Smart Leaders
A sense of purpose
How to create a culture of winning
By Erik Cassano
Smart Business Indianapolis | March 2008
Page 1 of 1
Chris Baggott
Co-founder, ExactTarget Email Marketing and Compendium Blogware
Communication with your
employees has to be two things above all else, says
Chris Baggott: consistent and
visionary.
Baggott — who co-founded
ExactTarget Email Marketing, a
300-employee company, and
who more recently co-founded
Compendium Blogware, where
he serves as CEO — says that
employees need to, first and
foremost, believe in your
integrity as a leader. If they trust that you will tell them the
truth, it is then your obligation
to inspire them by showing
them that they can achieve the
personal satisfaction and advancement that they are looking for in
their careers.
Failure to motivate your
employees with your words —
both written and spoken — can
result in a stagnant company,
Baggott says, which can lead
your best and brightest workers
to look for new challenges elsewhere.
Smart Business spoke with
Baggott about why inspiring
and motivating employees has
to start at the top.
Inspire with your communication.
Always be honest when communicating. You never have a chance
to get your integrity back.
Be consistent. You can’t say
one thing one day and totally
shift gears the next day. You
have to be ‘on-message’ and
clear. You have to be consistent
and visionary.
People want to aspire to something, so when you’re talking
about things, you have to be
aspirational. ‘We’re going to
make the best widget in the
world’ isn’t so aspirational, but
how people are going to benefit
from that widget, that’s where
the aspiration comes in and
makes people excited.
People want to find value in
what they’re doing. I just had a
young woman who I met a year
ago, right as she was graduating
college. She was going to move
to New Jersey and work in a
large pharmaceutical company
in corporate finance.
She was all excited, she was a
corporate finance major, and she
reached out to me after eight
months and she said, ‘Get me
out of here.’ She was in an organization where she sat in a cubicle and people counseled her on
her career in terms of decades,
like, ‘Don’t mess up here, and in
five years, you might get to be a
director-level person.’
It wasn’t inspiring, it wasn’t a
meritocracy, she knew wasn’t
going anywhere, she was surrounded by 20-year veterans
who were completely unmotivated, just doing their jobs and
getting the heck out of there.
There was nothing to look forward to, particularly for young
people, who probably aren’t
looking at their lives in terms
of decades.
They expect to have many
jobs in their careers. You have
to give them something that says, ‘This is really, really cool;
this is changing the way people
are doing things, and your role
in this is really important.’
You have to tell them that if
you do a good job, it doesn’t matter how old you are or how long
you’ve worked here, if you’re
worthy of a promotion or leadership role, you’re going to get it.
Set the stage. It becomes really
important for the leader to set
the stage. You do that in a lot of
ways. You have frequent communication; you share information with all employees.
Specific strategies we’ve executed have been things like
monthly meetings. Every month,
we bring the entire organization
together for lunch, anybody who
is out of town calls in for kind of
a review of all major areas of the company. Everyone sees
what everyone else is doing, and
when they see we’re all rowing
in the same direction, those
monthly meetings really help.
I’m a big fan of being an industry leader because your team
wants to be associated with a
winning team. The more you
can project that you are a winning team, the better it is. So
your PR efforts, your conferences and meetings, and I’m
even a big fan of blogging, these
are the things that show your
people that you are winners and
a winning organization. You set
the culture of winning and that
you are leaders.
However, the bigger the organization, the harder it is to set
and maintain that kind of tone.
There isn’t a magic bullet for
that. You try to talk; you try to
manage by walking around. You
do talk to people and try to
solicit feedback.
You want to create that kind of
culture. If you surround yourself
with yes-people and put up this
barrier of inapproachability, people won’t approach you. You’ll
get that result. You have to be
able to be approachable and accept and act on ideas. You have
to let people constantly know
that you are accessible and that
you care about this. It’s showing
people that you care. That’s the
biggest thing. It’s the about the
health of your organization.
Make yourself visible. People like
people. I was recently at a conference, and we were talking
about the social-networking phenomenon. I made the argument that it’s not such a new
thing; it’s just different.
In the old days, in the small
organizations in olden times
before we had megacorporations, everybody knew everybody. We shared our lives together. Then we went through
this phase in probably the 1920s
or ’30s with the formation of big
conglomerates that institutionalized everything — business and
hierarchies and unions — and
we kind of lost that touch.
Now, we have new tools that
all us to get face-to-face with
people, but you can leverage
tools like blogging and video
and e-mail to get your message
out to people with a personal
touch.
HOW TO REACH: Compendium Blogware, www.compendiumblogware.com; ExactTarget Email Marketing, www.exacttarget.com
