Grit & Growth – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on leadership with Collins Dobbs, a Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in leadership and a seasoned executive coach. According to Dobbs, becoming a truly phenomenal leader requires a deeper understanding of both yourself and your team, enabling you to navigate tough conversations, develop real connections, and create a culture where people feel safe to offer real feedback.

As an executive coach, Collins Dobbs has worked with senior leaders across industries to help them navigate complex team dynamics and enhance their emotional intelligence. As an instructor for the popular Interpersonal Dynamics course (affectionately known as "Touchy Feely"), he also helps young leaders in the Stanford GSB classroom to foster self-awareness, communicate more authentically, and develop the building blocks for effective leadership in their personal and professional worlds.

Key Takeaways 

Be a signal generator

“People are looking for leaders to communicate how they navigate in the good times, but also in the challenging times. Are they open to innovation? Are they open to ideas? Are they open to creating opportunities for success and failure? That's a big job of leaders to generate those signals to say, it's okay. We welcome mistakes and risks as long as we learn from them and fix them going forward.” 

Be open to giving and receiving feedback

“We come in and we have thoughts. And often underneath those thoughts are feelings. And so while the thoughts sometimes say what's important to us, oftentimes the feelings signal how important they are. We try to help the students understand both their thoughts and their feelings. And then as they interact with each other, understand their intentions, the impact of the behavior, and what comes up for them and what comes up for others as well.”

Embrace the unknowing

“A piece of leadership is about: What do I do in the not knowing? I don't know exactly what I need to know when markets change, when staffs change, when skills change. That's part of leadership. And part of it is, is a willingness to stand in the unknowing and a trust in oneself and others that we can figure it out.”

Make sure you have the right support system

“I think peer groups are tremendously important. If it's a CEO roundtable, or a group of alumni, do you have a circle of people where you can really be authentic? Because you're not alone.”

Lead with space, pace, and grace

“Can we pause? Can we create an understanding? Can we see where we're missing expectations from each other? Can we state what those expectations are? And then can we make a plan in terms of how we're willing to work together to meet that?”

Listen to Collins Dobbs’ advice to aspiring and experienced leaders on how to become not just a good leader, but a phenomenal one.

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Every entrepreneur understands the critical importance of sales to business success. But often, in the early stages of growth, teams tend to focus on marketing without having a strategic plan or process for how to turn leads into sales. Yann Le Beux, co-founder of a research and design firm in Senegal, and Zia Yusuf, a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group and Stanford Seed consultant, share their experiences and strategies for building and strengthening your sales strategy.

Yann Le Beux’s company, YUX Design, focuses on creating user-centered designs that address the unique needs of African markets, helping their clients to bridge the gap between global tech and local context. But Le had his own gap to bridge — between marketing efforts and sales conversions. Zia Yusuf, who has taught at Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner School of Design, lent his expertise in innovation and design thinking to help Le Beux and his team realize that their marketing and sales strategies must be aligned with the needs of specific customer segments. “You don't sell to companies, you sell to human beings,” Yusuf advises. “You're selling to very large organizations, but they're not your client and it's not even the business unit that's your client. It's not even the head of that business unit. There could be actually two, three different roles – and understanding how to sell to those people and individuals was kind of a little bit of a breakthrough as well.”

Le Beux admits that his small company didn’t grow quickly because it was  constrained by talent issues. “But as soon as you start growing, you realize you have to feed all these people ready to work and you need to be much more consistent in your approach to business development and stop behaving like a spoiled child where clients come to you naturally,” he says.

Le Beux’s process started with creating a strong product-market fit for each of his business units, honestly assessing the competition, and transitioning from targeting companies to connecting with key decision makers. Yusuf also advises entrepreneurs to think about the true cost of sales and the effort required to get something. “When you're at an early stage as a company, you feel that every dollar that comes in is fantastic, but it may have taken 60 percent of the company working for three weeks to respond to an RFP which leads to a small dollar amount of revenue. You want it. So you're excited, but should you have spent those three weeks and 60 percent of your team pursuing a different opportunity in a different way?”

Hear how Le Beux and Yusuf worked together to balance marketing and sales while trying to scale, plus stories of partnering with Google and meeting the demands of a tech giant, along with strategic pricing during a global recession.

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Meet Raj Prakash, cofounder of Zifo, a science informatics company in India. While growing revenues is on almost every entrepreneur’s mind, Prakash believes building a thriving culture should be too. Hear how creating a great place to work is helping his company achieve great results.

Zifo is one of the largest global pure play science informatics companies, with over 1,800 employees. And it counts many of the largest global bio-pharma companies among its customers. The company focuses on technology for collecting and analyzing data that has been instrumental in the development of medications and vaccines for global viruses and illnesses. But that’s more of the quantitative story. For Raj Prakash, thinking about the qualitative experience of his employees is essential to success. “We are a science-first, people-first company,” he explains.

Prakash has a broader definition of what it means to grow. “It's just not revenue,” he says. “ It is about opportunity to people, opportunity to explore self. It's doing something impactful. It's a people-driven mechanism that encourages persistence and tenacity to get results."

“There is a culture of playing to win. Every action is measured in terms of intent and intensity of action, not just on result. It's fun, it is tough, but winning it together, or playing it together, even losing it together, it's fun. We want to be a place which is highly valued as a great place to work.”

And it seems to be working. Zifo has been listed as one of the great places to work for seven consecutive years. 

Hear how Prakash is building a thriving culture while growing a company that leads to scientific breakthroughs.

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Meet Grace Macharia, a speech and language therapist and founder of SLT Support in Nairobi, Kenya. She created a social enterprise with a mission to support not only her patients, but also the profession of speech therapy in Kenya as a whole. 

“In 2011 there were about five speech therapists in Kenya, and all of them were trained out of the country. Can you imagine only five speech therapists for a population of 21 million?!” she recounts. When Macharia eventually found her true career calling in speech therapy, she realized that she couldn’t deliver the kind of impact she wanted without the help of others. So, she created a business, got the training she needed to formalize her business structure and organization, and began lobbying policy makers to give the profession the recognition and support it deserved.

Not everyone is born an entrepreneur. Grace Macharia certainly didn’t think of herself that way. But she had the persistence of an entrepreneur and a deep concern for her patients, many of whom needed more than just speech therapy services. Today her company treats patients, trains new therapists, and offers a multidisciplinary, holistic approach to care that is yielding better outcomes. And she’s created an association of speech and language therapists in Kenya to support each other and lobby for reform.

Of course, Macharia is still pushing for more. Speech therapy, she says, “is a profession that still needs a lot of attention. A lot of the people who need our services actually don't get it. When we have access to all this in every county, not just in Nairobi, not in just the cities in Kenya, but in every county, and not just in Kenya, East Africa, that would be a success and a dream come true.”

Hear how Macharia got the entrepreneurial training she needed to run a business and promote her profession so that other therapists and patients succeed.

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If/Then is a new podcast from the Stanford Graduate School of Business that we think will be of great interest to Grit & Growth listeners. This episode features Stanford GSB Professor Jonathan Levav analyzing the premise, “If we want to generate better ideas, then we need to get people back to the office.”

To Zoom or not to Zoom? That is the question on many leaders’ minds, nearly four years after the COVID-19 pandemic emptied offices around the world. While remote work has become the new normal, Jonathan Levav, Professor of Marketing at Stanford GSB, believes video conferencing is no substitute for face-to-face communication — especially where creativity is concerned. When it comes to the spontaneous and collaborative nature of coming up with new ideas, Levav says, “Screens are just too constraining.”

Levav’s insights come from a research study where pairs were asked to devise alternative uses for everyday items. “Pairs that worked face-to-face generated 15 to 20 percent more ideas than pairs that worked on Zoom,” he notes. What’s more, in-person brainstorming helped people consider a wider and more diverse range of possibilities. “Working on Zoom was a double penalty,” Levav says. “Fewer ideas — and a narrower set of ideas.”

Hear about Levav’s insights and research on remote work and how to keep your creative edge in our post-pandemic world.

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Meet Sakshi Kapahi, head of Omam Consultants, an HR consultancy in India, and a mother on a mission to balance home and work life for herself and her employees. Hear about Kapahi’s journey — the hurdles and highlights — as she grew both her family and the business her father started over 40 years ago.

In India, a country where only 14 percent of entrepreneurs are women, Sakshi Kapahi has had to grapple with all the familiar obstacles that working mothers face … and then some. “You always get these questions, right? Oh, you must be working for your husband. Or you must be building this for your father or your husband. They assume there has to be a male member that will come through later,” she recounts. Having enough time for kids and business, what she calls “her two babies,” is a constant struggle. 

Kapahi says that building both a personal and professional support system is critical to juggling priorities and managing feelings of guilt. “One thing I'm still working on is you have to be kind to yourself as a woman, which is what we don't do. There's always guilt that I missed something for the team, in the office, at home. Everyone keeps saying ‘be kind to yourself,’ but nobody tells you how,” she says. Finding a female mentor with kids was incredibly helpful for Kapahi, and she strives to provide that kind of support for her employees as well, 70 percent of whom are women.

Hear how Kapahi is tackling motherhood and entrepreneurship while growing a company that does the same for other women.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on friction — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Robert Sutton, Stanford professor in the School of Engineering and best-selling author, has stories and strategies to help you identify the causes of friction, eliminate it, and even learn how to use friction intentionally to create more space for success. 

Friction, according to Bob Sutton, “ is simply putting obstacles in front of people that slow them down, that make their jobs more difficult and maybe a little bit more frustrating.” Sutton has written multiple New York Times bestsellers, including The No Asshole Rule, and Scaling Up Excellence with coauthor and Stanford colleague Huggy Rao. His upcoming book with Rao is all about the friction that typically arises after companies scale, and it is appropriately titled The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.

Sutton’s research shows that friction often starts at the top. Luckily, he has lots of advice for how to become more aware of the power and influence leaders wield and tips for eliminating unwanted friction in your organization.

Seven Masterclass Takeaways

Adopt a trustee mindset. 

According to Sutton, “Leaders should be trustees of other people’s time.” This means not just trying to find ways of saving people's time, but also being aware of how you’re imposing on their time. 

Don’t be oblivious. 

“Leaders need to be aware of the power and influence they have,” says Sutton, because an offhand comment can send employees on a wild goose chase that costs time, energy, and money. “That’s what happens when people in positions of power…are unaware of their cone of friction.” Leaders also need to acknowledge their blind spots. Many assume that because of their success, they know everything that matters about their organization; what Sutton calls the “fallacy of centrality.” Either way, what you don’t know can certainly hurt you.

Avoid power poisoning. 

“When people feel powerful or more powerful than others they tend to focus on their own needs over others and then they act like the rules don’t apply to them,” Sutton says. Friction is almost always the result.

Embrace inconvenience. 

Leaders often get the VIP treatment. They don’t have to stand in line or wait on hold. But Sutton says that this “absence of inconvenience…is protecting you from the experience that your customers are facing.” If you don’t feel the friction yourself, how can you address it?

Play the subtraction game.

Sutton suggests approaching problems with a subtraction mindset as an antidote to what he calls addition sickness. He says, “First, make a list of stuff that's getting in the way and driving you crazy. Okay, so now what are you going to do to get rid of it?”

Fight friction as a team.

“Friction is often an orphan problem that we point at other people, and we tell them it's their job to fix it,” Sutton says. Given the high-friction nature of friction fixing, he suggests a team effort.

Remember that not all friction is bad.

Sutton acknowledges that some things should be hard, like cheating, stealing, and making stupid decisions quickly. He says “Sometimes, being fast — all that does is get you killed off more quickly. The goal of getting rid of mindless, unwanted friction is to clear the way for the things in life that are hard and should be hard.”

Listen to Bob Sutton’s anecdotes and advice on how to recognize and remove friction in the workplace. 

The Friction Project will be released on January 30, and you can pre-order copies of the book now. (https://www.amazon.com/Friction-Project-Leaders-Things-Easier/dp/1250284414)

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on growth mindset and psychological safety and how they can empower employees to speak up, fail fast, and fail smart — with accountability but not retribution. Sarah Soule, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor in organizational behavior, has tips and tricks for leaders to help build a culture that encourages healthy debate and out-of-the-box thinking.

Failure happens … whether you like it or not.  Yet, almost every entrepreneur would agree that learning the right way to fail is what enables businesses to succeed. But how do you create an environment where people aren’t afraid to fail? According to Professor Soule, it all starts with building an environment of psychological safety: a climate where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns and speaking up when needed without being judged or viewed negatively by the leaders when they do.

Soule encourages leaders to remember that all humans make mistakes. And in some types of work, failure is actually part of the process. However, failure is not a luxury every organization has — especially in health care — so she recommends simulating failure instead. The key, she explains, is that when we make mistakes, we learn from them and don’t hide them. Otherwise,  they’re likely to snowball into bigger mistakes. “One of the elements of psychological safety is that people on a team don't hide their mistakes. They also feel comfortable and safe to challenge their superiors, to challenge their colleagues, when they see something is about to go amiss,” she says.

5 Masterclass Takeaways 

Not all mistakes are the same.

Soule encourages everyone to “distinguish between mistakes that are made that should have been preventable — because somebody has been inattentive or has been sloppy or has just been going rogue — versus smart failure.”

Try to learn from failure. 

“When and if we do fail or fall short of what we hoped, we can learn from it. That can only happen if the team feels like it is okay to bring forward these possibilities without you judging them or firing them because they're challenging you. It’s not who failed. No blaming. But why did we fail? And what can we learn from that?” she says.

Walk the walk. Talk the talk.

Soule advises leaders to align their actions and values. “I think one of the things that's very important, particularly for a new leader in an established organization, is to come in right away and express what the values and expectations of the culture are going to be, and then to continually repeat them, and demonstrate that it’s what the leader believes.”

Strike a balance between acceptance and accountability. 

Soule says, “Leaders actually really need to distinguish between those two and not just celebrate all failure. There's got to be some accountability, right? When we have made mistakes that should have been preventable, we do need to hold people accountable for that.”

Pre-mortems can be a safe way to simulate failure.

“Pre-mortems are a structured but simple way to bring the whole team together to pretend that something has failed massively,” Soule explains. “Think very hard about what were the reasons for this failure and then brainstorm ways that those reasons could be averted as a way to prevent the failure from happening.”

Listen to Sarah Soule’s evidence, advice, and strategies for how to leverage psychological safety to increase team performance, productivity, and innovation by failing in the right way.

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Does your company have a culture where people are truly free to speak their minds … without fear of retribution? At the start of the pandemic, Elikem Tamaklo, managing director for Nyaho Healthcare in Ghana, realized that the answer was no. Hear how he changed his company’s culture and his own behavior to lead his team through COVID-19 and beyond. Also, gain strategic insights from Sarah Soule, professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, on the process and benefits of creating an environment of psychological safety in your organization.

Psychological safety wasn’t on Elikem Tamaklo’s mind when he joined his family’s private group medical practice. But in 2019 when the pandemic hit, uncertainty, fear, and challenging conversations were the norm. It didn’t take long to realize that if his team members weren’t willing to openly share what they were feeling and fearing, then decision-making would suffer. 

Psychological safety, according to Sarah Soule, professor of organizational behavior, is a climate where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns and speaking up when needed.  Most important, they must feel like they are not going to be judged or viewed negatively by the leaders when they do bring things up. Soule says the benefits to the organization are well-researched and impressive. “Morale is higher, burnout is lower, motivation is much, much higher. People are willing to participate in decision making and that leads to better decision-making. What we see is that team performance, creativity, and resilience increase, and we get higher levels of innovation,” Soule explains.

During COVID, everything was amplified, especially for those working in health care.  The situation was made even worse when Tamaklo contracted the virus. He chose to publicize his diagnosis. “I said I would bear the risk personally. People acknowledged the bravery in sharing my COVID status and the narrative was more about people seeing that getting COVID is not your fault. So get tested,” he remembers. After much discussion, Nyaho became the first private organization to perform COVID testing.

Expressing vulnerability is one of the ways Soule says leaders can model the behavior they seek in others. She explains “The hardest thing that leaders have to do is to both model the kind of behavior that they want on the team and be sure when they invite the truth, it's authentic and people believe it.” Soule also advises leaders and their frontline managers to speak less and last, engage in active listening, and construct norms for how teams interact.

Listen to Tamaklo’s personal and company journey toward psychological safety and the challenges and benefits they’ve experienced. And get practical advice from Soule on how leaders and teams can create an open culture where productivity and innovation thrive.

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We're excited to announce that Stanford Seed has a new advisory board member: Andreata Muforo. We are thrilled to have Andreata on our team! To celebrate, we're bringing back one of our favorite episodes from Season 1, "Raising Capital in Africa: It's Not Just About the Money", which featured Andreata as a guest. Enjoy!

Original Show Notes:

Meet Elo Umeh, Managing Director and CEO of Terragon Group, a Nigerian digital marketing and data insights company, and Andreata Muforo and Ido Sum from TLcom Capital, and learn how to make the most of your fundraising efforts to successfully grow your business in Africa.

Elo never intended to formally raise money—he initially relied on friends and family to launch Terragon. But as the business grew, so did his vision, and he needed to find an investor that understood the enormous opportunity in a rapidly growing sector. Since 2016, he’s led Terragon through two funding rounds: a $5 million series A round and a bridge round of $4 million. Now a leader in Africa’s data and marketing technology space, Terragon is currently raising another $16 million for its Series B. 

Elo shares his fundraising journey, explaining that it’s not just about the money, but who provides the capital is also key. He ended up working with Andreata Muforo and Ido Sum from TLcom, a venture capital firm with experience investing in tech-enabled businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa. Their relationship demonstrates how the right investors can help your business grow and actually enhance—not dampen—the quality of your decisions as a CEO.

Andreata and Ido of TLcom also share what they look for in a company and provide tips for how you can approach your next fundraising round.

Listen to Elo’s journey and Andreata and Ido’s insights to learn how to maximize the value of your firm’s next fundraising round.

Resources:

Terragon Group: https://terragongroup.com/ 

TLcom Capital: https://tlcomcapital.com/ 

Stanford Seed: http://stanfordseed.co/Grit

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