Leadership Spotlight: Leading with Transparency

October 19, 2024/0 Comments/in Leadership, Leadership Spotlight/by Angela MacCabe

We’re excited to announce that after appearing on Episode #15 of the Elevate Business Podcast, Riaz Sidi has been selected for the Intuity Performance Leadership Spotlight series.

Riaz Sidi who is the president of Sidi.io, a boutique demand generation agency specializing in lead generation for B2B tech companies. As a dynamic sales leader, Riaz has experience training over 500 advertising professionals and brings this experience leading his team at Sidi.io which has grown from 3 employees to 13 in just the past 8 months.

Here are the top 3 insights he shared with the community.

1. How do you guide the culture at Sidi.io?

It’s a good question. So we have guiding principles printed out in my office here, but we also have a soft copy in Google Drive that anyone can access. These are very simple, standard one-liners in terms of our ethics, our principles, how we operate and essentially define what our goal is. And so, it’s always about reiterating and reminding the team of these values and being very open and transparent.

You want to tread the line between your belief system or politics, if you will, into the workplace and make sure that we’re embracing the team’s diversity. I’ve been acutely aware of ensuring that there’s a gender balance in our organization and that there’s a diversity balance.

And when you close your eyes and open your ears to what people are saying, it’s interesting how many smart people are out there when we look past some of the preconceived biases and notions we have about people that are not like.

2. What has been your biggest learning, seeing your team double in size more than once this past year?

I think the biggest ah-ha moment has been, I probably waited too long to hire people. I don’t regret it, but I also recognize that if I maybe had invested in people earlier, we could have possibly scaled a little differently. I know a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners; they get into the “I know everything kind of mentality,” and I think I was there where I didn’t feel like anyone was going to do it as well as me.

You know, I’ve gotten to this point where we were making X amount of revenue per month, and it’s like no one else is doing that. So I must be like the greatest thing ever. But I think I realized that I don’t know everything and that if I could leverage others’ expertise in, for example, Facebook ads, Finance, HR and other functions of the business, I’d make better use of my time.

So I think that the learnings have really been investing in the right people, recognizing that I’m not arrogant or obnoxious, thinking that you know everything, and then making sure that I pay a good salary to my people.

3. How do you create a safe to fail environment for your employees to thrive?

Yeah, like in terms of how receptive people are going to be open, ultimately, the goal is for them to feel as open, as comfortable as they want. There’s no obligation to wear their heart on their sleeve. But I think ultimately, we just want the team to know that there is a channel for them to vent if they need to, and we don’t want to feel obligated to take me up on that.

But I think people have chosen to kind of be open because they tend to trust me, and they trust the team. The way to keep people accountable is to hire people you can trust, passionate about the mission, and conveying a vision.

If people don’t know what success looks like, how will they describe that or get excited about that? People know that we’re growing, and so whenever we have a new client, everyone hears about it, and we celebrate it as a team. So getting people involved in the bigger picture in all of those things will help drive engagement. It’ll drive passion because at the end of the day, yeah, it might be like my name and my hair over there on the logo, but ultimately we’re a team. We are living and dying by our collective response and the way that we work together to help clients.

If you’re interested in learning more from our Spotlight Leadership, check out Jesse Perreault’s post on Building Team Relationships.

Leadership Spotlight: Supporting Scaling Teams

October 19, 2024/0 Comments/in Leadership, Leadership Spotlight/by Angela MacCabe

How to Support Teams as they Scale

I had the chance to chat with Phil Chang and Kenny Vannucci from This Commerce Life about what it looks like to support teams as they scale.

These are the main takeaways from this conversation.

Going from Player to Coach – Kenny

“I always go back to sports. You’ve got to go from being the player to being the coach. And you have to understand what that transition means you delegate. And delegate doesn’t mean you throw shit on people’s desks and walk away. Delegation is teaching – putting it on the desk, following up, and understanding what you’re good at and maybe not good at— potentially hiring a good assistant coach. But I think most fall apart because most entrepreneurs or founders think they can do it all. Yeah. And if they could do it all, why are they talking to anybody about anything? Just do it. Right. But what they should find out is there are only X amount of hours in a day, and quite frankly, you can’t do it all, and you can’t do it all well.”

Keeping Teams in The Loop – Phil

“In that process of growing, we need to keep doing is briefing our teams right like the ability to keep your team on track and yet give them enough room involves here’s where we want months ago here are the taboo things or the things you cannot do. Everything else is fair game. I don’t know what it’s going to look like because even the three of us, if I said, draw me a garden, the three of us would come up with something different, but at the end of the day, that’s what I wanted.”

Start Thinking Like a CEO – Phil

When you’re an owner, you’re used to doing everything independently. It’s a tried and true formula. You rely on yourself. The inspiration is from you. You have to have a certain stubbornness and no fear. Because everyone will say you can’t. I can’t do it. You can’t do it. And you build that kind of like ironclad. I can do it. I’m going to make it. Screw you, guys. I got to get it done. But when you want to scale, I feel like the first thing those folks need to do is stop thinking like an owner and start thinking like a CEO.

Leading Without Ego – Me (Ange MacCabe)

“And I can tell you within my growth and getting vulnerable here, the Ange three years ago would not sit in front of a group and say, hey, can you critique me on, you know, on my video or my presentation or hit, right? I could not do that at that point. I did it two months ago and didn’t even think about it. And my team, the first thing they said to me was, are you sure right now? Do you want us to take it away and then give you written feedback?

And I’m like; we’re doing a working meeting, so let’s hear what we have to say here. It’s okay. Safe space. We’re all flipping friends here. And it took them a minute.

And we’re all coaches and consultants. We play in this space. It took them a minute to adjust to that concept, I’m going to give my CEO and co-founder feedback, and she will be okay with it. And it was a huge learning opportunity for the team and me to be like, okay, so this is a safe space to speak.

For more leadership insights, check out our post on Fueling Team Performance.

Creating a Healthy and Consistent Company Culture

October 19, 2024/0 Comments/in Leadership/by Angela MacCabe

Hi, and a warm welcome to The Human Side of Business Podcast. I’m your host Ange MacCabe. I have the pleasure of introducing you to Gabriel Cowan, Chief Executive Officer at Audio Design Desk.

Audio Design Desk, won 2022 NAB Product of the Year, CES Innovator and Fast Company’s “Next Big Thing In Tech” with its AI-assisted software suite that reinvents the process of creating audio for video. Used on Netflix, HBOMax, Amazon Prime, and others, ADD gives creatives the ability to perform sound design, sound effects, and music in real-time, turning hours of tedious work into minutes of immersive fun.

In this episode Gabriel and I dive into workplace culture and discuss the strategies behind maintaining a consistent and healthy work environment.

Developing Workplace Culture

Gabriel Cowan: So I think in terms of creating a positive culture, there will always be conflict, there will always be issues. If you can remove the assumptions, remove the gossip, the minute that you start hearing people chattering and go and step into whatever the issue is and leader through curiosity – my experience is that there’s a real reason for whatever the issue is, and the person on the other side of that issue is struggling with it, and they need resources. These are the three resources we have. We have time, money and creativity. And we don’t have any more time or any more money. So we have to get creative about solving this problem. And that’s where this trust can really help.

Open Communication in Leadership

Gabriel Cowan: I think what has been positive about our culture, even though it’s on Zoom, is just keeping really open with everybody. So in these morning meetings, I really share exactly what’s going on with a fundraising thing or with a business thing, or with our business, the good and the bad. But to have people share in the challenges as well as the opportunity really does create that environment where we’ve all experienced challenges. And somebody like, literally, sometimes an intern will have a voice in one of the challenges that I’m presenting in the morning, and that’ll be the spark of an idea that solves that challenge. Not to mention that just having a community to commiserate with makes you feel better.

Utilizing Employee Skill Sets

Gabriel Cowan: You’re always going to get 200% out of somebody when they’re doing something that they like. And so as much as I possibly, I find out where people are, what they like to do, and then try to lead them towards that. My partner in this business is a guy named Ryan Francesconi, he said a job is three things: It’s how much you learn, how much you make, and how much shit you take. That’s it. Ryan is a programmer, he could be making, like, ridiculous money. He’s like, I’m not making as much, but I take zero shit and I’m learning a ton. And it is true that not taking crap, that’s a huge pressure valve that can be released. So we try to lead with empathy and we try to make sure that they’re all learning.

Defining Expectations

Ange MacCabe: Right, so my definition of good performance from a consulting perspective is that people are industrious, they can have high levels of autonomy. There’s candor and transparency, and they’re huge problem solvers. And in the consulting world, problem solving is not as commonsensical as one would think it would be. So one of my jobs in creating Intuity Performance was to really kind of check my own expectations at the door, and I guess figure out what’s my 75%, versus me having the expectation that a consultant is going to be able to step in and meet my expectations out of the gate without me saying anything? So I guess my question has multiple parts in the sense of how are people showing up in your organization if they’re not meeting your expectations?

If you’re interested in learning more from our Spotlight Leaders check out Laura Meyer’s Leadership Spotlight on: Leading with Intention.

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