First Team

What about building alliances to carry out a strategic goal? How would you define alliances and how do they shape your effectiveness as a leader?

Yeah, so I talked about my survivor alliances and I mean, alliances are really important. I think it was Tim Ferriss that talks about your first team. Your first team is your peer group, right? So, in my case at DocuSign Dan Springer was my boss, everybody who reported to Dan Springer was my peer group. And there is something really important about that first team and building alliances with your peer group, because particularly at the most senior levels, you're running the whole company. And yes my area was just technology and operations. But collectively with my peers, we were running every part of the company. And so if you are not aligned and if you don't have those alliances with your peer group, the company is not going to have the success that it could or should have.

And my experience at Schwab taught me that the importance of your first team and your peer group. And when I was at Schwab, it was just after the dotcom bubble had burst and so Schwab made all of its money on trades. Well, after the bubble burst, nobody was trading, nobody was even opening their brokerage statements. We went to everyone was trading to no one was trading, which meant there was no revenue coming in. So, we had really, really hard work to do around cutting costs which often meant laying off people. In addition to rationalizing technology, moving people from high cost geographies to lower cost geographies, closing entire offices and branches. It was so hard. All of that was just such heart wrenching work that we had to do. But because my survivor alliance was my first team, it was my peer group, we all knew we were in this together and the company was not going to remain an independent company if we didn't reduce hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses and costs. And so, going into those kinds of battles with your alliance, with your first team, makes all the difference in the world. Because if you feel like you have to do those really, really hard things by yourself, you don't do them as well as when you have the support of those around you.