How to Build a High Performing Exec Team with Jess Hunt

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster, I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster. And I'm here today with Jess Hunt. Jess is a senior technology operating executive and independent board member with significant experience in talent oriented marketplaces like Andela, Axiom and GLG. Jess, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Jess Hunt: Thanks, Matt. I'm delighted to be here.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, it's good to see you. So I love our topic for today, which is about high performing executive teams. I always say that the single most important thing as a success factor for a company is having a healthy, high performing executive team. So I would love to hear your top three over your career, sort of top three things that go into building a high performing executive team.

Jess Hunt: Great. And it is such an important part of developing a company, is developing the executive team. And it often can be on the side of the desk when there are so many demands of a CEO's time and energy. I think the three things that I... The first thing that I see that's so important is over time developing the idea itself of an executive team as its own entity.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Jess Hunt: And that is often a mindset and expected behaviors that follow the mindset. Sometimes this is called the first team mindset. And the idea is that as an executive, you are actually a part of an entity that works collectively on the business and the company. And I was pretty far along in my own career before I was really asked to develop this mindset. My CEO said, " Listen..." I was head of revenue, and he's like, " You're running your function and all of the executives at this table are running their function. But when you're in here, you're wearing a different hat, you're a part of a team working collectively." And this is a mindset and a set of behaviors, and it's understanding each other's strengths and weaknesses and gaps and motivations. And I think that's unusual and hard to do when you're growing.

Matt Blumberg: And it's critical, I'm a huge fan of that. I think Patrick Lencioni writes about that in a bunch of his books.

Jess Hunt: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: And we've always adopted that at Return Path and now at Bolster. And I always tell people, " If you show up to the executive team meeting as the head of the technology delegation or the head of the sales delegation, you should just turn around and walk back out the door."

Jess Hunt: Right. But of course that's a new thing, that's not what got you here, but that's what's expected of you now.

Matt Blumberg: Okay.

Jess Hunt: Yes.

Matt Blumberg: Number two.

Jess Hunt: The second thing is, and sometimes your executive team as you're growing is like a game of Tetris. You've got an experienced person over here, you got a gap over here, you got an emerging leader over here. But what you need to expect of that team is a shared empirical understanding of the business. And often you have gaps that you have to overcome. And again, you have to kind of set the bar as a CEO. My friend Cassie Young calls this P& L fluency, that you have to expect of all the people at the table, no matter who they are. And a rigorous use of the metrics that you've all agreed on. You have to expect that the members of the team really understand the rationale and how to use the metrics across the business, not just the ones from their function. Of course, this feeds into number one.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. Very good. All right. And bring it home.

Jess Hunt: All right. The last one is as CEO, there are so many demands on your time. I see lots of CEOs neglecting, frankly, the management they have of the individual members of the team. And this is especially hard if you're a first time CEO and you've never had a kick- ass CFO. How do you know what good looks like? But that's the time where you get help. Because the reason this is so important is that over time, execs that aren't fit for purpose degrade the effectiveness of the executive team. And a bonus point for CEOs who know that great talent comes and goes, and that's kind of a law of nature of growth teams. And the CEOs who develop a little acceptance of this probably have less heartburn.

Matt Blumberg: All right, that is dynamite. All three of those are great things for CEOs to be deliberate and intentional about as they're doing the most important thing they have to do, which is build a high performance executive team.

Jess Hunt: Right on.

Matt Blumberg: Jess Hunt, thank you so much.

Jess Hunt: Thanks Matt.