Lessons Learned from Leading brightspot for Ten Years

Over nearly ten years of leading brightspot, I've been gathering and refining my lessons on leadership. Our long time coach, advisor, and consultant Winnie da Silva recently interviewed me for her upcoming podcast. Beyond just a great conversation – I always learn a ton from talking to Winnie – it prompted me to clean up and share these seven leadership lessons so that it might help others who are also learning as they're leading.

1. Productize your services early, systematize operations later. Define the scope, process, tools, and deliverables to accelerate consistency and learning. But don't systematize your operations too early because you need flexibility as you grow – and better to delegate to a person with judgement than an inflexible system.

2. Don't make what David C. Baker calls "the big hire" mistake where you put your hopes in hiring someone to take the company to the next level. This rarely works out because too much is riding on this person and since they come from the kind of organization you aren’t yet, there’s likely a mismatch in expectations.

3. To grow, focus – don't diversify – your services and sectors. It will be tempting to think you need to reach a more diverse customer base in order to grow, but then you risk muddling your positioning and unfocusing your team. Better to go deep, at least initially, and you’ll benefit from quicker learning and more consistent delivery.

4. As a leader you can and should set an example but you shouldn’t be the benchmark for success. Your team is not you, and is different than you for a reason: to complement you and empower them. Instead, accept and capitalize on those differences instead of getting disappointed when they do something differently or more slowly than you would.

5. Your business can make a statement without being a statement. You can run your company to right the wrongs you see in business, but not every wrong – and you won't get everything right. Every business decision doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. If you don’t pick your spots, you risk focusing too much internally on your company and not enough externally on your customers.

6. Don't change too much too fast – even if things seem interdependent to you. Even the most adaptable teams need some stability and to know what they can count on that’s not changing. If you move too fast, you get too far out over the horizon and your team can't follow you. To paraphrase from the West Wing: a leader with no followers is just a person taking a walk.

7. Embrace distributed work, not just flexible work. While it's easier to build culture in person and have everyone in the same place M – F and 9-5, the benefits of a distributed team outweigh the costs of flexibility. So, it may seem inefficient at first when everything is a hybrid of in-person and online, but you’ll gain flexibility, access to talent, and proximity to customers and collaborators.