“Together We Win” to facilitate organizational productivity.
Eric believes that everything starts with culture, “everyday behaviors that characterize an organization” based on shared knowledge, values, and expectations. Eric prioritizes culture, customer loyalty, and leadership.
These everyday behaviors require continuous thought, attention, and evaluation. It is not a quarterly event, a jazzy corporate poster, or a switch that can simply be turned on. Each day is an opportunity to reflect on the previous day’s behaviors and improve.

Further, it is the responsibility of all leaders to hold a mirror to their own behaviors, adjust accordingly, and to set an example. Never ask anyone to do something you are not willing to do. Leaders should also be humble, transparent and hold themselves accountable.  
Culture: The foundational behavior is Integrity, layered with the Pursuit of Excellence, Personal Accountability, and Personal Discipline.

Companies, organizations, and teams that operate with integrity are trustworthy, faster, and more agile. Eliminating the distractions of political maneuvering, second-guessing, and truth triangulation frees an organization’s individuals to focus on productivity and progress. Organizations whose individuals operate without integrity will experience substandard performance issues and low morale, leading to high turnover, sabotaging organizational momentum and progress.

The pursuit of excellence involves relentless dedication to continuous improvement and exceeding expectations. This core behavior is facilitated by encouraging people to think differently, extending oneself beyond one’s comfort zone, and continuously striving for better results. Teams that successfully pursue excellence tend to enjoy more freedom and latitude to implement new ideas and pursue new opportunities. Teams that focus on the bare minimum tend to be over-managed or micro-managed, which nobody likes.

Exercising personal accountability is an ideal means of achieving organizational control, providing stability and a foundation for scaling an organization. When people “pass the buck,” don’t take ownership of their actions, or wait and hope for matters to sort themselves out, internal and external escalations run rampant, creating distractions and additional work, and elevating tensions. A lack of accountability is debilitating to any organization and leads to low morale and high turnover.

Personal discipline leads to greater organizational and individual happiness. Conscientiousness to one’s own needs, as well as awareness and support of the challenges, goals, and pursuits of one’s colleagues is not only good for the organization but can also be very personally rewarding. Intentionally setting aside time to energize oneself and attend to one’s colleagues personally and professionally helps make everyone happier and more productive, allowing everyone to reach their full potential.

Loyalty: The concept of “Customers for Life” is the precursor to viral marketing without the additional baggage of social media.

Eric’s vision of “Customers for Life” is supported by the mission that every customer renews, grows, and serves as a reference. When pursuing excellence, hope is not a strategy. Based on lessons learned from years of experience with both successes and failures, Eric’s philosophy for developing customer loyalty includes keeping your promises, making the customer’s job easier, delivering real economic value, and developing strategic alignment.

It all starts with trust.An organization must honor its commitments, keeping promises as referenced in marketing content, sales campaigns, product documentation, solution cutsheets, contracts, etc. Minimally, an organization must be prepared to honor all its“table stakes,” or customarily/legally binding obligations, but any organization that makes a habit of breaking less enforceable promises should keep a “going out of business sign” on hand.

While efficiency is treated as a pipe dream amongst the incompetent, effective organizations reduce workload through effectiveness and efficiency. Doing more with less takes both hard work and collective insight. Without guidance, telling a project team that something needs to be done better without more people or more time is a hallmark of bad management. Showing your customer that you can provide effective and efficient solutions that simplifies their work is a key component in securing customer loyalty. There is no better way to get the attention of customer management than being a source of scalability and simplicity.

Evidencing and communicating the economic value of a product or service is just as vital as actually providing it. A customer must be able to justify their investment in a product or service through an explicit evaluation of its impact on their bottom line. As senior managers are very keen to demonstrate that they are good company stewards, help them communicate economic value to leadership by providing hard data and evidence on how your product or service reduces expenses or increases revenue.  Providing periodic and transparent evaluation of product or service benefits resonates with senior management, gets the attention of executives, and facilitates the renewal process by centering the discussion around value versus cost.

Once you earn the customer’s trust, you simplify their experience, maximizing economic value. Establishing Strategic alignment is the next objective—to achieve this, and organization must ensure that its corporate strategy and product roadmap aligns with your customer’s long-term objectives and needs. It is best to be clear and transparent in this regard, with regular communication and recuring discussions to validate alignment or close on any gaps. Should strategic alignment become unfeasible, the best policy may be to part ways amicably rather than bear the time, effort, and expense of a ‘forced’ relationship.  In fact, an organization with a truly valuable product or service should focus on customers where there is a shared long-term strategy.

Leadership vs. Management: Properly-served and empowered teams benefit from collective brainpower, creativity, and contagious energy—moving more quickly, handling challenges more easily, and being much more change-adaptive.

Along his professional journey, Eric has had the opportunity and privilege to lead teams varying in size, from dozens to hundreds, to more than a thousand direct reports, nationally and globally. He has led salespeople, business analysts, IT staff, developers, technical writers, UX designers, trainers, consultants, technical account managers, project managers, technical support staff, and customer success managers. The most significant lesson he has learned over the course of his career is that effective delegation, empowerment, and leadership development is the key to large-scale success. A well-led 1,000-person team can be more agile, effective, and productive with much less effort than a significantly smaller. poorly-led team. When time and attention are dedicated to first-line managers, strategy and tactics converge, and scalability is achievable.

Eric values the depth of his diverse professional experiences, as they presented diverse and cross-functional opportunities to learn and grow, with some of the best learnings coming from mistakes he made along the way. Upon reflection, Eric attributes a serious anxiety attack he experienced early in his career, as an unseasoned manager to employing Command and Control tactics. At the time, he felt overwhelmed by the need to have all the answers and explain the “how,” too focused on “I” instead of “we,” limiting team performance. The pivot to Servant Leadership had begun.

Experience has taught Eric that organizational success is better, more scalable, and easier to sustain when you focus on developing, mentoring, and empowering team members rather than dictating from above.  He believes that he owes his team honesty, the pursuit of excellence, accountability for failures, and responsibility for their success by defining a clear vision and the “why,” versus the “how.”  Further, he is convinced that great teams can triumph with clear vision, encouragement, empowerment, and the support to break down barriers. Eric believes that properly-served and empowered teams benefit from more collective brainpower, creativity, and contagious energy—moving more quickly, handling challenges more easily, and being much more change-adaptive. Contrary to Command and Control Management, a Servant Leader takes the onus of clarifying purpose, setting clear priorities, and establishing goals to fuel a highly-engaged team. Eric likes referring to the culmination of healthy culture, customer obsession, and servant leadership as ‘together we win,’ just like a crew shell lifting out of the water to bypass hurdles and defeat the competition.

Eric believes that leaders must differentiate themselves by exercising behaviors that help develop future leaders, such as:
Leadership:
  • Prioritizes culture
  • Succession planning
  • Facilitator and enabler
  • Open communications
  • Solicits feedback
  • Focuses on team success
  • Set the example
  • Loves team diversity
  • ‘Head and heart’ energy
  • Develops careers
  • Emphasizes the ‘why’
  • Raises the bar
  • Confronts issues and Sees Opportunities
MANAGEMENT:
  • Emphasis on tactics and metrics
  • Gate keeping staff
  • Executor and road blocker
  • One way communication
  • Unapproachable
  • Self-promotion
  • ‘Do what I say, not as I do’
  • Self-love
  • ‘Limelight’ energy
  • Drives workers
  • ‘Because I said so’
  • Accepts the status quo
  • Avoids issues and looks for blame
The above is part of Eric’s“tool kit” of best practices and approaches to establish an effective leadership culture. Additionally, a good leader should improve through continuous self-reflection:
The key is not to remain self-satisfied, but to pursue continuous growth and improvement.  Less than ideal answers to the above questions should be seen as new opportunities to reflect, correct, or improve one’s leadership behaviors.