As a managed cloud services provider, it’s an unfortunate inevitability that technical outages occur. One of the times we had a major outage during my tenure as CEO of iNSYNQ, the timing could not have possibly been worse (tax season for a customer base primarily comprised of accountants). When our platform went down, the volume of calls to the Technical Support team and the Customer Service team spiked exactly as you’d expect, and the emotional intensity level spiked by more than you’d probably expect. Most of our employees are in the trenches during this kind of event one way or another, having to take phone call after phone call from customers that are understandably enraged. As CEO, it wasn’t naturally part of my daily workflow to be in the line of fire; unlike the majority of our employees that were getting verbally abused on call after call after call. I responded by not only directly taking as many of these calls as I possibly could, but stepped into the figurative spotlight in the social media arena head on. I tried to personally take as much responsibility for the event as I could. Those that were responsible for taking these calls as one of the primary responsibilities of their roles in the company, quickly took notice to what I was doing, and what I was saying in the social media spotlight (not through the company’s social accounts, but through my own personal accounts), and relayed back to me how inspiring my approach was for them to continue to fight through this brutal event.

There are two tactics that I’ll point to here.

First, implementing, and expecting a radically candid culture throughout the organization. This means that not only are employees allowed to speak candidly with one another, it’s their responsibility to do so. This can be a dicey framework to live and work by for a variety of reasons, but one of those reasons is that inevitably peoples’ egos and emotions impact how they react to blunt, direct, constructive criticism. With that said, when everyone in the room is aware of this framework, understands its intention, and abides by it (which is much easier said than done and takes time and practice), there’s a much more pronounced bias to hold each other accountable.

In the interest of answering the question directly, I won’t elaborate on all of the nuances of TRULY establishing this kind of dynamic and what I’ve learned over time (in many cases the hard way) about how to make it work. I’ll simply focus on the impact it has on motivation. When you have a group of ambitious, capable people on a team, there’s an innocent, yet very dangerous inclination to make big promises and not deliver. In the often naturally chaotic coarse of a fast-paced, high-expectations work environment, there are so many important tasks that people commit to and never follow through on. By successfully making it okay for people to unemotionally say to one another “you said you were going to do XYZ, and you didn’t” there’s a healthy form of peer pressure, and not wanting to repeatedly get called out for not doing what you say, that motivates people. Not only to execute, but also to be more calculated in what they take on.

The second tactic is to motivate by setting high expectations, ensuring that outcomes and key results are crystal clear, documented, and mutually agreed upon. And then essentially getting out of the way, other than to periodically ask for updates on progress. This is essentially a more extreme approach to not micromanaging.

Of course, nothing is more important to effectively establishing this candid cultural framework than to be religious in upholding it yourself as a leader.

I had an executive on the leadership team that over time had earned a particularly high degree of credibility with me for consistently going above and beyond. However, over the years, my dynamic her as her boss, would periodically shift to one where I’d start to let my guard down; her reputation preceded her too much. However, she was still such a star performer that the balance between me providing constant positive reinforcement vs. asking hard questions and being unwavering in highlighting things that she had committed to delivering, but would then quietly fail to make any material progress on, would periodically become imbalanced towards the prior. One of the most important psychological challenges that an effective leader faces, especially a CEO, is structurally recalibrating one’s mindset to not only be willing to have uncomfortable conversations at any time and with anyone, but to psychologically reprogram themselves to genuinely desire to have them. This took time for me, however once I had internalized this fundamental shift, the positive ripple effect it had throughout the organization (never mind with this particular individual) was transformative.

Fastest: firing someone. Slowest: hiring someone.

I am a very strong believer in an organizational culture that is defined by embracing unusual (and often uncomfortable) levels of three things: 1) transparency; 2) forthrightness; 3) genuine curiosity / open-mindedness. I am also an avid supporter of a systematic, structured approach to meeting rhythms: 15- minute daily stand-up meetings, weekly tactical meetings, and quarterly offsite meertings that are more strategic in nature. Each of these meetings have specific agenda structures. To make all meetings as productive as possible, they each require varying degrees of preparation, and there’s always a lot that gets covered in a relatively short period of time. As a result, these meetings are often intense, and anyone in the organization is welcome to hear almost everything that is said in any of these meetings, particularly in the leadership team meetings.

A couple years into my tenure at a company I recently led as CEO, the Board decided to make a substantial investment in hiring a ‘visionary’ type product leader. Following a particularly intense search, we hired a veteran product executive that was significantly further along in her career than I was. While this new hire reported to me, given the amount of time and resources invested in filling the role, the amount of financial capital invested towards incentivizing and supporting the executive, and the among of experience she had building transformative software products, my responsibility as her boss was more centered around ensuring she was empowered to focus on creatively advancing our software suite without distraction than mentoring or inserting myself in her area of focus. We were both under a tremendous amount of pressure.

While one of the things that stood out to me most about her compared to the other finalist candidates, was her self-proclaimed transparent style. However, over time it became very clear that she did not define ‘transparency’ in the same way I did, considered what I define as ‘forthrightness’ as a free pass to be disrespectful (to which she took serious offense), and probably had had success leading the development of a product because she was relentlessly unwavering in her opinion about any given subject matter.

I found myself faced with an having to make an extraordinarily unnerving decision between: a) undermining the operating principles I valued most and had placed so much emphasis on, holding every single other employee to such a high standard in embracing; or, b) firing this visionary that we had invested so much behind over an extended period.

I’ll offer two examples. One horror story, and one screaming success, respectively. Example 1: Over the course of a one-month period, I went from turning around a struggling business, increasing its value by 800% over a 3.5 year period fraught with adversity, to finding myself navigating that same business through a crisis that was so devastating that it had become virtually worthless. I responded by doing what needed to be done to minimize the damages. We had to let a lot of very high-caliber, loyal, team members go. Raise emergency capital. Restructure the organizational chart and many team members’ roles, in a very empty, dark office environment, with the sole purpose of surviving long enough to minimize how much value was destroyed. Everything that we had built despite more adversity than was ever anticipated, seemed like it had been destroyed. All of my personal wealth I had worked and sacrificed so much for over a seven year period, vanished. I focused on what was in my control, taking one day at a time. While the damages were deep, we managed to successfully sell the business, with almost all of the remaining employees transitioning over to a new organization with a bright future, and a feeling that I had done right by my investors, successfully turning an overnight total loss into what ended up being, relatively speaking, a screaming success.

Example 2: I stepped into a new leadership role in an independently-operated line of business that was unprofitable, not growing, and disconnected with the rest of the company. Over the course of 2 years, we grew revenue by 820%, improved annualized profitability by $24 million, and increased the value of the business by 16.4x. I went from managing leading a team of 40 located on half of one floor in one office location, to a team of 156 working across 5 offices spread across the country. This radical change resulted in me deciding to start from scratch as an entrepreneur.