Here are a few of my favorite leadership tips from CEOs, founders and executives featured recently in our Heartbeat interviews.
Every two weeks, I ask one question on a leadership lesson to a founder, CEO, or business owner I respect and share it on The Heartbeat ❤️, our bi-weekly newsletter on how to become a better leader. The question I always ask is, “What’s one thing you wish you’d learned earlier as a leader?” Here’s what some of our recent interviewees had to say…
Leaders don’t need to know it all.
Rob Walling is the co-founder of Drip, an email marketing automation software company that we in fact use a Know Your Company. What does Rob wish he’d learned sooner? That it’s okay for leaders to ask questions. He says:
“I wish that I had learned that I didn’t need all the answers as a leader. [I hire] people that are better than I am at something, and then when a problem comes up I can look around the room and say, ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’” — Rob Walling, co-founder of Drip
Embrace failure.
Aynn Collins is the Director of Talent Strategy at MailChimp, the world’s largest marketing automation platform with more than 900 employees. Aynn’s advice to her younger self is to understand that failure is part of growing as a leader.
“Embracing failure and understanding how you learn and grow from those failures is what I would tell people to learn early in their career. They can own failures, talk about them, debrief with your team on…and not try to just make everything shiny and pretty. Because we know business and leadership is not always perfect, and shiny and pretty.” — Aynn Collins, Director of Talent Strategy at Mailchimp
Forget the org chart.
Dan Mall is the founder of SuperFriendly (a design collaborative that’s worked with clients such as Apple, Time Magazine and ESPN) and CEO of SuperBooked (a software application that helps people find creative work). For Dan, he wishes he’d known that an organizational chart isn’t the end-all, be-all of business.
“The leaders aren’t the ones at the top. They should be the ones at the bottom. They should be the one supporting everyone else…They need to be able to see everything. They need to be able to support people. So, I wish I would have learned the idea of servant leadership, which is becoming more and more popular now.” — Dan Mall, founder of SuperFriendly and CEO of SuperBooked
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