Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Be a B2B Leader.
Speaker: I'm your host Felicjan and I'm a marketing manager who wants to learn more about business, marketing and leadership.
Speaker: Today our guest is Tomek Ogrodziński.
Speaker: He has over 10 years of experience in various B2B companies with roles from UX through research, insights and analytics up to strategy, which is his current focus.
Speaker: Tomek will share with us his business experience and explain how you can understand the context you are in.
Speaker: So let's get started.
Speaker: Hi Tomek and welcome to the show.
Speaker: Hi Felicia and thanks for having me.
Speaker: So let's jump straight in.
Speaker: Based on your experience, what's the biggest piece of advice you would give someone who wants to become a business leader?
Speaker: Yeah, here I'm always very careful.
Speaker: because I really think context is key.
Speaker: It bothers me where I see universal advice being given because I really think the deepest experts, the companies which are very successful, it's because they have a deep understanding of their own situation and the context around them and they can choose the tactics and strategies which are the perfect fit.
Speaker: So these tactics and strategies, they're not universal.
Speaker: They're not simply good or effective.
Speaker: They're good or effective in that particular context.
Speaker: So I think the biggest piece of advice I can give is mind your individual context and be careful around just copying set patterns.
Speaker: And there's some ways to kind of go deeper on that if you want to dig deeper.
Speaker: So why is it hard to understand your context?
Speaker: Because you are living, you are working, you know what you are doing, but...
Speaker: Yeah, I think there's a lot of cognitive biases, which make it a lot harder for us to think more broadly and also to balance different kinds of information.
Speaker: My background is in cognitive science, and I've always loved social psychology.
Speaker: And there's this one effect called the fundamental attributional bias, which in particular really stuck with me.
Speaker: And
Speaker: If we really simplify it, it comes down to the fact that we can't help but to try to make sense of the world and we do it with the information that we have on hand.
Speaker: So if we imagine that we're late to work and someone from our family got hurt and we're rushing to the hospital and we bump into someone.
Speaker: And the question is, how do we interpret that after the fact?
Speaker: We say like, well, you know, like I'm a nice person.
Speaker: I would never usually do that, but these are very specific circumstances.
Speaker: But if we're walking along and someone bumps into us, you know, it's very natural for us to be like, wow, that's a really rude person.
Speaker: It's like bumped into us and just kept on going, didn't even look back.
Speaker: And it's because we have a lot of information readily available about our own context, but not a lot about this other person.
Speaker: And the same is often true for us as individuals, as professionals, and for companies as a whole, where there is some information which is very readily available and obvious and others which aren't.
Speaker: And sometimes we take the short path and that leads us astray.
Speaker: I think a lot of that is visible with, for example, founders or leaders where there's incredible pressure for performance at a given moment.
Speaker: And quite often, the data that's readily available might be, for example, business intelligence data or your best customers.
Speaker: And that's what's right there.
Speaker: If you have a hammer, everything's a nail.
Speaker: So you might over-focus on that information while ignoring the broader market context, which is often the more powerful force, right?
Speaker: Like we like to think that it's like it's us doing everything and all the outcomes are because of the choices we made.
Speaker: And then of course we have, like we can definitely affect outcomes, but the bigger context is like a major C, like you can swim in it, but the waves are tossing you left and right and right.
Speaker: someone who's wise understands the difference between the two.
Speaker: There's actually some really interesting research as well.
Speaker: It was from a book.
Speaker: I can't remember that particular study, but they analyzed the mistakes that experts make most and ignoring base rates is that mistake.
Speaker: So if you're an expert, you know a lot about an area, then you tend to overvalue the impact
Speaker: of a lot of detail for the whole.
Speaker: And you kind of ignore the fact that, you know, like all these details, they make the 5% or 10% or 20% difference.
Speaker: It might be critical when you're performing at your highest, but like, you can't forget that 80% is not those details.
Speaker: It's some pretty simple things and it's often major processes that are happening in the market, in the industry and so forth.
Speaker: Yeah, like that's a theme that always pops up, like almost in all interviews that I have.
Speaker: If you get the fundamentals right and the basics and you really focus on that,
Speaker: you will have much better results than if you would start looking for some hacks or whatever.
Speaker: Because it always goes back to the fundamentals.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's fundamentals that allow you to make those selections.
Speaker: So it's not that hacks or tips or strategies are bad.
Speaker: They are a toolkit.
Speaker: but it's having really strong fundamentals and understanding, which allow you to select the optimal ones in a given moment.
Speaker: It's kind of like having a supercar.
Speaker: If you're not a race car driver, it doesn't matter.
Speaker: You're not going to be able to turn the wheel the right angle, start braking or accelerating at the right moment.
Speaker: It doesn't matter that you have the supercar.
Speaker: But if you have the fundamentals, then you can really leverage the right tactics at the right time.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: And how can people better understand the context that they are in?
Speaker: How can they deal with those biases and everything?
Speaker: Yeah, I think there's a number of things there and it all starts with understanding that you have them.
Speaker: So, so really, um, thinking about the unknown unknowns, um,
Speaker: A good one is trying to make a checklist of yourself or use.
Speaker: There's lots of different frameworks, right?
Speaker: But there's a reason why industries like no-fail industries, like spacecraft, space launch, or aircraft, they use checklists all the time.
Speaker: It's because they're very effective, right?
Speaker: They allow you to step back, use a framework to kind of check all the different angles or perspectives.
Speaker: So I definitely use something like if you're a business leader, you might want to use something like the business model canvas.
Speaker: And maybe you're spending all of your time obsessing about pricing because that's what got you to this stage of growth.
Speaker: But I think you asked like, you know, when in particular is it dangerous to, you know, you might, why is it so hard to understand context?
Speaker: It's because it's changing all the time.
Speaker: So even if you, if you make that effort at one time to really understand, then like you don't get to do it once and you walk away.
Speaker: And that's particularly true for leaders in high growth companies because they're changing context all the time.
Speaker: even if you're a CEO, when you take your company from early seed, MVP, to Series A, Series B, your title stays CEO, but you're doing a very different role.
Speaker: The things that matter, the things that make you successful are different.
Speaker: And it kind of makes me think of, I think, the Peter Principle, where
Speaker: You end up stuck in the role that you're worst at because if the skills that were really good for you to be a technical contributor don't necessarily make you a good manager.
Speaker: What makes you a good manager doesn't necessarily make you a good leader.
Speaker: And it's the same thing for companies.
Speaker: At the company level, the company might excel at conversion rate optimization, and that might take it to one stage.
Speaker: That might be a good strategy at one stage of its growth.
Speaker: but then it needs to find a new market and like you can't optimize past that.
Speaker: It's a local maxima and you need a different set of skills.
Speaker: And that's a situation where you had understanding of your context and you were doing very well because you could use that understanding to pick the right tactics and then the situation changed.
Speaker: So you have to reevaluate at the regular cadence.
Speaker: So to go back to answer your question, two pieces of advice I have is one to have some form of, it doesn't matter what you use, it can be a checklist, it can be a business model canvas, whatever, but have something that you can use to remind yourself about different perspectives on a topic.
Speaker: Try to reevaluate on a regular basis.
Speaker: Just put an occurring event in your calendar so that you don't get lost in the flow and forget to take a look at the outside, what's happening out there.
Speaker: And finally, it's other people, right?
Speaker: So there was this really great set of studies, I think it was a couple of years back, released by Google.
Speaker: Like their HR teams analyze which teams, what makes high-performing teams.
Speaker: And in large part, they found that it wasn't in the highest performing individuals.
Speaker: It was the level of trust and cohesion within the team and the level of diversity of experience and perspective.
Speaker: So one way to close your blind spots is to make sure that you're interacting regularly and asking for perspective and really listening to people that might have different viewpoints than your own.
Speaker: Yeah, I think the keyword there is really listening because many business owners, they have that diversity in their teams, but they believe that they know the answers and they don't listen to feedback from others.
Speaker: But that's why you are hiring smart people to really give you that advice.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's tricky because often when they listen are the moments when
Speaker: You know, they may know and when they don't is when they might want to.
Speaker: And you know, like I've been a founder and you know, like I've definitely fallen for the same traps and I'm not saying if I start another company and then was really successful, I wouldn't fall for it again.
Speaker: It's just very, it's very difficult because in the moment when
Speaker: you get a very strong external feedback and proof that you've mastered a skill, that skill very quickly stops, potentially stops being relevant.
Speaker: So like if you, and that's often for startup founders, that's often raising a round of funding.
Speaker: So you perfect the skill to make your company work very well at a certain stage, and that allows you to raise funding.
Speaker: And then you have this incredible boost and validation.
Speaker: But it also means that now right away, you raise the funding to transform your company, to change it, to change its basic mechanics.
Speaker: So, so whatever you were doing before that you master, like it might not be relevant anymore and where you need to go.
Speaker: So, so that might, the moment where you feel most confident and the most like you might not need advice might be the moment when you do need the advice the most.
Speaker: I'm not sure I know the answer to that.
Speaker: So like I said, it's all very contextual and the blind spots for me might be different than the blind spots for you.
Speaker: And if I told you like, hey, you need these three things, like that would be running contrary to what I told you at the very beginning, where it's like, hey, if someone gives universal advice, they might be full of shit, you know?
Speaker: But what I can tell you is that you can create your checklist by really reflecting, right?
Speaker: Like reflect on when you got things wrong, like reflect on when you identified blind spots, ask people whose advice you trust, like, hey, like what's like, how would you describe the way that I look at the world?
Speaker: And what are some of the things that might be blind spots for me?
Speaker: And then you might get an answer.
Speaker: You might say like, hey, like you're highly analytical and you understand the markets really well, but you sometimes ignore the inter-human elements, the politics of play around you.
Speaker: Like, okay, that's a great answer.
Speaker: Like, sounds like on my checklist, I need to say like, hey,
Speaker: consider the team dynamics, consider the interpersonal relationships involved and make sure that I don't get stuck in what I do best, maybe like that analytical aspect.
Speaker: And also that helps you close that gap.
Speaker: So this is actually a process I went through like six or seven years ago when
Speaker: I realized I had this big gap and by seeking feedback, by listening, I became aware of it.
Speaker: And initially it was a huge challenge because we all like doing things we're good at.
Speaker: So we tend to focus on that and that actually contributes to the blind spot.
Speaker: But it was also a challenge because like, wow, this is hard.
Speaker: And it's really by focusing on it, it helped me to
Speaker: After a while it becomes second nature to do that like check.
Speaker: It's kind of like you're doing your shoulder check when you're driving a car and you're like, okay, like, hey, we're all good, you know, like what are the relationships?
Speaker: And it's very fulfilling to be able to close that kind of gap.
Speaker: I love this answer.
Speaker: Like really, from the start that you started talking about it.
Speaker: Yeah, does that one hit home, I guess, a little bit?
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: It hit home perfectly.
Speaker: Yeah, I want to also talk with you about looking at the business holistically.
Speaker: Whether you're a founder or someone in the C-suite or a different department, you look oftentimes at only your piece of the business.
Speaker: So why is it important to look holistically at everything, no matter what you're always doing?
Speaker: Yeah, I think I've been very lucky in my career that I
Speaker: For bad and for good, I skipped a lot of the entry level work.
Speaker: It meant that I had to drink from the fire hose and I made some great big mistakes in the beginning because I was a co-founder at Micrometrics very early on in my career.
Speaker: But it also allowed me to start learning about the strategic elements and the business elements very early on and basically throughout my whole career.
Speaker: And what's really interesting, I mean, like the system always wins, right?
Speaker: Like what we're trying to do when we're creating a company is we're creating a system.
Speaker: And it's really within that Google study I cited.
Speaker: It's not enough, like you can't just take a top performer, put them in a team and have that team perform.
Speaker: The right team beats the individual contributor.
Speaker: that's a top expert every time.
Speaker: So again, like it's when getting too deep into optimizing a single piece kind of misses the fact that that's just a detail which has an important impact, but a small impact, a huge impact is the coordination of the whole.
Speaker: And, you know, like this was really apparent in a fairly recent role.
Speaker: I had a Trend Micro, which is a large cybersecurity provider, and I was focused on their enterprise business.
Speaker: So I was talking a lot to chief information security officers at very large companies, companies with, you know, budgets the size of, you know, small countries and stuff like that.
Speaker: And it's really interesting that those people, those CISOs, rarely cared about best of breed point solutions.
Speaker: Like they were building systems.
Speaker: They cared about coverage.
Speaker: They cared about the interconnection of all the individual pieces.
Speaker: They cared about economies and probabilities of risk.
Speaker: And then that's really what a very successful leader does is that they take care of the system rather than focusing on individual parts.
Speaker: And that system will always win.
Speaker: I can think of a million analogies, right?
Speaker: You know, like a good soccer team will, you know, like you can't take Ronaldo and pitch him against a team of people, right?
Speaker: Like he's a really amazing addition to a team, but that team has to be well oiled and coordinated.
Speaker: And that's when we get into strategy.
Speaker: Like what is strategy to me?
Speaker: One of the biggest things is it's this equation with multiple interrelated variables where you can't really just change something within marketing and expect the whole system to be unaffected.
Speaker: Like the kind of go-to market that you choose dictates what kind of product you need.
Speaker: It dictates the pricing model.
Speaker: It dictates...
Speaker: your business model, the kind of partnerships and vice versa.
Speaker: So you're always optimizing across the whole thing.
Speaker: And when you don't, you just get incredible inefficiencies.
Speaker: You can have a great, potentially great go-to market, for example, but it's completely at odds with your pricing or your product.
Speaker: And there's lots of books about that, right?
Speaker: For example, looking at like there's a dead zone in terms of size between large deal sizes with complex systems kind of approach where you're selling to few customers, you're selling a highly customized product and you're getting huge margin and certain kinds of approaches might make sense there where you need a product that's very robust.
Speaker: It needs a lot of features.
Speaker: It needs to be highly customizable.
Speaker: Your average deal size in LTV is high enough to leverage things like account-based marketing, which can work really well.
Speaker: Your typical closing cycle is long.
Speaker: It's a very different situation than if you're running a volume operations business and then what you're doing is you're selling at mass volume and try using ABM there.
Speaker: It's like, okay, that doesn't work.
Speaker: Your customers are probably quite small.
Speaker: They're buying you because you're super easy and fast to set up and cheap.
Speaker: and you're using a totally different strategy and your go-to market has to be extremely efficient because you just can't spend the same for leads.
Speaker: And that's just one example.
Speaker: This holds to every single function.
Speaker: So you can go into mergers and acquisitions and it'll be interconnected in the exact same way.
Speaker: You can go into finance or even HR, right?
Speaker: You can't sustain a very large...
Speaker: Like you might have a much smaller marketing team if you're going for a volume play.
Speaker: Then you might, you know, are you going to have dedicated sales?
Speaker: And what's the structure of that sales team?
Speaker: So when we talk about leaders, like you said, like be a B2B leader, not B2B manager, but a B2B leader.
Speaker: So what does this leader need to do?
Speaker: Like, do they need to do work themselves?
Speaker: Like, well, probably not.
Speaker: They need to build the system.
Speaker: They're building the machine, which will succeed.
Speaker: And building the machine means choosing the parts, sure, but the biggest part is how will they interconnect and how are they all justified in the context of the goal that we're trying to accomplish.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the true leader, I would say has to be a great communicator because if their work impacts the whole business and other areas, they have to navigate the change.
Speaker: Like a hundred percent like they, and like they, they generally have to align everyone.
Speaker: Uh, and a big part of that is creating that alignment between functions so that they understand their interrelationships.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Every company I've ever worked at had some level of siloing.
Speaker: And I think everyone has experienced this.
Speaker: And it's not necessarily bad to a certain extent.
Speaker: You can't have everyone talk to everyone, but mostly, quite often, it's roles that really should be talking to each other that don't or that are prevented from doing that.
Speaker: And to counter that, you have to help them understand each other's perspectives.
Speaker: And you also, it's not very efficient talking to everyone all the time.
Speaker: So you need to instill a shared mental model and a shared language that allows people to be coordinated, even if they're not coordinating directly.
Speaker: So would you say that it's the job of the CEO to create this model to ensure that all those departments communicate with each other and are aligned?
Speaker: I'd say there's a very big element.
Speaker: I mean, CEOs take on, like there's not a super defined, it's not as much of a defined role.
Speaker: We just talked about earlier how the role of the CEO changes depending on the company size and the situation and how in high growth companies and in startups in particular, that role changes throughout.
Speaker: You don't get a title change when your startup goes from trying to get early traction and figure out product market fit to scaling or adding new product lines, but your role does change.
Speaker: I've never been a CEO.
Speaker: I've been in a C-level position at a company I co-founded, but I've also been in many startups where I got to observe CEOs and co-founders quite closely.
Speaker: And I think they have a major impact on this together with their overall management team.
Speaker: I think the COO is also a very important role for this aspect.
Speaker: They're explicitly tasked with these kinds of efficiencies, but it's typically the CEO which has a strong leadership element in culture.
Speaker: and also in setting direction.
Speaker: So quite often they're the ones that have to make it a goal for the company to have that overarching understanding and that coordination between teams, departments, roles, and they're leading the culture, right?
Speaker: So if a company has a culture of deep collaboration and shared understanding, then that's gonna, has to come from somewhere and probably from the top.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: With all the individual contributors see that, yeah, the whole management works together, that they are aligned and communicate often and open with each other, then they will just follow.
Speaker: Like I've seen it in the company that I work at and at a few other companies that, yeah, the CEO and his attitude towards people has a massive impact on the whole company's culture just because people feel how they can behave.
Speaker: And that's the thing with company values that, yeah, some people said it, but you have to really practice it if you want to make it work.
Speaker: Yeah, every company has some nice looking values on their website, but you still have to live it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think the other thing is, you know, like if there's any friction or competition between top level leaders, you know, that really has a huge negative impact.
Speaker: If managers or individual contributors, you know,
Speaker: uh they will pick up that they're kind of in a camp that's you know potentially competing for resources or or you know has is not aligned with other groups and uh you know both the good and the bad propagate all the way down into the organization absolutely absolutely so tomek one last question for today like what's the biggest takeaway from our conversation what would you like people to understand
Speaker: I think context is key is the takeaway.
Speaker: So, and also like that needs for reflection.
Speaker: It's very easy to get caught up in the moment in the needs of today.
Speaker: Very many companies are always, you know, struggling, striving hard to meet this quarter's objective or whatever it may be.
Speaker: But,
Speaker: But it's important to reflect on a regular basis and kind of check yourself against the context.
Speaker: And like, am I doing the things which are truly important?
Speaker: And where are my blind spots?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So start preparing your checklist.
Speaker: Oh, for sure.
Speaker: And where can people find you and how can you help them?
Speaker: Well, people can find me on LinkedIn.
Speaker: I'm actually quite interested in continuing some of the advisory work that I'm doing already with some startups.
Speaker: So I'm open to those kinds of roles and I've been doing a little bit more mentoring recently.
Speaker: Also always happy just to talk shop, anyone that's interested in kind of strategy insights, roles, research, analytics, startups in general.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: So thank you very much for today.
Speaker: It was a pleasure to have you.
Speaker: And I really liked that way you talked about business from a different lens than just strategy, execution, strategy, execution.
Speaker: Yeah, this was great.
Speaker: Thanks for having me, Felicien.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to this episode of Be a B2B Leader.
Speaker: If you liked this episode, make sure to leave a review in your favorite podcast app.
Speaker: Also, if there is something you would like to learn, let me know.
Speaker: After all, we are building a knowledge base for B2B.
