Today’s leaders face more complex, fast-moving challenges than the generations who preceded them. It often feels like the past couple of years have brought a decade of change, with industries shifting overnight, long-term trends accelerating, and well-established business processes falling by the wayside. Navigating this environment is no mean feat. It’s the responsibility of leaders to evolve and pivot their organizations to thrive in our new environment. At the same time, our expectations of leaders have never been higher. The leaders of the world’s most successful companies have assumed almost a mythical, totemic status in the eyes of some. The reason? They lead with purpose.
Leaders are now cast as visionaries. It’s their role to drive the organization forward, rally their … [+]
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Leaders are now cast as visionaries. It’s their role to drive an organization forward, rally their team around a common cause, and reach forward and transform the future into a reality. Yesterday’s staid, conservative approach to leadership has rapidly become outdated, and the market rewards leaders who lead with impetus, a clear vision, and laser-focused execution. But how can leaders evolve to meet the challenge?
To answer this question, founders from some of the nation’s most exciting companies weighed in. They shared with me how they lead with purpose, with insights clustered around three key philosophies.
Don’t be afraid to take risks
The best leaders have high-risk tolerances. In fact, it’s practically impossible to obtain a leadership position without taking some risks along the way. But not every risk is an existential, bet-the-whole-company deal: effective leaders take a series of small risks every day and empower those around them to do the same.
For Allan Beechinor, CEO and co-founder at Altada – an AI solutions provider – leaders need to be transparent about the risks they take. He explains, “we aim to be vocal about our own risks and failures to encourage our teams to take risks. This ensures we hear everyone’s ideas and perspectives, allowing our company to continue growing rapidly.”
Leading with purpose isn’t meant to be comfortable. It’s a challenge and requires leaders to think outside of the box and challenge conventional norms. Donal Tobin is the CEO of Integrate.io, explaining that, “It is part of our company’s DNA to take risks. Starting a company in itself is the biggest risk a founder and team will ever take. And as companies grow, they have to make tough decisions.” For Integrate.io, building a data warehouse integration for eCommerce required ongoing pivots, with the fast realization that the technology couldn’t be “everything to everyone.” Instead, as Tobin describes, “we took the risk of committing to moving up-market and serving mid-market and Enterprise clients. This, unfortunately, meant losing some of our long-term SMB customers, as our offerings no longer met all of their diverse needs. Allowing our teams to take risks, and most importantly helping them get comfortable with taking risks, has been a critical pillar of our company’s success.”
Another leader of a fast-growing startup who started out in a different industry is Sachin Narode. He explains, “I came to travel from a completely different background. I was a medical doctor who focused on molecular biology research. After successfully exiting my first healthcare startup, I decided to travel. I became obsessed with the payments and supply chain issues that plague the travel industry, and I decided to dive in and build a company that would solve those issues.” He faced a huge learning curve, and spent several years completing research and development to find a solution. The risk paid off, as his product, Xeni, is offering something completely novel in the market, supporting a travel industry in active recovery and growth.
Build on existing infrastructure
Many leaders set out with lofty ambitions, whether to disrupt an entire industry or to revolutionize the way consumers use technology. It’s an admirable goal, but it can often get in the way of progress.
Mohsen Omrani is the co-founder and CEO of OPTT, a platform revolutionizing the future of mental healthcare. In Mohsen’s experience as a founder, a lesson he learned early is that it’s not always necessary to reinvent the wheel. He explains, “The secret to building an innovative product is not always about inventing something entirely new from scratch. Instead, it’s about making user-centric adjustments to existing products or services to deliver a unique and customized experience for your consumer.”
Throughout his company’s growth journey, Omrani has focused on incremental and measurable progress to match new demands in the market. In a time when consumer behavior was vastly changing at the height of the pandemic, holding steady to research-backed practices proved to be challenging. Luckily, Omrani’s academic background forced steadiness over OPTT’s dynamic period of growth, helping OPTT maintain credibility and integrity in the fast-flooded field of virtual mental health services.
His journey typifies both boldnesses in the face of risk and building on a firm foundation, which he explains this way: “I left academia with the goal to make a change in how mental health is practiced, knowing that the gap in my academic activities would make it almost impossible to return to an academic career. This was a risky decision, but I knew if I was successful, I could make a true change in many people’s lives.”
Every industry has foundational principles that have been in place for years. They’re well established, proven to work, and deliver value to stakeholders. But they can be iterated on.
For Tobin of Integrate.io, he explains that the most visionary leaders have “the ability to realize that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but you need to find what you excel at and double down on what will make a company successful.” In relation to the product, Tobin states, “we certainly didn’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, we looked at critical market needs and gaps that weren’t being filled and built the only single platform for any eCommerce companies to consolidate and provide powerful insights from all of their siloed data to quickly take advantage of customer habits to drive go to market success.”
At Altada, Beechinor recognizes that reinvention isn’t the name of the game: “It’s evolution, not revolution. We work with existing technologies, but what we’re doing is making it easier for our customers to unlock their value. It’s the combination of using technologies such as OCR, NLP, ML and AI, alongside our proprietary platform, that makes our solutions unique.” A company’s differentiator isn’t only technology anymore. Rather, its application, and the people behind it, are the elements unlocking value.
While this approach works for infusing tech into legacy industries, it can also be applied to new, emerging technologies. Back in the early 2010s, Dhruvil Sanghvi was a young consultant with a front-row seat to the proliferation of eCommerce. He soon realized that current logistics solutions needed to evolve to meet this demand. So he founded LogiNext. His team has built upon some solid foundations, “Great work has been happening in the SaaS industry. Experts like Jason Lemkin have templatized many metrics for building and scaling a SaaS company which I have personally gained a lot of insights from. Right from the revenue metrics to track to building business teams across geographies, there are some benchmarks on which we’ve built. Of course, there will be many things unique to one’s own experience, but this is one area of scaling a SaaS startup where we are not reinventing the wheel but building upon the solid foundations set up by the likes of Salesforce, Adobe, and Intuit.” That approach paid off: today, the company serves more than 200 enterprises in 50 countries with a delivery automation platform to capitalize on the rapid expansion of the eCommerce sector.
At Xeni, Narode saw the opportunity for a fresh application of the Web 3.0 technology that was already being deployed in other spaces. He says, “I realized I could solve the industry’s payments problem (payments in travel are expensive, slow, and face high fraud rates) by solving other problems simultaneously. Others had conceived of applying a blockchain payment solution to the travel industry, but they came at it as outsiders trying to convince the industry to adopt their payment product.” Xeni is approaching this problem by first capturing bookings on its own platform by simplifying online travel selling for travel professionals. Then, by controlling the transaction volume ourselves, they have the ability to transition our partners’ payments to blockchain. Narode spent years listening to what people truly wanted and needed in the travel space, and found a way to bring new technology to address longstanding problems in the industry.
While a popular rallying cry for startups, disruption isn’t always the right approach. Effective leaders deliver results, solve tangible problems and make our everyday lives better. Leading with purpose means committing to continuous iteration, an approach that compounds over time and delivers exponential results.
Embracing diversity is crucial
Countless studies have shown that diverse teams perform better than homogenous teams. For leaders, the benefits of surrounding themselves with a diverse team are clear. Diversity fuels innovation, foments new ideas and exposes leaders to a plethora of different perspectives.
Many companies are embracing diversity as a core cultural value. That takes multiple different forms: from building teams that span global borders to enabling everyone––regardless of position––to openly share their ideas without fear of criticism.
Leading Xeni, Narode explains that, “Although our team comes from various backgrounds – deep expertise in travel, engineering and finance – the combination of skills and viewpoints is essential to building something disruptive.” Xeni’s team is currently based worldwide, in the U.S., Canada, India, Singapore, Bulgaria and Spain, which they feel allows diverse viewpoints and experiences to feed innovation. Xeni’s leadership ensures that the whole team is rowing in the same direction.
This ambitious plan for equity and open access is carried out in their own company structure: “Team Xeni is located all around the world. We have members right here in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, India, Singapore, Bulgaria, Spain, and worldwide. Although people come from various backgrounds – deep expertise in travel, engineering, and finance – the combination of skills and viewpoints is essential to building something disruptive.”
The same paradigm is in play at LogiNext, with a group built on diversity: “Our entire technology platform was architected by a female leader, which one doesn’t generally see in the tech startup space and we consciously try to have gender diversity within teams as well so that more perspectives seep in. As a unit, this is also helpful because we’re more prepared to empathize with a wider audience, which in turn helps create a larger impact,” Sanghvi explains.
Beechinor, CEO of Altada, wholeheartedly agrees on the importance of embracing diversity, commenting, “hearing diverse perspectives fuels innovation, deepens connections between people, and makes us a better company overall.”
Leading with purpose isn’t easy, but those leaders who master it will find that it’s a force multiplier that produces ripple effects throughout their organizations. When leaders at the very top set this tone, these positive behaviors cascade to every level of the business, instilling a vision and drive in each and every employee that helps elevate the organization to new levels.
This approach is key to Beechinor, who brings open-mindedness to the table where innovation is at work: “Hearing diverse perspectives fuels innovation, deepens connections between people and makes us a better company overall. In addition, we aim to bring a sense of shared purpose to Altada, allowing us to work together to reach our common goals.”
Taking the commonality of vision a step further, Narode from Xeni explains that, “Although people come from various backgrounds – deep expertise in travel, engineering, and finance – the combination of skills and viewpoints is essential to building something disruptive.”
For Tobin at Integrate.io, they understand there’s a significant strategic advantage to diversity: “What works in one market (e.g. Japan) does not necessarily work in another market (e.g. the U.S.), so having a diverse team allows us to identify and test various strategies across multiple markets with a team that brings a multi-verse of experience, cultural norms, and diverse ideation to the table. This only helps us create psychological safety and highly diverse viewpoints when making decisions or delving into new opportunities. We truly feel that this is a competitive differentiator for Integrate.io as we expand our reach.”
Leading into what’s next
Leadership in the modern age is an education in uncharted territory, and it requires risk, relationship and imagination. Nevertheless, companies like XeniaApp are proactively aware of and producing solutions to new problems in global communities. Even now, they are taking innovation a step further by facilitating transactions in crypto, disintermediating credit card transactions in the travel payment process. These owners may be mavericks, but they are also some of the smartest people building some of the most creative products in the market today. In the likely-to-be-immortalized phrasing of OPTT CEO, Mohsen Omrani, “If it takes a village to raise a child, it definitely takes a city to build a unicorn company.”
The pace of change in modern markets shows no signs of slowing. Leaders who thrive in this environment are maximally adaptive, able to foresee and forecast, and prioritize purpose-built endeavors. While there is no crystal ball for what’s next, it’s safe to say that leaders who employ these three strategies stand a good chance of rising above the crowd.
