Blake P. Sallé, Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Emerging Technologies at Cisco Systems, believes that his strongest leadership traits are passion and energy, and thinks that every good leader should be able to create the environment where his team gets this passion.
1. What is your strongest leadership trait?
I think, my strongest leadership traits are passion and energy. That raises the energy of my team; and also, to lead from the front. Whether that's showing vulnerabilities, whether, it's holding people accountable. Mostly, it is making sure that you do what you say and you never ask anybody to do something that you wouldn't do yourself. You've got to lead from the front. It raises the value of your team; it raises the energy of your team. I think it's very important.
2. How are you doing it?
It's tough, because if you are going to have energy and passion and if you try to fake it, than people can quickly tell that you are artificial. You have to be careful with it. I think you just have to have a great attitude or optimistic approach, because there are so many times when as a leader or in business, especially in times like today, you can get down over events. But, if you have an optimistic approach in business and in leadership, it transfers to the team and it enables to find a way to be able to exceed your goals. I think, you've got to be careful that the routs have to be found in having an optimistic approach trying to understand what's possible and than making sure that you're not synthetic or artificial in a way that you display energy. When you do that and when you are genuine and deliberate, your team is feed of that. At the core, I believe, that people at all levels want to be led, and so, they feed of the leader to really show case to them, how they should approach complex problems or situations. I think, that's where a feeling of optimism, a feeling of energy, a feeling of passion really comes through to people, and they can find a way to chart that course and exceed objectives.
3. How can you get this condition of high energy level?
I think its a bit innate but that this skill can be also learned. If you force yourself to seek first to understand before you understood. You take a pause and try to understand where people's positions are before trying to change their mind, and if you force yourself and learn how to take a positive approach, it's so easy for any of us on any given day to assume the negative or to say what we can or can't do, but if you really think about ideas and what's possible, many times that can guide your energy level and guide your team and find that passion on days when it's just not normal at the surface.
4. Do you think passion has something to do with the energy?
Yes, I think so. People often may leave an organization to go work for a new boss or a better boss or they might leave a bad boss. It's probably, because in that kind of environment it's difficult to have passion about what you do. I think one of the other big skills of leaders is to realize that we are in the environment creation business. At the end of the day, our job is to create an environment in which people can be successful, and if you can create that environment than your team gets that passion.
5. Can you give an example?
I was a first line sales manager calling on a very large energy company in the US. The transaction was, actually, a 1.1 billion dollar transaction that Cisco was fighting for. Couple of leaders up the chain said it's not a real deal; it's not going to happen. We had worked very closely with the executive management of this company; we knew there was a real opportunity. So, my team was getting a bit down, because they knew that we didn't have the support up the chain to pursue an opportunity that in that time was the biggest opportunity Cisco had ever looked at. We rally the team together and we told them that if they focus on what they can control, than we, as a leadership team, will provide them air cover and get them what they needed. So, we not only showed them that we were at the boat with them, but that we would do things that were very challenging for ourselves to make sure that they were able to achieve their goals.
6. How did you motivate your team in this situation?
I think the team saw that we were willing to lead from the front, they saw the passion we had about trying to win this deal, and, inevitably, what we ended up doing was going to the CEO of our company. I passed a message to him through a board member and he called me back! (another great example of passion and energy) And John Chambers flew down next week. Then, we had series of meetings and outcomes and within two months we had one of the largest IPN-optical networks that Cisco had ever sold for 1.1 billion dollars. When the team saw that we had the energy and passion to go beyond the bounds that they thought we were going to do, they flourished as a result to that and did several things that positioned us for our CEO to ask for the business.
7. Do you have another example?
Another example was at one of the largest retailers in the world. We had done about a million dollars every single year with the same retailer. This retailer has two thousands stores. Anything times two thousands is a lot of money, and it was unacceptable for us to do a million dollars a year. So, we pushed the team to say what can we do, and they said they had a lot of leaders come in and tell them they should do more, but this is just the amount of money they do with them and they are never going to do more. So, what we did was we got together at a team meeting -a cross functional meeting, and we put aside history and said, let's just focus on what's possible. We whiteboarded every opportunity that was possible and in the end of the day, we said there is seventy-three million dollars that we could capture if we did everything correctly. Finally, the account team agreed. I asked what shold we then say if we have a chance to speak with the CEO of the retail company? We put together a 30 seconds elevator pitch. Then, as a leader, I pushed the team and got some unique energy and a feeling of what can be achieved, I called the CEO's office, which was something that nobody thought we could do. An hour later the CEO called back, and we gave him the very quick pitch that we had come up with, and we got thirty minutes in his office. We articulated the business value, fast-forward nine months through a lot of hard work and we secured a hundred million dollar deal what was supposed to be a hundred million over five years, we did eighty-eight million in two years. So, that's seventy-three million that we whiteboarded from an account that only did one million.
8. How can you persuade your team to think differently?
In order to motivate someone to do something differently you have to describe what's in it for them, and what that change will bring to them in terms of quality of life, in terms of achievement or in terms of some other metric that is important. It's getting people to aspire to something much greater than they have before; getting them to see that if we expand our horizons, if we expand our thinking, if we think positively, than we can find a whole slew of solutions that may look incredibly different from what we've seen in the past. It doesn't always work and sometimes you have people in your team which don't have the passion, don't have the energy, don't have the capabilities to see what's possible, and in those situations if it doesn't work than you maybe need to make some hard choices and put those people on new opportunities.
9. What pushed you to talk to CEO over the head of your boss?
You have to decide as a leader when you are willing to take risk and you bounce that with the reward. I surely don't recommend that people go around their management chain, but, in previously described situation there was an individual who was blocking the good of the company and what the company could achieve and could aspire to. That was a very risky proposition, but when it is the right thing to do for the company and it's ethically the right thing to do, than I think you have to take those risks. And what you find is, that on most transactions, partnerships, deals you'll spend a lot less time if you can rationalize and justify the business decision and talk to the individual that runs the line of business than you can do by trying to offer a technology searching for a problem to solve. What I recommend to all of my teams is that you want to be able to show the value of whatever solution you're offering. If you could take this message to the chief executive and be able to clearly say that through our solutions we've done this for other companies in similar situations, we think this will be the eternal investment and I'd like to prove that to you and bring that back to you and if it's true, can we have a partnership. If you are able to articulate very simply, very clearly, than of course, why would they not want to make that investment?
10. Where did you learn it?
I think I learned that in one software company. It was a company in which if you didn't make three calls to the CEO within the first three months, they fired you. I don't recommend that as a leadership style, but it certainly made us learn how to speak to the line of business. We learned very quickly that if you can speak to the line of business you probably can easily articulate what value your organization provides to another organization. If you could do that it makes life much easier for everybody involved.
11. Is it important to show an example to your team?
I think in every instance as a leader it's always easier to go do it yourself, but if you don't teach your team how to make the calls, you don't let them share the decisions, than they are less up to follow. If you make a leap and you don't have them behind you, they are not going to learn, they may not follow you as much, whereas, if you can get them in the boat with you and they understand the moves you're making. Hopefully, you can educate them along the way as to how to do it, so the next time they are able to make that call on their own and I, as a leader, can scale differently. It is better to teach your team and let them share the experience, because you can give advice to people, but when you, actually, do it, it becomes much clearer. You also learn a lot about your team, if your team doesn't want to do it and they are making poor choices, than you learn as well what team members are going to be with you.
Prepared byKatia Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on October 27, 2008
