Impacting the Business Beyond Your Role with Marlo Struve

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 Marlo Struve. Marlo is a growth executive. She's a marketing and product leader focusing on growth. She advises startups and particularly works in mid and later stage companies. Marlo, it's great to have you on the Daily bolster.

Marlo Struve: Thanks so much, Matt. Thanks for having me here.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, so my question for you is you've been a senior executive at a couple of different companies, and I always say that the best senior executives, the best CXOs are the ones who both crush their own job, but also know how to add value to the company and to the executive team, and to the CEO, and even to the board kind of outside their area. So you color outside the lines really effectively, and I know this is how you operate as well. I would love to hear your top three formula for operating successfully as a CXO outside your area.

Marlo Struve: I appreciate you mentioning this, Matt, because I do think that this is one of the things that people often forget to interview for, but it's so critical. So the first thing that I feel like I end up coaching younger leaders who are thinking that they want to make that next step to that leadership or to that executive level, is the first thing they need to get really comfortable with is anticipating what's next and what's not being said in leadership or executive meetings. So if you're doing annual planning, you need to be thinking two or three years out, even though the questions aren't being asked. If you're doing quarterly planning, you need to be thinking about that next year. And I oftentimes create a framework or a rubric, and I'm just going to quickly reference my notes. I think anticipate whatever's next, right? If you're thinking about month, anticipate that quarter. If you're thinking about quarter, anticipate that year, and do it for your leadership, your managers, your ICs and your partners, whoever your vendors are. And then specifically think about people, process tools and metrics, and think about all the different ways you need to be anticipating what might happen to the business along those lines. And you can ask really good questions from that. So that would be the first thing.

Matt Blumberg: Okay, that makes sense.

Marlo Struve: The second thing that really is often it's not appreciated, but so critical, it's connecting the dots and creating a web within the organization. So when you think about being on a leadership team, and when you think about understanding the organization as a whole, are you creating relationships across the organization as a whole? At one of my former companies, I was leading a marketing, sales, and partially a product team, but I would go to coffee once a quarter with one of the electrical engineers, and he was an IC, but I learned so much from him about what was happening across the company and what his perspectives were. So create a web of other leaders in IC so you can ask really informed questions. And that actually relates to the third thing. Sorry, I don't mean to inaudible

Matt Blumberg: No, I was just going to say I love that. I always feel like the people who've been on my executive teams, I always tell them first and foremost, you are a leader at the company, and that means you are entitled to lead anyone at the company and meet with anyone at the company. So that really fits with the connecting the dots and building relationships outside your team.

Marlo Struve: Yeah, And making sure all of your executives know that that's what you want. So when a sales leader asks for coffee with a customer success rep, that the customer success leader isn't like, " Whoa, whoa, why are you talking to the people?" No, everybody should talk to everybody, and it's not a threatening thing. It's good. But yeah. The third thing, and it relates a little bit to number two for me, is really understanding incentives across the organization. So think about the different subcultures within each of the teams and how have those managers or leaders incentivized or encouraged their people with intrinsic and extrinsic incentives, and understanding also your partners and your partner contracts, and what are they incentivized to do? Because oftentimes when push comes to shove, people are going to do what they're incentivized to do, and it's really, really important to understand the drivers and the motivations and weave that into how you're forming your relationships, and then weave that into how you're anticipating that bigger picture at the company.

Matt Blumberg: Great advice, Marlo. Marlo Struve, growth executive and advisor on how successful CXOs can color outside the lines. Thank you for being here.

Marlo Struve: Thanks, Matt.