What defines a great leader to you?
Wow, that's a big question.
So let me start.
I think so first of all, leadership, I think leadership is all about people, right?
So I think a great leader, first and foremost, is a people person,
somebody that's actually there for their team, that cares for their team,
and that actually is passionate about the people that they work with.
So I think that that's first and foremost, I think a people person.
And if I look in my own history and the best leaders that I've worked with,
I think that's what I remember most,
the people that actually built that human connection, that built a human connection with me.
So I think that's first.
Second, what makes a great leader is a visionary,
somebody that actually has a vision of where they want to take whatever it is that they're working on,
the team, the project, the program, the company,
but to really have a vision of the future
and what that team, that program, that company is going to look like two years, three years, five years from now.
And they can talk about their vision in a way that makes it come alive.
That for the people working for them, they see that vision, they believe in that vision,
and they actually want to work towards that vision.
So the vision is really what takes them, takes the team along on the journey.
So a vision for me is not like the one line vision statements that you see on all these websites
and that all these companies have.
A vision really is something that is vivid, that you can live,
that you can explain, that people really buy into and understand.
So I think those are two parts of it.
Yeah, I think there's so much to being a great leader.
I think people that can build an amazing team.
So, I mean, building a team, hiring amazing people, putting them together,
not just one set of people.
So you have a lot of leaders that don't want to hire people that are better than them at some scale or even altogether.
So building a great team, I think, is one of the aspects of a leader.
I think no ego.
That probably comes with what I just said before.
Leaders that don't have an ego, that can actually check their ego.
Well, everybody has an ego, but people that can actually check their ego at the door
and puts their team, the objective before their own ego.
Yeah, I think that's sort of the four or five attributes that I would say make a great leader.
There's so many questions I can ask you in that aspect.
But let's talk about the ego aspect.
Why that?
And tell me more about that.
So why that?
If you actually have, and I mean, we all have egos, right?
And in one form or another, we need an ego to have self-confidence.
So an ego is not bad.
When the ego actually becomes a priority and you start to put that ego and you put yourself before the team
or you put yourself before the goal, I think that's where it all goes wrong.
So I think making sure that there's a balance, of course, as a leader, you need to have your ego.
Make sure that there's a balance, of course, as a leader, you need to have your own boundaries
and your own priorities, but not put yourself before the team or not to put yourself before the end objective.
I think having that balance requires you to check that ego.
Yeah.
And how does someone get that balance?
I mean, or how have you gotten that balance in your life, Mark?
I think that's how did I get that balance.
It's something you develop over time, and it's been a lesson for me.
I mean, if I look at myself 10 years ago, I certainly wasn't the best leader.
I'm not saying I'm a great leader now today, but I sure have learned a lot over the years.
If I look at myself 10 years ago, what I said, probably the first thing I said, building that human connection,
actually having that genuine human connection with the team is something I wasn't very good at as a person.
And I think that I've learned from the people that I've worked with, the leaders that I've worked with, that that is really important.
And I think it's the lessons that you learn over the years that for me have actually helped me to do that and to check my own ego as well.
And I've also worked, another example, I've worked for leaders that were like absolutely, and I think this is a great example.
I worked for a couple of years for a leader that was, he was really good, but he was also extremely driven.
And he had this one skill that annoyed the hell out of me.
I would always be extremely prepared for meetings or I knew everything about my projects.
He could always ask me the one question that I hadn't thought about or the one question I wasn't prepared for.
I don't know how he did that because I was always extremely well prepared or so I thought.
I think that also really helped me check my ego and learn me to be humble in my work as well because there's no way that I can know it all.
That's awesome. Wow. Thank you for sharing that with us.
Well, I have a few more questions. Let's see if we can find that one.
I think we've already discussed this, but I think if you would put in an aspect of leaders and entrepreneurs at the same time, what tips would you give them?
So I do a lot of leadership coaching as well, and there's something that I haven't talked about.
I do a lot of coaching for people that have just become a leader or have only been a leader for like two, three, four years.
And a couple of the same mistakes that everybody makes.
So that's why I like to talk about this, because everybody makes this in the beginning.
So first of all, they still want to be in control of everything or be in all the meetings or be present and know everything.
So I think that's the first mistake.
Not mistake, but it's the first pitfall that they all fall into is at one point, you're still an individual contributor.
You do your own work and you know everything and you can see everything at the point that you become a leader.
They want to continue that process. They want to continue to be in control of everything and see everything and be in every meeting and see everybody's work.
And that's something you've got to let go of. You've got to let go of.
You've got to start trusting the people that work for you and actually delegate the work to them and check the inputs, check the outputs, but don't check the actual work that you're doing.
So I think that's the first one.
And then on top of that, what I coach my leaders or leaders that I work with on is the job of a leader is not actually getting the work done.
Yes, that's part of the work, right? You have a team and with that team, you have objectives and you work towards those objectives.
The other really important goal that you have as a leader is to grow the people below you.
So one of the things that I try to work with the people I coach is to consciously delegate work.
So you give people work that is just a bit too difficult, that is just outside of their comfort zone, that is a little bit too difficult.
It's in their stretch zone. And you do not to make their life difficult, but you actually do that to help them grow and to get them to slowly get to the next level as well.
So growing people, I think half the job that you have as a leader is growing the people that work for you and making sure that they get the opportunities and the chances and the challenges that will help them grow.
So those are the two tips for at least for the more junior leaders that I work with.
That's awesome. You mentioned that not to control the meeting itself, but control the inputs and the outputs.
Yes.
And I'm assuming that that's after you've given them clear instructions, there's steps and procedures in place that helps them do the task the right way.
Yes.
So tell me more about that. Have you had any experiences where things didn't go plan or the leader itself was the issue in the whole process?
Yes. So I think the other part, I mean, if you give people a little bit too much responsibility, there is the chance that they're going to feel right.
That chance that they're going to make mistakes and people learn through mistakes. So that is actually OK.
I think as a leader, you need to give people room to make mistakes as long as those are controllable mistakes, manageable mistakes.
They can't be too big, right? Because if they're too big, then it all goes wrong.
But people should be allowed to make small mistakes. And that is OK.
You should celebrate them because that's where people learn and people grow.
I'll give you an example of a mistake that I made. And this was a couple of years ago.
I was running a project or I was not running a project.
I had actually delegated a project to someone in my team and he needed to do a it was an upgrade project, but he also needed to do quite a few of the you need to organize a lot of the testing with a lot of different people in the organization.
He was actually quite technical. So the first part, the upgrade part that went really well and he knew exactly what he was doing.
That second part, organizing the testing with everyone in the organization, didn't go as well.
So we got to a couple of weeks before they go live. It was four or five weeks before they go live.
And that hadn't been organized. And at that point, unfortunately, we had to help him to actually get that done.
And it was quite an escalation because those are quite senior people in our business.
We got it done in the end, but that was slightly too much room.
And I let it go slightly too far before intervening. So these things happen.
And again, it's OK. I also learned from that that that was probably a little bit too much room.
Thank you for sharing that. You, though, on the other hand, you work with CFOs.
CTOs. CTOs. Yeah, CTOs. My bad. Yeah, you're right. I was like C-suite. I was a technological side. You're right.
So you work with CTOs. You're working on the higher level of things. And I bet there's different challenges that they face.
Would you like to talk about that aspect? Sure. No, I like that as well.
So I mean, it's a whole different ballgame because as a as a CTO, you have you actually have multiple teams working for you.
So you don't directly control the team, but you control like a middle management layer who all have their own teams.
And that creates a very different environment. So a couple of examples.
Also, I think as a CTO, you need to spend at least 50 percent of your time outside of the tech organization.
So you need to spend 50 percent of your time talking to the other people in the business, working with your stakeholders in the business,
working with the CFOs, the sales organization, the customer support organization, with the supply chain, the operations organization.
And that's hard. So for a lot of people that are in a CTO role, they struggle to spend enough time on non tech issues.
And it is not non tech because, I mean, you talk to a head of sales about the technology, you talk to a CFO about the technology.
But it's a very uncomfortable situation because you can't control the situation.
Those may actually be challenging stakeholders, difficult stakeholders.
And it's very easy to take a step back and focus yourself on your own tech organization and the technology and the infrastructure and the applications and everything else.
So that's one thing that I see quite a bit. And that's that is a big challenge.
I think the second challenge that I see with technology is they often become and that's a bigger organization.
They become just operators. So if somebody in the business organization asked them a question like,
can we have this or can we have that? They go and deliver that. And that that's all that they do.
So they don't proactively reach out and talk about potential solutions and position tech as something that can grow a business because tech is incredibly powerful these days.
And tech can really boost the company forward. They don't do that.
They take a step back and just wait for a question. They wait for the order. They wait for whatever comes in and they will deliver against it.
So I feel that CTOs really need to take a big step up and actually become a visionary for technology within the organization and talk to all of these senior stakeholders and have that discussion.
Like, how can we make technology the the rocket that's going to boost this organization forward?
So tell me more about that, because I feel like you've had some experiences in that.
And what input did you give in that case and what output was the result of if some of these conversations you had maybe as a CTO?
So I mostly do the coaching. So I'm slightly behind the scenes in most of these discussions, but I can talk about some of these situations.
So one of the situations that I've seen is there was a very senior stakeholder in an organization that somebody that I was coaching.
And they were quite difficult, challenging, demanding and blaming technology for all of everything that went wrong.
The reaction from the person that I was coaching was to take a step back and actually not speak to them and let it go.
That really creates a very difficult situation. If you don't take that discussion head on and you actually confront them and have a discussion like how can we solve this together?
That created a very difficult environment. And I worked with them to actually solve that and to go and address that problem with them.
So that's yeah, those are the things not to do. Like take a take a step back. And I was talking about them.
I don't want to come get names or organizations, but like taking that step back is just the wrong decision.
Like confront problem head on, talk to the stakeholders and actually find a middle ground.
Like how can technology help you solve your problems? And not everything is a technology problem because people love to blame their business problems on technology.
And often that's not the case. Right? Often there's a lot of other things going on as well.
But it's easy to blame technology if something goes wrong.
Yeah, you're right. And that actually happens in a lot of other niches too.
Like a lot of times leaders would find ways to blame marketing or they'll find ways to blame sales or they'll find ways to blame technology or they'll find ways to blame customer support.
Like it might not be the core issue. I mean if a customer got sold a bad product or a bad experience, that's not the is the is and that happens a lot in businesses.
It's very easy to blame others. It's hard to take ownership and step up and say we're going to solve this together.
But it's the only way forward. I mean if something else happens, it's always better to be part of the solutions than to be part of the problem.
So even if technology is the problem, step up, fix it and deal with it.
Thank you for sharing that.
I have two more questions for you. I think these ones might be a little bit tough.
Sure.
Why do you think leaders hide from funding their vision? And how can those leaders then lean into funding their vision?
Wow, I think that is an interesting question.
So a vision is very far into the future, right? A vision is often three, five years in the future.
And a vision is good. But in the end, you need a very solid and concrete plan to get there.
So and that comes with three months plans, six months plans, year plans. Like what are we going to do in 2025? What are we going to do in Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4?
So first, I think a vision is nice, but it needs to be broken down into a plan first. And I think that's not always done properly.
So actually getting to a realistic plan that's going to realize that vision is a first step.
And that's a lot of people just start taking steps without having that three-year, five-year plan to get to the vision.
So I think that's the first one, diligent planning, which takes work, time and effort.
I think the second part, funding. Funding is risky. It's very easy to not fund a growth trajectory or a next plan
and just stay with the status quo, especially if you are in an organization that's profitable.
But a lot of people do want to go to the next level, that 2x, 10x level of the organization.
To get there, you do need to have funding and you do need to take risks, but you can contain the risks.
So you can actually go and, like I heard this from my coach the other week,
just start by taking all of the riskiest assumptions and start just taking those off the list.
So what do I need to do to achieve my vision? What are the biggest assumptions and the riskiest assumptions that I have on my list?
And just take them off and start addressing those first.
And it often doesn't take 100K, 200K, 500K, a million to do a short test.
You can do a quick pilot test often with spending 5K or 10K or 20K.
You can do a quick test to prove that something is going to work or isn't going to work.
And it's fine if it isn't going to work. If that loses you just 5K or 10K, that's okay, as long as it doesn't lose you the million.
It doesn't have to bankrupt the company by doing a small test.
And if you see that it works, you can scale up quickly and actually make it work.
So why do leaders hide from funding their vision?
And I think this is actually a bigger question. Leaders don't like taking risks.
It's very easy as a leader in an organization to follow the safe path.
If you follow, and this maybe isn't true for CEOs, but this is true for most other leaders,
if you follow the safe path, you won't get fired, for example.
And I see that a lot in the bigger organizations that I work with, for example.
If they have a challenge that they're working on and they want to solve it,
the safest path that they can take is they can hire one of the big four firms, a big consultancy firm, a McKinsey, an Accenture, one of those firms.
And if they've given the answer and something still goes wrong, they can always say, oh, but this was advice that we got from the big four.
You can't blame me for that. And that's just the safe path and not taking risk and just being able to blame someone else if something goes wrong.
So I think a lot of people like playing it safe for their own career, their own perspectives, their own future,
and don't like taking risks because you don't just risk the organization and the team.
It's also your own career that you put at risk there. And people don't like that. They like playing it safe.
Yeah, me neither. I don't like playing it safe. If more and more entrepreneurs bet on themselves earlier enough and they took the risk early enough,
I think they'll know either they're not met for that thing or they'll fail faster and they'll progress faster or they'll not get stuck in one dream or one vision of their
instead of either progressing or not or switching sides. I think that's a very, very valid point.
And I think it's in those cases, especially for entrepreneurs, it's always good to remember what is your absolute worst case scenario.
So if your entire business goes bankrupt, if all goes to hell, what are you going to do?
So my worst case scenario is that I'm going to have to, I mean, I'm also in tech.
My worst case scenario is that I'm going to have to call a tech company and actually ask them for a job and go back into a nine to five.
That's my absolute and I don't want to do that, right? No matter what happens. That's like my worst case scenario.
But I mean, I'm not going to be homeless. I'm not going to be living under a bridge.
If all goes to hell, I'm going to have to call somebody to give me a nine to five and I'll be paid an OK salary and it'll be OK.
But that's that's absolutely what I'm trying to prevent. Yeah, that's awesome.
That's that's exactly my position to my worst case scenario that I could get a nine to five job at a tech company. Yeah.
That's a scenario. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.
And then for some people, this might be the best case scenario. They want to get hired by a tech company and get a nine to five job.
And that's OK. Right. I mean, there's a lot of people that have the nine to five with the tech company.
They're absolutely happy there. They don't want to take the chances that are very happy with the money that they get paid there.
They should absolutely stay there. Right. I mean, yeah, I started entrepreneurship now four years ago.
I could have made a lot more money in in just a nine to five. Right.
Becoming a CIO or something or doing that or just a high price consultant. I would have made more money.
I learned so much more doing this and this has been so much more fun.
I wouldn't have missed it for the world, but I would have made more money over there for sure.
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