Should you cut a difficult employee loose? You can skip reading this and I will give you the answer now: YES. Stop debating this and agonizing over the decision, because you already know the right thing to do.
SaaS Culture Best Practices
Read, listen and watch SaaS culture best practices for founders and leaders of growing technology companies. Join SaaS co-founders and operators for guidance on sales, marketing, customer success, culture, and institutional readiness.
What’s Your Sales Culture?
Think it’s not important to define your sales culture? Think again. Culture shapes how people work together and independently, reinforces norms of behaviors and sets expectations. Left unchecked, it may not help you attain your goals.
Be Deliberate About Your Meeting Culture
Meetings can make or break your culture. It’s really hard to untangle established patterns in a company to reshape the number duration, and frequency of meetings you have. But you can make significant improvements if you are vigilant. It requires fortitude, and sometimes really putting your foot down to stop the insanity.
My Keys for Managing Creatives
Know that they often believe in what could be more than what is. And swinging for the fences is why they get up in the morning.
Balancing Working IN the Business Versus ON the Business
Working on the business means focusing on the big-picture strategic stuff. Working in the business means…well, it means working in the business. Spending time in the day-to-day running the company. As a leader, you need a balance of both.
Leaders, Sometimes You Need to Get Your Hands Dirty
Entrepreneurs can be control freaks and micro-manage everything, which stunts a company in so many ways. But, on the flip side, I know a lot of “leaders” who rarely get their hands dirty in the actual work their team is doing. If you spend all your time working “on the business” and no time working “in the business”, you can quickly lose touch with the actual business itself. A good example is that time I scored some leads.
The Most Important Interview Question You Can Ask
No matter what role I am interviewing for, and what I have already asked, I have one critical question that I ask everyone at the end of final round of interviews. When a candidate has made it through all the hoops and I think I am ready to make them an offer, I end the final interview with…
The (In)Consistent Social CEO
When I was running ion interactive, I excused my personal inconsistent content production by maintaining that it was less important that managing the company. Perhaps that was true. But, perhaps it wasn’t.
It’s Never Cool to Lose Your Temper at Work
Many times in the early days of running our first company, I lost my temper with an employee. I criticized and I complained. If things weren’t done exactly as I wanted them or if someone had not lived up to my impossibly high expectations, I was pretty vocal in my displeasure. I didn’t go on rampages, and I didn’t scream at the top of my lungs. But I would be too candid, too firm, too upset, too frank, too unpleasant about whatever the disappointment was.Here’s how I learned to contain my emotions at work.
How I lost My Ability to Do Deep Work
I only have a few entrepreneurial regrets, and losing my ability to do deep work is one of them. As we grew, I wasn’t doing the deep work myself anymore, I was supervising the people who did the deep work…I blame myself and the choices I made that let me slip into this distraction-filled, adrenaline-fueled existence. A company needs its leaders to do deep work, so this was definitely a shortcoming of mine. I was allowing the shallow, urgent work take all of my attention, and lulling myself into thinking that was my job. Here’s how I am fixing it.
