Tag: leadership

Marissa Mayer – The before and after becoming a CEO

Marissa Mayer seems to be everywhere at the moment. Whenever I am on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, I’m seeing news in all my feeds at the moment. Obviously since taking the CEO and President of Yahoo roles her profile while already large when at Google, seems to have increased exponentially.

One of the things that I realised was that I had never actually seen a video of her speaking. All I ever really saw was a similar shot taken of her smiling when on a forum or during a presentation – much like the image above. So I thought I would search on YouTube for some videos and I stumbled across this relatively short video interview of Marissa Mayer with Charlie Rose for the IAB.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zP1p8ZTCio

Mayer on The Importance of Listening

In the video, Marissa Mayer discusses what its like to be a CEO and her early successes. One of the main things that she said that resonated with me was this:

I think the most important thing I have learned about being a CEO is the importance of listening. People talk about what changes as you grow in your career. Someone pointed out to me which I think is really true is that early in your career you get ahead by following the rules perfectly. Like getting things done on time, like following the rules and meeting expectations.

Mayer on Breaking the Rules

Another pertinent point that Marissa Mayer went on to say was that its important to understand when to break the rules and when the rules do not apply.

When you become an executive it becomes knowing when to break the rules or knowing when the rules do not apply.

I must say that I have been impressed with Marissa Mayer and her leadership of Yahoo. They have seen traffic increase, been building new products and innovating.

I believe that to grow in the digital space, you need to be doing all of those things. Without building new products, innovating and focus, you will be left behind. Big businesses are competing against small start ups who are amassing large groups of users without worrying about how to monetise this audience until much later.

Too often I see big companies shooting great ideas down because of lack of investment or lack of resource. While I understand how traditional businesses work, this is not how the company with grow. They need to take more risks. They need to start pushing the boundaries.

When faced with a new platform, they tend to just try to repurpose their existing products on to it, rather than taking advantage of the technology and trying something new.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on Marissa Mayer and Yahoo as I think that they are on course to grow further and surprise a lot of people on the way.

Leadership – What makes a great leader?

Leadership is something that I am really passionate about – and reading articles to help me to be a better leader is hugely important and I just read an article on LinkedIn entitled Great Leadership Starts and Ends with This which really resonated with me.

The Best Leadership Advice EverI was struggling to engage the audience. Okay, forget struggling — I was dying onstage. Maybe I was having an off day. Maybe they were having an off day.

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via Linkedin

In short, Jeff Haden (the article’s writer) was talking in front of a number of CEOs and senior managers and out of the blue asked them what makes a great leader.

Not expecting any response from them, one of the CEOs chirped up with No one cares how much you know until they first know how much you care about them.

He went on to explain that you can convey to employees what the company strategy, vision and goals are and they might care for a short period of time, but they will then go back to what they normally do. It doesn’t resonate with them and doesn’t necessarily change their behaviours.

Only when a leader demonstrates their passion and how much they care about their employees will it really make a difference. He went on to say:

“We can try to communicate and engage and connect all we want but no one really listens. They just smile and nod and go back to doing their jobs the way they always do.

“Our employees don’t really care about what we want them to do until they know how much we care about them. When employees know — truly know — that you care about them, then they will care about you. And when they know you care, then they will listen to you… and then they will do anything for you.”

This really resonated with me. I have had a few different managers in my time and by far the best one was the one who cared about me and my career. Others who have either just barked orders or dictated what needed to be done and how didn’t inspire me or motivate me.

A great leader trusts their employees

It was under this manager who cared that I really progressed through the company. I completely bought into his strategy, which in turn allowed my team to buy into it as well. I learned that you need to nurture a good working environment and build up a level of trust to really engage with your employees and for them to engage with the business.

This really is the only other point I would make on this. Not only does a great leader care about their employees, they also trust them. Great employees are able to make decisions, try new things, feel comfortable to fail and learn from their mistakes.

My recipe: Great leaders create great employees which in turn makes these leaders even better – repeat.

I know that there is a lot more to it than this, but I felt that this article was worth highlighting as it gave a slightly different, tangible and achievable example of great leadership.