The importance of honest discussions and CEO report 01/22

In today's episode, Mattias shares the CEO report of January 2022, which he is presenting monthly to his company's board. He also takes about why it is so important to have open and honest discussions with your employees.

CEO REPORT

1. The good things:

- Mathilda joined as iGoMoon's first-ever HR person. She's been on board for a couple of weeks now, and Mattias is excited about all the things she will improve in the future. One of the things she arranged recently is signing up iGoMoon for a "step contest." The whole team downloaded an app to keep track of their daily steps and compete with other companies.

- The leadership group ("kommandobryggan") did an inventory of all the internal meetings. In addition, all the agendas of those meetings were improved as well. Like this, everything will become much clearer and ultimately run more smoothly in the future.

- The leadership group is also working towards a better understanding of their mission and establishing the proper communication to work together as a team. Mattias is investing about 250.000 SEK in promoting those improvements with the help of a dedicated leadership coach and special training for his employees. Mattias himself is going through more advanced training, which will turn him into a certified coach.

2. The less good things:

After starting the year with a kickoff in the sales team, they discovered some areas of improvement. One of them is working on finding the needs of their customers. HubSpot's timing for their online training focused on improving sales skills could not be better in this case, and the whole sales team will go through a two-month training.

This course is divided into eight different segments:
- Changing markets - changing mindset
- Setting expectations through upfront contracts
- Deeper discovery: the importance of uncovering pain
- Deeper discovery: quantifying pain
- Questioning strategies
- Budget and investment
- Understanding the decision-making process
- Presenting solutions

While December 2021 turned out to be a record month, January started quite a bit slower. This did not necessarily come as a surprise, since January in the service industry has historically always been a slower month. Still, Mattias believes one of the reasons for losing momentum is that they did not have a proper plan after the Christmas break.

3. Future opportunities:

Mattias has been thinking about it for a while and now wants to start transforming his own leadership. One of the bigger things he wants to change is his participation in basically every meeting.

He wants to take a step aside and give his leaders the chance to actually grow and lead. Otherwise, they will never stop reassuring with Mattias whenever something needs to be decided in a meeting.

The main cornerstones to make 2022 the best year ever:
Mattias has a whole list of things he wants to work on in the coming months. These include:

- Define and package implantation products
- Improve partnership model
- Going forward with the leadership program
- Growing to four production teams
- Plan the leadership for the office in cape town

Regarding the last point, Mattias has some thoughts he is sharing. Especially after the latest team leader leaving iGoMoon so quickly after just getting started in December, he wants to make sure the following team leader is a perfect fit. That person needs to have a clear understanding of iGoMoon's culture code and have worked for the company for a while.

Growth calls at iGoMoon

He also shares some leadership insights he's gained over the years when having growth calls with his employees. At iGoMoon there are three growth calls:

1. The first session is about goals and the things that drive a person. Relationships within the team are also one of the topics.
2. The second session is all about values and iGoMoon's culture code.
3. The third growth call focuses on benefits, e.g., salaries.

He emphasizes how important it is to have these three different calls. Only when having these discussions and a clear understanding of what is going on, there can be a foundation for future conversations about salaries e.g.

At the beginning of his career as a leader, he was very focused on having nice conversations during the first two growth calls. However, these meetings are the place and time for having open and honest discussions.

Conversations like this are not always a nice experience, but you need to have them. Only then you can have fruitful discussions about salaries and benefits that also match the learnings and the expectations.

💡 EPISODE TAKE AWAY

How do you keep discussions honest in challenging topics?