When you are in the midst of an important product launch, or any strategic initiative for that matter, you can easily get lost in the activities and events that lead up to the important day. Then, once you’ve finished, it can be hard to stay fresh and motivated knowing you have a million action items that came out of the strategic endeavor. One very important lesson though that any effective leader should never forget, take time to recognize those employees that made the effort a success and share the results of the success directly with as many as you can.
That’s what we did recently following on the heels of the successful introduction of HYCU
the first purpose-built data protection solution for Nutanix.
After the introduction of HYCU leading into and at .NEXT, the Nutanix annual user event in Washington, D.C, we made a point of carving out time to visit as many of our international offices as we could. Our engineering teams and developers that had spent countless hours making the solution work, now had the opportunity to hear and see the reaction from many of the executive team, first-hand. And despite what you hope you will happen, I’m always pleasantly surprised by the reaction. In this case, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive and the feedback to the countless sessions and hours we spent with employees across Europe was equally rewarding.
All of this leads me to the three important take-aways on why these personal visits and celebrations of success are so important.
- In particular when you are working in a multi-cultural environment, you need to reap the full benefit of having offices in different countries. When you are dealing with different members of the same team, all of whom may have different sets of cultural beliefs, it’s important to harness each team member’s unique contributions. This gets to the essence of driving innovation and harnessing the talents of as many people as you can. That’s the ultimate power of diversity. It’s also important to recognize the way in which feedback is received and how communications varies across multi-cultural work environments. While the difference is powerful, it’s also important to take time to adjust both the message and emphasis on key activities.
- Celebrating success is both rewarding and contagious. It’s easy sometimes when we sit in our offices with other executives and make decisions to lose sight of some of the details. It can also feel like a burden at times. That’s especially true when you spend as much time as you may do on strategic initiatives. However, when you see the results and you share them with as many people as you can, in person, it not only improves morale but it reenergizes you, as a leader. To be around so many people that will have helped to make your efforts strong is intoxicating. So while sharing the success may feel more effort than it should, the feedback you will receive is more than well worth the effort.
- It’s all part of the 360-degree feedback loop. There is no substitute for standing in front of your teams, many of whom you may be meeting for the first time or only know from reading emails or hearing their voice on conference calls. To see and hear your team’s feedback is inspiring. And like I’ve mentioned before, while you can anticipate much of what the feedback might be, you can never truly anticipate it all. This feedback is critically important to factor into all of your efforts across your company. It beats survey data. It beats email. And it is equally as motivating.
I never lose the sense of pride I have in all the employees, partners, and customers that can make any new product launch or strategic initiative successful. There’s nothing that feels as rewarding when the market acts positively. But I can’t say this enough. There is nothing that can compare to the looks on each and every engineer’s face when they see the results of everything they have done. It is priceless.
As we know, it takes a motivated team to be successful and I'm fortunate to have many of the most talented marketers, engineers and execs working at Comtrade Software. For me, that’s more motivation than any leader can ask for!
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