Editor’s note: Grace Ueng is CEO of Savvy Growth, a leadership coaching and management consultancy founded in 2003. Her great passion to help leaders and the companies they run achieve their fullest potential combined with her empathy and ability to help leaders figure out their “why” is what clients value most. Grace will be writing a regular column for WRAL TechWire. Watch for future columns.
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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – When I look back at my career, the environments where I was happiest, thrived and achieved the best results for my companies, they all shared three aspects:
- The CEO empowered me
- There was positive friction
- I could run with new ideas
I grew exponentially and succeeded when I was empowered and stagnated and failed when I was not. When Kip Frey was named CEO of OpenSite Technologies and one of his first tasks was hiring a marketing leader, his board member Alan Taetle suggested he call me.
Grace Ueng (Photo by Christer Berg)
Kip called and invited me to lunch. Quickly thereafter, he asked me to join his leadership team. He knew that I had never done enterprise software marketing, but had solid consumer marketing skills. He said “don’t worry, call Jane.” And promptly ‘abandoned’ me. I say this tongue in cheek, but several of my fellow executives did compete with each other on how few emails Kip sent them. One of them said in his entire time working for Kip, he received only three emails and one of them consisted of only two words, “see me.”
Jane had been his marketing leader at Accipiter, a startup that had grown quickly and had a good exit. I embodied the imposter syndrome before it was invented as I was doing a job and learning it at the same time. Jane answered all my questions and pointed me to many resources, which I in turn lapped up. I had joined at employee 30, and we quickly quadrupled in size, and I was hiring like mad.
My first hire was Vickie Gibbs, who sat right beside me with just a partition between us to provide some semblance of privacy. On one of her first few days on the job, I told her we would be traveling the following week to brief our key industry analyst and asked her if she had figured out how to demo the product. She said across the wall that she would be sure to figure out what our product did before she presented it to our key analyst – there was a whole weekend between us and the meeting.
Kip trusted me to do my thing, and I in turn, trusted my fast growing team. That was the only way we were going to grow at the pace that we wanted. We created a new category naming it ‘dynamic commerce’ and led the exponential growth of that market.
At times it was nerve racking as I didn’t really know what I was doing since I had never done it before. And Kip, focusing on his role as the master of the deal, didn’t offer much guidance which I realized later was a blessing when I worked for a micromanaging CEO. Kip trusted me to figure things out, which I did. Years later, he said that I “willed” the right things to happen (even if I was figuring it out along the way).
Every leader would agree with the statement “empowerment is important.” The problem is that not many know how to actually empower. Instead, many are unaware that the questions or requests they make of their team can be perceived as micromanaging and therefore, to high achievers, demoralizing. Kip practiced the extreme of empowerment and that brought out the best in me. The wise leader knows who they can ‘abandon’ versus those they must ride herd.
Positive Friction
Another key component of the growth we drove was the positive friction I enjoyed with our vice president of sales, Tom Hanlon. My marketing team would complain that sales was not following up on all the wonderful leads we were delivering. So I had each marketing team member partner with each member of the sales team and become “sales/marketing buddies.” We would sit in on sales pipeline meetings to understand which leads would result in closed deals. We participated in sales calls to help accelerate the sales cycle.
Within a couple of years, we had built the leading brand in our newly created category which caused Siebel Systems, the fastest growing software company at that time, to buy us before we had the chance to IPO.
Oregon Trail’s Anniversary
Earlier, when I had taken the plunge out of Fortune 500 corporate America, I joined my first tech venture, an educational software company that had just gone public, and was best known for its Oregon Trail series. I was hired to jumpstart their consumer channel. Kathy Quinby-Johnson and the CEO Dale LaFrenz completely empowered me, I was given free reign to “do my thing.” I quickly applied my experiences from Sports Illustrated (SI), General Mills, and Clorox to software.
One day I realized that Oregon Trail would be soon celebrating its 25th anniversary, so I decided to create a new sku, an anniversary edition and simply take all the prior versions of Oregon Trail and burn them onto one CD and make that the treasured anniversary product. I then worked with the team to design a wooden collectors box with wagons burnished on the sides that children could use to store the anniversary CD and their favorite marbles and other small trinkets. This new sku, which cost almost nothing to develop, quickly became the #1 title on PC Data. Moving so quickly did cause one slight hiccup. We hadn’t done drop testing and some of the boxes fell apart enroute to retail, so we had to make some quick glue adjustments. Net net, a big and fun win!
The First Issue of Sports Illustrated
I had taken prior learnings from doing new business development at SI in order to concept the 25th Anniversary Oregon Trail edition. One day I was looking at a spreadsheet which listed the carrying cost of a small quantity of SI first issues we had in special archival temperature controlled storage. As my job was to develop an SI Catalog, in order to extend the SI franchise and leverage its hugely loyal subscriber base, I thought, what about emulating Neiman Marcus who during that era would put an extremely high end item that created buzz as an attraction point in each of their catalogs. So I put the first SI issue, a collector’s edition, complete with bubble gum sports card, in a personalized leather portfolio, attached a premium price and engendering nostalgia along with a gift that would be treasured.
In roles where I wasn’t empowered, I felt constrained and unhappy causing my work to suffer. In one case the founder/CEO was always looking over my shoulder and found fault with whatever I did. In another, I had to run and rerun numbers of my test markets every way till Sunday and that still left my boss unsure of what direction to take. Suffice it to say that those failed roles led me to happier pastures where I found empowerment and happiness.
Having an environment where you are truly empowered to do your thing and can challenge colleagues respectfully, and be given authority to run with things that are novel and untested can lead to breakthrough business results.
The Best Form of Empowerment
40 years before he retired, Mike Krzyzewski was nearly fired. Duke athletic director Tom Butters was feeling pressure from alumni, donors, and fans to do something about this coach with a funny last name who was underperforming three years after Butters took a risk on him. Instead of firing Krzyzewski, he sat him down and handed him a five-year contract extension. “We’ve got a problem,” Butters said. “We’ve got a public that doesn’t know how good you are. We’ve got a press that is too damn dumb to tell them how good you are. And right now I have a coach that I’m concerned doesn’t know how good he is.”
Kip didn’t even have that conversation with me. He showed it by ‘abandoning’ me and letting me run with my show. Kip had complete faith in the people he hired, even when they did not. In my book, that is the best form of empowerment.
About Grace Ueng
Grace is CEO of Savvy Growth, a leadership coaching and management consultancy founded in 2003. Her great passion to help leaders and the companies they run achieve their fullest potential combined with her empathy and ability to help leaders figure out their “why” are what clients value most. Grace’s core offerings are one on one coaching for CEOs and their leadership teams, leading workshops on Personal Branding, Happiness and Speaking Success, and conducting strategic reviews for companies at a critical juncture. She is also hired as a keynote speaker on the topic of Happiness, as interest in mental well being has grown in recent years.
A marketing strategist, Grace held leadership roles at five high growth technology ventures that successfully exited through acquisition or IPO. She started her career at Bain & Company and then worked in brand management at Clorox and General Mills. She is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School and holds a positive coaching certification from the Whole Being Institute.
Grace and her partner, Rich Chleboski, a cleantech veteran, develop and implement strategies to support the growth of impact focused companies and then coach their leaders in carrying out their strategic plans. Their expertise spans all phases of the business from evaluation through growth and liquidity.
More from Grace Ueng:
Project Peak: Climbing the Mountains of Life, Business and Beyond
Do you have a best friend at work? Workplaces are changing – and bosses must adopt
