Lead From the Front

People talk about leadership all the time, and all the things that they can do to be great leaders. What I have always found, and what I have always appreciated about great leaders is that they lead from the front.

This is something that I take to heart because there’s nothing that makes you prouder then when your leader is right there with you in the trenches arm to arm winning or losing but doing it as a team. The worst leaders that I have ever seen are the ones who sit back pontificate on what everybody else should be doing. Love to share in the victories, but never share in the defeats. As a team, you’re not going to win every battle and you’re not going to be successful at everything that you try to accomplish. As the old adage suggests, you learn more from your losses than you do from your victories. How you deal with the losses is what really inspires and creates great companies, and great company culture. Take the time to examine and understand what you could’ve done better in those situations - learn and adapt. Everybody makes mistakes, especially when moving as fast as we do and under the types of pressure that we all have.

How do you lead from the front? Look at your own actions and examine your own behaviors. What it ultimately means to me is not asking the team to do anything that you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself.

Looking at different areas of the business and how this is applied - lead from the front by doing QA work, test and use your own product! Understand what things don’t work, there is no better way to be an expert in technology than to do QA on it, you will truly understand the intricacies.

When it comes to development one of the things that I enjoy most is getting on a call on a Friday afternoon and reviewing all the updates that the development team has been working on. Opining and collaborating on direction and design. Really letting the team be part of the decision-making process. For me personally, the team wouldn’t actually want any of my code, so I tend not to contribute to the development branches, I think they would kick me out of GitHub 😂

For the GTM team, it means putting customers first, willingness to do just a little bit more, push a little bit harder to make a customer successful, working with prospects to support and creating opportunities. Being out in the field, planes trains and automobiles, away from home stuck in airports, because that’s what the team does. Be there with them doing it! Not sitting back at the office feet up on desk calling and asking for the news. Be in the trenches.

For the field engineering team, it means being willing to be involved in a proof of concept and be right there with the customers as they lean in to learn our product. Do more demos! I have always respected executives that can still get down and dirty with a product demo. I challenge all leaders of companies that they should be able to demonstrate their own technology. I think it’s ridiculous when, especially technical leaders, can’t even navigate their own product or even worse don’t have a login to their own product. That’s real!

When it comes to customer success it’s being willing to work with customers and be right there when customers are running into challenges or there’s something that a customer needs and they require extra attention. Really, it’s about not only working with customers as they’re in the prospect stage, but also even more important to work with customers once they become a customer, once they’re working with your product so that you can truly understand the good the bad and the ugly of the technology that you’re bringing to market.

If you can lead from the front your team is going to be right there with you on the front lines crushing goals as a team. That is the dream.

2024 is going to be a great year! Very excited to come out of stealth and show the world what we are working on. #stillhustling #builtnotbought #getready #itsimminent