Don Brown believes that the most important thing a business leader can do is to stay real: Stay real with your customers, your
employees and your managers. When you have bad news, deliver it quickly and in full, says the founder, chairman, president and CEO
of Interactive Intelligence Inc. If you dance around the topic, speculation will take root instead, and the situation will fester. Likewise,
broadcast good news just as quickly, as few things motivate people like the knowledge that their work is producing wins. Brown says
your authenticity as a leader comes down to your willingness to communicate openly and frequently. That approach has helped Brown
grow Interactive Intelligence from a start-up software solutions firm in 1994 to an $83 million, 600-employee company in 2006. Smart
Business spoke with Brown about how your attitude and willingness to communicate can help your company grow.
Keep it real when communicating. The key
has been to dispense with the corporate
bullshit. I’m a very plain-spoken person,
and whether it’s been bad times when
we’ve had to lay people off following the
whole dot-com bubble burst or great
times when things are going well, the key
has been to not lapse into the corporate-speak, the content-free sort of stuff you
hear that comes across as being completely phony and impersonal.
More than anything, I try to be genuine,
to the point of possibly being overly
frank. But I think people appreciate that,
particularly in smaller organizations.
They don’t want their managers and
leaders talking to them like they’re at
IBM. They want people to stay real and
shoot straight with them.
You do that by forcing yourself to open
up to people and telling them how you
feel. A few years back, I was out of town
at a customer site and got some bad
financial news. We were going to have to
do a layoff. So I sat down and typed a
very heartfelt e-mail on my BlackBerry
and sent it to the whole company.
I was very honest about the way I felt,
especially going through a downsizing,
knowing how emotionally devastating it
is, and to just let people know that their
company and their leaders aren’t these
heartless robots who do these things just
looking at spreadsheets and don’t understand the impact on people’s lives.
People appreciate that, even though you
had to do tough things, there’s at least a
human being behind those decisions.
Make time for communication. You make
the time to communicate by prioritizing
it, by considering it to be as important as
anything else you’re doing. It comes
down to reminding yourself what is
important. We can never forget that the
only reason we are in existence is
because we create a product that makes
our customers happy, and everything
else is secondary to that.
Financial reports, sales meetings, none of the rest of it would happen or have
any meaning if we weren’t creating innovative products.
Turn negatives into positives. The main
thing is to just be accepting of defeat and
mistakes, and by that, I mean to just
shake it off and not take it personally.
Realize that everybody makes mistakes, everybody does dumb things, and
the best thing you can do is learn from
them and realize that mistakes present
something of an opportunity for growth.
Entrepreneurs often have to be thick-skinned people, or maybe just blindly
optimistic. Even in the bad times, they’re
looking for a silver lining.
I don’t know exactly how you develop
that thick skin, but it comes down to
almost a naive view of the world, that if
you work hard enough, everything will
turn out fine in the end. It helps you get
through the bad times if you have this
inner sense that good times are just
around the corner.
It makes you less prone to giving up
and enables you to just keep on churning
through, even when things look bleak as
they sometimes are going to.
A lot of times, it also comes down to viewing everything as a learning exercise. Admitting to yourself that you’re not
the smartest person in the world, and
that you have things that you can learn,
and that even the people you hold up as
exemplars, they’ve all taken their knocks
and made their mistakes, but they’ve
learned from it and never given up.
Get excited about where you’re heading.
The biggest thing that has served me
well is being able to impart a genuine
excitement over what we are doing. For
a company founded on the concept of
innovation, the person at the top really
has to be able to communicate excitement over the achievements that have
been made and the plan that has been
laid out for the future.
Just being able to celebrate, periodically, the minor victories along the way, it
helps enormously when you suffer the
inevitable defeats. You find reasons to be
happy and to be excited and to share
those moments with the people most
responsible for those contributions,
which pumps them up.
Share with your team a sense of
excitement about the future. People like
to know that what they are doing matters. To have the chief executive get
excited over not just stellar profits for a
quarter but about a new feature that has
been added to a product or a new ad
campaign or a sale in a new country, I
think it really makes people feel like
they matter. That’s the biggest thing
when you are building a company, when
you’re dealing with a lot of intelligent,
creative people who can go any number
of places and do different things.
They’re looking for a way to make a difference with their lives. That’s maybe
the most important role of a chief executive: to be something of a cheerleader
and let people know that what they’re
doing matters.
HOW TO REACH: Interactive Intelligence Inc., www.inin.com or
(317) 872-3000