Ten Lessons on Leadership from Kendall Collins
Kendall Collins, CMO at Okta, Tech Advisor, on his Ten Leadership Lessons
Earlier this year, I invited Kendall Collins to speak to our group of executive women leaders about leadership. Now to be honest, we hadn’t had a cys-male come speak to us for a long time. But we are constantly working towards equity, inclusion and diversity at HiPower, so we expanded our network for this session. And learned a lot in the process.
This is a super quick summary of 10 take-aways from Kendall’s talk. For more details, I highly recommend getting him to speak at your offsite.
1. Start with a blank sheet of paper.
Sometimes, when a team is stuck or ideating, it’s better to pull out a blank sheet of paper, or a blank Google Doc, and start from scratch. This does two things: it gives people the freedom to start over; and it helps to even the playing field. Giving your team a blank sheet to start from makes room for people who aren’t the loudest to still have their voice represented. It gives people who need time to think before talking the space to do that.
So start with a blank sheet of paper.
2. Don’t design a solution until you have described the problem.
If someone comes into your office with a solution. Stop them. Ask them to describe the problem. Make sure they describe it well. And then ask them to define how we will know when the problem has been solved – what will change. Only then do you start thinking about solutions.
3. Build people up.
Your greatest success will be if, in future years, you look around and realize that the people you developed on your team went on to become legendary.
4. Give your team the choice.
In high risk, high reward moments, give your team the choice of being the one to deliver the presentation. If the team feels confident in the results, let them present. If it’s a more controversial topic, take on the risk yourself.
5. People always talk about what they want. But they never talk about what they are willing to give up.
Whether you are doing it consciously or not, every decision you make is a prioritization decision. When you take on too much, you have made a decision to deprioritize everything to be less than great. If you throw yourself in your work, you have made a decision to deprioritize your personal life. What’s important is to make these decisions consciously and thoughtfully.
6. Build value across functions.
Careers normally begin with functional management and then proceed to people management. People often desire a role in strategic management – which requires you to build value across functions - and ask me how to get there. If you see the bigger picture and you can direct teams to prosecute the bigger picture, then you have earned the right to work beyond the function you know.
7. West coast nice.
Cultures, whether geographic or corporate, that thrive too much on praise and not enough on constructive criticism eat away at trust. For more on this see Toxic Positivity.
8. You see the true fabric of relationships when you lose battles together, not when you win them.
There is a lot written about how to develop a strong company culture. But the true test of the culture you have developed is what happens to relationships at your company when things take a turn for the worse. When things get tough, do people start looking for other jobs or disengage? Or do they lean in and work together to turn things around?
9. Having kids is a significant OS upgrade.
We talk a lot about leading change, whether in a company, in your personal life, or in society. To truly understand the change you want to lead, you may have to first give yourself a significant upgrade in the OS of that change.
[We talked about this with Kendall when we discussed how men can be better allies for women’s issues. Kendall talked frankly about changing how he sees the world after having a daughter.]
10. I have mixed feelings about Elon Musk. But I can’t deny his brilliance.
There’s a lot to be learned about leadership and driving change from this Elon quote: “I want to be able to think about the future and feel good about that — that we’re doing what we can to have the future be as good as possible, to be inspired by what is likely to happen and to look forward to the next day.”
He is driving solutions for two of the biggest challenges today that people didn't believe could be solved. When he believes in something, he is unrelenting. And this allows him to prosecute his ideas in a completely different way from how most people would approach the solution.
And so with that, our discussion felt like it came full circle to the beginning.
Start with a blank sheet of paper.