How CEOs Can Get the Most From CXOs with Sarah E. Brown

Speaker 1: 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 am Matt Blumberg and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with my friend Sarah Brown. Sarah is a B2B tech marketing leader. She is an author of the extraordinary book Lead Upwards, which everyone listening to this should read. She is a startup mentor, she's an ecosystem builder, and she's focused on scaling SaaS companies through customer- centric marketing. She is also focused on being a student of the game and has some great wisdom to offer. And Sarah, we are so happy to have you here today.

Sarah Brown: Thank you, Matt. I'm so thrilled to get to talk to you and listeners today.

Matt Blumberg: So one of the things that I love about your book is most business books are written by the person at the top. You intentionally have one about growing your career from the middle up. And a lot of the audience we have here is founders and CEOs. So I would love to ask you, what are the top three things in your mind that a CEO should do to get the most out of someone on his or her executive team?

Sarah Brown: The first thing a CEO should do to get the most out of his or her executive team is to set their new executive up for success in the first 90 days. And for this book Lead Upwards, interviewed almost 50 people and one of the people I interviewed I know is a friend of yours, Matt Blumberg, Gainsight CEO, Nick Mehta. And something Nick recommended was really bucketing the wins in the first 90 days into four categories. So quickly walking through those, small impact, low effort, small impact, big effort, big impact, low effort, big impact, big effort. And in terms of prioritization, you want to postpone most of the small impact, low effort things. Do a few of them, have your executive do all they can to avoid the small impact, big effort, do as many of the big impact, low effort points on the board, wins as they can. And then the big impact, big effort things, postpone most of them, but do a few. So when you're aligning on your vision of success with your executive in the first 90 days, that's going to really set things up for success beyond that.

Matt Blumberg: All right, so it starts with a good onboarding and then what?

Sarah Brown: So after the first 90 days, or excuse me, during the first 90 days when you're onboarding your executive and you've got that set up for success, beyond that, we also want to look at something called attunement. And Matt, you and I have discussed this in many different ways because I think in some ways CEOs are also constantly being attuned to, if that's the right grammar, in that people are constantly understanding the best work styles of the founders. But I think really learning and understanding how to work best with each of your executives, recognizing they're all unique flowers and each person works differently, has a different background. And so within that point, I would say understanding is your startup leader coming from big company where their biggest challenge is going to be getting in the weeds in tactical. And we see this a lot when people come from larger companies, particularly brought into companies as they're scaling. They may struggle with if you're at series A or even series B, if there's those key things that they just haven't done in a long time. They've had many, many layers between them and the actual work being done. And so you'll want to really focus them on, I'd say we call it being on the shop floor and really paying attention to the details or in the other direction, if you've got a new leader, they're going to really struggle with potentially recruiting their team. They may or may not have that Rolodex to choose from talent. So really encouraging them to prioritize that, things of that nature. So again, attune to your executive and really help them with specifically what's important to them. How does that land?

Matt Blumberg: Meet them where they are for sure.

Sarah Brown: There you go.

Matt Blumberg: Okay. And what's your number three?

Sarah Brown: I'd say being really clear about the weaknesses of the leader you've hired and their strengths and how they map to yours. We have all seen a startup founder who used to be a VP of sales in a past life or a CMO, and they burned through VPs of sales or burned through CMOs. And there's no judgment there, but really understanding your own biases in different departments. And also if you've never done a function, I think this is why CXO is so wonderful. Cause it really encourages, I think, a lot of different behaviors around if you don't have the expertise, fractional leaders can be wonderful to bring in to help you understand what you don't know. But I would say if you have a core competency in an area like watch out, that'd be my biggest piece of advice. How does that land with your experience?

Matt Blumberg: I mean, it's right there and we can have a conversation another time about the struggles that I had managing that particular department at my last job, which I don't think I'm having anymore at my new company.

Sarah Brown: Love that.

Matt Blumberg: You have to get stuff out of your system.

Sarah Brown: There you go.

Matt Blumberg: Sarah Brown, CMO extraordinaire, and author of Lead Upwards. Thank you so much for being here.

Sarah Brown: Thanks for having me Matt.