It's All About Relationships!

You need a Posse in the C Suite.

In business it is about the company you keep...those who you can depend on and look to for guidance and answers. Relationships come in all forms: bosses, clients, colleagues, people who provide services to you and any person you talk, market, sell, support or buy from. It's a long list that keeps on getting longer as you move through your career.  As you become more successful others will seek you out to develop a relationship with you that hopefully can be mutually beneficial. 

Perhaps nowhere is it more important for there to be good relationships than in the C Suite of your company.  If the senior leaders cannot work together it severely limits the company's future chances of success. Kind of like John Maxwell’s "law of the lid" which says leadership ability determines a person’s effectiveness. I have been fortunate to be part of several management teams and have seen many different relationship structures with varying degrees of success. My most successful run was with a company that had to build a management team from scratch, switch a few people out for new talent and move the roles and responsibilities around a little to get things right. This took several years but once we got it right, we worked well together, had some fun and watched the results start to pile up.

Here are 5 things you can do to build a management team which has strong relationships.  

I.   Build a culture of accountability and results

II.  Define roles and make sure the bases are covered, have structure

III. Meet regularly/debate often/don’t default to consensus decision making

IV. March toward the same goal

V.  Be leaders, take risks and learn

I. Building a corporate culture of any kind is hard. Changing one is harder. I try to focus on accountability when I think about culture.  If the majority of your people take responsibility, focus on 3 or 4 major initiatives and drive these down through their staff, you have a chance of building a culture of results. Be careful when you talk to founding CEO's about culture change. They may say in idle conversation that there needs to be change but when you get into it you are basically calling CEO's baby ugly. I did this at a past company and almost got shown the door within weeks of starting there. They don't like it, the heroic ones own up to it and get on with the pick-and-shovel work needed to change a culture. In our case, we rallied around some new ways of working and now that I have moved on I believe the company is in better shape than when I found it. 

II. Role definition is tough, particularly in small or start-up companies where people often where several hats. That said the people at the top have to know their role and try not to stray beyond.  If you are the head of marketing then focus 100% of your time marketing to help your company create a customer. Famed management guru Peter Drucker boils business down even more simply by saying “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” I try to focus all my time on marketing though I am responsible for sales and relationship management as well. Over the years I have managed to take a marketing approach to these other important disciplines, which has helped me retain my focus.

III. We all have many meetings but the most important one is the senior leadership meeting normally held once a week to set the focus. If you entered the new year with a clear strategy, this meeting should be an update on the top few initiatives that are being worked on across the company to support the strategy. Often companies get away from their strategy by turning this meeting into a tactical meeting of widget counting and operational challenges. I have found debate amongst leaders to be the most useful part of these meetings. The CEO is there to play Salomon if need be. If you can't move ahead until everyone agrees you have settled to consensus decision making which will hurt your results as the management team will have become a group of "yes" men.

V. I once worked for a company where the management team had differing opinions on the true goal of why we were in business. Some wanted to just make money, others wanted job security. Again, Drucker says you are in business to create a customer, but what is beyond that? If you are VC backed you are likely trying to pile up those customers and associated revenue to eventually monetize the asset through an eventual sale. If you are not, or the VC has their eye off the ball, you are likely just creating a job for yourself. These are often lifestyle type companies which can be very successful in their own right. I remember talking to a CEO in Lake Tahoe about his company and his employees. The CTO literally lived in a Winnebago in the parking lot. On days when it snowed, work was put off so the employees could go skiing in the morning and work in the afternoon. The key here is to know why you are in business and try to align the management team with that reason. If you do it right, your culture will create itself around the purpose of the business. 

V. In my career I have been fired, quit and retired… and I don't recommend any of them. I have taken risks in new jobs, industries and in pushing back against the status quo. I have managed sales teams for over 20 years and never used quotas to motivate my teams. Some leaders take risks after quiet assessment and fact gathering and then step off into the unknown, working hard for results. Others commit first. Entrepreneur Mick Ebeling committed to the parents of a paralyzed ALS victim that he would create technology to allow their son to talk again through what would become EyeWriter technology. He committed first, then went out and with the fear of failure motivated himself and others to deliver the needed technology in record time. Whichever type you are it is important to not be afraid to peer out over the abyss.

Keep an eye on the people running your company and see if they are lining themselves up against these ideals.  If they are, they are likely working well together and have good working relationships with each other, their staff as well as customers and partners. The power of unison and focus in the C Suite sets the tone for everything but the foundation will always be reliant on strong relationships.

My Best,