“Great leaders know when they’re wrong.”

In this episode, Craig Anderson talks with Ben Pippenger, Co-Founder and Staff Product Manager of Zylo, about the evolution of leadership and the lessons learned from building and scaling a company. Ben shares his journey from an individual contributor to a leader, emphasizing the importance of understanding what truly motivates a team. He discusses how recognition—not just money—keeps employees engaged, why leaders must carve out time for their people, and how making mistakes can be a powerful learning tool. Ben also reflects on lessons from his time at Salesforce, the challenges of maintaining company culture at scale, and why leadership isn’t just about getting things done—it’s about bringing people along with you.

After You Listen:

• Connect with Ben Pippenger on LinkedIn
• Check out Zylo
• Connect with Craig on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to Craig’s "The Evolving Leader" newsletter

Key Takeaways:

• Understand what motivates your team to drive engagement and performance
• Prioritize recognition over money to build lasting team appreciation
• Embrace mistakes as learning opportunities to grow as a leader

Things to listen for:
(00:00) Intro
(01:30) Ben’s transition from contributor to leader
(04:12) The role of motivation in building a high-performance team
(07:28) How Salesforce’s leadership principles influenced Ben’s approach
(10:18) Why leadership isn’t just about more productivity
(14:23) The importance of career paths for non-managers
(18:30) Creating a culture of recognition and peer feedback
(22:45) The one leadership lesson Ben would tell his younger self

Episode Transcript

This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human. 

Craig Anderson [00:00:00]:

So I was new on the job, leading this whole team, and I had this what I thought to be a great idea, that the team hadn't been bold enough, they weren't aggressive enough. So I came up with a great idea for a campaign, and it bombed spectacularly. Welcome to Executive Evolution. I have over 25 years of leadership experience in corporate America. I learned a lot of lessons the hard way. And I created this podcast so that you won't have to. You know, sometimes when we come into new leadership roles, we walk in the door with some preconceptions about what the team has done or what the challenges are. I walked into this thinking the team hadn't really been pushing hard enough, that the team was really missing opportunities.

Craig Anderson [00:00:47]:

I didn't have a lot of basis, just a gut feel. Then I came up with the idea that we should have this very specific campaign to try and go out and grow our business under the specific idea of charging people for something no one else in the space was charging them for. And it bombed spectacularly. It was a bad idea. No one was pushing back on me because I was new and I wasn't willing to even consider that I was wrong. That's a bad mistake that we can make as leaders in new leadership roles, especially coming in externally without really taking the time to understand what's going on. My guest today is Ben Pippenger. He's the co-founder and staff product manager at Zylo.

Craig Anderson [00:01:30]:

And while he didn't make a mistake as big as I did, he does at some point in the interview today. Talk about the importance of realizing that sometimes as the leader, you're wrong. I wish I had learned that sooner. At any rate, let's jump into the story of Ben's Executive Evolution. Ben, welcome to the Executive Evolution podcast.

Ben Pippenger [00:01:48]:

Thank you, Craig. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Craig Anderson [00:01:50]:

Absolutely. Thanks for coming on. And I'm really interested by your story. I love these stories because there's so much going on out there with people who've started businesses, seen them grown, different challenges. And I love getting these stories out there because I think so many young leaders feel a bit overwhelmed and feel like maybe they should know more than they do, but I don't always think we did when we were starting.

Ben Pippenger [00:02:12]:

Never do. Trial by fire is what I call it. Great. You got to jump in and get your feet wet and learn as you go.

Craig Anderson [00:02:18]:

I know, right? And that's the only good way to do it. But hopefully we'll spend. Get some kernels out there for people and they can maybe Find out because it's, as you probably realize, it's not as easy as it looks when you're looking up at the manager and you think, man, they've got a cakewalk of a job, man, they just sit around and tell people what to do.

Ben Pippenger [00:02:34]:

It's more to it than that for sure. Yeah.

Craig Anderson [00:02:35]:

Just a scope. So what I like to do is I always like to start out with our lightning round and jump into those questions with you, and then we'll just kind of see where things go from there. All right, Are you ready for the first question in the lightning round, Ben?

Ben Pippenger [00:02:47]:

Yeah, let's do it.

Craig Anderson [00:02:48]:

All right. What is the best book on leadership you have ever read?

Ben Pippenger [00:02:52]:

Yeah, this is a good one. I don't know how many product leaders you've had on. That's my sort of blood. And what I do is I think product first around a lot of different concepts of product, meaning building software products. Building SaaS products is really where I've spent my time. I think for this question, I would answer a book that sort of put me on that trajectory and brought me into not necessarily leadership skills, but like opened my eyes to what building a product means and the leadership type of leadership styles you need to do it. It's called Inspired. It's by this guy named Marty Cagan.

Ben Pippenger [00:03:21]:

He's sort of a big figurehead, I guess, in the product management world. I'm not sure if he's still working for this group. It was called the Silicon Valley Product Group was his company that he had started up.

Craig Anderson [00:03:30]:

Yeah. But it's a great book.

Ben Pippenger [00:03:31]:

It talks about how to build products in a really easy way to conceive. But I would definitely recommend it to anyone that's interested in a product career and product leadership.

Craig Anderson [00:03:40]:

Yeah, like for you, from that book, what was like the “aha” thing? Do you remember when you first read it?

Ben Pippenger [00:03:45]:

Yeah, it's been a little bit. But I think probably the “aha” thing was just the book talks about iterative product development processes and like how you learn from your customers and really get close to understanding the key problems that they're trying to solve. Which really resonated with me. You know, I like to think that way. I like to tackle projects and chunks and like demonstrate value along the way. And for me, that's really stuck with me.

Craig Anderson [00:04:07]:

Nice. Cool. All right, second question. Who is your leadership crush?

Ben Pippenger [00:04:12]:

My leadership crush again? I thought about this one a little bit and being in the world of tech, a lot of the sort of tech luminaries these days, not really sure. All the things they believe in. So it's sort of hard picking my crush nowadays, but I got to go back to my roots where I, I think, grew into the product leader that I am today, and that was at Salesforce. And so I would say my leadership crush has got to be Mark Benioff. I've never met him personally. I've been in the same room with him. I think what he's been able to do at Salesforce, the type of company that he's been able to create. He's the founder.

Ben Pippenger [00:04:41]:

Right. He's one of the co founders, and he's still there leading the company after so many years and growing it into what it is today. I think. I think I pick him.

Craig Anderson [00:04:48]:

Yeah. Yeah. He does have. I mean, I don't know a ton about him aside from head of Salesforce, but he certainly seems to have his strong opinions. He holds them strongly. He applies them to a lot of things, including how he runs Salesforce. It seems like he's got a lot of kind of intellectual integrity across the whole thing of this is how we run the company. And it seems like culture is at the core of what he's trying to build.

Craig Anderson [00:05:10]:

I haven't worked in Salesforce, but it seems like that's such a big thing. It is.

Ben Pippenger [00:05:14]:

And I. And I think even like culture and what companies have gone through, especially tech companies with reductions over the last few years with COVID and everything else that's gone on, I think that took a hit at Salesforce a little bit because it was. They said they had ohana culture, which was like family and like, you don't fire your brother and your sister. Right. And so it becomes a little bit tough to have that sort of culture when, like, you're still a business and you have to operate the way a business has to operate. But to me, it feels like they've weathered the storm pretty well and been able to work through that. And I think that that takes a strong leader to be able to do that. And so I don't know all his secrets and tricks and everything, but he's definitely, I think, one to keep tabs on and monitor and watch.

Craig Anderson [00:05:52]:

It's so interesting as you grow because you have all these ideas. And I found this when I was running businesses and running teams. It's like I started to ask myself, this thing I want to do. Can I do this at scale? Like, when I have 100 people or 200 people or 300 people, can I keep these things going? And when you talk about, like, that ohana culture it's great. And now suddenly you look around, I don't know what. Salesforce has tens of thousands of employees, and it's like, how do you extend that when you're so big? I don't know. Have you seen that as you have grown with Zylo that there's certain cultural artifacts that you really want to keep, but they're getting. You have to kind of say, how do we do this in this environment?

Ben Pippenger [00:06:24]:

Yeah. I mean, so Zylo is a startup. It was a handful of us that started the company back in the day. And when you're getting going, you're just doing things to get things to work.

Craig Anderson [00:06:33]:

Right.

Ben Pippenger [00:06:33]:

You're trying to show value. You're trying to win customers, you're trying to keep those customers and doing everything you can to make that happen. So, for sure, I mean, we.

Craig Anderson [00:06:41]:

We still.

Ben Pippenger [00:06:42]:

We're nine years, eight and a half years into doing Zylo. There's definitely things that we built that aren't scalable processes that we'll have to continue to go back and adjust and address as we keep going. I think back to Mark Benioff real quick. I think that something that we did at Zylo that he sort of invented at Salesforce is this thing called the V2MOM. I don't know if you're familiar with that or not, but it's a framework that companies use to set, stands for vision, values, measures, obstacles and methods is what it stands for, and essentially allows you to set a plan for really anything you're doing. It could be your company strategy, it could be a project, it could be whatever, and outlines for the key principles of that plan. And I think that's something that we've used here that allows us to communicate what the strategy is and then take that out to the business and to employees. It's a scalable way to roll that out.

Ben Pippenger [00:07:28]:

So I think that's. That's one thing that we took from him, that and from Salesforce, that we still do today on an annual basis for the organization.

Craig Anderson [00:07:34]:

Love it. All right, last question. I call it a lightning round. It never goes that fast. But last question, in ten words or less, how do you define leadership?

Ben Pippenger [00:07:45]:

Yeah, I think 10 words or less, I would say leadership is you need to empower, you need to be ambitious, trusted advisor for folks. And then I would say always personally and professionally, growing and learning would be. I don't know if those 10 words or less, but when I think leadership, I think about those things, and when I think about people that you're leading. Those characteristics and qualities I think are really important for them to be successful and for, for them to get behind what you're trying to accomplish as a leader.

Craig Anderson [00:08:10]:

Yeah. And I'd be interested when you talk about always growing as a leader, what things do you do to help you develop as a leader? Like you said, you've been a co founder of this business, you've been going eight years. How do you keep grinding to grow this?

Ben Pippenger [00:08:25]:

It's funny. So if I rewind the clock back, I considered getting the MBA probably, I don't know, 15 years ago, going back to business school and seeing where that would take me. At that point in time I was having a really successful career and I was having a lot of fun doing what I was doing and I didn't. So I stayed doing what I was. I stayed grinding. Right. I stayed working really hard and still look back on that decision and I think it was the right one because to me you can go and get educated and learn and I think that's really important and a lot of people need to do that. But for me I'm more of a hands on person and so I need to experience and be in the weeds and be grinding and getting the work done and putting myself out there and putting myself in uncomfortable positions and situations that maybe I'm unfamiliar with or haven't done before.

Ben Pippenger [00:09:08]:

And for me that's, that's how I continue to learn and grow is by doing those things.

Craig Anderson [00:09:12]:

Okay, cool. So you touched on this a little bit back then, but what do you consider to be your first real leadership role?

Ben Pippenger [00:09:19]:

So first real leadership role. And I'm going to define leadership. I think you can define leadership in a couple of ways. I mean in this context I'm going to find as having a team of people that we were, I was leading and we were working towards a common goal prior to Zylo and even Salesforce, but sort of Salesforce. I was working for a company called ExactTarget which was an email marketing company which here in you see a lot of people that have that heritage in their DNA. But I had the opportunity to move from Indianapolis out west to Seattle and we opened an office in Bellevue. We were serving. Microsoft was a big customer of ours and that was the first chance I had.

Ben Pippenger [00:09:55]:

People that I was working with where we were all trying to make Microsoft successful, we were getting them to be moved over from an old on premise email server that they had created to using our SaaS based products which was Exact Target. So that was the first true leadership role. Where I had people reporting to me and had accountability to a customer, but also to those folks to make them successful and help them grow and learn in their careers.

Craig Anderson [00:10:18]:

Yeah. And so when you stepped into that, what kind of surprised you? We go in with a certain set of expectations about what leadership is going to be. But what surprised you when you've suddenly found yourself with people looking at you figuring, like, what am I supposed to do next?

Ben Pippenger [00:10:33]:

What surprised me would be, I think, you know, people, every person is different. Every person has different perspective on the work that they're doing, has different reasons why they're doing that work, has different ways that they feel that they want to be rewarded, has different motivators for why they're doing that. So I think the biggest surprise for me was like coming out from an individual contributor into that type of role. All of a sudden you need to care about what all these other people are doing and why and really, truly understand it. Really, truly get to know them and understand them and learn what motivates them. And then I think the tricky thing is then taking that and trying to pivot that into their performance at work and making sure that you can motivate them properly in order to get to the outcomes of whatever it is you're trying to drive as a team. And, you know, I think that's really important. And I think that's really important to build a high performance team is to be able to do that.

Ben Pippenger [00:11:22]:

So I think that's probably the biggest learning is just like it's not just all of a sudden you have people and you can get more done with a team. You have to really think about those people and what motivates them and align your goals and strategy to. To work as well.

Craig Anderson [00:11:34]:

And I always find it interesting because we tend to look at high performing individual contributors and say, you're going to be a leader now. And then we put you in that role and in your case, moved you all the way across the country or three quarters of the way across the country too. And the struggle I hear from a lot of people is, yeah, I moved into that and I really wasn't sure I knew what I was doing, but I was a little concerned about asking questions because clearly they figured I could do it. How did you get the kind of training and development? Was there a lot of formal structures that, I mean, exact Target famously had the orange culture and. Yeah, and so many things. But was there mentorship or was there formal training? How did you get prepared or did you just learn on the go?

Ben Pippenger [00:12:14]:

I mean, I think it's a little bit of both. I mean ET was a startup as well. Right. And so yeah, they were sort of a growing very quickly startup and they did invest in formal leadership, mentoring and training, both hosted by internal folks. But also they bring in third parties and things like that to make sure that you had the skills to do things like have difficult conversations and you know, they would train you on the review process and like those sort of like key fundamentals. I remember going to one training that was, I'm just remembering this. It was like we spent half a day learning how to listen. It's like, how do you listen? Like how do you really listen to what people are saying? And so all of those things I think really helped.

Ben Pippenger [00:12:49]:

And then Salesforce was the next step and they invest a lot into those sorts of things as well. But the core fundamentals were set up for you in that way. But I think a lot of it is. Not everyone is a people manager. You could be a very, like, to your point, very good individual contributor and you just think the next step is to manage people. But that's not always the next step. Like you could manage a big part of a process or you can manage, be responsible for a big strategy that's happening at the business that necessarily doesn't require people management skills. So I do think people need to think about that too.

Ben Pippenger [00:13:21]:

Like I think people just automatically jump to, hey, the right way to progress through a career is to get others reporting to me. But there's other ways to be a high performing individual contributor and have more responsibility in line with what a manager would have people as well.

Craig Anderson [00:13:36]:

Yeah, and I think that's something a lot of companies could probably do better is to have a path for the person who is a great teammate, employee, high producer, but it's just not a person who even if you teach them all the. You talked about the soft skills, right? The soft skills are some of the hardest skills I think to learn as a leader that just may not be who they are. And if we force them into that as their only chance to advance, they're going to blow up themselves, the business, or both, or at least the people. I always wonder why companies don't try and identify more. Companies don't try and identify, say here's a ladder for our independent contributors, here's our management track. And it just seems like such an opportunity to make sure talent because otherwise you just run the risk of people leaving for more money doing something else or whatever it be. And talent's hard, especially now.

Ben Pippenger [00:14:23]:

Yeah, I mean and like I think I don't remember what the status you might know Craig, but the number one reason people leave a company is their manager. Right. And so like not only if you put someone in that position that isn't able to have those proper skills to be a good manager, like you're not only going to be hurting that manager and they're whatever it is they're trying to accomplish, but really anyone on their team, you know, you're likely not to have a high performing team and having people leave the business as a result of that.

Craig Anderson [00:14:46]:

Oh yeah, and the other piece is you kind of start creating these generation leadership crises in your business because they're not teaching those people how to lead and, or they think they are. And even worse, I've seen companies where they get that person but because they were a great contributor, they just leave them alone. And then you see people leave, you see people not learning how to lead and it's just a combustible problem for a lot of businesses.

Ben Pippenger [00:15:08]:

So there's two of the points I think are important here. So one is your comment on like the laddering of a manager versus sort of a professional. I do see that actually pretty commonly rolled out within software engineering teams. So you will see like a track for managers within like software engineering. So you can be a software engineering manager and you could be a director and all that vp, all that sort of stuff.

Craig Anderson [00:15:29]:

Yeah.

Ben Pippenger [00:15:29]:

But then on the individual contributor side, I mean a lot of these, a lot of engineers don't have those soft skills. Right. They like to put their headphones on and be heads down coding and working and solving hard problems. And for those types of folks there's still laddering and career paths like you can become a principal and architecture those sorts of ways to advance in your career without necessarily having people that are reporting to you. I think the other thing that's important to, to remember and for those folks that may be looking at a leadership type of role or manager type of role, one thing that I struggled with was carving out the time to do that part of your job because I think all or a lot of managers are going to be high performing. They're going to want to get stuff done, they're going to want to be successful and drive whatever it is that they're the strategy, the outcome is that they're trying to drive towards. But you need to make sure you're carving off the right time. Back to what I said at the beginning there about one big surprise is to get to know the people that you're working with, really work with them on their career pathing and their goals and their strategies and where they want to get to in the next two, three, four years and helping them with that, that makes you as a manager more successful.

Ben Pippenger [00:16:33]:

But I have found that that can be difficult to do when you feel the pressure to deliver whatever it is you're supposed to be delivering on.

Craig Anderson [00:16:40]:

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. It's really hard to make that mental mindset shift to say, oh man, I have to not only tell these, you know, give these people a vision and direction, I actually have to invest in them to help them grow because hopefully I'll get promoted down the road and I want somebody prepared to step into this role behind me. And so it's great to think about it that way. So now let's advance to today. So now, you know, you're a founder of a company or co founder of Zylo, you have a lot of responsibility. There's how has your view on leadership kind of evolved over the years? What do you see as primary maybe today that you didn't see as primary yesterday as a leader?

Ben Pippenger [00:17:18]:

Yeah, I mean being a co founder at a company is definitely different than working at a Salesforce. Right. There's different problems you're going to tackle, there's different challenges you're going to face. There's, I'm going to say bigger decisions but like you're making the decisions on the future of a company versus you know, being part of a company that a lot of times those decisions are happening in another room but maybe you're not in or something. So I would say like I taken forward like the foundation of the people element and sort of those software skills and making sure that people that you work with, you're really getting to know or doing your best to get to know and understanding what motivates them. Going back to what I said earlier about like learning, I mean a startup you're always learning like you are facing new things daily that you've never faced before. So I think that that has been good for me. Just that that's how I like to continue progressing has been a good way to continue pushing forward with my leadership skills here and working with the team that I work with today.

Craig Anderson [00:18:11]:

Can you think of like things that you learned in some of those early roles, not just the first one in Seattle, but some of the other early subsequent roles that you kind of said, these are lessons I took away of things. I look back now and said, man, I do things differently now because of that. What Were some of maybe the things you wish you had done differently back then that you now do regularly today.

Ben Pippenger [00:18:30]:

So another role that I had, so I moved to Seattle like I said, and then Microsoft was a wild success. We got them set up. That was all great. And so then I moved into a different type of role. I was running accounts some of our large consumer brands, so T-Mobile, Nike and all the Nike brands and then Gap and all the Gap brands. So like Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, all those. And so that role, I was responsible for the customer, so making sure they were happy and successful and renewed with our software. But then also the, the campaign team that was building, testing and sending all of the emails that all those companies sends.

Ben Pippenger [00:19:03]:

You imagine like a Gap, right? You probably get Old Navy emails or something. I mean they send just a ton of emails. And it's high pressure job. Like if one of the email campaigns was screwed up for some reason, like it could cost millions of dollars in revenue for the Gap. Like that's how much money is involved with any one of these individual email senses. So it was high pressure for me, but then also high pressure for the team that we worked with because they had to feel that the quality of their product was where it needed to be, that the email was being sent on time, that we didn't get blocked by some spam checker somewhere or whatever. And so for me I was like, how do I motivate this team to stay interested in doing this? Because it was every day building and sending emails and getting these things out the door and trying to make our customers successful. I always looked at it as like, well, we have to do a couple things.

Ben Pippenger [00:19:50]:

One, we need to make sure we're having fun. Because some of this can be a grind, to be honest. Like some of it's a grind. It's called work for a reason.

Craig Anderson [00:19:56]:

Right.

Ben Pippenger [00:19:56]:

But how do we inject a little fun into it? And I did that a couple different ways. You know, I always made sure that the team I was working at the time was we were in San Francisco and it was sort of a younger team that all came into the office and got all this work done. So we would make sure we hosted social type events so that people could let loose a little bit, have fun, get to know each other, each of their teammates, because I think that's really important for the teammates to also feel accountable and trust each other. And then the other thing that, that I did was I tried to instill a little camaraderie through like some friendly competition sort of stuff. So, like, we would do, we actually had this program where I had custom bulletin boards made, and then we had these little pins that we created. So every week, the team would vote for anyone on the team that was impactful to the work they did that week. And we used those people. They got these little sticker pin things, almost like, you think about, like a football helmet, right?

Craig Anderson [00:20:49]:

Yeah.

Ben Pippenger [00:20:50]:

And you think about Ohio State. You see them, they have all their buckeye stickers all over their helmets, and that's. It's a similar type of program. So we. We did something like that to try to just, like, foster team camaraderie and then a little bit of friendly competition for, you know, who's getting the most buttons and stickers and things like that on their boards. That was something that I think is important. And I think taking forward today is, I think is still important. Like, you need to be having fun, because it can't be a grind, but you need to be having fun.

Ben Pippenger [00:21:14]:

And also, it's not all. For most of us, we're not out there curing cancer. We're doing other stuff. And so, like, you have to also put things into perspective.

Craig Anderson [00:21:21]:

Oh, yeah. But what I like about it is you've kind of built in a recognition because that's such an important piece to try and keep teams motivated. I mean, money is important. Everybody wants to make money. Everybody wants to get their bonus, their incentive, whatever, and that all matters. But I think at the core, people want to know their work is valued and that you're actually paying attention and giving them that reward. So I love that you keyed into that early and have continued to do that, because I would imagine that helps you kind of keep people on board in times when I'm sure people can go make $5,000 more a year somewhere else.

Ben Pippenger [00:21:53]:

Yeah.

Craig Anderson [00:21:53]:

But what are they walking into? So I love that.

Ben Pippenger [00:21:56]:

Yeah. You know, the money, it motivates, for sure, but it's simply temporary. You can get someone to be motivated by a bonus or whatever. But I think also, like, the recognition and then the peer recognition, that was the other part of it. It wasn't me, their manager, you know, saying, you did a great job. Here's a sticker. It was the people that they work with, you know, which means something different to be. To feel that from those that are in the trenches with you and.

Ben Pippenger [00:22:18]:

And working as hard as you. So.

Craig Anderson [00:22:20]:

Yeah. And making it real that way. I love that. So if you could go back, I don't know if you have a favorite time machine, if you're a DeLorean guy or a time. You know, however you like to go back in time. And you could go back to Ben at that first leadership role?

Ben Pippenger [00:22:34]:

Yeah.

Craig Anderson [00:22:35]:

What's the one piece of advice you would give him that would make him calmer, happier, more effective, better at his job? What's the one most important piece of advice you'd have for him?

Ben Pippenger [00:22:45]:

I would definitely say DeLorean. I'm an 80s kid, so I gotta use the back to the future. One piece of advice I'd give to him, I think in my nature, I don't. I don't necessarily like being wrong. I can accept being wrong, and I'm okay with being wrong. I don't like it, though, but I think I would tell myself, like, you're gonna be wrong a lot and it's okay. Learn from when you're. When you're wrong and just.

Ben Pippenger [00:23:06]:

And continue doing better.

Craig Anderson [00:23:08]:

I love that. Yeah. That's such a key to being confident as a leader is when people can say something to you and you're like, you know what? You're right. And you don't get into that stubborn, no, I'm right thing. And that's hard, I think, especially when you're young, because you think you know everything. Awesome. Well. So, Ben, thank you for sharing the story today.

Craig Anderson [00:23:26]:

If people want to follow you or learn more about Zyla, what are the best ways for them to do that?

Ben Pippenger [00:23:31]:

Yeah, the best way for me is on LinkedIn from a professional perspective. So, like, look me up on LinkedIn. It's Ben Pippenger at Zylo.

Craig Anderson [00:23:39]:

Excellent. We'll drop the links into the show notes. Thank you very much for being here. We really appreciate it.

Ben Pippenger [00:23:44]:

Yep, you bet. Craig, thank you.

Craig Anderson [00:23:45]:

Thanks. I really want to thank Ben for sharing the story of his Executive Evolution with us. Really haven't had anybody from a product leadership role really even much. Many founders of companies on the podcast. So I really appreciated his perspective. As always. I like to break down what we talked about today and the big takeaways for me in the areas of competence, confidence, and con. In the area of competence, Ben mentioned the.

Craig Anderson [00:24:11]:

Early on in his leadership role, he went through classes that taught him some of the soft skills of leadership. And this is so critical and so crucial. You know, a lot of times we come into leadership roles, our first leadership role, with a lot of product knowledge or industry knowledge, and we think that might be enough. But when we're dealing with people, we need to understand how to have difficult conversations, how to motivate. Learning those competencies is such an important piece of growing as a leader in the area of competence. I want to mention that he talked about it being okay to be wrong as the leader and to be willing to learn and have the self awareness that when you're wrong, you need to open up your ears and listen to what other people are talking about. And then finally, in the area of calm, this is kind of a different way to look at calm. But what I appreciated was that he, Ben, talked about the program that he instituted that had peers providing positive feedback and acknowledgement to peers.

Craig Anderson [00:25:05]:

How does that align with calm? Well, that means you don't have to put it all on you as the leader for these programs to help grow and develop people. They don't all have to fall on you. And when you know that it's not always reliant on you and you build systems that help things move forward in these areas, it really does help to keep your calm as a leader. So thanks again, Ben, as always. You can go from being an accidental leader to the greatest leader of all time. All it takes is developing your confidence, competence and calm. See you next time in Executive Evolution.