent Union Army generals — but the theme of the book is that he had as one of his greatest strengths the ability to co-opt most of his political rivals and get them to join his cabinet, effectively neutering them politically as well as showing a unity government to the people.

This stands in subtle but important contrast to George Washington, who filled his cabinet with men who were rivals to each other (Hamilton, Jefferson) but who never overtly challenged Washington himself.

Does that Team of Rivals concept — in either the Lincoln form or the Washington form — have a place in your business?  I’d say rarely in the Lincoln sense and more often in the Washington sense.

Lincoln, in order to be effective, didn’t have much of a choice.  Needing regional and philosophical representation on his cabinet at a time of national crisis, bringing Seward, Chase, and Bates on board was a smart move, however much a pain in the ass Chase ended up being.  There certainly could be times when corporate leadership calls for a representative executive team or even Board, for example in a massive merger with uncertain integration or in a scary turnaround.  But other than extreme circumstances like that, the Lincoln model is probably a recipe for weak, undermined leadership and heartache for the boss.

The Washington model is different and can be quite effective if managed closely.  One could argue that Washington didn’t manage the seething Hamilton and frothy Jefferson closely enough, but the reality is that the debates between the two of them in the founding days of our government, when well moderated by Washington, forged better national unity and just plain better results than had Washington had a cabinet made up of like-minded individuals.  As a CEO, I love hearing divergent opinion on my executive team.  That kind of discussion is challenging to manage — at least in our case we don’t have people at each other’s throats — but as long as you view your job as NOT to create compromises to appease all factions but instead to have the luxury of hearing multiple well articulated points of view as inputs to a decision you have to make, then you and your company end up with a far, far better result.

(Post 1 of 4 in the series of Scaling CPO’s)

In most startups, the HR function starts out as tactical, because you have to get people hired and paid, and while you might have a founder or early-stage employee who can do these things, often these tasks are frequently outsourced to a PEO.  As the company grows, it probably in-sources payroll and benefits, hires a recruiter, and maybe has an HR Manager who handles the function. Depending on the number of roles you see being filled, the degree of specialization, or a host of other factors, an in-house team to handle the tactical aspects of HR makes a lot of sense. But at some point you may need to hire a Chief People Officer.

One sign that it’s time to hire a Chief People Officer is if you feel that you’re the driver of company values, that you’re the one talking about values and viewing the company and interactions with that lens—but you’re the only one that cares about the core values. If your HR function is only focused on the tactical aspects of the role and not on how values drive the company, you’ll need to consider a full-time People Officer because focusing on tactical functions only will not help your company scale.

Another sign is if you are spending too much of your own time training managers and leaders or working on interpersonal dynamics on your leadership team. What’s the right amount of time? I think of these tasks (if you’re a a CEO) as things where you should be more like a consultant rather than the driving force behind them. If you find that a large portion of your day or week is filled with people ops activities, it’s time to think about hiring someone.

A third sign that it might be time to hire a People officer can happen when your board asks you what your talent strategy is with respect to improving diversity, retention, and engagement metrics, while simultaneously decreasing average employee salary, and you don’t have a great answer. While it’s acceptable—occasionally—to not know the strategy at a detailed level for a particular part of your business, if you get asked a question by your board and haven’t the faintest idea on how you can get an answer, that ‘s a good sign that you should consider brining in a full-time Chief People Officer.

A fraction Chief People Officer may be a great option, especially if you have a very competent HR manager or director who has strategic inclinations but not enough experience operating as a strategic executive.  If you have a person who just needs a little more supervision in order to “level up” then a fractional executive could be helpful. Or, if you need someone to play more of a consigliere or team coach role to your executive team but don’t want to engage a coach — and your day-to-day HR leader is getting the job done but too junior to facilitate workshops for the senior team, a fractional executive would work. Finally, if you have a very junior HR function or are insourcing it for the first time and need help setting up the whole function from scratch at an advanced size relative to other functions, a fractional executive would be helpful.

As a startup it’s easy to focus on the day-to-day operational details of the People Ops team because those things—payroll, benefits, hiring, onboarding—are tangible and have metrics associated with them. But those things won’t help you scale. If you want to scale your company, if you want to go from $2 million in revenues to $50 million you’ll need to have a person in your organization who is passionate about the values and passionate about helping individual contributors and leaders connect their work to the values. A Chief People Officer will be able to step in and be a leader to the leadership team; after all, companies are built into greatness by people, so this key position is pivotal to the company. 

(You can find this post on the Bolster Blog here)

As I finished up my work on the Second Edition of Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business and started working on a new startup, my colleagues and I started envisioning a new book as a sequel or companion to Startup CEO that is going to be published on June 9 with our same publisher, Wiley & Sons.  The book is called Startup CXO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams.

Simply put, the first book left me with the nagging feeling that it wasn’t enough to only help CEOs excel, because starting and scaling a business is a collective effort. What about the other critical leadership functions that are needed to grow a company?  If you’re leading HR, or Finance, or Marketing, or any key function inside a startup, what resources are available to you? What should you be thinking about?  What does ‘great’ look like?  What challenges lurk around the corner as you scale your function that you might not be focused on today?  If you’re a CEO who has never managed all these functions before, what should you be looking for when you hire and manage all these people?  If you’re an aspiring executive, from entry-level to manager to director, what do you need to think about as you grow your career and develop your skills?

Startup CXO is a “book of books,” with one section for each major function inside a company.  Each section is be composed of 15-20 discrete short chapters outlining the key “playbooks” for each functional role in the company – Chief People Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, etc., hence the title Startup CXO – which is a generally accepted label in the startup ecosystem for “Chief ____ Officer.”

Here are the front and back covers of the book, with some great endorsements we’re so proud of on the back.

This is an important topic to write about at this particular time because America’s “startup revolution” continues to gather steam.  There are only increasing numbers of venture capital investors, seed funds, and accelerators supporting increasing numbers of entrepreneurial ventures.  While there are a number of books in the marketplace about CEOs and leadership, and some about individual functional disciplines (lots of books about the topic of Sales, the topic of Product Development), there are very few books that are practical how-to guides for any individual function, and NONE that wrap all these functions into a compendium that can be used by a whole startup executive team.  Very simply, each section of this book serves as a how-to guide for a given executive, and taken together, the book will be a good how-to guide for startup executive teams in general.

Startup CXO has my name on it as principal author, and I’m writing parts of it, but I can’t even pretend to write it on my own, so the book has a large number of contributors who have the experience, credibility, and expertise to share something of value with others in their specific functional disciplines — most of my Bolster co-founders are writing sections, and the others are being written by former Return Path executive colleagues — Jack Sinclair, Cathy Hawley, Ken Takahashi, Anita Absey, George Bilbrey, Dennis Dayman, Nick Badgett, Shawn Nussbaum, and Holly Enneking.

Startup CXO is also pretty closely related to Bolster’s business, since we are in the business of helping assess and place on-demand CXO talent, and as such, the final section of the book has a series of chapters written by Bolster members who are career Fractional Executives about their experience as a Fractional CXO.

The book is available for pre-order now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Oh, and stay tuned for a third book in the series (kind of) due out late this year. More on that over the summer as the project takes shape!

(This post, written by my co-founder Cathy Hawley, also appeared on Bolster.com)

The gig economy is a labor market where short-term or freelance roles are more prevalent than permanent positions. It’s generally characterized by having independent contractors rather than full-time positions, but in some locations and for some types of roles, gig workers may be part-time or fixed-term employees.

The gig economy that started with roles like artists, drivers and web designers is quickly expanding to include executive-level roles. There are  a few trends in today’s workplace that are driving this expansion. Startups and scaleups have more flexible, remote-friendly work environments and are looking for creative, less expensive ways of accelerating growth. Executives have shorter average job tenure and are more often displaced or between roles, and they are also interested in the flexibility that gig work can give them.

In a study conducted by MavenLink/Research Now, “The White Collar Gig Economy,” 47% of companies state they are looking to hire contractors to fill management and senior executive roles, including c-suite contractors. At the same time, 63% of full-time executives would switch to become a contractor, given the opportunity. These trends will be accelerated by the current economic downturn and recovery, as some companies have fewer resources, and more executives are displaced.

At the executive level, there are a few different types of roles that could be considered ‘gigs’. The most common two are coaching and project-based consulting.  Coaching or advising, and particularly CEO coaching and advising, has become very prevalent over the last 10 years. The CEO hires a coach who can help them navigate new situations and challenges. Often, CEO coaches stay with a CEO for a number of years, helping guide and support them through the stages of company growth. There are also coaches and advisors for other functional areas to provide similar support for other executives, although more commonly these coaches are hired for specific initiatives. 

Then there  is project-based consulting, where executive-level talent is hired to run a specific project such as reviewing a company’s packaging and pricing, performing due diligence on an acquisition, creating a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategy, or creating an investor deck for a fundraising event. This type of consulting isn’t new, and it’s similar to what large consulting firms offer. It seems to be more prevalent now for very senior roles than it ever has been in the past.

But the gig economy for executives now reaches well beyond coaches and consultants.  There are also executives who are hired into interim leadership roles while a company searches for a permanent placement. Some roles take a long time to find the right person, but there’s an urgent need for someone to take on the leadership mantle in the interim. If the interim executive is a good fit, and is open to it, it’s not uncommon for this individual to be considered for the permanent position.  “Try before you buy” works both ways — it can be good for the company and good for the executive, too.

An up-and-coming type of executive gig role is the fractional role. We are seeing this more and more in the last couple of years.  Fractional executives can either be consultants or employees, since the expectation is a long-term relationship, on a part-time basis. For example, 3 days or a certain number of hours per week. The fractional executive is responsible for all functional areas as a full-time executive in that same role. The company may be too small to need (or afford) their level of expertise on a full time basis, but needs more than just an advisor or project consultant. The fractional executive generally remains with a company until the company needs a full-time leader for that function, in which case either the fractional executive goes full-time, or the company hires someone new.  Fractional executives may support more than one client at a time, and may also come with a team of more junior functional experts who can support them to take on more work.

Finally, for our purposes at Bolster, joining a company’s board of directors could be considered taking a ‘gig’ role since it’s not a full-time executive role.  Startups and scaleups need independent directors, and their needs change based on their size, stage and strategy. We see a growing trend of companies contracting with directors for 1 -2 years rather than lifetime service. 

There’s a real opportunity right now for companies to capitalize on the expertise of this talent pool without having to hire them for long-term full time roles, and for executives who want to contribute their skills and expertise without the commitment of a 80-hour work week. Bolster is helping bring these two audiences together in a marketplace that matches on-demand executives with companies who need their services the most. Bolster also provides services for members so they can focus on their consulting rather than their business, and for companies to evaluate their executive teams and boards.

(This is the first in a series of three posts on this topic.)

Harry Potter was lucky.  He had, in Albus Dumbledore, the ultimate wise elder, in his corner.  Someone who could teach him how to be a better human being (er, wizard), how to be more proficient with his wand and spells, how to think strategically and defeat the bad guys.

All of us would benefit from having an Albus Dumbledore in our lives.  But most of us don’t — and most of the people we’d call on to be that wise elder in our corner aren’t capable of the full range of advice and counsel that Dumbledore is. 

Why work with a Coach or a Mentor?  I’ll start this post with a quick argument in favor of CEO Coaches and Mentors (sometimes called Advisors).  Even as a 20-something first-time CEO years ago, I was deeply skeptical of the value of a Coach, but that was in 1999 or 2000 when coaches weren’t so commonplace.  Now that their value seems much more obvious, and there are so many amazing Mentors and Coaches available, I’m surprised by how many CEOs I speak to still seem skeptical about their value.  Just think — the world’s greatest athletes, the ones who get paid zillions of dollars because they are the best in the world at something, use MULTIPLE coaches DAILY to perfect their craft and keep them focused.  Why should Rafael Nadal or Serena Williams have a trainer and a coach, but not you?

I’ve benefited over the years from the advice of more people than I can ever count or thank.  But when it comes to being a CEO, I have leveraged the counsel of a CEO Coach or Mentor principally in three different areas:

1. Functional topics on the craft of being a CEO from the lofty “how to run a board meeting” to the nitty gritty details of “how to do a layoff”
2. Developmental/behavioral topics like “how I show up as a leader in the organization,” or “how to be a better listener”
3. Team Effectiveness topics like “how do I get the most out of my leadership team,” or “why doesn’t Person X trust Person Y and how does that impact team performance?”

In some unusual circumstances, you can find a person who does all three of these things for you and can scale as you and your company grow.  But for the most part, getting all three of these things requires engaging two different people, and maybe even more mentors.  

What’s the difference between a CEO Mentor and a CEO Coach?  Counsel on Item 1 above — what I would call CEO Mentorship — almost certainly requires someone to have been a CEO — preferably multiple times, or for a long period of time, or through multiple stages of company growth, or two or three of those qualifiers.  This is the kind of person who can literally teach you how to do CEO things.  These people are super busy, they won’t have open ended amounts of time for you, but you should expect sage wisdom and answers when you need them.  And you can have more than one of them at a time, or change them out as your company evolves and your needs change.

Counsel on items 2 and 3 — what I would call CEO Coaching — frequently come together in a professional who is and has been for a while, a coach.  The person might have had a significant career in business before becoming a coach but wasn’t necessarily a CEO.  The person probably has some kind of academic grounding, like a Master’s degree in Organizational Development or Industrial Psychology, or a Certificate in Coaching.  This is the kind of person who can do things for you and your team like facilitate meetings, run assessments like Myers-Briggs or DISC, and coach other leaders on your team.  This person is dedicated to helping you be the best leader, professional, and CEO that you can be and must be both empathetic and comfortable pushing you hard.  

Sometimes you get mentorship and coaching in the same person, but almost only with CEO Coaches who are also CEO Mentors by my definition above.

Five signs you need a CEO Mentor and/or Coach:

• You are playing ‘whack-a-mole’ — running from crisis to crisis in your organization and are not able to make time to think, be current with email, or make time for important things like hiring senior executives
• Your board is getting frustrated with you, your team and/or the lack of progress in the business
• The company isn’t scaling as fast as it should
• Your leadership team is not a cohesive team and you are in the middle of all decisions
• The company has high employee turnover and/or poor reviews on Glassdoor 

Do yourself and your company a favor and invest in a CEO Coach and Mentor(s). It’s an investment in accelerating your own and your company’s success. In later posts, I’ll talk about how to hire and best leverage both Coaches and Mentors. 

Next post in the series coming:  How to Select a CEO Mentor or CEO Coach