When you’re a boss, one of your biggest responsibilities is to help your people grow.

Doing that requires patience, because they won’t all grow at the same rate.

Some people grow fast, like a hare, others are more in the tortoise category, but that doesn’t make them less valuable.

The hares may grow faster, but the growth often lacks substance. Tortoises, on the other hand, are known to dig deep in order to go beyond the knowledge needed to do something and understand the underlying principles.

Speed is important and the lack of depth may not be a problem until something goes wrong. Finding a solution or work-around often requires the deeper understanding that tortoises possess.

The smart boss knows having a balance of both hares and tortoises yields the strongest team; one that can accomplish far more on time and in budget than a team that is predominantly one type or the other.

Image credit: Inspiyr.com

Have you ever been a member of a group or team that is flat out terrible? I have. I have been a member of that soccer team that never won a game, the work group that wasn’t succeeding.

Did I like it? Absolutely not. Did I learn from it? I think in some ways I did.

Have you ever seen that same team or group start to succeed with different leadership? In my case I have a very real world example of where this came to pass.

I had the pleasure of serving for five years in The United States Marine Corps. During this five year time the US was involved in several conflicts and I found myself deployed to Fallujah, Iraq.

During my deployment I served with a team of 12 other Marines, together we were known as a squad. Now this is the military, but a small group of people working together can be found within any type of organization. 

Our squad was led by a leader who, while a good guy, was not well equipped to lead a group of Marines into life or death situations.

This person had some leadership challenges that ultimately led to low morale, loss of confidence and an overall lack of guidance.

To be completely clear, the group sucked. We moped around, were not excited about our purpose and lacked vision.

After some time our higher leadership realized a change should be made and they moved our leader to a role better suited for his skill set.

I will tell you right now, that was a life changer.

We had a new leader come aboard that had the experience needed, was motivated and challenged us to be better then we were the day before.

Now overall the same 13 people were on the team, but the outcome was completely different.

We worked better as a group, shared responsibilities and were proud of our accomplishments.

I look back on this one example often when I think of how one person can shape a culture. 

Now, obviously the military has a top down culture when it comes to leadership, but it also embraces servant leadership.

In this scenario our new leader embraced servanthood. He made sure we were taken care of before his needs and that reflected in our outcome.

Have you been on a team that isn’t performing to its abilities? What is holding it back?

I had a conversation the other day with my CEO and he said something that stuck with me. He said, “leadership isn’t a title, its an action”.

Isn’t that true of culture too? You and I are the ones who will set the tone.

Do I always get it right? Absolutely not! I fail more times then I succeed. I tear down when I should build, allow emotions to dictate over data and more. At the end of the day my personal culture and that of my team is dictated by my thoughts and deeds, no one else.

Who determines yours?

Image credit: David Spinks

What was your work history before you became a founder?

Many founders don’t have senior management experience, let alone CEO/President or COO experience.

Some are young; others were non-executive managers, team members or individual contributors.

Which is OK, if they recognize that having the title and filling the shoes are two different things.

That’s not just my comment; it’s what award winning journalist Soledad O’Brien, founder and CEO of Starfish Media Group, said about herself.

Another challenge was that I was successful in my previous role because I really worked hard and took a lot of responsibility for making things good. But that’s not actually a great skill for being a boss. The job of the boss is to help other people reach their goals and their dreams.

At what point will I actually grow into this job, because I have the title? At what point will I actually be making decisions like someone who is the C.E.O. of the company? I would say it took a solid year before I felt good about it.

And I’m willing to bet, based on her own words, that she has little interest in hiring “stars,” who are usually full of attitude and ego.

You hire for character and teach people skills. And environment is very important to me. It’s important to me that people aren’t unpleasant and that they treat each other respectfully. It’s hard to be creative when there’s someone or something that’s really irking you.

So are you a person of integrity who makes the environment a really nice space? I will watch how they treat the person at the front desk versus me.

Whatever kind of startup you have, take a few minutes to read the O’Brien interview.

Then look in the mirror and accept that no matter what your background is you probably have a steep learning curve before you become your title.

Flickr image credit: Starfish Media Group

KG’s schedule has gotten so bad that he sends no-words-needed images in lieu of written posts.

Either way he really nails the subject, as with today’s offering.

It’s not the first time we’ve addressed that issue; in 2010 I posted about what happens when that ‘I’ rears it’s ugly head.

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

More and more research is showing that real creativity is a more solo function than a team effort.

Susan Cain spells this out in a thoughtful LinkedIn post that is well worth your time, especially if you are a young founder raised on social media, with a penchant for crowdsourcing and Yelp.

Consider the words of Steve Wozniak in his memoir iWoz.

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.

Then read, digest and tweak Cain’s ideas to fit your situation, then put the concepts to work in your company.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Most of us crave acknowledgement when we do something well, I know I do.

Decades ago when I worked as a recruiter for MRI in San Francisco my boss, “Ray,” wasn’t big on that.

It’s not that he wouldn’t do it, he just never thought about it.

Acknowledgement wasn’t something Ray needed, so he was blind to its effect on others.

When he did give the kind of heady feedback that makes people hungry for more, you could see that he didn’t understand it.

Worse, more often than not, it came in response to what he was told — you literally had to walk into his office and say you closed the deal or got a new client to have it happen. 

But praise caught by fishing or out-and-out asking is not worth a whole lot when it comes to motivation.

Nor did he understand how to build a strong team; the kind that could put an ‘Office of the Year’ award on the wall.

I still remember his effort to create the same esprit de corps as “Jeff,” another MRI manager and good friend of his enjoyed.

The effort failed, probably because Ray considered Jeff’s approach rah-rah stuff — the kind of stuff he was known to disparage.

Ray’s problem was similar to many managers I’ve worked with over the years, i.e., he assumed others wanted to be managed in the same way he liked to be managed.

When Ray did try doing it differently it felt like a con.

Which it was, because he didn’t really believe in what he was doing.

Image credit: Jim Hammer

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Whose responsibility or fault, if you’re feeling judgmental, is it if a hire goes south?

No matter the circumstances, that dubious honor lies with the hiring manager.

In the decades I’ve worked with hiring managers I’ve heard every conceivable (and inconceivable) reason, but none shifted the de facto responsibility (blame, if you prefer).

Most of the time managers’ claim some variation of ‘the candidate lied…’

Of course, that’s what reference checks are for.

Often it’s the manager who doesn’t

• sufficiently think through the job;
• consider the current team’s competencies;
• accurately share the culture; or
• was even consciously aware of the culture;
• consider the candidate’s career interests;
• etc., etc.

The main thing to remember is what good hiring actually means:

Hiring the right person into the right position at the right time and for the right reasons.

Change any “right” in this sentence to “wrong” and you’ll end up with a bad hire, but a bad hire does not mean a bad person.

Bad hires have four basic ingredients—

• charm,
• bad reqs,
• poor hiring skills, and
• homophily

all of which are a function of the hiring manager’s MAP and can be overcome.

Founders, like many managers in larger companies, frequently claim they are too busy to take time to lay the groundwork for solid hires and then wonder why they make hiring blunders.

Poor hiring leads to high turnover.

High turnover shrinks your candidate pool because it wrecks your street rep and street reps are forever—good, bad or indifferent—nothing fades away in this digital age.

Image credit: HikingArtist

This week I attended AO OnDemand 2014—a good conference for understanding how the enterprise SaaS ecosystem and its up-and-coming young companies are developing.  The conference also details market changes that are happening around mergers and acquisitions and the strategic moves that large enterprise software players are making to position themselves.

As usual there was an interesting group of people there, everything from startup executives to representatives from EMC, SAP, Oracle and others, which made for good networking with a variety of people from interesting companies.

What I’d like to highlight today is BeyondCore, a very interesting data analytics company I’ve been following on the Internet for more than a year.  Since I’m in the big data analytics market myself, I spend a lot of time getting to know the environment and make it a point to follow the most interesting new companies. 

I had the pleasure of meeting the newly hired VP Marketing Sandra Peterson and their CEO Arijit Sengupta.  They’ve created a brilliant piece of software that truly solves some of the problems in the data analytics world—especially when directed at the business user.  Not only does it automatically look for what’s interesting in the data and present it to you, but it also provides you with an automated analysis to help you better understand the relevant points in the data. 

These are exactly the types of functionality that Sandra highlighted when I asked her why she joined the company.  She had only come on board three days prior, so of course it was interesting to understand why an experienced senior marketing executive would join a young company (other than the options package and pay, of course…).

What she brought up was the unique combination of personal characteristics of Arijit, the founder.  His tenacity as a technology visionary to struggle with the problems of building a company against all odds and his infectious communication of the advantages in the product he’d created in a way that average people could understand were clear attractions for her beyond the technology itself.  I certainly saw both when he briefly demoed the product for me.

BeyondCore has an impressive product with a good team; I wish them good fortune and will continue to follow their development and successes.

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Today is Valentine’s Day and a good time to consider how best to show your love for your team.

Basically, there are two ways bosses show their love, either with cool tools or magic minutes.

Think about the old saying, “give a fool a tool and you’ll still have a fool,” which is frequently forgotten in our tech-happy world.

For discussion purposes, the term ‘fool’ denotes an underperforming person or group.

Showing your love by showering them with the latest, greatest technology or apps is unlikely to turn the fools around.

That’s where the magic minutes come in, because the majority of fools really aren’t fools.

They’re more like lost souls looking for a path to productivity, personal satisfaction and success.

Most people want their company to succeed, want to do their work well and want to feel good about what they do.

And whether you like it or not, when you chose to found a company you took on the duel roles of leader and manager.

That means your real job is spending whatever minutes are required to guide them to the path out of fooldom and into becoming an appreciated member of a powerful team.

It’s also one of the most important and satisfying experiences you will ever have no matter what happens to your company.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Do you really need to hire stars?

Can a manager build a winning team with other teams’ castoffs?

Before you say no take a look at the Phoenix Suns.

“By making feature artists out of other teams’ backups, Ryan McDonough, the Suns’ first-year general manager, has created a group that performs in perfect harmony.”

He also avoids all the ego and drama that comes with hiring so-called stars.

McDonough understands that before anyone can perform they need the opportunity to do so.

“Just because somebody hasn’t done something doesn’t mean they can’t do it. It might just mean they need an opportunity.”

If you listen to the media and a plethora of managers you will hear abut a talent shortage.

They will moan that amidst the enormous number of job-seekers there is not one shred of the talent that they need.

Managers forget that that “proven talent” happened under a specific set of circumstances in a specific culture and with a specific management style—change one or more of those and there is no guarantee of the same performance.

They also forget building a winning team is a key ingredient of the job for which they were hired and are paid the big bucks.

They also will never have the pleasure and personal ego trip of hearing a team member say something like this.

“I kind of always knew I had this in me,” Miles Plumlee said, “but I never guessed I’d be where I’m at already.”

Flickr image credit: Arya Ziai