Three Years; Three Lessons Learned on Executive Leadership

What does it take to be an executive???This question has been asked throughout my career by managers, directors, and most recently by an auditorium full of aspiring high-achieving high school students (link here).?Last week, I celebrated my three-year anniversary of my first executive role and wanted to share what has helped guide my path.?

1.????Embrace Empathy

When I joined Entelo in the Summer of 2020, the world was aflame figuratively and literally.?From the global pandemic to the BLM Movement to political and civil unrest on a global scale, I realized instantly my global Customer Success team had things on their mind that outweighed work.?On top of that, I walked into a company that had downsized 2/3 of its workforce and was transitioning their founding CEO.?

With that in mind, during my first Customer Success team meeting I openly shared that the mental and emotional health of our team was my #1 priority.?Words are nothing without action, so we made our early 1:1’s an open forum for our teams to share what they and their families were going through and not to mention anything work-related. Seems crazy, right??The conversations were emotional, intense, and raw and many of the team openly shared they were actively interviewing to leave the company.?I listened more than I spoke and in the end, we were able to connect on a human level which was essential for the work we had in front of us.?

It sounds simple, but too often executives join an org with a pre-determined agenda that accounts for everything except what their teams may be going through. Worse yet, we all know an executive who’s spoken big but not honored it with action.?By embracing empathy, we all started off on a human-to-human level vs. Exec to IC(individual contributor).?There is no way we would have collectively been able to accomplish our incredible goals like improving our NPS score by 200% without embracing empathy first.

And during that critical first 6 months, we did not have a single resignation.

2.????Speak Directly to Your Customers (and then speak to them again)

I don’t care what type of company you work for; there’s not better barometer on how you are doing than your customers.?As Vice President of Customer Success, our team was responsible for the number one company initiative:?improve our company’s gross retention (i.e. retaining our core customers).?And things were not going well.

Too often I have seen or heard of an executive plan that sounds great in the boardroom but is disconnected from the reality of the day-to-day.?As a 1st time executive, it was imperative to avoid that by jumping in with both feet and speaking directly to our customers leadership teams.

My 30-60-90-day plan had called for me to speak directly to our core customers during my first 6 months.?After my first week, that plan was accelerated for me to speak to our Top 100 enterprise customers my first 90 days.?These were not simply introductions but strategic discussions around their pain points ranging from the product to internal challenges.?Like the conversations I’d had with my team, they were also feeling the pain of the state of the world both personally and professionally.?By listening to their challenges across recruiting and technology we were able to begin to form a partnership that would anchor the most successful turnaround in our company’s history.?In 6 short months, we increased our Net Promoter Score (NPS) by over 200% while increasing our gross retention by over 100%.?

Those executive conversations were the starting point for a new program in Customer Success we launched to have multi-cadence executive touch with our customers throughout the year.?From key QBR/ABRs to Executive Sponsors, we showed our commitment to the success of our customers and then delivered on it.??

There’s no way our customer success team would have accomplished the astounding achievement of increasing our gross retention by over 100% in six months without the ability to have strategic conversations with our customers.?As an executive I’d recommend having a consistent presence with your customers.

3.????Have a (Project) Plan

One lesson I’ve personally learned as an executive is the importance of being able to create (and execute) a scalable project plan.?This is vital on many levels but most importantly because you’re going to face challenges like any other level in your career.?The main difference lies in the enormity of the impact of your team’s ability to successful traverse these obstacles.?And were there obstacles.?Here are some of the key initiates our team faced that required a project plan.

• Restructuring our entire Customer Success Model from customer base to roles
• Launching our 1st over paid Professional Services (PS) offering; building a PS division
• Migrating 100 customers off of a legacy software in 90 days vs. the 365 day plan
• Launching strategic calls with our core 100 Enterprise customers in 90 days

This could not have been accomplished without the dynamic customer success leaders at I had the great fortune to lead.?Each were at various levels in their careers and knowing how critical project management is, we built a professional development plan where we collectively took a course on Project Management led by @Chris croft (link here).?In fact our head of support eventually transitioned to a Project Management role).?

Ultimately, our collective success led to our acquisition by SilkRoad Technologies almost a year ago which shook up the talent acquisition technology space and is shaping the future of how companies source, engage, hire and retain their employees.?In the past year, I’ve had the immense fortune to join a new executive team surrounded with even larger challenges but also larger opportunities to learn and make a difference. ?I appreciate you letting me share my perspective on what has impacted my path.?For me personally, there’s no way this kind of success happens without embracing these three core lessons.

As always, I’m happy to keep this conversation going with anyone seeking to level-up to the next stage in their career and if you’re looking for a speaker for your company or conference, please feel free to reach out.?

Andre J. Boulais

VP of Recruiting and Sourcing Solutions

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/andrejboulais/

BONUS:

If you’d like to learn more on executive level project management for recruiting, I’ll be leading an upcoming webinar with CEO Elaine Davidson where we’ll be covering many of the lessons learned above and how they can be applied to your company’s talent acquisition.?We hope to see hundreds of executives (and aspiring executives) joining the audience of hundreds of recruiting and HR professionals for our webinar (link here).