Episode 27 - Leadership Team

Episode 27 – The leadership team

Every great company has a deep bench.  Every company needs a group of Lieutenants who are the real driving force behind the company.  In Q1, I formalized this group at Riya and named it the Leadership team.  This is something I’ve done in the past as well. I invite the members of the Leadership into my weekly executive staff meetings.

A Leadership team has three main benefits

a)    Transparency:  I has always surprised me that the conversations that were occurring at an executive level were not the same focus as the ones happening at the managerial level.  After years of running a startup, I realized that this was largely caused by differences in access to information.  At the executive level information on how we were doing to plan was always the focus.  At the managerial level this wasn’t the case.  By having the Leadership team as part of exec staff they got the same level of data and focus.

b)    Mentoring: These were the leaders of the company.  Each was someone who had shown an ability to drive projects and to drive a certain metric or initiative.  Frankly this skill is far more rare than you might think. I love super aggressive and driven people and try and groom them for promotion.  I take a specific interest in the aspirations and careers of these folks and try my hardest to make sure we are always setting them up for the next step. 

c)    Multiplicity of View Points: Having a leadership team gives me more opinions when we are trying to make a decision than just having my five direct reports in the room.  There are times that this has helped me to make the best decision.

So who are these rockstars at Riya?  They include people you’ve already heard about on my blog like:  Vincent – who I think will one day be an awesome VP of Engineering for any company that has strong research component; Baris and Jacquie who together are the quality czars for our Likeness search - Jacquie is just a bulldog for ensuring that we have the best user experience and Baris is insatiable for getting as many features into the core search engine as possible; Danny and Sam who together are building a secret weapon that I can’t tell you about (I know it is corny but it is true); Tanvir, Dan, & Eric our engineering leads without whom very little would get done;  Mehul our “data” guy who I have in a lot of meetings just to make sure we are always making decisions based upon as much information as possible;  and a few more folks who I will talk more about in later posts since I want to highlight them further. 

Once our team from India gets moved over I will also add some of them to the team.

The strength of Riya is not just its executive team.  The real pillars of this company are this Leadership team.  I recommend that every startup formalize a group like this.

26 - India grows up, 25 - Million mice, 24 - Land Invasion, 23 - Nuclear Power Plant,
22 - Fast iteration , 21 - Like.com prognosis , 20 -Launch Video and More , 19 -PR Coverage of Like , 18 - Like.com Launches , 17 -Pre launch , 16 , 15 , 14 , 13 , 12 , 11 , 10 , 9 , 8 , 7 , 6 , 5 , 4 , 3 , 2 , 1 .

Comments

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"a leadership team gives me more opinions when we are trying to make a decision"

I think that's the main pillar of the strategy.. consensus molding is always the hardest, when one takes on this type of leadership. That is, everyone has an equal say in the decision and the voting on it. At times, the Executive(s) find they have to swallow their pride and thats what makes a good leadership team. This leads the to strategic direction and focus.

I think Gandhi said "Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress." !!

[Beth Kirsch]

I'll never forget in my interview with you, I asked you, "what you wanted me to achieve in 90 days?", and you gave the very CEO answer, "the world". But unlike many CEO's who would say something like that as lip service, what I found out when I started working for you, is you really do expect everyone at every level in your organization to give you the world everyday day in and day out.

One day, someone on my team said he is on "Team Munjal" and you could just tell everyone agreed. That feeling clearly permeates the organization at every level even though you are asking the world from us every day and pushing us as hard as you can.

If you asked me how you pull this off and keep the attrition rate so low, I would have said transparency, mentoring, and that you listen to everyone's point of view, so its interesting to see you write about this.

What you left out of your blog, and perhaps this is best said by your staff and not you, is your approach to the leadership team really motivates people to come in and give you the world everyday which is what we need to do to overcoming the odds to make like.com work.

[Rashid Qamar]

Dear, i see him .... so i intersted business point of view for to my country (pakistan) level .. i need and agree for franchise business here in my country ... so i waiting your good response ....

Rashid Qamar

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