Best Seller TV, the only show dedicated to covering today’s best-selling business books on C-Suite TV, is announcing a new episode featuring Leo Bottary, author of Peernovation: What Peer Advisory Groups Can Teach Us About Building High Performing Teams.
Bottary discovered the concept of group learning during graduate school. While in a room with mid-to-senior level executives, he realized everyone had amassed a wealth of knowledge that was there for the taking. That scenario became a catapult for the power of collective learning, writing several books about the importance of peers, and even starting a podcast.
Peers, he says, are important to assess and develop high performing teams within any organization. In fact, there are 5 factors that are common to that type of team and those are:
Having the right people
Psychological safety
Productivity
Accountability
Leadership
He focused on the second factor because leaders should be thinking about fostering an environment in which these high performing individuals have the ability to speak up, speak out, and take risks without fear of consequences. Having that security in place allows for continued innovation and greater results.
Bottary says that “the five factors are a framework, not a prescription” and advises that every leader should know their organizations better and identify what will work well within their culture.
As a sports fan, Bottary cites an example of knowing what works for the organization by mentioning the famed head coach of the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team, Geno Auriemma. As one of the most successful sports programs in the country, men’s or women’s, Coach Auriemma credits the team’s success with finding those players who are great teammates, not just talented, and creating a culture of accountability.
The same principle should apply to corporations everywhere. Every organization needs to determine what the “it” factor is and what creates success. Bottary encourages leaders struggling to find the “it” factor to use their biggest asset: current team members. Once they ask their teams, Bottary says, leaders experience one of the biggest learning moments as a result.
All episodes of Best Seller TV air on C-Suite TV and are hosted by TV personality, Taryn Winter Brill.
Best-selling author, speaker, and former Fortune 100 CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett created Best Seller TV to give top-tier business authors a forum for sharing thought-provoking insights, in-depth business analysis, and their compelling personal narratives.
“Your people are your most important resource. Trust them to be honest with you because leaders don’t always have all the answers,” Hayzlett said. “As leaders, we often focus on working ON the business, not IN the business. Those in the trenches can teach you almost as much as you can teach them. Leo has a finger on the pulse, so watch the episode to gain key insights about the importance of peers and what you can learn from them.”
In The Hero Club, we like to celebrate the successes of all our leaders. We all experienced the disruption COVID brought upon our businesses and lives, but there were plenty of success stories that can be highlighted despite a very difficult time for many.
Evan and Rachel Dash, a husband-and-wife team, are one of those success stories.
Their company, StoreBound, is well on their way to become a household name, and there’s a good chance you’ve seen or might own some of their small appliances. You can find Dash products everywhere, from department stores to big-box retailers, Amazon, even grocery stores. Evan and Rachel built an idea into a multi-million-dollar business. Within the last year, Dash sold a majority interest to Groupe SEB, a French company behind well-known brands such as T-Fal, Krups, Rowenta, and more.
“(Groupe SEB) approached us and said, ‘we absolutely love what you’re doing. We appear to be doing the same things, but we’re doing it in the opposite way. We love what you’re doing with digital marketing. We could bring you resources,’” Evan said during a recent C-Suite Network Digital Discussion Leadership Series event.
To fully grasp the magnitude of their success, it’s critical to bring some perspective into StoreBound’s origin story.
“Unbelievable Business School Education”
Evan enjoyed a successful career in retail, working for several big name brands like Lord & Taylor, Linens N Things, and most recently, Macy’s.
“I spent most of my working life in corporate America, and when you work in corporate America, there’s not a lot that you really have to be concerned about,” he said. “You do your kind of corporate politics, and you impress the right people, and your career tends to go pretty well.”
Even with all this success, Evan admits he had some entrepreneurial impulses but wasn’t much of a risk-taker himself.
“I didn’t feel like department store retailing was moving in the right direction, but I kept getting promotions and these incredible opportunities to learn,” Evan recalled. “I got the most unbelievable business school education on somebody else’s dime, with no risk, getting overpaid.”
Part of that on-the-job business school education included building a network and knowledge base that he didn’t realize the value of all that information until he went to a product trade show.
It was there where Evan decided to turn his badge, so people didn’t know who he was working for, and went to see the new vendors. There he found a mother and daughter with a new, interesting product and struck up a conversation.
The duo told Evan a large retailer had just visited their booth and promised to order 10,000 units. When Evan asked how they would finance the production of an order, the mother said she was ready to take out a second mortgage.
“I just had this epiphany that these poor ladies are not going to get paid. They don’t realize what they’re getting into. The company is going to hold back payment to make sure that everything sells. Whatever doesn’t sell is going to get sent back. They could wind up losing everything,” Evan recalls. “I realized at that point that the average person has no idea, the perils of working with big retailers.”
On the other side of the equation, Evan realized companies on the supply side had no idea the pressures he was under as a retail buyer.
He saw the opportunity. While he and his wife Rachel (who also worked as a retail buyer) didn’t know what kind of product their company would sell, there was an end goal in their mind.
“We just wanted to win hearts,” Evan said. “We knew that started with winning the hearts of the team that we hope to eventually build. Winning the hearts of our retail customers and then winning the hearts of the end consumer. If we were ever fortunate enough to get that far along, where we had actual consumers buying our products.”
Creating an “Entrance Strategy”
As Dash went from idea to reality, Evan and Rachel found a few surprises waiting for them.
“When we first started the business, everybody I knew in the financial community said, ‘Oh, you live right down on Wall Street. Write up a business plan. Take it around. People will be throwing money at you,’” Evan said. “We did exactly that. We wrote up an amazing business plan, and we went to several private equity companies. We would walk in the first question they would ask is ‘What’s your exit strategy?’ We were like, ‘Exit strategy? We’re working on an entrance strategy!’”
At that point, Evan admits he hadn’t built anything of value yet.
His team put their heads down, crunched the numbers, and came up with a way to bootstrap the company without having to dilute equity. However, they did revisit their finances after hitting certain milestones. While the business grew, they went on what Evan called “a four-year search” to find the right partner, backing out of several potential deals along the way.
Then Groupe SEB called.
“We spent the better part of around a year and a half really getting to know them, traveling to France, having them come to the U.S.,” Evan said. “The more that we spend time together, and the more that we talked about potential problems on the horizon, the more we realize that our values were so in sync. I remember this one day, I got their first annual report, and they had 75 pages that were dedicated to corporate social responsibility, and that just blew me away, to look at the leadership position they were taking in sustainability and employee rights and engagement.”
Building Value with Values
Aligning Dash with a company with values was important to Rachel and Evan. From day one, Dash wasn’t only selling small appliances. It was something more.
It was all about the people, not only the employees but the outside stakeholders as well.
“We wanted people who are truly caring. We look for that caring gene and the DNA,” Evan said. “You cannot teach somebody to care. We want to know when we’re interviewing with them. We really get into it. Do you care about your neighbors? Do you care about your home? Do you care about your family? Do you care about yourself? What things prove it?”
“Because when you find somebody who truly cares, they bring such a passion to the workplace. They’re self-starters. They don’t have to be pushed to do what the right things are. We look for people whose moral compass is in the right place, and we feel if they’re reasonably intelligent, we can teach them how to do the job. And we can teach them how to do the job with excellence, but we can’t teach them those core, fundamental values that have to be innate inside them.”
The ‘X’ Factor
Every business has a secret ingredient in their recipe for success. For the Dashes, that’s community. As part of The Hero Club community comprised of CEOs, founders and investors who pledge to lead with integrity, transparency, and create an impact within the communities they serve.
“(The Hero Club) has been absolutely wonderful. I got to know Tricia (Benn) and Jeffrey (Hayzlett) very well initially when Rachel and I were deciding on whether or not we wanted that to be part of a networking group,” Evan said. “The fact of the matter is, we were on the right track in our business. We didn’t really do it for trying to grow our own business. We did it to create space for ourselves.”
Evan said The Hero Club offers an unrivaled community; business leaders can’t find elsewhere.
“(The Hero Club) been a wonderful opportunity to create that space to think, and that’s been harder and harder to do as the business has grown and we found that (The) Hero Club has just been the most wonderful people and every time you will disappear for a month because we’re busy with things and the schedule doesn’t conflict or scheduled doesn’t work out, and we come back, and it’s like just regrouping with old friends, and it’s just been a wonderful experience,”
I’d like to thank Evan for the insightful conversation. If you’re interested in learning more about joining the C-Suite Network and participating in events like the Digital Discussion Leadership Series, consider becoming part of this community of leaders. For less than the cost of a business lunch a month, we provide you with networking opportunities and content to make you the most strategic person in any room. Click here to learn more.
Zoom fatigue is more than just a timely catch phrase. For many of us, it’s the effect of over a year of isolation, away from the office and our co-workers. While there’s no question Zoom is an incredibly effective tool to stay in touch and conduct business, Zoom fatigue is something that needs to be addressed.
According to recent studies by Stanford University, one in seven women, or 13.8 percent, and one in twenty(5.5 percent) men reported feeling “very” to “extremely” fatigued during Zoom calls. Why are women more severely affected? There are a number of factors associated with this gender discrepancy; for example, women are more often feeling physically trapped in the camera’s field of view.
Women also have the same number of meetings as men, on average, but their meetings seem to last longer. Also, women are less likely to take breaks between meetings. In the past year, I logged in more than 3,000 hours on Zoom hosting events and video calls (a conservative estimate) and averaged anywhere from 10-20+ meetings on a daily basis. Before the pandemic, there was travel time or in-person time between meetings, but there are no built-in breaks during virtual meetings.
Last year, Zoom experienced a growth of 354 percent and through the first months of the pandemic, they went from 10 million users to 300 million daily meeting participants – and 2 trillion minutes in April of 2020 alone!
How do we help our teams combat Zoom fatigue? How do we avoid falling into that ourselves? Here are a few helpful hints.
Have Fun With Your Zoom Space
If we have to have our videos on during calls, how about having some fun with our backgrounds? Choose a virtual background that makes you happy – the beach, a mountain trail, whatever it is that brings a smile to your face. Also, there are emojis you can play with to bring some levity into your meeting – should the meeting warrant levity. Our state of mind plays an integral role during each and every call, so why not enjoy it?
Move Around
If you have a stand-up desk, use it. It breaks the monotony of always having to sit down and remain stationary. Plus, it’s a good way to break out of our sedentary habits. If you don’t have a stand-up desk, get up and walk around your house. Go outside and take a walk during a conference call or even in between meetings. That’ll help distract you for a short period of time and make it easier to re-focus as you head into your next call.
Be Purposeful with Your Time
Every morning, take a look at your calendar. See where the gaps are in your day and use that time to schedule breaks – even if it’s only a short, 15-minute window. Keep in mind that you’re only one and that no matter how much work there is to be done, there are only 24 hours in a day. As the busy executives that we are, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed, don’t let that happen to you. You’re in control of your calendar!
Allow Video ‘Off’ on Some Calls
For many, having to constantly be ‘on’ can be draining, as the cognitive load is much higher during video calls. For some leaders, this isn’t a problem, as they thrive on that eye-to-eye connection. However, it doesn’t work for everyone.
It helps to know who on your team is energized by video calls and who is drained by them. Reading verbal cues can be an incredibly useful tool in our arsenal. If you know someone on your team is experiencing Zoom fatigue, allow them to occasionally shut off their cameras and recharge, or step away from a quick break.
Give Yourself Grace
We’ve all driven to thrive through difficult year – physically, mentally, and emotionally. We have been put through the ringer and we are often our own worst critics. Let’s give ourselves the grace we deserve as imperfect human beings. Perfection is a myth, so a little grace goes a long way to creating an environment where we are all appreciated and accepted.
Invest in Your Community
Here at theC-Suite Network, we are always stressing the importance of community. There is power in numbers. It’s incredibly important to our overall well-being to find a group of people you want to be associated with, who live your values, and capitalize on the immense intellectual property of that collective.
Other quick tips you can employ in your everyday work lives are:
Avoid multi-tasking during your calls
Focus on the positive
Remember the power of what you give voice to
Your mindset has an incredible effect on what you do every day. There are no ‘little’ things in business. The ‘little things’ add up to all we are trying to accomplish – scale our businesses, increase our bottom lines and impact. Let’s take care of ourselves so we can take care of business – personally and professionally.
Women have taken the mantle of being the best at everything they do — the best mother, the best worker. That is an unattainable goal that has been exacerbated throughout this pandemic. I like to think about it as our lives being more integrated and that shows in how I live my life.
As executive leaders, we have to make a conscious effort to recognize that a woman’s self-perception is different, statistically, then men. It’s not a matter of being better or worse, it’s about being different. Great leaders know they have to support everyone and create a culture of trust that allows for everyone to thrive, even during difficult circumstances.
Great employees want flexibility, to know that their voice matters, and to deliver on greatness. How do we, as leaders, harness the disruption taking place right now? By removing ignorance, create that culture of trust from top to bottom and align on the actions we can take.
I recently did an interview with WILS-AM about this topic. Take a listen and comment. How can we continue to improve as leaders?
I recently did an interview with WHO (1040AM) in Des Moines where I talked about how the pressures women faced has exacerbated in the past few months due to COVID, but it’s nothing new.
To listen to the full interview, click on the link below: