Lessons - The Definition of a Business Leader | David Siegel - CEO of Meetup

So what is out of obviously you have some experience? So what is what is what is the definition of a leader in a business context? And what is the most important trait for a leader? Oh, wow. Okay. So let's go backwards The most important trait for a leader from my perspective is Understanding that your role is to enable the success of everyone around you is to think about the reverse Organizational chart where like the leader is on the bottom of the chart not at the top your role is to support and enable the success of all the executives and The executive's role is to support and enable the success of their managers and manage role to enable the success of Individuals my role is not to succeed myself. I Don't need to succeed myself. I need to enable the different people on my team to succeed and guess what then I succeed But that's my job is to enable everyone else to succeed around me and do what whatever is necessary sometimes It means letting go of people to enable them to succeed actually To mean that is the most important role of a leader support the success of those around you Now I I agree with I agree with what the role of the leader is and I want to I want to understand your opinion about how to do this tactically when There's interests of other parties that are that may be prompt different decision making so for example when you were acquired at Investopedia Obviously Stayholders there was certain stakeholders that were making that decision because they thought it was for the benefit of those stakeholders or even shareholders But in a in a business environment, how do you align that leadership principle which I agree with? with The expectations of shareholders for example or or owners or whatnot because that's the that's a fundamental thing that I think I always see Causing conflict everybody agrees what a good leader is But nobody knows how to do it when they're bored and their owners Feel the need to do things differently for example that obviously drive ROI or whatever that metric is right good Okay, so to me the golden rule is all about transparency Meaning if I am told by my parent company or by my board transparently You're not doing a good enough job you need to focus on this not that etc. I or I transmit that information to someone else it Align's interests in a lot more an effective way than if information is withheld the biggest challenge oftentimes and why there's a lot's a misalignment like you're referring to Scott is because Abort will have access to certain information like oh a company wants to go public or Whatever the the the we want to sell this company whatever the the incentive is for the board and And the management team or the employees have a completely different incentive and Then there's tension and and there's problems because people have missed have there's asymmetrical access to information The more that a leader can ensure that there's as consistent information as possible So the most junior person and and the board member knows the same thing the better and you could say oh David That's unrealistic. We share all of our financials with every employee our board does not know any Information that every single employee does not know and get access to is there a risk in doing so? Can that employee take screenshots of like our financials and post them on wherever Read it. Yeah, they can and there's a risk but the reward of having alignment And incentives and priorities because you're brutally transparent is You know the way to go and it goes with managing someone you need to be transparent someone's not doing a great job It's not nice to them Not kind to them to like say don't worry keep it up. Yo everything will be okay And then surprise them later on kind of the kindest thing you could do is give very critical transparent Maybe overly blunt in order to be clear information in as respectful a way as possible. So transparent to me see to me is like The end all be all This is like um, this is like radical candidate. Yeah, yeah like that's true. Yeah At our company. We have like a book. We had a book club Um, yeah, and radical was one of the books in the book club. Yes I have no doubt it was it's a it's a great it's a great leadership philosophy. So Um, and this is what you're doing. This is this is one of the principles and You want one other thing about it? Yeah, you don't mind. Yeah, yeah, so no It's your show man. You say whatever you want. It's your show dude. It's not my show, but like I'm still gonna like say it. So go for it Um The there's one of the most famous managers leaders ever in fact he won Time magazines manager of the century for the 20th century was Jack Welch the CEO of GE general electric for for 20 years at the time that he left the highest market cap company in the world He was on iac's board and I got to sit down with him and me with him one on one And I said to Jack Welch you were the manager of like the century What can you teach me about managing it like on one foot and he's like Just focus on transparency Focus on trust if you build transparency. You'll have trust and if you have trust You could have anything make sure you have trust of your employees trust of your board trust of your team That's all that's that's the most important thing. So that had an impact too