Be willing to correct. You have to know what you’re looking for in a leader, and you have to have the courage to admit hiring and promotion mistakes early on. If you make a mistake hiring for a leadership role, you have to be willing to turn around in the first three months, or at least the first six months, of the leader’s tenure. That’s a hard thing, but it’s something that you get better at over time. It does depend on the personality of the leader. I don’t want leaders in here who are quick on the trigger. I want people to appreciate that we’re all human, we’re all flawed, but there are certain fundamentals that a leader has to have.
Fundamentally, a leader has to have integrity, and not everybody does. Fundamentally, a leader has to have the expertise to drive a particular function, and sometimes it’s difficult to figure that out. As a CEO, you’re not necessarily knowledgeable about every function that reports into you. Fundamentally, you have to have a work ethic that makes this more than just an 8-to-5 job, because nobody succeeds with that mentality. Those are some of the fundamentals of what you’re looking for, but it takes time to get better at identifying those things.
Develop a support system. You have to have the discipline to critique your own hires. But you also have to have support on top of you, too. If you have any kind of dysfunctionality on top of you, it makes your job that much more difficult. If you’re a CEO, you have to have a board that you have developed and with which you have developed a sense of trust. They trust that you are going to make the right decisions, they trust that you are going to communicate with them as to why you’re making these decisions, and if the business is going in the right direction and they perceive it, that strengthens the trust.
All along the way of building a company, there are going to be ups and downs, so that trust might be stronger or weaker depending on where you are in the building of the company. That affects your ability to move forward with some of the tough change decisions that you make.
How to reach: Advanced Bionics LLC, (877) 829-0026 or www.advancedbionics.com
