Leadership development concepts and practices

¶ … Leadership

The future of the company was dependent on the success or failure of a series of six product introductions, and everyone from the company president to the newest members of the development, marketing and sales teams were involved in the product introduction and launch plans. The company president had often said that the product introductions would mean the difference between bonuses or not at the end of the year, and potentially raises in the next year. It would mean a major increase in sales and would also get the company into an entirely new series of markets.

As a member of marketing, the majority of action items fell into our department. The Director of our department had the product concept sketches, potential advertising programs, and mock-ups of the trade show booth that we'd use to roll out the products at a major industry trade show. He was working well over 60 hours a week and was just consumed with the project. Our department had done several other product introductions, much smaller in scale than this, yet this one was by far the biggest we'd done since I had joined the company. With so much work going on, you would expect that the Director would be stressed out and short with people, telling them to get their work done as fast as they could. He was under tremendous pressure to make the product introduction a success; everyone in the company was relying on a strong launch for their bonuses and for a potential raise in the next year.

In the midst of such stress, the Director however managed the product introduction with a focus on showing the rest of the industry, and most importantly our customers and competitors that we as a team were the best there was. He kept telling us that in our competitors there were our counterparts, watching the launch, and in this product launch each of us would have a chance to literally stand toe-to-toe with our counterparts in competitive companies and show them what we stood for. We could show the industry what our marketing team stood for. When we would have our team meetings we were actually a team of competitors, banded together, to send a statement to the other companies who had taken business from us in the past. Our Director made it clear this product launch was pay-back time for our competitors; we would send a clear statement that we were the dominant thought leaders in this marketplace. Our Director would also remind us that the trade show where the launch would be formally rolled out for the industry and its many media partners would be first focused on our execution; our message to the industry was how tight of a team we were. It was so invigorating to realize that each of us would leave an indelible mark on the product introduction. Our Director had successfully infused a high level of ownership into the entire team by focusing us each on the goal of first showing up our competitors, and second, showing the industry what we were capable of. It was no longer a job, it was a collective statement of strength and thought leadership in the area of product launches. This really galvanized the team as well. Later I'd learn that this was called transformational leadership, which was exactly what the Director of our department had successfully accomplished.

Our Director also realized that for the launch to be highly successful, we would also need to have the president or CEO of the company completely onboard with the concepts, messaging, and approach to defining our competitive direction. Our Director also made sure the Sales VPs and the other VPs of Operations, Pricing and Product Management all were completely in agreement with the approach. At our weekly staff meetings the CEO would periodically come in and discuss how critical the launch was, how satisfied he was with the quality of the work, and would give individual recognition to the team members on marketing which had created the most outstanding materials, whether they were creative or competitive analysis in scope. At times the VP of Sales would also come in and talk about how much this product launch would serve the sales force and make their jobs easier. He talked about how each of our projects was essential for the success of the sales teams in the field, and even the sales teams in our channel partners and resellers. The VP of Product Management also came in and discussed the many areas of how product design was specifically tailored to our target markets, and joked about the launch being the birth of a baby he'd been carrying for over two years. He made us know how he had such an incredible level of ownership for the products and was now handing them off to us to launch. What our Director was also doing was infusing into the team a very high level of responsibility. He didn't have to browbeat us, yell or have anxiety attacks about the many action items over the launch. Just a word from any of the VPs and our CEO and we realized that we're dealing with the future of the company. None of them said this, but it was obvious from the time each took to be with us.