What Separates Good Teams from Bad Teams?

Every once in a while, I have a conversation that forces me to distill an idea to a sound bite – those frequently become blog posts.  Many happen with members of my team at Return Path, or my friend Matt on our Saturday morning runs, or my Dad or Mom, or Mariquita.  This one happened at dinner the other night with Mariquita and my in-laws Rick and Carmen.

The subject came up about managing a senior team, and different iterations of teams I’ve managed over the years.  And the specific question we posed was “What are the most significant characteristics that separate good teams from bad teams?”  Here’s where the conversation went…“I believe that 100% of the members of good teams can, 100% of the time”

1. Get outside of themselves.  They have no personal agenda, only the best interests of the company, in mind.  They make every effort to see issues on which they disagree from the opposing point of view
2. Understand the difference between fact and opinion.  As my friend Brad says, “The plural of anecdotes is not data.”  And as Winston Churchill said, “Facts are stubborn things.”  If everyone on a team not only understands what is a fact and what is not a fact, AND all team members are naturally curious to understand and root out all the relevant facts of an issue, that’s when the magic happens

Of course there are many other characteristics or checklists of characteristics that separate good teams from bad teams.  But these feel to me like pretty solid ones – at least a good starting point for a conversation around the conference room table.

Stamina

A couple years ago I had breakfast with Nick Mehta, my friend who runs the incredibly exciting Gainsight.  I think at the time I had been running Return Path for 15 years, and he was probably 5 years into his journey.  He said he wanted to run his company forever, and he asked me how I had developed the stamina to keep running Return Path as long as I had.  My off the cuff answer had three points, although writing them down afterwards yielded a couple more.  For entrepreneurs who love what they do, love running and building companies for the long haul, this is an important topic.  CEOs have to change their thinking as their businesses scale, or they will self implode!  What are five things you need to get comfortable with as your business scales in order to be in it for the long haul?

Get more comfortable with not every employee being a rock star.  When you have 5, 10, or even 100 employees, you need everyone to be firing on all cylinders at all times.  More than that, you want to hire “rock stars,” people you can see growing rapidly with their jobs.  As organizations get larger, though, not only is it impossible to staff them that way, it’s not desirable either.  One of the most influential books I’ve read on hiring over the years, Topgrading (review, buy), talks about only hiring A players, but hiring three kinds of A players:  people who are excellent at the job you’re hiring them for and may never grow into a new role; people who are excellent at the job you’re hiring them for and who are likely promotable over time; and people who are excellent at the job you’re hiring them for and are executive material.  Startup CEOs tend to focus on the third kind of hire for everyone.  Scaling CEOs recognize that you need a balance of all three once you stop growing 100% year over year, or even 50%.

Get more comfortable with people quitting.  This has been a tough one for me over the years, although I developed it out of necessity first (there’s only so much you can take personally!), with a philosophy to follow.  I used to take every single employee departure personally.  You are leaving MY company?  What’s wrong with you?  What’s wrong with me or the company?  Can I make a diving catch to save you from leaving?  The reality here about why people leave companies may be 10% about how competitive the war for talent has gotten in technology.  But it’s also 40% from each of two other factors.  First, it’s 40% that, as your organization grows and scales, it may not be the right environment for any given employee any more. Our first employee resigned because we had “gotten too big” when we had about 25 employees.  That happens a bit more these days!  But different people find a sweet spot in different sizes of company.  Second, it’s 40% that sometimes the right next step for someone to take in their career isn’t on offer at your company.  You may not have the right job for the person’s career trajectory if it’s already filled, with the incumbent unlikely to leave.  You may not have the right job for the person’s career trajectory at all if it’s highly specialized.  Or for employees earlier in their careers, it may just be valuable for them to work at another company so they can see the differences between two different types of workplace.

Get more comfortable with a whole bunch of entry level, younger employees who may be great people but won’t necessarily be your friends.  I started Return Path in my late 20s, and I was right at our average age.  It felt like everyone in the company was a peer in that sense, and that I could be friends with all of them.  Now I’m in my (still) mid-40s and am well beyond our average age, despite my high level of energy and of course my youthful appearance.  There was a time several years ago where I’d say things to myself or to someone on my team like “how come no one wants to hang out with me after work any more,” or “wow do I feel out of place at this happy hour – it’s really loud here.”  That’s all ok and normal.  Participate in office social events whenever you want to and as much as you can, but don’t expect to be the last man or woman standing at the end of the evening, and don’t expect that everyone in the room will want to have a drink with you.  No matter how approachable and informal you are, you’re still the CEO, and that office and title are bound to intimidate some people.

Get more comfortable with shifts in culture and differentiate them in your mind from shifts in values.  I wrote a lot about this a couple years ago in The Difference Between Culture and Values . To paraphrase from that post, an organization’s values shouldn’t change over time, but its culture – the expression of those values – necessarily changes with the passage of time and the growth of the company.  The most clear example I can come up with is about the value of transparency and the use case of firing someone.  When you have 10 employees, you can probably just explain to everyone why you fired Joe.  When you have 100 employees, it’s not a great idea to tell everyone why you fired Joe, although you might be ok if everyone finds out.  When you have 1,000 employees, telling everyone why you fired Joe invites a lawsuit from Joe and an expensive settlement on your part, although it’s probably ok and important if Joe’s team or key stakeholders comes to understand what happened.  Does that evolution mean you aren’t being true to your value of transparency?  No.  It just means that WHERE and HOW you are transparent needs to evolve as the company evolves.

• Get more comfortable with process.  This doesn’t mean you have to turn your nimble startup into a bureaucracy.  But a certain amount of process (more over time as the company scales) is a critical enabler of larger groups of people not only getting things done but getting the right things done, and it’s a critical enabler of the company’s financial health.  At some point, you and your CFO can’t go into a room for a day and do the annual budget by yourselves any more.  But you also can’t let each executive set a budget and just add them together.  At some point, you can’t approve every hire yourself.  But you also can’t let people hire whoever they want, and you can’t let some other single person approve all new hires either, since no one really has the cross-company view that you and maybe a couple of other senior executives has.  At some point, the expense policy of “use your best judgment and spend the company’s money as if it was your own” has to fit inside department T&E budgets, or it’s possible that everyone’s individual best judgments won’t be globally optimal and will cause you to miss your numbers.  Allow process to develop organically.  Be appropriately skeptical of things that smell like bureaucracy and challenge them, but don’t disallow them categorically.  Hire people who understand more sophisticated business process, but don’t let them run amok and make sure they are thoughtful about how and where they introduce process to the organization.

I bet there are 50 things that should be on this list, not 5.  Any others out there to share?

Over the years,  I’ve had a list of nagging questions every time I’ve contemplated my board, but didn’t have anyone I could turn to who had deep, broad advice on this topic. Those questions were:

• How big should my board be at this stage?  
• How many independent directors should I have? 
• What is the right profile of an independent director? 
• How many options should I give a board member? 
• How do I find the best, diverse, talent for my board openings?

That’s why Bolster is excited to announce the launch of our first CEO tool: Board Benchmarking. This application (which is free!) is the first of a series of tools that we’re designing to help CEOs understand the performance, design, and impact of themselves, their executive teams, and their boards. The results of this first application will shed light on the independence, diversity, and compensation of private company boards that’s never been available on a broad basis before.

Why are we starting with Board Benchmarking?

1. Increasing Board Diversity is top of mind right now…
   …and that means CEOs need to have a handle on three things at the same time to get it right:  appropriate board size/number of independent seats, a talent pipeline that is diverse and well vetted, and clear compensation guidelines for independent directors.  Diverse employee populations and customer bases start with having a diverse board and a CEO (you!) who is attuned to the benefits of diversity at the top.  The longer you wait to prioritize diversity in the boardroom, the harder it becomes to change the makeup of your board. Culture becomes entrenched, recruiting becomes driven by referrals, and before you know it, everyone in an organization looks and thinks a little bit the same way. By capturing data on the diversity and composition of startup boards, we hope to offer an industry-wide snapshot to help CEOs start to have what can often be tricky conversations with their VCs about board size and composition as early as possible. And by pairing that with Bolster’s unique marketplace for diverse and vetted Board-ready talent, we hope to help CEOs slay all three dragons (number of independent seats, talent pipeline, and comp guidelines) at the same time.

2. Private company board composition is notoriously tricky to benchmark.
   Unlike public companies, which are required to disclose the identities and compensation packages for their boards of directors, private board structure tends to remain…well, private! While this makes sense from a regulatory perspective, it often means private companies CEOs are taking a shot in the dark when it comes to things like when to add independent directors and how much to pay them. By aggregating and anonymizing thousands of data points across hundreds of private companies, we hope to (for the first time ever) provide CEOs with a very real, in-the-moment look at how their board today stacks up against others in similar cohorts.

3. Filling an open board seat is a high-priority item for a CEO, and a tough one to get right.
   It’s said that good choices come from good options.  Early benchmarking results show that half of startup CEOs expect to fill an open board position within the next 12 months. Just as it’s critically important to get the right executives around your (well, now virtual) table, it’s equally, if not even more  important to build a board that effectively supports you, your company, and your customers. Every month that goes by with a board vacancy is another month where you’re potentially leaving valuable introductions and perspectives on the table. We hope that by exposing these board searches across such a broad subset of companies, we’ll also empower CEOs to take immediate next steps to fill those vacancies — including help recruiting multiple board candidates directly from the Bolster network.

As we conduct this survey over the next month, we’ll provide greater visibility into the size, composition, diversity, and director compensation of private company boards. We’re also establishing robust pipeline partnerships to amplify board-ready talent from organizations with diverse membership of African American, Hispanic/Latinx, and women orgs. So for anyone interested in adding qualified diverse talent to their boards, we’ll be ready.

Participants who complete the survey will receive early access to your benchmark results and a comprehensive guide to building and managing your Board of Directors. 

In early Q1, we’ll invite all participants of our Board Benchmarking survey to log in to Bolster and view their results interactively. CEOs will be able to see how their own boards stack up compared to others in the VC portfolio network or other cohorts. VC partners will be able to see patterns across the entire portfolio. 

Watch this space in the coming days and weeks for CEO-specific content about hiring Board members. 

We invite you to register as a Bolster client to participate in our Board Benchmarking survey today.

All three of our kids were at sleep-away camp for the past month, which was a first for us.  A great, but weird, first!  Our time “off” was bracketed by the absolutely amazing story of Come From Away.  One of the first nights after the kids left, we saw the show on Broadway (Broadway show web site here, Wikipedia entry about the musical and story synopsis here).  Then the last night before they came home, we saw Tom Brokaw’s ~45 minute documentary, entitled Operation Yellow Ribbon, which you can get to here or below.

https://youtu.be/jXbxoy4Mges

Come From Away is an amazing edge story to 9/11 that I’d never heard of before.  It’s hard to believe there’s a 9/11 story that is this positive, funny, and incredibly heart-warming that isn’t better known.  But thanks to the show, it is starting to be.  It’s the story of the small town Gander in Newfoundland to which a large number of US-bound flights were diverted after the planes hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon.  It’s the story of how a town of 9,000 people warmly absorbed over 7,000 stranded and upset passengers for 4-5 days before North American air traffic was flowing again following the attacks.

We were both on the edge of our seats for the entire 2 hour (with no intermission) show and were incredibly choked up the whole time…and had a hard time talking for a few minutes after.  I’m sure for us, some of that is wrapped up in personal connection to 9/11, as our apartment was only 7 blocks north of the World Trade Center with a clear, 35th floor view of the site, and all that came with that.  We didn’t lose anyone close to us in the attacks, but we knew dozens of second degree people lost; I had worked in one of the smaller World Trade Center buildings for a couple years earlier in my career; our neighborhood felt a bit like a military zone for a few weeks after the attacks; and we saw and smelled the smoke emanating from the site through Christmas of that year.

After seeing the show, we researched it a bit and found out just how close to real the portrayal was.  So we watched the documentary.  I always have a great association with Brokaw’s voice as the calm voice of objective but empathic journalism.  He does such a great job of, to paraphrase him from the documentary, showing the juxtaposition of humanity at its darkest moment and its opposite.

Both the show and the documentary are worth watching, and I’m not sure the order of the two matters.  But whatever order you take them in, put both on your list, even if you weren’t a New Yorker on 9/11.

Please go put Decide and Conquer: 44 Decisions that will Make or Break All Leaders by David Siegel on your reading list, or buy it. David’s book is up there on my list with Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s a totally different kind of book than Startup CEO, and in some ways a much better one in that there’s a great through-line or storyline, as David shares his leadership framework in the context of his journey of getting hired to replace founder Scott Heiferman as Meetup’s CEO after its acquisition by WeWork, including some juicy interactions with Adam Neumann, through the trials and tribulations of WeWork as a parent company, through COVID and its impact on an in-person meeting facilitator like Meetup, through to the sale of Meetup OUT of WeWork.

It’s hard to do the book justice with a quick write up. It’s incredibly concise. It’s clear. It’s witty. Most of all, it’s very human, and David shares a very human, common sense approach to leadership. I particularly like a device he uses to reinforce his main points and principles by bolding the key phrases every time they show up in the book: be kind, be confident, be bold, expand your options, focus on the long-term picture, be pragmatic, be honest, be speedy, do what’s right for the business, work for your people and they’ll work for you, be surprised only about being surprised. These all resonate with me so much.

One of the interesting things about the book is that David is a CEO, but not a founder (although he was sort of a re-founder in this case). A lot of CEO books talk about how to run a company, or give stories from the trials and tribulations thereof, but few focus on the elements of interviewing for the CEO job, or taking over the reins of a company in the midst of a turbulent flight. So the book is about getting the job, starting the job, doing a turnaround, leading a company through growth, a buy-out, and managing a company inside of another company. And because Meetup is such an iconic brand and business, it’s easy to understand a lot of the backdrop to David’s story.

I just met David for the first time a few weeks ago. We knew a bunch of people in common from his DoubleClick days. We instantly hit it off and traded copies of our books, and then were reading them at the same time trading emails about the parts that clicked. I just can’t recommend the book enough to any CEO or founder. In my view, it joins a pretty elite canon.

The Best Laid Plans, Part I

One of my readers asked me if I have a formula that I use to develop strategic plans.  While every year and every situation is different, I do have a general outline that I’ve followed that has been pretty successful over the years at Return Path.  There are three phases — input, analysis, and output.  I’ll break this up into three postings over the next three weeks.

The Input Phase goes something like this:

Conduct stakeholder interviews with a few top clients, resellers, suppliers; Board of directors; and junior staff roundtables.  Formal interviews set up in advance, with questions given ahead.  Goal for customers: find out their view of the business today, how we’re serving them, what they’d like to see us do differently, what other products we could provide them.  Goal for Board/staff: get their general take on the business and the market, current and future.

Conduct non-stakeholder interviews with a few industry experts who know the company at least a little bit.  Goal: learn what they think about how we were doing today…and what they would do if they were CEO to grow the business in the future.

Re-skim a handful of classic business books and articles.  Perennial favorite include Good to Great, Contrarian Thinking, and Crossing the Chasm.

Hold a solo visioning exercise.  Take a day off, wander around Central Park.  No phone, no email.  Nothing but thinking about business, your career, where you want everything to head from a high level.

Hold senior staff brainstorming.  Two-day off-site strategy session with senior team and maybe Board.

Next up:  the Analysis Phase.

I was mentoring a first time founder the other day who asked me, “How do you know what advice to follow and what advice not to follow?” (For the record, it’s a little ”meta” to answer that question!). I talked about looking for patterns and common themes in the advice from others and exercising judgment about how to pick and choose from competing pieces of advice. But then he asked me how I fight confirmation bias when I’m exercising judgment and incoming advice.

Fighting confirmation bias is both incredibly important and incredibly difficult, and I’d never articulated my thoughts on that before, so I thought I’d do that here.

The way you have to train yourself to fight confirmation bias is to develop a routine or muscle around receiving a piece of advice that you don’t like. While the normal response is to dismiss it or argue against it, the muscle you have to build is to react to advice you don’t like by taking a beat and asking yourself, “Why don’t I like this advice?”

Is it that you think it’s factually wrong or is given on incomplete information? Is that it just disagrees with your world view? Or is it that you just hope it’s not true because it would mean bad things for you or your company? If it’s the latter, or something like it, it’s time to sit down and analyze the advice in the context of the question you asked. What happens if it is true? Why would it be true?

Under the headline of “hope is not a strategy,” doing that work gets you to a better place, because it’s in that work, in pausing to answer the question “Why don’t I like this advice,” that the hard work of fighting confirmation bias happens.

I’ve gotten to know a number of Bolster members over the last few years, and one who I have come to appreciate quite a bit is Tim Porthouse. I’m on Tim’s email list, and with his permission, I’m reprinting something he wrote in his newsletter this month on the topic of CEO engagement in politics and current events. As you may know, I’ve written a bunch on this topic lately, with two posts with the same title as this one, Should CEOs wade into Politics (part I here, part II here). Thanks to Tim for having such an articulate framework on this important subject.

Your Leadership Game: “No Comment.”

Should you speak up about news events/ politics?

Most of the time, I say, no!

Startup CEOs feel pressure to speak up on news events: Black Lives Matter, Abortion, LBGTQ+ rights, the conflict in Israel/Palestine, Trump vs. Biden. Many tell me they feel pressured to say something, but are deeply conflicted.

Like you, I am deeply distressed by wars, murder, restrictions on human rights, bias, and hate. But if we feel something, should we say something?

Before you speak up, ask the following questions:

1.      Mission relevance. Is your startup’s success or mission on the line? Are customers or employees directly impacted? Example: It makes sense for Airbnb to advocate when a city tries to ban short-term rentals. It makes sense to advocate for your LBGTQ+ employees when a state tries to restrict their rights.

2.      Moving the needle. Will speaking out change anything? If you “denounce” something or “take a stand,” what really happens? Example: If you have employees in a state banning abortion and you tell them your startup will support them as much as the law allows, this could create great peace of mind for employees. But if your startup does not operate in Ukraine or Russia, then denouncing Russia does little (and Russia does not care!)

3.      Expertise. Do you have a deep understanding of the situation? It’s usually more complicated than it appears, especially at first. Once you speak out, you have painted yourself into a corner you will be forced to defend.

4.      Precedence and equivalence. If you issue a statement about today’s news event, will you react to tomorrow’s event? Why not? Where do you draw the line?Someone will be offended that you spoke up about X but not Y.

5.      Backlash. Are you ready to spend significant time engaging with those who disagree with you?It can get ugly quickly, and mistakes can be costly. Plus, the American public is tiring of business leaders commenting on the news.

6.      Vicarious liability. Who are you speaking for? When you say, “Our startup denounces X”?Does the whole company denounce it? You don’t know, and probably not. Does the Leadership Team? They may feel pressured to support you. What you are really saying is, “I denounce X!” OK, great, then say it to your friends and family. Leave your startup to talk about business.

If your answers are “yes,” – then speak out.

If not, I recommend keeping quiet.

In my opinion, our job is to build great companies, not debate current events.

By not speaking out, you can say, “We don’t talk politics here.” You can shut down any two-sided arguments at work and say, “Let’s get back to work,”removing a big distraction. Remember when employees protested because Google was bidding for Pentagon contracts?

I realize that you will be challenged to make a statement, that, “Saying nothing is unacceptable/ complicit.” But whoever challenges you will only be satisfied if you support their view.

If you still want to speak out, I respect your choice. Some of you will be angry with me for writing this, and I accept that. I’m asking you to think carefully before you make a statement.

(This is a bonus quick 5th post, inspired by long time StartupCEO.com reader Daniel Clough, to the series that ended last week about Scaling CPO’s- the other posts are: When to Hire your First Chief People Officer, What does Great Look like in a Chief Privacy Officer, Signs your Chief Privacy Officer isn’t Scaling, and How I Engage With The Chief People Officer.)

As I’ve noted over the years, the Chief People Officer role is a tough one to get right and a tough one to scale with the organization if what you’re really looking for is a strategic business partner who can lead not just the important blocking and tackling in HR but innovates the people part of your organization, building new systems and programs, approaches recruiting as building great teams instead of filling seats, helps manage your company operating system, and developing and coaching leaders.

A number of later stage CEOs I mentor have come to me over the years when they have a sub-par Chief People Officer and said something like “I’m going to put HR under my CFO.” To me, that’s a bit of a cop-out – it’s acknowledging that the person in the role isn’t strong enough to be a full-throated executive, but the CEO doesn’t want to go through the hassle or expense of replacing them.

Here’s my answer when I hear that from a CEO: “Ok, then your CFO will actually now become your Chief People Officer.  You must have a Chief People Officer on the exec team reporting to you.”

There are few things about which I have a stronger point of view. Someone in your organization must have strategic oversight for human capital. If it’s not your head of HR and you can’t bear recruiting/replacing that person, then it needs to be whoever your put that person under. Or it’s you. But at even mid-scale companies, why would you take that responsibility on yourself?

I’m thrilled to announce The Daily Bolster — a quick-hitting podcast for startup leaders scaling their businesses. It’s the actionable insight you need to scale—in about 5 minutes. The first episode drops this coming Monday.

Our team created The Daily Bolster for folks in the startup world who — like me — want to hear from industry experts of all backgrounds, but don’t always have the time to listen to full length interviews, even at 2x speed (which usually ends up sounding like Alvin & The Chipmunks, anyway).

Instead, we’re getting straight to the point. GTTFP, as Brad says.

Starting next week, I will be joined every day by experienced operators and industry experts who share their real-world experiences and practical advice. Each day of the week, we’ll cover a different topic or theme:

• Monday: CEO Tips & Tricks
• Tuesday: Scaling Yourself & Your Team
• Wednesday: The View from the Board Room
• Thursday: Ask Bolster (this one will be more like 20-30 minutes to go deeper with someone)

The schedule is jam-packed with dynamic guests and punchy interviews. Whether you tune in every day, when you see a guest you’re especially interested in, or only on Tuesdays, we’re so excited to share these conversations with you.

In Week 1, I welcome Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta, board member extraordinaire and marketplace guru Cristina Miller, Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, Helpscout CEO Nick Francis, and Bessemer Operating Partner and veteran CFO Jeff Epstein. They’ll share their practical advice and real-world experiences around professional development, company culture, startup strategy, and tips and tricks for executive growth.

Check out the season preview to learn more. You can also sign up for email notifications, to make sure you never miss an episode. The daily email will also include a pull quote and clips in case even the 5-minute version is too long for you.

You can subscribe to The Daily Bolster on these platforms: Bolster, YouTube, Apple, Google, Spotify, Amazon, Stitcher, Pandora, and Castbox, plus we’ll put each episode up on LinkedIn and Twitter. You should either follow me (T, LI) or Bolster (T, LI) on those to see the content.

My cofounder Cathy wrote a great post on the Bolster blog back in January called Procrastinating Executive Development, in which she talks about the fact that even executives who appreciate the value of professional development usually don’t get to it because they’re too busy or don’t realize how important it is. I see this every day with CEOs and founders. Cathy had a well phrased but somewhat gentle ask at the end of her post:

My ask for all CEOs is this: give each of your executives the gift of feedback now, and hold each other accountable for continued growth and development to match the growth and development of your company.

Let me put it in starker terms:

Grow or Die.

Every executive, every professional, can scale further than they think is possible, and further than you think is possible. Most of us do have some ceiling somewhere…but it will take us years to find it (if we ever find it). The key to scaling is a growth mentality. You have to not just value development, you have to crave it, view it as essential, and prioritize it.

Startups are incredibly dynamic. You’re creating something out of nothing. Disrupting an industry. Revolutionizing something. Putting a dent in the universe. For a startup to succeed, it has to constantly put something in market, learn, calibrate, accelerate, maybe pivot, and most of all grow. How can a leader of a startup scale from one stage of life to the next without focusing on personal growth and development if the job changes from one quarter to the next?

I was lucky enough to have a great leadership team at my prior company, Return Path, over the course of 20 years. Within that long block of time with many executives, there was a particular period of time, roughly 2004-2012, that I jokingly refer to as the “golden age.” That’s when we grew the business from roughly $5mm in revenue to $50 or $60mm. The remarkable thing was that we executed that growth with the same group of 5-6 senior executives. A couple new people joined the team, and we struggled to get one executive role right, but by and large one core group took us from small to mid-sized. Why? We looked at each other — literally, in one meeting where we were talking about professional development — and said, “we have to commit to individual coaching, to team coaching, and to growth as leaders, or the company will outpace us and we’ll be roadkill.”

That set us on a path to focus on our own growth and development as leaders. We were constantly reading and sharing relevant articles, blog posts, and books. We engaged in a lot of coaching and development instruments like MBTI, TKI, and DISC. We learned the value of retrospectives, transparent 360s, and a steady diet of feedback. We challenged ourselves to do better. We worked at it. As one of the members of the Golden Age said of our work, “we went to the gym.”

The “Grow or Die” mantra is real. You can’t possibly be successful in today’s world if you’re not learning, if you don’t have a growth mentality. You are never the smartest person in the room. The minute you are convinced that you are…you’re screwed.

If you don’t believe me, look at the development of your business itself as a metaphor for your own development as a leader. What happens to your startup if it stops growing?

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