Understanding the Drivers of Success

Although generally business is great at Return Path  and by almost any standard in the world has been consistently strong over the years, as everyone internally knows, the second part of 2012 and most of 2013 were not our finest years/quarters.  We had a number of challenges scaling our business, many of which have since been addressed and improved significantly.

When I step back and reflect on “what went wrong” in the quarters where we came up short of our own expectations, I can come up with lots of specific answers around finer points of execution, and even a few abstracted ones around our industry, solutions, team, and processes.  But one interesting answer I came up with recently was that the reason we faltered a bit was that we didn’t clearly understand the drivers of success in our business in the 1-2 years prior to things getting tough.  And when I reflect back on our entire 14+ year history, I think that pattern has repeated itself a few times, so I’m going to conclude there’s something to it.

What does that mean?  Well, a rising tide — success in your company — papers over a lot of challenges in the business, things that probably aren’t working well that you ignore because the general trend, numbers, and success are there.  Similarly, a falling tide — when the going gets a little tough for you — quickly reveals the cracks in the foundation.

In our case, I think that while some of our success in 2010 and 2011 was due to our product, service, team, etc. — there were two other key drivers.  One was the massive growth in social media and daily deal sites (huge users of email), which led to more rapid customer acquisition and more rapid customer expansion coupled with less customer churn.  The second was the fact that the email filtering environment was undergoing a change, especially at Gmail and Yahoo, which caused more problems and disruption for our clients’ email programs than usual — the sweet spot of our solution.

While of course you always want to make hay while the sun shines, in both of these cases, a more careful analysis, even WHILE WE WERE MAKING HAY, would have led us to the conclusion that both of those trends were not only potentially short-term, but that the end of the trend could be a double negative — both the end of a specific positive (lots of new customers, lots more market need), and the beginning of a BROADER negative (more customer churn, reduced market need).

What are we going to do about this?  I am going to more consistently apply one of our learning principles, the Post-Mortem  –THE ART OF THE POST-MORTEM, to more general business performance issues instead of specific activities or incidents.  But more important, I am going to make sure we do that when things are going well…not just when the going gets tough.

What are the drivers of success in your business?  What would happen if they shifted tomorrow?

I love the concept of Servant Leadership.  From the source, the definition is:

While servant leadership is a timeless concept, the phrase “servant leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, Greenleaf said:

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?“

A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the “top of the pyramid,” servant leadership is different. The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.

This is a very broad societal definition, but it’s fairly easy to apply to a more narrow corporate, or even startup environment.  Are you as a CEO oriented primarily towards your people, or towards other stakeholders like customers or shareholders?  By the way, trying to do right by all three stakeholders is NOT a problem in a world of being oriented towards one.  It’s just a philosophy around which comes first, and why.  Our People First philosophy at Return Path is fair clear that at the end of the day, all three stakeholders win IF you do right by employees, so they do the best possible work for customers, so you build a healthy and profitable and growing business.

CEOs who practice Servant Leadership aren’t necessarily focused on power dynamics, or on helping those least privileged in society (at least not as part of their job)…but they are focused on making sure that their employees most important needs are met — both in the moment, as in making sure employees are empowered and not blocked or bottlenecked, and over the long haul, as in making sure employees have opportunities to learn, grow, advance their careers, make an impact, and have the ability to live a well balanced life.

I was in a meeting a couple weeks back with another leader and a few people on his team.  He *seemed* to practice Servant Leadership the way he was speaking to his team members.  But he wasn’t, really.  He was doing something I refer to as Sucking Down.  He was telling them things they clearly wanted to hear.  He was lavishing praise on them for minor accomplishments.  He was smiling and saying yes, when what he really meant was no.  He was practicing the art of Sucking Up, only to people on his team, not to a boss.  I got a sense that something wasn’t right during the meeting, and then post meeting, he actually fessed up to me — even bragged about it — that he was being disingenuous to get what he wanted out of his people.

There’s a clear difference between Servant Leadership and Sucking Down in the long run.  The danger comes in the moment.  Just as managers need to build good detection skills to sniff out evidence of someone on their team Sucking Up, employees need to be able to understand that clear difference in their managers’ behavior as they think about how to manage their careers, and even where to work.

Half the Benefit is in the Preparation

This past week, we had what has become an annual tradition for us – a two-day Board meeting that’s Board and senior management (usually offsite, not this year to keep costs down) and geared to recapping the prior year and planning out 2009 together.  Since we are now two companies, we did two of them back-to-back, one for Authentic Response and the other for Return Path.

It’s a little exhausting to do these meetings, and it’s exhausting to attend them, but they’re well worth it.  The intensity of the sessions, discussion, and even social time in between meetings is great for everyone to get on the same page and remember what’s working, what’s not, and what the world around us looks like as we dive off the high dive for another year.

The most exhausting part is probably the preparation for the meetings.  We probably send out over 400 pages of material in advance – binders, tabs, the works.  It’s the only eco-unfriendly Board packet of the year.  It feels like the old days in management consulting.  It takes days of intense preparation — meetings, spreadsheets, powerpoints, occasionally even some soul searching — to get the books right.  And then, once those are out (the week before the meeting), we spend almost as much time getting the presentations down for the actual meeting, since presenting 400 pages of material that people have already read is completely useless.

By the end of the meetings, we’re in good shape for the next year.  But before the meetings have even started, we’ve gotten a huge percentage of the benefit out of the process.  Pulling materials together is one thing, but figuring out how to craft the overall story (then each piece of it in 10-15 minutes or less) for a semi-external audience is something entirely different.  That’s where the rubber meets the road and where good executives are able to step back; remember what the core drivers and critical success factors are; separate the laundry list of tactics from the kernel that includes strategy, development of competitive advantage, and value creation; and then articulate it quickly, crisply, and convincingly. 

I’m incredibly proud of how both management teams drove the process this year – and I’m charged up for a great 2009 (economy be damned!).

It’s election season, the GOP convention is literally in my backyard, and while this is not a political blog, I can’t help myself. As we as Americans grapple with the question of who we want to be our next leader (or at least those people who live in the 11 annointed swing states do), I have had a lot of thoughts lately about the question of what makes a good leader, and what the differences are between successful leadership in politics and successful leadership in business.

James O’Toole’s article on President Bush on page 31 of the September issue of Fast Company (no link available yet) brings up a really interesting point in comparing Bush to former president Ronald Reagan. He asserts that “what made Reagan effective and respected was that his actions followed consistently from a positive worldview.” (I’d also argue that the positive worldview as a starting point had something to do with it, but that’s beside the point.) He goes on to say that Bush has an “implementation problem” in that he “has vacillated between contradictory approaches to leadership: realism and idealism.” His central thesis is stated very clearly that

“Realists and idealists can both be effective leaders. But one cannot be both at once…The leadership lesson for GW – and for any leader – is simple: Followers don’t much care if leaders are realists or idealists, but they distrust inconsistency.”

This may or may not be true in the political arena, but I know it’s not true in business. Jim Collins’ watershed books Built to Last and Good to Great — both must reads! — describe the ideal CEO as someone who can simultaneously be optimistic and idealistic about the future of the company while simultaneously recognizing and dealing with the realities of the short-term situation. Ironically for this posting, Collins calls this the Stockdale paradox, after retired Admiral James Stockdale, a military leader and erstwhile vice presidential candidate of Ross Perot in the 1992 election.

As CEO, I have to constantly be selling the vision of the company — what we’re trying to become and how we’re going to get there — in broad strokes to my investors, board, management team, employees, and even customers. It’s that vision that keeps the whole machine running and keeps everyone focused and excited and working hard towards our long-term goals. But I have to be equally vigilant about the mundane realities of the current quarter, making our numbers, containing costs, and running the machine. If I did either one without the other, I think the whole system would break down.

Is Bush’s problem, as O’Toole asserts, that he articulated two different types of reasons for the war in Iraq — one rooted in Realism (WMD) and one rooted in Idealism (freedom and democracy)? Same goes for his states reasons for the tax cut — Realism on the one hand (to stimulate the economy) and Idealism on the other hand (shrink government). I agree that the Bush Administration has occasional implementation problems and doesn’t have nearly the “following” that Reagan and other more successful leaders in the past have, but I don’t think they’re caused by combining Realism and Idealism in the President’s leadership style. I think the leader of the free world has to do both well, each at its appropriate time, in order to be effective at his job.

Next up in this series: Admitting Mistakes.

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

I’ve written about our 360 Review process at Return Path a few times in the past:

• overall process
• process for my review in particular
• update on a process change and unintended consequences of that process change)
• learnings from this year’s process about my staff

And the last two times around, I’ve also posted the output of my own review publicly here in the form of my development plan:

• Here in 2008
• Here in 2009

So here we are again.  I have my new development plan all spruced up and ready to go.  Many thanks to my team and Board for this valuable input, and to Angela Baldonero (my fantastic SVP People and in-house coach), and Marc Maltz of Triad Consulting for helping me interpret the data and draft this plan.  Here at a high level is what I’m going to be working on for the next 1-2 years:

• Institutionalize impatience and lessen the dependency dynamic on me.  What does this mean?  Basically it means that I want to make others in the organization and on my team in particular as impatient as I am for progress, success, reinvention, streamlining and overcoming/minimizing operational realities.  I’ll talk more about something I’ve taken to calling “productive disruption” in a future blog post
• Focus on making every staff interaction at all levels a coaching session.  Despite some efforts over the years, I still feel like I talk too much when I interact with people in the organization on a 1:1 or small group basis.  I should be asking many more questions and teaching people to fish, not fishing for them
• Continue to foster deep and sustained engagement at all levels.  We’ve done a lot of this, really well, over the years.  But at nearly 250 people now and growing rapidly, it’s getting harder and harder.  I want to focus some real time and energy in the months to come on making sure we keep this critical element of our culture vibrant at our new size and stage
• I have some other more tactical goals as well like improving at public speaking and getting more involved with leadership recruiting and management training, but the above items are more or less the nub of it

One thing I know I’ll have to do with some of these items and some of the tactical ones in particular is engage in some form of deliberate practice, as defined by Geoffrey Colvin in his book Talent is Overrated (blog post on the book here).  That will be interesting to figure out.

But that’s the story.  Everyone at Return Path and on my Board – please help me meet these important goals for my development over the next couple of years!

Years ago, I heard then General David Petraeus give a talk to a small group of us about leadership. He was literally coming to us live from his command center in Iraq or Afghanistan when he was running the whole theater of war over there. I realize he subsequently had some tarnish on his reputation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor around handling classified information, but the main thrust of his talk, his Formula for Strategic Leadership, still stands as one of the more memorable talks on leadership I’ve ever heard and is no less relevant as a result.

Given that I still remember it vividly 14-15 years later, I thought I’d recreate it here with my own annotations after the four principles. It’s a simple 4-step formula:

1. Get the big ideas right. Obviously, you aren’t going to go down in history as a great leader if you consistently get the big picture wrong. That doesn’t mean you have to be right about everything and every detail. But if you pick the wrong market, bet on the wrong approach, happen to get your timing wrong by a few years…it’s hard to win.
2. Communicate them up and down the organization. Every mature leader knows that ideas and plans only go so far if they stay in your head or get filtered down through leadership teams. For your values to take root, for your strategy and strategic choices to make sense, and for people in the organization to be able to connect their daily execution to your company’s north star, you need to spend a lot of time communicating those things throughout the organization. Different groups, different meetings, different channels. And then, when you’re finally exhausted and sick of hearing yourself say those things over and over and over again…keep saying them.
3. Personally oversee their implementation. Leaders who throw things over the proverbial wall — “here’s what to do, now go do it while I move on to something else” — are not really strategic leaders. The devil is in the details. If you can’t bother to spend a few minutes overseeing the implementation of your strategy and carefully watching when and how it works and doesn’t (see next item), you may be a good visionary, but you’re not really a strategic leader.
4. Memorialize and institutionalize best and worst practices. This is where so many leaders fall down on the job. When something in your organization wraps up — a launch, a quarter, a project — you have to do a retrospective, curate learnings both good and bad, and publish them. That way your whole organization can have a growth mindset as a system.

There are about a zillion books on leadership out there. Most of them are probably between 200 and 400 pages long. While they may all have variations on this theme and colorful examples behind them, this still rings true for me as the essential formula for strategic leadership.

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 and Uline just now, costs $11 if you buy in bulk and is built to last 4-6 weeks. That gives us an annual per urinal expense of about $100 – trivial in the scheme of maintaining an office, restaurant, or place of business.

But here’s the thing. These floor mats are few and far between. I don’t have scientific research on the matter, but I’d guess that between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 places of business have them. Maybe even fewer.

So, urinal floor mats are (a) cheap, (b) easy to acquire, and (c) make a profound difference in the environment. And yet, they are only have 10-20% market penetration at most.

That market penetration is not far off from the prevalence of very good leadership and management in business. I hear stories all the time from executives about absolutely terrible leadership practices. I also hear plenty of stories that aren’t awful, but are evidence of non-leadership or non-management. The experience of working for a good manager, or in an organization with strong leadership, is profoundly different than working with the absence of those things.

To complete the analogy, good management and leadership are also (a) cheap, (b) easy to acquire, and (c) make a profound difference in the work environment. Sure, you can’t buy good leadership online, but it’s not all that difficult to be a caring, supportive, transparent manager. Heck, there’s even a book called The One Minute Manager.

So why the low market penetration of both? It makes no logical sense. It’s not as if most people haven’t had the experience of using a urinal with a floor mat…or of having a really good leader or manager. It’s not as if leaders and decision makers don’t appreciate those things themselves.

The answer boils down to three simple points that anyone who is a manager or leader can do, any day:

• You have to pay attention
• You have to care
• You have to act

Great leaders and managers exhibit all three of these traits. They pay attention to things around them, noting that Everything is Data. They care about people, about experiences, about impressions, about reputations. And when they notice that something is off – however small it is – they care enough to remember and then take the time to act. To make a small change. Send an email. Have a quick conversation. Make a suggestion. Give someone quick praise or constructive feedback.

And to come back to where this post started – it’s also not that hard to have a nice men’s room at your office or business or restaurant. You just have to pay attention to the fact that it’s a much better experience to buy floor mats. You have to care about the experience in the men’s room (for yourself, for employees, for customers, for vendors, for visitors). And then you have to act and either buy the stupid mats or ask an office manager to do the same!

As I mentioned the other day, the second edition of Startup CEO is out.  This post is a teaser for the content in one of the new chapters in this edition on Authentic Leadership.

As I mentioned last week, 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. Two of those principles, which are timeless and transcend turmoil, uncertainty, time and place, are creating space to think and reflect and being intentional in your actions. In a world in which CEOs are increasingly called upon to deal with more than traditional business (pricing, strategy, go-to market approaches, team building, etc.) it’s imperative to approach and solve challenging situations from a foundation that doesn’t waver. 

At Return Path our values were the foundation that provided a lens through which we made every decision. Well, not every decision, only the good ones. When we strayed from our core values, that got us into trouble. The other principle, outlined in Chapter 1 of the Second Edition, is leading an organization authentically.

Let me provide a couple concrete examples of what I mean by “Authentic Leadership” since the term can be interpreted many ways.

One example is to avoid what I call the “Say-Do” gap.  This is obviously a very different thread than talking about how the company relates to the outside world and current events.  But in some ways, it’s even more important.  A leader can’t truly be trusted and followed by their team without being very cognizant of, and hopefully avoiding close to 100%, any gap between the things they say or policies they create, and the things they do.  There is no faster way to generate muscle-pulling eyerolls on your team than to create a policy or a value and promptly not follow it. 

I’ll give you an example that just drove me nuts early in my career here, though there are others in the book.  I worked for a company that had an expense policy – one of those old school policies that included things like “you can spend up to $10 on a taxi home if you work past 8 pm unless it’s summer when it’s still light out at 8 pm” (or something like that).  Anyway, the policy stipulated a max an employee could spend on a hotel for a business trip, but the CEO  (who was an employee) didn’t follow that policy 100% of the time.  When called out on it, did the CEO apologize and say they would follow the policy just like everyone else? No, the CEO changed the policy in the employee handbook so that it read “blah blah blah, other than the CEO, President, or CFO, who may spend a higher dollar amount at his discretion.”

What does that say about the CEO? How engaged are employees likely to be, how much effort are they willing to devote to the company if there are special rules for the executives? You can make any rule you want — as you probably know if you have read a bunch of my posts or my book over the years, I’m a proponent of rule-light environments — but you can’t make rules for everyone else that you aren’t willing to follow yourself unless you own the whole company and don’t care what anyone thinks about you or says about you behind your back.

Beyond avoiding the Say-Do Gap, this new chapter of the book on Authentic Leadership also talks about how CEOs respond to current events in today’s increasingly politicized and polarized world.  This has always felt to me like a losing proposition for most CEOs, which I talk about quite a bit in the book.  When the world is polarized, whatever you do as CEO, whatever position you take on things, is bound to upset, alienate, or infuriate some nontrivial percentage of your workforce.  I even give some examples in the book of how I focused on using the company’s best interests and the company’s values as guideposts for reacting (or not reacting) to politically divisive or charged issues like guns or “religious liberty” laws.  I say this noting that there are some people who *believe* that their side of an issue like this is right, and the other side is wrong, but the issues have some element of nuance to them.

Today’s world feels a bit different, and I’m not sure what I would be doing if I was leading a known, scaled enterprise at this stage in the game.  The largely peaceful protests around all aspects of racial injustice in America in the wake of the murder of George Floyd — and the brutality and senselessness of that murder itself — have caused a tidal wave of dialog reaching all corners of the country and the world.  The root of this issue doesn’t feel to me like one that has a lot of nuance or a second side to the argument.  After all, what reasonable person is out there arguing that George Floyd’s death was called for, or even that black Americans don’t have a deep-seeded and widespread reasonable claim to inequality…even if their view of what to do about it differs?

I *think* what I would be doing in a broader leadership role today is figuring out what my organization could be doing to help reduce or eliminate structural racial inequality where we could based on our business, as opposed to driving my organization to take a specific political stand. I know for sure that I wouldn’t solicit feedback from a select group of people only, but I would create a space where voices from across the organization (and stakeholders outside of it as well) could be heard. That’s not a solution, but a start, and in challenging times making a little bit of headway can lead to a cascading effect. It can, if you keep the momentum.

And, in line with “authentic leadership,” it’s okay to admit that you don’t have the answers, that you might not even know the questions to ask. But doing nothing, or operating in a “business as usual” way won’t make your company stronger, won’t open up new opportunities, won’t generate new ideas, and won’t sit well with your employees, who are very much thinking about these issues. 

So, in today’s challenging times I would follow my own advice, be thoughtful and reflective, and intentional in searching for common solutions.  I’d try to avoid “mob mentality” pressure — but I would also be listening carefully to my stakeholders and to my own conscience.

In the coming weeks, I’ll write posts that get into some of the other topics I cover in the book, but none of them will be as good as reading the full thing!

Book Short: The Anti-Level-5 Leader

The Five Temptations of a CEO, another short leadership fable in a series by Patrick Lencioni, wasn’t as meaningful to me as the last one I read, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link), but it wasn’t bad and was also a quick read.

The book to me was the 30 minute version of all the Level-5 Leadership stuff that Collins wrote about in Good to Great and Built to Last. All that said, it was a good quick read and a reminder of what not to do. The temptations are things that most CEOs I’ve ever known (present company very much included) have at least succumbed to at one point or another in their career. That said, you as a CEO should quit or be fired if you have them in earnest, so hopefully if you do have them, you recognize it and have them in diminishing quantities with experience, and hopefully not all at once:

– The temptation to be concerned about his or her image above company results

– The temptation to want to be popular with his or her direct reports above holding them accountable for results

– The temptation to ensure that decisions are correct, even if that means not making a decision on limited information when one is needed

– The temptation to find harmony on one’s staff rather than have productive conflict, discussion, and debate

– The temptation to avoid vulnerability and trust in one’s staff

I’m still going to read the others in Lencioni’s series as well. They may not be the best business books ever written, but they’re solid B/B+s, and they’re short and simple, which few business books are and all should be!

Scaling the Team

(This post was requested by my long-time Board member Fred Wilson and is also running concurrently on his blog today.  I’ll be back with the third and fourth installments of “The Best Laid Plans” next Thursday and the following Thursday)

When Return Path reached 100 employees a few years back, I had a dinner with my Board one night at which they basically told me, “Management teams never scale intact as you grow the business.  Someone always breaks.”  I’m sure they were right based on their own experience; I, of course, took this as a challenge.  And ever since then, my senior management team and I have become obsessed with scaling ourselves as managers.  So far, so good.  We are over 300 employees now and rapidly headed to 400 in the coming year, and the core senior management team is still in place and doing well.  Below are five reasons why that’s the case.

1. We appreciate the criticality of excellent management and recognize that it is a completely different skill set from everything else we have learned in our careers.  This is like Step 1 in a typical “12-step program.”  First, admit you have a problem.  If you put together (a) management is important, (b) management is a different skill set, and (c) you might not be great at it, with the standard (d) you are an overachiever who likes to excel in everything, then you are setting the stage for yourself to learn and work hard at improving at management as a practice, which is the next item on the list.
2. We consistently work at improving our management skills.  We have a strong culture of 360 feedback, development plans, coaching, and post mortems on major incidents, both as individuals and as a senior team.  Most of us have engaged on and off over the years with an executive coach, for the most part Marc Maltz from Triad Consulting.  In fact, the team holds each other accountable for individual performance against our development plans at our quarterly offsites.  But learning on the inside is only part of the process.
3. We learn from the successes and failures of others whenever possible.  My team regularly engages as individuals in rigorous external benchmarking to understand how peers at other companies – preferably ones either like us or larger – operate.  We methodically pick benchmarking candidates.  We ask for their time and get on their calendars.  We share knowledge and best practices back with them.  We pay this forward to smaller companies when they ask us for help.  And we incorporate the relevant learnings back into our own day to day work.
4. We build the strongest possible second-level management bench we can to make sure we have a broad base of leadership and management in the company that complements our own skills.  A while back I wrote about the Peter Principle, Applied to Management that it’s quite easy to accumulate mediocre managers over the years because you feel like you have to promote your top performers into roles that are viewed as higher profile, are probably higher comp – and for which they may be completely unprepared and unsuited.  Angela Baldonero, my SVP People, and I have done a lot here to ensure that we are preparing people for management and leadership roles, and pushing them as much as we push ourselves.  We have developed and executed comprehensive Management Training and Leadership Development programs in conjunction with Mark Frein at Refinery Leadership Partners.  Make no mistake about it – this is a huge investment of time and money.  But it’s well worth it.  Training someone who knows your business well and knows his job well how to be a great manager is worth 100x the expense of the training relative to having an employee blow up and needing to replace them from the outside.
5. We are hawkish about hiring in from the outside.  Sometimes you have to bolster your team, or your second-level team.  Expanding companies require more executives and managers, even if everyone on the team is scaling well.  But there are significant perils with hiring in from the outside, which I’ve written about twice with the same metaphor (sometimes I forget what I have posted in the past) – Like an Organ Transplant and Rejected by the Body.  You get the idea.  Your culture is important.  Your people are important.  New managers at any level instantly become stewards of both.  If they are failing as managers, then they need to leave.  Now.

I’m sure there are other things we do to scale ourselves as a management team – and more than that, I’m sure there are many things we could and should be doing but aren’t.  But so far, these things have been the mainstays of happily (they would agree) proving our Board wrong and remaining intact as a team as the business grows.

Parenting and Corporate Leadership

Let me be clear up front:  I do not think of my colleagues at Return Path as children, and I do not think of Casey, Wilson, and Elyse as employees.  That said, after a couple weeks of good quality family time in January, I was struck by the realization that being a CEO for a long time before having kids has made me a better parent…and I think being a new parent the last three years has made me a better CEO. 

Here's why.  The two roles have a heavy overlap in required core interpersonal competencies.  And doing both of them well means you're practicing those competencies twice as many hours in a week than just doing one – and in different settings.  It's like cross training.  In no order, the cross-over competencies I can think of are…

Decisiveness.  Be wishy washy at work, and the team can get stuck in a holding pattern.  Be wishy washy with kids, they run their agenda, not yours.

Listening.  As my friend Anita says, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason.  Listening to your team at work, and also listening for what's not being said, is the best way to understand what's going on in your organization.  Kids need to be heard as well.  The best way to teach good verbal communication skills is to ask questions and then listen actively and attentively to the responses.

Focus.  Basically, no one benefits from multitasking, even if it feels like a more efficient way of working.  Anyone you're spending time with, whether professionally or at home, deserves your full attention. The reality is that the human brain is full of entropy anyway, so even a focused conversation, meeting, or play time, is somehow compromised.  Actually doing other activities at the same time destroys the human connection.

Patience.  For the most part, steering people to draw their own conclusions about things at work is key.  Even if it takes longer than just telling them what to do, it produces better results.  With kids, patience takes on a whole new meaning, but giving them space to work through issues and scenarios on their own, while hard, clearly fosters independence.

Alignment.  If you and your senior staff disagree about something, cross-communication confuses the team.  If you and your spouse aren't on the same page about something, watch those kids play the two of you off each other.  A united front at the top is key!

I'm sure there are others…but these are the main things that jump to mind.  And of course one can be great in one area without being in the other area at all, or without being great in it.  Are you a parent and a business leader?  What do you think?