Trusting your Intuition as a Leader: Interview with Carol Leaman of Axonify
Recently, Tim Jackson and I have been conducting interviews with leaders in the tech community about their thoughts on leadership and talent management. Check out the Leadership Pad if you’d like to see the past interviews.
Continuing in this series, I spoke to Carol Leaman, CEO of Axonify. Axonify’s Employee Knowledge Platform delivers personalized, bite-sized “gamified” learning content in short bursts, allowing you to teach and reinforce critical concepts like health and safety information in an engaging way.
Carol’s key piece of advice? Trust your intuition about who to promote, and who to let go.
More insights from Carol are in the interview below.
Q: What characteristics do you look for when identifying leaders to work at Axonify?
A: What stands out to me are things like confidence and a steadiness in approach. What I mean by that is somebody who isn’t volatile or that gets easily amped about things. That they can deal with stress and challenge and adapt to those things with a steadiness and confidence. And, somebody who has a positive attitude — a ‘glass half full’ kind of attitude.
They also need to be clearly interested in people. Leadership is all about the people that report to you — enabling them, supporting them, promoting them, and recognizing them. They need to have the orientation of going outside of themselves. That their success involves the success of the those around them.
Those are the things that I think make a good leader. It has nothing to do with their past job titles or even their own personal desire to be leaders. Because in my experience, people aspire to leadership frequently, but more people are simply not capable of doing it well.
Q: What are some of the ways that you develop talent at Axonify?
A: Suzanne, our VP of HR, is in the midst right now of pulling together a program for emerging leaders in the business. Four years in, we’re at the size now that we’ve now started to be able to identify people who are demonstrating the qualities of emerging leaders. So, Suzanne is designing a program to help educate and support those individuals that we think have great leadership potential.
And, just generally we have offered opportunities internally to some specific individuals to start to manage people. Their managers support them in that effort. Again, it’s just the natural evolution of a company growing. A specific example is our Development team. We have 20 people on it now, and 20 people is just too many for one person to manage. So, our VP of Development has split the team in two, and each of those halves of the team has a Team Lead that manages the activity within that group. It was quite clear who the two leaders of those groups would be. They were people that already had, through their natural behavior, became the leaders of the team. When we promoted them officially to those team lead positions, nobody questioned it. That is another leadership quality that is hard to define. But, people know innately who good leaders are. And when they are pointed at, you can’t question it because you just know that they’re a good leader.
Q: What challenges do you face from a talent standpoint?
A: Hiring is difficult in Waterloo region because we compete with so many other companies for top talent. So, the sheer competitive nature of the landscape here makes it tough to recruit people.
In our specific case, sometimes you get folks who come from a longer-established bigger company, who aren’t used to working in a start-up environment. The pace is quite rapid. You are expected to ‘pick up and do’ and exercise good judgment. You have authority and autonomy around a lot of stuff that you might not have in a bigger company. So sometimes it can take a little time for those folks to get used to the fact that we work twice as fast as a big insurance company. You don’t need to wait to do things and wait for long approvals. You just need to do it yourself.
We also have a broad cross-section of ages at Axonify, but sometimes there is a level of ambition in the younger generation where they have an expectation of promotion and purview that extends beyond their years of experience. They haven’t earned the right yet. So sometimes you have to dial them back a little bit without demoralizing them. You have to strike a fine balance. This doesn’t characterize everybody by any stretch though. In fact, we have a number of younger folks at Axonify. Their quality work and work ethic is amazing.
Q: What leadership ‘lessons learned’ are you drawing upon from your past experience growing start-ups like PostRank?
A: You really need to trust people to exercise good judgment and do things that they believe are going to be beneficial to the company. But in order to be able to trust people, people have to know things. They are trusting you to give them all the tools and information at your disposal to allow them to exercise good judgment. So, there is an element of trust that goes both ways that you really need to have to get people to perform at their best.
In my experience, I learned that lesson pretty early on. It’s just something that’s engrained in me at this point. I just naturally trust everybody, and it’s almost like, “prove to me that I can’t trust you.” That rarely happens though because we all want to do really well. I can’t think of anybody who I’ve met who didn’t want to succeed and do well. If you have that attitude towards people, they do it.
Another lesson learned is course-correcting people who don’t exhibit the culture and values. You do get the odd person who doesn’t align with that and you need to nip those things in the bud pretty quickly in order to maintain culture. Part of leadership is establishing the culture, and then maintaining it.
You do get the odd person who is never going to work out though. I never prolong people who are clearly never going to work out. As soon as that starts to become clear, you just deal with it, and deal with it quickly. If you drag those things out and let them stay, you end up in exactly the same place but way further down the road having done a lot more damage.
I also would say to hire as high as you possibly can. Get the very best person you can afford for the role. I talk to a lot of young entrepreneurs who try to cheap out on people. I always say to them, “Find the best person possible, and you will figure out how to come to an agreement with the best person possible.” That’s where you should start, because the best person possible will pay you back in spades in terms of productivity and acceleration of your business. So I always try to do that.
Q: Do you see any potential for leadership skills to be taught via microlearning platforms such as Axonify?
A: Yes, and in fact we are actively seeking partners right now who have proprietary leadership programs that we can work with to ‘Axonify’ their content and get it on the platform to deliver it. Our customers are asking us all the time. We have, for example, a partner in New York City who delivers leadership programs to retail companies. They do foundational learning over the course of a week or so. They have Axonified that content and continuously deliver it in a microlearning format after that initial week. That is essentially what we want to do with other partners — find great leadership content that we can Axonify and then sell to our customers and do a revenue share or something like that.
Q: I imagine that there are people out there who would say that you can’t teach leadership skills through microlearning. Do you have a response to that?
A: You can. Microlearning is about taking content or concepts, and chunking them down into tiny bits of information. You can, for example, have a short video that is a two-minute long interaction between a manager and a direct report. That two-minute video is a piece of microlearning. In the video there is a situation and a response, then we can ask questions around that situation. For example, “In that circumstance, what choices does the manager have to deal with that situation?” The answer is A, B, or C. You can start to reinforce behaviours that result from watching a short video and have that reinforced through microlearning questions. That’s the technique we use, and it works very effectively to cause retention in the brain around those key concepts, which in fact does change behavior.
Somebody can sit in a room being taught for 8 hours how to be a better leader. That’s great, except that you’re pounding tons of information into somebody’s head that they’re never going to remember. Then you hope that when they get on the job they start to apply those concepts. That upfront learning session is terrific to lay the foundation. But the key is, what do you do afterward? You can use a solution like Axonify to chunk down those core concepts and create the modules to reinforce key pieces of behavior.
