Yesterday most of the Zavee team attended the Get Motivated seminar at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, FL. The all-day event included talks by Rudy Giuliani, Robert Schuller, Zig Ziglar and Colin Powell, among others.
Gen. Colin Powell (via Charles Haynes)
Several of the speakers, including General Powell, shared their insights into leadership. General Powell said that he had brought the same style of leadership to teams of every size, whether 40 people or 3 million. The hallmarks of leadership that he described – recognizing and rewarding performance; making sure the team has the resources they need; and requiring accountability – certainly apply to teams of any size. But not all teams are the same, and different situations sometimes call for different leadership styles.
Our team at Zavee is a case in point. As a startup, in a rapidly evolving space, Zavee is not following a well-established path to growth. On the contrary, we are to a large extent inventing our path as we go along. Zavee is a business built on great ideas as well as great execution, and we don’t think anyone at Zavee has a monopoly on great ideas. We think it is vital to listen to every member of the Zavee team, and to consider their perspectives seriously before committing to any course of action. This means that our leadership style is unusually collegial, rather than top-down, and requires an environment of mutual trust and respect.
Of course, once a decision is made we expect everyone to do their best to implement it, even if they had proposed a different course of action. One of the many rewards of working at Zavee is seeing our colleagues overcome their disparate viewpoints and work together as a team to build our business. Whatever their point of view on any given issue, everyone at Zavee is totally committed to our mission of supporting local shoppers, merchants and causes.
One of our business goals at Zavee is scale: dramatically increasing revenues without proportionately increasing costs. One of our strategies is to avoid a conventional, hierarchical management structure. Although unavoidable in some organizations, we believe that this kind of structure tends to hamper creativity and impair innovation. However big Zavee gets – and we hope it gets really, really big – we will strive to maintain a small, close-knit senior management team like we have today.
As a small business that isn’t planning to stay small, we have given a lot of thought to our management and organizational structure. Have you done the same with your business?
