As most of you know by now, I wrote a book that was published last fall called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business.  I’m excited to announce that, starting on January 20th, the book has now been turned into Kauffman Fellows Academy (KFA) online course called Startup CEO.  Similarly, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s highly successful Venture Deals is also going to launch as Venture Deals KFA online course on February 24th. Both will be offered initially on the NovoEd platform.

The parties involved in getting it off the ground (besides me) were the team at Kauffman Fellows Academy and NovoEd.  Clint Korver, a serial entrepreneur and Stanford adjunct professor, spearheaded the project, and between filming the course and now, he switched jobs from KFA to be the COO at NovoEd, so he has been on all sides of this.   NovoEd is a very unique online educational platform that gives students the ability internationally to work together in teams and collaborate on assignments and peer review one another’s work.  So far over 1,300 people have signed up for Startup CEO from countries as far-flung as the China, Brasil, Iran, the U.K., Australia and, of course, Silicon valley..  This is an exciting extension of the book for me to watch unfold.

The class itself is a very unique format, a bit of “the entrepreneur’s studio” model.  For each chapter of the book (there are 48), I filmed a 5-10 minute Q&A with Clint in front of a live audience of a dozen startup CEOs in New York.  This was a serious production – much more than I expected – with a three-person former CNN production team of Kevin Rockwell, Chuck Afflerbach, and led by former Emmy Award winning CNN Correspondent Rusty Dornin.  Preparing for the class this way was fun and gave me a good opportunity to further crystallize the main point or theme of each chapter.  Having a live audience was super helpful to see what worked and what didn’t work.

Startup CEO: The Online Course Part II

Startup CEO the online course offered by the Kauffman Fellows Academy is back this fall starting September 15!  As many of you know, the course is based on my book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Your Business.

When the course first ran earlier this year, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Hundreds of students from six continents signed up, all eager to learn as much as they could about entrepreneurship and how to develop their startups.  The students worked together in teams to develop their startup ideas on the unique online educational platform NovoEd.  I was amazed at the enthusiasm of students who dove into lectures and the book and then exchanged ideas in the forums.  It was very powerful to see cohorts of students from all over the world sharing their experiences together, almost like the CEO peer group that I write about in the book.

The real power of it really hit me when I was in Brazil  this last spring at a dinner and one of the attendees approached me and told me he was one of the Startup CEO students and how much he was enjoying the course.

To bring the class to life, we began holding Google hangouts moderated by KFA VP and former CNN correspondent Rusty Dornin.  The students could write in questions live during the hangout or watch the recorded version later.  The hangouts were not only informative but fun.

Here are a few comments from students in the winter course:

“The lectures and the hangouts were incredibly insightful. I’m sure I’ll avoid a good number of mistakes I would have surely made without taking this class!

“I enjoyed the high quality of the lecturers and their very practical experience and guidance. This included the excellent visiting lecturers and whilst I was unable to join the hangouts in real time (I’m in Australia) I was able to watch the recordings”

In addition, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s course Venture Deals  based on their popular book Venture Deals: Be Smarter than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist will begin September 29th.  Brad Feld and other celebrated investors will also be featured in hangouts for the course and Brad loves to dive into the forums.

I am looking forward to this next round and our global discussion of how to create and manage successful startups.

New Media Deal, Part II – the We Media Deal

My original New Medial Deal posting from August, 2004, is my favorite posting of all 220 or so that I’ve done to date. It has the most clicks of any posting I’ve done. People mention it to me all the time. I even used it as the foundation for the preface to our book at Return Path, Sign Me Up!

The general thesis (although the original posting is short and worth reading) is simple. Old Media was one-way communication – they produce it, you consume it, and Old Media had a deal with us: they give us free or cheap content, we tolerate their advertising. Think about your favorite radio station or an episode of The Office on TV. The New Media deal is an Internet derivative of that, that is founded on some degree of two-way communication: they give us free services and more targeted advertising in exchange for some of our personal data — just like the Old Media deal, we are willing make a small sacrifice, in this case, some pieces of our anonymity, in a heartbeat if the value exchange is there. This is true of everything from personalized stock quotes on My Yahoo! to the New York Times on the Web. The New Media Deal doesn’t replace the Old Media Deal, it just adapts it to the new environment.

But what about the new generation of services that have popped up on the web around peer production?  The ones that aren’t one-way communication or two-way communication, but community-oriented communciation.  (Note I am resisting hard calling them Web 2.0, but you know it’s there somewhere.)  Does the New Media Deal still apply, or are we on to something else?  I think the rules are morphing once again, and now there’s a new deal — let’s call it the We Media Deal — that builds on the “data as part of the value exchange” moniker of the New Media Deal. Like its predecessor deals, the We Media Deal doesn’t replace the New Media Deal or the Old Media Deal, it just adapts it for new types of services.

The We Media Deal has two components to it:  (1) the value of the service to you increases in lock-step as you contribute more data to it, and (2) the more transparent the value exchange, the more willing you are to share your data.

Ok – that sounds very academic – what do I mean in plain English? Let’s break it down.

1. The value to you increases in lock-step as you contribute more data.  This is something that probably wasn’t obvious with the original New Media Deal, since it wasn’t clear that if you gave My Yahoo! incrementally more data (one more stock quote, for example), you’d get more relevant ads or services.  It’s a pretty static value exchange.  But think about the new generation of web services around peer production.

– The more you use Delicious to bookmark web pages, the more relevant it becomes to you, and the more dependent you become on it as your own “Internet within an Internet.”

– The more you wite a blog or post photos to Flickr, the more engrained the act of blogging becomes in your daily existence — you start looking at the world, ever so slightly, through the lens of “that would make an interesting posting” (trust me).

– The more you use Wikipedia (or wikis in general), the more committed you become to Wikipedia as your first go-to source for information, and the more you get infected with the desire to contribute to it.

The bottom line with the first part of the We Media Deal is that the more you give to the system, the more you want and need out of the system.  A big part of peer production is that most people fundamentally, if quietly, want to belong to any bit of community they can find.  All these new web services of late have transformed the mass Internet from a read platform to a read/write platform, so now everyone can have a say in things.  The same reason eBay is cooler and bigger than the New York Times on the Web will drive this new generation of services, and new spins on old services, forward.

2. Next up — the more transparent the value exchange, the more willing you are to share your data.  Transparecy rules.  When you contribute to the web, you’re exposed, so why is trasparency a help and not a hindrance?  Let’s look at the same 3 examples.

– Delicious let’s you delete your account and all your personal data.  They’re blatant about it during the sign-up process.  The result?  It increases your trust in the network since you can easily exit at any time.

– Blogging and Flickr couldn’t be more transparent.  They’re personal printing presses.  If you’re good at it, you really have to think before you write. It’s you – you’re really hanging out there transparent for all the world to see – therefore you’re even more invested in what you write and derive even more value from the activity.

– Similarly, Wikipedia tracks who changes what, and if you make an error, the community will correct it in an astonishingly short time frame, keeping you honest.

The good news is that, while the We Media Deal is coming of age, our New Media Deal is alive and well and growing stronger as the web evolves as well.  Free services and more targeted advertising in exchange for some of your personal data makes a ton of sense when the right balance of service and data is there.  Transparency and control make the We Media Deal an even stronger stronger bond between company and individual, mostly because the bond is between company and community — the deal gets more solid the more we as individuals invest in it.

Corporate Sniglets

This might be showing my age, but those who may have watched Not Necessarily the News in the 80s might remember the Sniglets segment that Rich Hall pioneered which spawned a series of short, fun books. Sniglets are words which are not in the dictionary, but which should be. I can remember a couple of examples from years ago that make the point — aquadexterity is the ability to operate bathtub dials with one’s feet; cheedle is the orange residue left on one’s fingers after eating a bag of Cheetos.

As is the case with many companies, we have made up some of our own words over the years at Return Path – think of them as Corporate Sniglets. I’m sure we have more than these, but here are a few that we use internally:

• Underlap is the opposite of Overlap. My colleague Tom Bartel coined this gem years ago when he was leading the integration work on an acquisition we did, as in “let’s look for areas of Overlap as well as areas of Underlap (things that neither companies does, but which we should as a combined company).”
• Pre-Mortem or Mid-Mortem are the timing opposites of Post-Mortem. We do Post-Mortems religiously, but sometimes you want to do one ahead of a project to think about what COULD go wrong and how to head those things off at the pass, or in the middle of a project to course-correct on it. I believe my colleague George Bilbrey gets credit for the Pre-Mortem, and I think I might have come up with Mid-Mortem.
• Frontfill is the opposite of Backfill. While you Backfill a position after an employee leaves, you can Frontfill it if you know someone is going to leave to get ahead of the curve and make sure you don’t have a big gap without a role being filled. Credit to Mike Mills for this one

RPers, are there others I’m missing?  Anyone else have any other gems from other companies?

What Does a CEO Do, Anyway?

Fred has a great post up last week in his MBA Mondays series caled “What a CEO Does.”  His three things (worth reading his whole post anyway) are set vision/strategy and communicate broadly, recruit/hire/retain top talent, and make sure there’s enough cash in the bank.

It’s great advice.  These three are core job responsibilities of any CEO, probably of any company, any size.  I’d like to build on that premise by adding two other dimensions to the list.  Fred was kind enough to offer me a “guest blogger” spot, so this post also appears today on his blog as well.

First, three corollaries – one for each of the three responsibilities Fred outlines.

• Setting vision and strategy are key…but in order to do that, the CEO must remember the principle of NIHITO (Nothing Interesting Happens in the Office) and must spend time in-market.  Get to know competitors well.  Spend time with customers and channel partners.  Actively work industry associations.  Walk the floor at conferences.  Understand what the substitute products are (not just direct competition).
• Recruiting and retaining top talent are pay-to-play…but you have to go well beyond the standards and basics here.  You have to be personally involved in as much of the process as you can – it’s not about delegating it to HR.  I find that fostering all-hands engagement is a CEO-led initiative.  Regularly conduct random roundtables of 6-10 employees.  Send your Board reports to ALL (redact what you must) and make your all-hands meetings Q&A instead of status updates.  Hold a CEO Council every time you have a tough decision to make and want a cross-section of opinions.
• Making sure there’s enough cash in the bank keeps the lights on…but managing a handful of financial metrics on concert with each other is what really makes the engine hum.  A lot of cash with a lot of debt is a poor position to be in.  Looking at recognized revenue when you really need to focus on bookings is shortsighted.  Managing operating losses as your burn/runway proxy when you have huge looming CapEx needs is a problem.

Second, three behaviors a CEO has to embody in order to be successful – this goes beyond the job description into key competencies.

• Don’t be a bottleneck.  You don’t have to be an Inbox-Zero nut, but you do need to make sure you don’t have people in the company chronically waiting on you before they can take their next actions on projects.  Otherwise, you lose all the leverage you have in hiring a team.
• Run great meetings.  Meetings are a company’s most expensive endeavors.  10 people around a table for an hour is a lot of salary expense!  Make sure your meetings are as short as possible, as actionable as possible, and as interesting as possible.  Don’t hold a meeting when an email or 5-minute recorded message will suffice.  Don’t hold a weekly standing meeting when it can be biweekly.  Vary the tempo of your meetings to match their purpose – the same staff group can have a weekly with one agenda, a monthly with a different agenda, and a quarterly with a different agenda.
• Keep yourself fresh…Join a CEO peer group.  Work with an executive coach.  Read business literature (blogs, books, magazines) like mad and apply your learnings.  Exercise regularly.  Don’t neglect your family or your hobbies.  Keep the bulk of your weekends, and at least one two-week vacation each year, sacrosanct and unplugged.

There are a million other things to do, or that you need to do well…but this is a good starting point for success.

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.

A Culture of Appreciation

As I mentioned in my last post in the Collaboration is Hard series, we’ve tried to create a culture of appreciation at Return Path that lowers barriers to collaboration and rewards mutual successes.  We developed a system that’s modeled somewhat after a couple of those short Ken Blanchard books, Whale Done and Gung Ho! It may seem a little hokey, and it doesn’t work 100% of the time, but in general, it’s a great way to make it easy for people to say a public “thanks” to a colleague for a job well done.

The idea is simple.  We have an “award request” form on our company Intranet that any employee can use to request one of five awards for one or more of their colleagues, and the list evolves over time.  The awards are:

ABCD – for going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty

Double E – for “everyday excellence”

Crowbar – for helping someone in sales “pry our way in” to a new customer

Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That – for coming up with a great insight for the business (credit for the name of course goes to our former colleague Andy Sernovitz)

WOOT – for Working Out Of Title and helping a colleague

Our HR coordinator Lisa does a quick review of award submissions to make sure they are true to their definitions and make sure that people aren’t abusing the system, and the awards are announced and posted on the home page of the Intranet every week and via RSS feed in near-real time.

Each award carries a token monetary value of $25-$200 paid with American Express gift checks, which are basically like cash.  We send out the checks with mini-statements to employees every quarter.

It’s not a perfect system.  The biggest shortcoming is that it’s not used evenly by different people or different groups.  But it’s the best thing we’ve come up with so far to allow everyone in the company to give a colleague a virtual pat on the back, which encourages great teamwork!

As I stared at a dugout of dispirited 14 year old boys Saturday afternoon in our tournament championship game, I found myself talking to my fellow coach Mitch about a book I’d read a few years ago (turns out 14) called Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End, written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor. While that original blog post is pretty specific to something that was going on at that point in time in my prior company, the thinking in the book about momentum and the role it plays in our psychology, about sports, about business, and about life in general, is timeless.

Watching this team of teens go through ups and downs within an hour was incredibly stark and clear. In the first inning, we made three errors (just jitters from being in the championship…the Bulldogs are better than that!). Those opened the door for our opponent to post a few runs and take a quick lead. It was as if the wind had been taken out of our sails, as if all 11 kids just took a punch to the gut. They were shocked and pretty listless in the dugout, and nothing the coaches could do or say shook them out of it. They just *knew* they were going to lose, so why try? Their confidence was gone. It wasn’t until we staged our own big rally, later in the game, where all of a sudden, one, then two, then three base hits and the kids were going bananas, up at the fence of the dugout and screaming, cheering each other on and feeling all of a sudden like we could win the game.

The swing in momentum took about 5 minutes in each direction. And all that was involved was a couple quick negative/positive indicators/actions.

The bottom line is that we still lost the game 10-5. But the energy that came from a couple positive developments that stopped a downward spiral and started an upward one was palpable and instructive. As one of my other fellow coaches Jay said to the boys after the game, “Boys, the lesson from today is that Everything Matters. We lost 10-5, but when we were only down by 5 runs with the bases loaded, how much did we regret those couple of errors in the first inning? Without those, we would have been down by 2 runs with victory in reach.”

It’s the same in startups.

When you run a startup, you regularly take three punches to the gut in a row — a client cancels on you, you have a web site outage, an employee quits — and all of a sudden, you view the world through a dark lens of, as my long-time friend and Board member Scott Weiss used to say, WFIO, short for We’re F#%ked, It’s Over (pronounced whiff-ee-oh).

And then, the opposite happens, and it’s like the heavens part and the angels start singing a hallelujah chorus. You win a big new deal. You get unexpected positive press or a key blogger or tweet creates massive buzz for you. Your CFO pings you with the news that revenue is surprisingly high this month. WFIO is suddenly replaced with what I’ll call WGTWIA — We’re Going to Win It All (let’s pronounce it wig-twee-uh).

And what’s the difference? Probably nothing big. Probably a couple small things that just happened to break in the right or wrong direction at the right time. That call or email you decided not to return for a couple days until it was too late. That presentation you could have spent an extra 45 minutes perfecting instead of half-assing. That extra run through a new module of code you wrote to make sure it’s fully debugged. Just like a few silly errors in 14-year old baseball because you had the jitters early in a big game.

Everything Matters. In sports, in business, in life. Anything you think is a “throw away” can turn out in retrospect to have made the difference between winning and losing, between success and failure.

This is a topic we write about obsessively in Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams — in fact, it’s basically the whole point of the book! I’ll write some more specific posts here in the coming weeks that take some excerpts from the book, but Bolster is putting on three free and open webinars we’re calling our “Bolster-up Series” over the coming weeks that I want to share with everyone who reads StartupCEO.com.

In this series, I’ll be doing short interviews with CEOs who we work with at Bolster on the different aspects of scaling specific functions, how they diagnosed those problems, and how they leveraged on-demand executive talent to solve those problems. The three events are:

• 7/20 2:00-2:30pm EST: Signs your Finance function isn’t scaling and what to do about it with MediaWallah founder and CEO Nancy Marzouk.
• 8/12 2:00-2:30pm EST: Signs your Revenue function isn’t scaling and what to do about it with Ozcode CEO Shimon Hason.
• 9/15 2:00-2:30pm EST: Signs your Marketing function isn’t scaling and what to do about it with Drip CEO John Tedesco.

You can sign up for the first one on Finance by clicking here.

(This is the sixth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

As these posts have been running, a few people have asked me to quickly compare this experience to the experience of being a Startup CEO.  And that’s an interesting way to think about it. In a lot of ways, the couple of weeks of getting the IRT up and running felt like starting up a new business, only a lot more intense.  Following the outline of sections in Startup CEO:  a field guide to scaling up your business…

Part One: Storytelling.  The whole timeframe was super compressed.  It took us 2 days to be able to spend 4 hours writing our initial pitch deck defining scope, structure, and staffing request – and that was while we were working hard on our first two workstreams.  In a startup environment, that process would have taken much longer, involved more customer discovery and product/market fit research and spending 100% of our time on that. But then we got our “approval and funding” in about 45 minutes – that would have taken weeks and involved dozens of pitch meetings.  In terms of creating the organization’s Mission, Vision, and Values, we didn’t even bother, although I think it helped that the three of us were generally on the same page with how to work and that urgency was the essence of our job. The larger emergency operations team that we were more or less embedded in also had a very clear set of values and operating principles on display…although we didn’t actually go read them, I think they were in sync with our view of our team’s mission and principles.  In terms of “bringing our story to life,” that was wholly unnecessary!

Part Two: Building The Company’s Human Capital.  Like a startup, getting it right with the first handful of employees means everything.  In this case, the first two deputies on the team, handpicked by the Governor’s staff, were awesome and critical.  Bringing someone in from the private sector to run a public sector team only works when the rest of the team is incredibly knowledgeable about how the machinery of state government works.  And in the end, I think Sarah will be a better leader for the team than I was because she had a combination of private and public sector experience (and within her public sector experience, she had a lot of emergency response experience).  In general, the recruiting process was soooo different than private sector and public sector normally are. The first two team members handpicked the best people they knew in other relevant parts of the government. People were brought onto the team after one short phone call.  Other state departments heads loaned their people willingly. No such thing as a comp negotiation or a reference check. There were a bunch of other things under the “Human Capital” heading that are interesting notes/comparables as well. First, feedback in a compressed-timeframe emergency is something that you absolutely can’t skip – and you can’t wait for a formal process either.  Our team was pretty good about giving feedback at least daily in a semi-structured way as well as in the moment. We didn’t really have time to get into things like career pathing and compensation and firing. We did, after about 6 days at the suggestion of Kacey, our Chief of Staff, move the team to almost entirely remote (other than leadership and occasional critical meetings). This worked surprisingly well for a workforce probably unaccustomed to remote work.  The rest of the world is also learning how to do a lot of that now, too.

Part Three: Execution.  This whole experience was 97% execution.  In fact, we had a hard time finding time for things like strategy and planning because there was a crushing amount of work to do (welcome to emergency response), and a small team to do it.  We didn’t have to worry about raising money, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and some of the other major execution steps in the private sector. We did do a good job of creating goals and milestones for our workstreams, but even that took a couple of weeks, and in retrospect, I wish we’d been able to do some of those sooner.  In terms of how our work got done, we were very conscious of creating daily meeting routines to structure our day and work – but there was no such thing as even a weekly meeting (let alone monthly strategics or quarterly offsites!), only daily meetings, multiple times per day. One thing that was interesting – I talk in the book about being deliberate and consistent with your platforms, especially around communication.  Channel proliferation is a real issue today (much more so than when I wrote the book), but we had an interesting mismatch at the beginning. The public sector team was used to email, text, and Google hangouts for comms. Nothing else. The private sector team used those things but was a lot more comfortable with Trello, Zoom, and Slack. Thank goodness both teams used G-Suite and not a mix of that and LiveOffice. But getting everyone on the team to converge on a couple systems is a work in progress and was messy, as evidenced in this great moment where Kacey was holding a laptop up to an actual whiteboard to show one of our private sector teams how she was thinking about something. 

Part Four: Building and Leading a Board of Directors.  This is kind of N/A, although the proxy for it in our case on the IRT was the leadership structure of the Emergency Operations Center and then the Governor and the part of his cabinet that was keyed into the emergency response.  In this regard, the main differences between the private sector and public sector were speed/formality (no room for formality when you’re meeting daily or at a moment’s notice!), and, interesting, the need for integration. A company reports to its board on how it’s doing.  This team had to use its “board” to make sure it was integrating with other state agencies and initiatives. In this way, the team functioned more like a business unit within a company than an actual company.

Part Five: Managing Yourself So You can Manage Others.  This was obviously critical…and obviously quite difficult.  And within the overall Emergency Operations Center (outside of our team, the real emergency professionals), there were people, including leaders, who were working 7 days/week for multiple weeks on end, and long days, too.  At one point, the EOC leader posted this note on the wall, and he frequently took time in daily briefings to encourage everyone to take a day or two off and take care of themselves physically.  He role-modeled that behavior as well. You can only run a sprint for so long. Once it becomes clear it’s a marathon, well, you know.

Stay tuned for the final post in the series tomorrow…

How to Wow Your Manager

Last week, I talked about how to Wow your employees.  Now I am going to discuss the converse of that – How to Wow your Manager.  Why Wow your manager?  Even if you are senior leader in an organization, the Wow factor is still important.

What impact does a Wow have?  It sends the signal that you are on top of things.  Symbolism is important.  It also advances the cause further and faster.  Why do you want to foster Wow moments with your team?  High performing teams have a lot of Wow going on.  If all members of a team see Wow regularly, they are all inspired to do more sooner, better.

Here are my top 10 examples on how to WOW your manager, along with the intended impact:

1. Show up for every check-in with the full agenda – send it a day or more ahead (Give your manager time and space to prepare)
2.  When you are asking your manager to communicate something (an email to the team, a reference letter, etc.), draft it for him or her (Editing is much easier than creating)
3.  Do a start-stop-continue analysis once a year on all of your key activities (Make yourself as efficient and effective as possible – that’s your responsibility as much as your manager’s)
4.  Own your own development plan and check in on it at least quarterly (Those who own their own career paths progress more quickly down them)
5. Read a relevant business book and ask your manager to discuss insights with you (Staying current with best practices in your field – books, articles, blog posts, videos, mentors, lectures –  is key in a learning organization)
6.  Dress for success – even casual can be neat and “client ready” (Your presence has an impact on those around you.  There’s no reason anyone should ever have to comment on your clothes, your hair, or any aspect of your personal hygiene)
7. Respond to every email where you are on the TO line within a day, even if it’s to say you will respond longer form later (At Return Path,  you have to be in the jet stream of communications. Otherwise, you find yourself in the exhaust of the jet stream)
8. End every meaningful interaction by asking for informal feedback on how you’re doing and what else you can be doing (Again, part of being in a learning organization…and taking more tasks on is always a sign that you are ready for more responsibility)
9. Do something that’s not required but that you feel is a best practice (This shows you’re on top of your game.  One example:  I send the Board a summary, the details, and the YoY trending of all of my expenses every year.  I don’t have to, but enough CEOs out there have high profile expense problems that I decided it’s a good practice.  They all LOVE it)
10.  (If you have staff reporting into you) Show up for every check-in with  your manager with a list of all staff issues and highlights (You need to bubble things up, both good and bad, so your manager is on top of his or her overall team and (a) is never surprised by events, (b) knows how best to handle skip-level communications, and (c) can think more broadly about resource deployment across the organization)