Leadership Mosaic

Whose leadership style do you admire and would want to learn more about or perhaps even emulate and take some of those traits and and adopted them as your own?

Yeah, it's a really interesting question and when you think about leadership and how people you know develop different styles I've never had an individual that I said you know I really want to model myself overall on that person but I've had a lot of people that I've looked at and said wow they do that great you know and I'm so impressed that the way they do that I just had this conversation with Reed Hastings who's the Netflix CEO and years and years ago when I was the CEO of responses and he at that time was at Netflix we shared two board members so just coincidentally two of our board of directors members and they had said to me you know what you might benefit by having someone whose business is a little bigger than yours because Netflix was bigger than response at that time still is and you guys should get together and it was sort of almost like trying to force a mentorship discussion if you will yeah and Reed and I both oh okay and we went he actually came up to the responses office and met it was great and he's super interesting super thoughtful guy I'm some of his thoughts and I'll get to the why he's great about thoughts on organization and about this concept of some people don't like that his thinking about this but the meritocracy aggressive meritocracy assume your people are going to be the best so you're gonna pay a premium for people and expect a lot from them he's got a lot of things I think are really powerful there that make employees feel proud about being part of that team at the same time there's aspects of it that but it wouldn't be my first choice.

What are those aspects?

Well, I think this there's a concept of you want to enable people to be you know quote unquote adults and you want to give them flexibility like they have unlimited vacation and one of the first companies to do that and that's a good example of saying we're trusting you to make the right decisions then as you scale and they talk about performance and they talk about a concepts a lot of concepts around not quite up or out but sort of the the discipline to say we're going to be coming back and Cole you know the group and we're gonna have a lot of stack ranking mentality and even though I used to when I was earlier in my career I thought that made a lot of sense now I've looked at it differently and different people can be successful in different ways and trying to compare people to other people works in some organizations where we have a quota in sales I don't think it works as well in marketing I don't think it works as well in HR I don't think it works as well on IT so letting people be excellent at who they are and not having to sort of force people you know as rigidly into a model I would I would differ with him on that and by the way I don't know he's updated view he's he's probably evolved it and he might not think the same way but it was great when we got forced sort of together to have some of these conversations I realized that you can take things from other people even though they're not gonna do everything perfectly and everything perfectly in your perspective so I learned a lot from him and we've actually had you know additional but he's called me one time and he wanted to know about online marketing we would build some mutual respect there are a lot of things I would call him and ask him for his opinion and other things I might not.