|
Resume Snippet
Managing Director, RedKey Education LLC
RedKey Education is a rapidly growing supplementary education firm with offices in Cambridge, MA, Providence, RI, New Haven, CT and Paris, France. The company provides one-on-one personalized education services both in the home and through online applications and tools. RedKey hires only graduates of global brand-name universities (Harvard, MIT, Yale, Brown) and provides premium educational services to high-income and aspirational families
Founded in 2004 with a compelling value-proposition, the company enjoyed rapid early growth. Between 2006 and early 2008, however, the company drifted due to lack of operational expertise and poor execution. I have been working with the company to bring my operational and business experience to the task of growing the company and expanding its geographic reach. Since I became involved, the company has opened three new offices (Providence, New Haven, and Paris), hired key staff, implemented professional sales and client management processes, dramatically improved financial management, and re-energized marketing.
Partner, IntelliStance LLC dba MarketStance
I am one of three owner-members of MarketStance. The firm started in 1997 as the MarketStance division of Conning & Company. In January 2001, through a management buyout, the division was taken outside Conning and setup as an independent company.
Today, MarketStance is a recognized insurance industry leader for its proprietary quantitative Business Intelligence (BI) information resources and analytical consulting services. These products and services support market development, agency management, underwriting and planning. MarketStance is recognized as a provider of innovative, cutting-edge analytic solutions, and has earned an outstanding reputation for data quality and client service.
Clients are primarily the thirty top national property casualty insurance carriers and the very largest insurance brokers.
Chief Operating Officer, MarketStance
During my 11 year tenure as Chief Operating Officer, the firm grew from a staff of two (myself and the CEO) to nearly twenty professionals and support staff. Since the company became independent, in January 2001, revenues have grown at 20-40% each year.
This success has been achieved without external investors, but internally funded through growth.
In Depth
See below for my Team Leadership Principles.
|
|
|
|
|
Team Leadership Principles
|
| Context
I've had a number of accomplishments in my career: earning a Ph.D. from Yale; graduating with an MBA from Wharton in only 18 months (while working 20 hours per week as a consultant); starting a successful not-for-profit; and most recently serving as COO of a highly successful, fast growing startup.
The results I have achieved are due in part to some basic leadership principles I've learned during the course of my career.
|
Keep it simple. However technical or esoteric, most of the problems teams tackle are at bottom simple. Too often, members of a team get lost in the details and lose track of how what they are doing fits in with what everyone else is doing, or how their part contributes to the team's ultimate objective.
One of the most useful contributions of a team leader is to help team members stay in touch with the simplicity of the problem to be solved, understand day-to-day what their contribution amounts to, and why its an important contribution. Everyone on a team also needs to understand and appreciate the role and contribution of the others. Who's going to keep making those connections if the team leader doesn't?
Focus on essentials. Hand in hand with simplicity is keeping everyone focused on the essentials. If a member of the team, or the team as a whole needs to make a detour in order to ultimately get from A to B, constantly remind them that it is a detour, and not the road.
Keep the big picture in mind. The big picture includes not only the ultimate goal, not only the connections between team members as they do their work, but connections to the history and future of the organization. When people understand the context surrounding a challenge and the history that got the team to what needs to be done today, they are much more effective -- and must more satisfied with their own work.
For example, we hired an intern to pull some data down off state government web sites. One of our analysts explained to her what we wanted. After a couple of days, I inspected her work. She'd captured lots of information we didn't need ("just in case") and lots of information we did need was missed ("that data didn't have any connection to what I was asked to do"). I explained to her what the product was we were trying to build, how clients would use that product, and how the data she was pulling would be processed before it went into the product. From then on, she pulled down exactly the data we needed.
Be consistent. One thing I've learned about selecting the right strategy -- whether a marketing strategy, a product strategy or a business strategy: it is more important to pick a strategy and stick to it, then pick the "right" strategy. Teams rely on consistency so they don't have to revisit and re-examine fundamental assumptions about their project every minute of every day. Be alert to changes in your own behavior or actions that might inadvertently signal to the team that the ground has unexpectedly shifted under them. If the project does need to be taken in a different direction, make sure the team is part of figuring why and where to go.
Be flexible. It is a fine line between being consistent, determined and focused on the one hand, and being blind, rigid and closed-minded on the other. If something comes up that, in light of the big picture and the essentials of the business, bring it to the team and discuss if a change in course is needed.
Don't let the best be enemy of the good. People don't like to hear "it's good enough." They need to feel that their work is much more than just "good enough." But often "good enough" means sufficient to accomplish what we need to get done, at the cost we can afford, with a return that justifies the investment. There is a saying in the movie business: every dollar goes up on the screen. Show why the part that is left undone or less than perfect enables additional real value to be delivered to the customer or to the organization. So, for example, if something isn't going to matter to the customer, don't spend your money on it. In the beginning, we often at MarketStance spent too much time refining and perfecting out estimation models. Only later did we begin to appreciate what aspects of our data matter to clients, and which don't. We learned when to let go of our perfectionism, and when to hold on to it. Time to market improved, and we could more easily get the pricing we needed.
Trust, but verify. When it comes to managing people, the strongest motivator is often -- I know you can do it. I've found that if I communicate to people my faith in their abilities, and get them what they need to be successful, they can do great things. But if I leave it at that, and don't review their work on a regular basis, they either think I don't care anymore or they get sloppy and let up.
Build trust. Extending trust to others is one thing, building up their trust in you as a team leader is another. I have found that trust comes from my demonstrating that I will work to get them what they need to excel, that they will be treated fairly, and often most importantly that I will look out for them when it comes to how they are treated by others in the organization.
BE BOLD. I've found that boldness, in vision and in execution, excites people, lets them see they can do great things and be part of something important, and binds them into a cohesive team focused on a common goal.
|
|
