All of us want to be a known as a friend to others. Yet, when we’re promoted to our first management position, it’s common to want to continue to be ‘one of the gang.’  But it doesn’t work.  A team needs the guidance and leadership of their manager, and the sooner you learn this the quicker you’ll be on your way to success.  In today’s Manager Mojo Podcast, you’ll hear the wisdom of leadership and friendship from Irene Blomgren.  Irene brings a great perspective since she is actually recruiting leaders for companies.  You’ll learn how the art of decision making can raise you with newly-earned respect from your peers to follow you as their leader.

YOU MAY READ THE TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW HERE:

Steve: Hello and welcome to the Manager Mojo podcast. I’m really pleased today, my special guest is Irene Blomgren. And Irene is a personal friend of mine as well as a business associate that I’ve known for quite some time and I know you are going to love getting to hear from her today. But first let me tell you a few things about Irene so that you can understand a little bit about her background. Irene specializes in the recruitment of senior level executives for information technology companies. Now, she has over 20 years of executive recruiting experience so I look forward to picking her brain today about that and I know you are going to love hearing it. She began her career as an in-house corporate recruiter and she worked with a lot of both large and small technology clients including Pacific Bell, Anderson Consulting, Deloitte, Cadence, Motorola, Gladnet and money more and she has really worked as an outsource recruitment model for a number of startups in the San Francisco Bay area. I met Irene when she was EVP of Human Resources at Taser International and she did a lot of cool stuff there as well. Irene received her BS in psychology from Westmont College and she brings an ability to strategize with her client partners to bring on the best and most compatible executives to build strong and successful teams. Irene, welcome to the Manager Mojo podcast.

Irene: Thank you so much Steve, it’s a pleasure always to work with you and certainly to share a little bit of what I have learned over the last 20 years with your audience.

Steve: I am so glad and we’re going to have a good time. First, before we get going too far, I’d love it if you would tell us a little bit about your business there in the Bay area and what you are currently really energized and working on.

Irene: Absolutely… so a couple of different areas. I’m located in Redwood City and cover the Bay area, I still also work with clients in Scottsdale and I go back there once a month now to do some HR consulting and some recruiting. But basically I have a boutique recruiting firm and we specialize, as you have mentioned, in executives, really director and above. Oftentimes we will partner with our clients because that’s how we look at our relationship and if they need a team built down a little bit, like from a director level we’ll certainly help them do that once we get to know them well and we see ourselves as an extension of our clients out into the community so we’re always delighted to try to meet whatever needs they have. As you have mentioned our primary focus is on bringing stellar leadership into companies. And then secondarily I do some consulting around team development, culture, leadership, those kinds of things. So bringing that HR background as well. I usually do those in conjunction where I am partnering with a client.

Steve: Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that and where I want to start today is to talk a little bit first about, I know you have an extensive HR background and here you are now looking for executives and trying to fit it in with companies. Would you mind sharing with us what have you found to be one of the biggest problems that you’ve seen that executives or leaders have in working and integrating into companies?

Irene: You know I think one of the issues – I assume when you mean bringing in a new person into a scene –

Steve: Absolutely.

Irene: You know onboarding, and that was one of the things I worked with at Taser, is so important and that’s all about communication and we know that is one of the key points of success within a company. So when someone puts so much effort, time and money into finding the right person to work in a company… oftentimes though once they are brought in we all breathe a sigh of relief and they think the job is done. And it’s not. It’s been shown that we can lose key people because they are onboarded incorrectly. And I’m talking about key leadership. People are human. When they come into a company onboarding is vital. They need to be communicated with, they need to be feeling a part of a team. There’s a lot of work in that initial month or so that needs to take place, really from day one, that integrates them fully. Getting to know the people in the company, really spend time with them to understand the culture, many of those things are talked about in the recruiting process but most of that foundation needs to be laid in those first few weeks and it’s really imperative that a company have a very strong, process oriented onboarding program in my opinion.

Steve: Yeah, isn’t that interesting how many people really don’t understand the importance of a fast start and the importance of communication. They just don’t get it. Yeah, so whenever you are looking for those leaders I know it’s important for you to determine their type of communication style. Do you adjust that based on what your client has told you will work in their culture or what do you see in terms of what are some of the things that you look for as a background for people that you look for that you do bring in as successful candidates?

Irene: You know, I think there’s… it’s not just a resume that you are looking for. I look at them as an entire process so when we begin to work with a client it’s a little bit different perhaps than a contingent search for a more […] jobs out there and they are looking for a skill set. We’re spending the time to get to know our clients, to get to know what their culture is like and to get to know what their communication style is. Then it’s really not helping the candidate to fit in with it, I’m looking for the candidate who is going to be the natural fit. Now we can give them pointers but if we take someone who is real… not that it’s bad but a real buttoned up like IBM kind of closed, you know, very, very large company corporate communications style and that’s what they’ve been used to and that’s what they are comfortable with and I try to put them in a San Francisco startup that has got 30 people in one big room… it’s not going to work. And so we are always trying to match the candidate to the company. And that just takes experience of knowing what we are doing and making that match. Because we want the candidate to be happy and we want the client to be happy and that means we have to do the matching.

Steve: Right, well thank you for sharing that and I can see where that would be a huge problem when you were a formal communicator and you go into a startup environment, that could cause problems in a hurry.

Irene: Right.

Steve: Well back whenever you were first beginning to manage people, I always like to ask my guests to share a little bit about what did you struggle with whenever you, yourself, just first went into management?

Irene: Oh my goodness, I made huge mistakes and, you know, it was sort of learn by experience certainly. My biggest mistake as I look back is my very first job as a manager I started my own company and I hired other people and I just wanted us all to be one big flat team which was great, it was a great perspective, it was very optimistic on my part. But I quickly learned that I was not providing the guidance and leadership that I needed to give. And sometimes there has to be, you know there has to be a little bit of distance and I couldn’t be always shoulder to shoulder. A lot of the time I could and I really believe that as a manager you lead by example so I was always willing to do everything but I also had to step back sometimes and I had to exert leadership and direction and so I had to learn that that was a little bit different than just being part of a team. That was the hardest thing for me.

Steve: It’s not easy, is it?

Irene: But I learned it and I was effective. No.

Steve: Well, you know, when you first started it sounds like you were at the point when you really wanted them to make some decisions and they were looking for you to help guide the decisions, is that a fair way of saying it?

Irene: Exactly. Absolutely. And I was making it all group-think and they wanted more guidance and leadership. And once I felt I needed to get where I was okay with that and it’s not that I didn’t have it within me but I exerted and so everyone was much happier when I took a step back and could provide the leadership and then we can do our group-think, it worked out really well.

Steve: You know, I’m always amazed and thank you so much for sharing that because I find that most mangers really struggle with decision making. It’s a common problem whenever we start taking on a team that we think everybody else is going to independently want to make decisions or collaborate to make decisions, oftentimes they are very uncomfortable with that and they want a leader that is going to say “Let’s do this,” or, “Let’s do that,” based on everybody’s input and that’s a tough thing to learn isn’t it?

Irene: It was. I had to learn it quickly. It was a lesson well learned.

Steve: That’s awesome. Well, we learn from our errors, I know I made so many myself and I share so many of them on my podcast so I can help people understand it’s okay to make mistakes, it’s when we have to learn from them. Now, whenever you decided that you went into management I would just like to hear what made you go in and lead people, was there a trigger point or an example in your life that made you want to actually go into leadership positions?

Irene: You know, even before I went into business I was… I tended to gravitate, I think it was just my personality, I just gravitated toward leadership. If there was ever a void I would try to step in and take it. Whether it was in my church or, you know, a parent group in school, whatever it was, if there was ever a void in leadership. Because I like to get things done. And I’m super goal-oriented and I like to see things get accomplished. If there was an accomplished leader I would never try to take over but if there wasn’t I would always try to step in and it was really to expedite things. But I sure had, my mother was an incredible example to me and she was a leader back in the 50s when it was rare to see a woman in a leadership role so I didn’t even know about a glass ceiling, literally until I was in a corporate environment in Silicon Valley. I didn’t even know that term. I did learn it. She had exemplified no fear, she just went for whatever and she was a very successful businesswoman in the 50s and 60s and 70s and so I had her as an example. I thought women could do anything they wanted to do and I know that was a huge advantage a lot of women did not have back then.

Steve: Well, what a great example to have in your life. As a father of two daughters and three granddaughters, I’m instilling in them that forget that idea of glass ceiling, be the best you can be.

Irene: Absolutely.

Steve: And the reality is there’s so much talent and let’s also acknowledge that the world needs leadership in such a great way, we could care less whether you are male or female, we want people that know how to do it and do it well.

Irene: Absolutely.

Steve: So whenever you started learning how to be a great leader, could you mind telling us a little bit about how you go about building a successful team, because I think with your HR background and your experience with working with a number of companies, I think that could be very helpful to leaders today to kind of hear some of the thought processes that you go through whenever you are looking at building that great team.

Irene: Sure, happy to do that. I think one of the most important – and I hate to parallel this with parenting but there is a parallel. As a parent I always felt I needed to study my children. Each one was different, each one had different skills and abilities and talents and my job as a parent was to learn those and provide an environment where they could really grow. And I think the same way about employees. So whenever I come into a new situation with employees my first job as a leader and manager is to get to know people. And not just to become friends but I need to study them. I need to understand what are their strengths and what are their weaknesses and provide an environment where we can build upon their strengths and I can help and encourage them where their weakness is to gird them up. Because if you build your team around your team’s strengths and everyone’s different then you build it around something helping them to understand each other’s unique strengths and perhaps weaknesses, you are going to build a solid team and get rid of gaps. It brings out a whole new appreciation. I hope it’s okay to talk about predictive index because that lends itself so well to my desire to learn about my team strengths. And then to build understanding that they saw each person could uniquely fill a position that no-one else could fill on that team. And it creates that sense of appreciation for each other and understanding of one another’s differences. So although I might, I had an example of this at Taser, I remember when we did predictive index and the person that did all the payroll for me saw my profile and she’s like, “Oh, you probably want to get rid of me now,” and I said, “No, no, no. I’m going to take out extra insurance on you because you are the detail person on the team. I’m the big picture. I couldn’t do payroll, that’s not something that I ever want to tackle but we desperately need you because you dot every I, you cross every T.” And you know, she came out of that conversation feeling so good about herself, we all felt great about her and we all held each other in higher value because we understood the value that each person brought. I hope that answers…

Steve: No, that’s awesome and you know that Irene I see people all the time that they hire but they really try to go out and they hire people exactly like themselves because they are most comfortable with them. And when I start talking to them I often remind them, “Look, if you hire everybody just like you that means all of you have the same strengths and all of you have the same weaknesses.” Those blind spots are really the death of a successful team aren’t they?

Irene: Absolutely.

Steve: So once you’ve got that successful ream and you were just mentioning it just a minute ago, so I would like for you to share your perspective on this topic: you were talking about talking to your payroll person and complimenting them on dotting the Is and crossing the Ts and doing things that you are not naturally good at. So I know you believe in coaching people to success. So talk to us a little bit about how important do you believe coaching your team is and what kind of priority should managers put on it?

Irene: Well, I mean, that’s what I do, you know, I’m either doing recruiting or I’m doing coaching. I think coaching is absolutely vital. Every company they are bottom line focused. We want our profit margin to be as high as possible. Well that requires a performance by our most importance resource, our people, is as high as possible. In order to get people’s performance to be heightened we must coach them. I mean, everybody has room to grow at every single place they are in their career. There is always room to grow. So if we want a high performing team then I believe we need to make the investment into coaching them, to increase their performance and increased performance comes through learning, through changing behaviors, it’s changing something that maybe is not productive for something that is. I think coaching is absolutely vital and if it’s ignored by the senior leadership in a company they are really only doing a disservice to their bottom line.

Steve: Oh absolutely and that’s when it gets their attention, doesn’t it?

Irene: Absolutely.

Steve: Now, Irene, what would you say though to those, and how would you answer to those leaders who say, “Well, you know, I think coaching is okay and that’s good for some people but I just find coaching to be too touchy-feely.” What do you, how would you answer that type of person?

Irene: Well people need, people have human needs. They need to feel cared about, they need to feel invested in. They need to feel valued. So if that’s what we are talking about touchy feely then I would suggest that that person needs to reexamine that because people need to feel touched and people have feelings. When people don’t feel valued and they don’t feel invested in those are the people, listen, those are the people that I go after when I am recruiting.

Steve: I love that. Say that again Irene, say that one more time.

Irene: Yeah, those people that don’t feel valued, that don’t feel invested and don’t feel cared about by the leadership of their company… I’m doing that right now with someone. Those are the people I am going after. Those are the people I can steal away and put in other companies who are coaching to invest in their people. It’s not always money that pulls people away from somewhere. We all have that basic need of feeling valued and cared about, that’s missing and I can provide it somewhere else on maybe the same amount of money… I can pull them away.

Steve: Isn’t it amazing how many – I can’t tell you how many times I hear people say, “Oh, it’s all about the money,” and I’m like, “You obviously have not met enough people yet.” Because it’s not about money in many, many cases is it?

Irene: No, I would say well over 50% of the time it’s not about money. And statistical studies show that it’s not about money. There’s a lot of other variables. I mean, once the basics are taken care of ad there’s not huge differentials then it’s not about money. It’s about feeling valued and participating and it’s about potential.

Steve: Wow. And it’s so cool to hear you actually say, “Hey guys, if you don’t care about your people – those are the people that I’m looking for.”

Irene: That’s right.

Steve: That is absolutely awesome. Well, I also know that, you know, when we look at culture fit and we start looking at coaching, we look at all the issues that go on with teams, unfortunately sometimes conflicts arise and what is your advice to actually resolve conflicts when you are in leadership positions?

Irene: Well I, you know, I laughed first because when I was at Taser they just sent everyone to me. I would be the conflict resolution, you know, cubicle. But I have always encouraged leaders in the companies that I work with. Communication is just key, it’s talking and. you know, it’s not just what comes out of your mouth it’s about what goes into your ear. So again, we’re back to that basic principle of having someone feel valued. And we all feel valued when someone listens to us. So when there’s conflict it is pretty important to get all parties in there on an individual basis and understand, let them speak, understand what they are talking about and then try to get to the bottom of where’s the real need, where’s the real pain point and help them to work through a solution with you and normally that kind of clears communication. Taking the time to listen will make all the difference in the world. Because you’ll probably hear more than what you are hearing at the onset, you are going to hear where the real issue lies and it is probably something that you can help solve.

Steve: I think… what great advice, Irene. I know myself early in my career I really did not understand that I actually had two ears and one mouth for a reason. And I had to learn that reason and, you know, I guess all of us do to some degree but when you really do listen to somebody else – and I mean listen with intent, the intent to understand what the real problems are, it does change the dynamic of conflict doesn’t it?

Irene: It absolutely does, it makes all the difference.

Steve: So, you know, dealing with those conflicts and resolving them that is all part of the leader’s position and really what we’ve been talking about so far today is that leadership requires a number of different skills and a number of different traits to be successful. So in your experience from an HR perspective and a leadership perspective, could you share with our audience what traits did you actually look for when you were looking to promote people into positions of leadership?

Irene: That’s a great question. You know, again, I’m going to go back to there could be a great individual contributor, you could have the brightest engineer or scientist in the world and they may make all the difference In your company because they are going to come up with the product, right? Your managers are different. So your managers, those are the people that are going to pull a team together, they have to have such strong people skills. So they are going to pull the team together, they are going to be able to give directions, they are going to be able to lend creativity, they are going to care about their people, they are going to listen to their people, they are going to be collaborative but they are also going to be decision makers. Decision making in leadership is absolutely vital. And you might make your decision slower than someone else but you still can make them. So if a person is having a very difficult time – and this certainly can be something that’s learned – but if they have a difficult time with decision making – and I’ve made hiring mistakes where I’ve hired someone who had all the skills overall but I’ve learned too late that they have a very difficult time making a decision, that they did not have that internal confidence to make a decision.

Steve: Right.

Irene: And it was a disaster.

Steve: Yeah.

Irene: I’ve seen it all the way up, to the top. And so you have to have that.

Steve: And you have that Irene, you just mentioned that you don’t want that to go past our leaders, you just said you’ve seen it go all the way up and so have I. Where people, they continued to move up in an organization and yet they struggled with decision making and eventually it causes severe issues doesn’t it?

Irene: It does indeed. It’s extremely… it costs a lot of money and it costs a lot of time. It’s very painful to a corporation and often very painful to the person.

Steve: Absolutely. Well I know, I am absolutely sold on the importance of it and my listeners and my subscribers understand that I’ve developed a program called the Mojo Leadership system to actually help people to understand what leadership is all about. And – I know you would be interested to hear this – the first two modules in the program are actually decision making and delegation. So, the fact is I teach them: this is what you have to do. You have to know how to make decisions and here’s how you go about doing it. And then that second thing is delegation. So I know you have always been a really busy, busy person. Talk to us about how important it is for people to understand how to delegate with their team and what that really means?

Irene: Well I’m going to go back to your earlier question about those early mistakes I made as a manager.

Steve: Cool, I love it.

Irene: One of the things I really had to work on throughout my career, probably until maybe the last five or seven years I had a really hard time delegating. So as a leader I had confidence, especially in my area of expertise. I knew how to do certain things. And it was really hard to learn to let go. And I had to learn to do this because I could not manage a team and I couldn’t even manage my own career by doing everything myself. I had to learn to let go. And to trust the people that were working on my team to do something. And you know sometimes I had to learn though that it was okay for someone to do it different than I would do it. And that was a learning process for me. But it proved to be, it was everything. You must trust your team. And as you learn their skills and you learn their strengths and you learn to let go and to delegate it is the only way you can get the job done. I made many too many mistakes by trying to do everything myself. Once I learned the art of delegation my life became much more positive and productive.

Steve: Yeah and you began to actually see your team improve don’t you?

Irene: Absolutely, because you are giving them space to grow.

Steve: Exactly.

Irene: They’ll take that space up and it’s always been fantastic to watch. I’m have now young recruiters that would never pick up the phone and talk to anyone, I’ve got one young man right out of college who’s now one of the lead recruiters at Microsoft and it’s so fun to watch these people’s careers grow under the mentoring that you are able to give without overwhelming them with having to do it your way or having to doing it for them.

Steve: Well I learned just like you did that if you try to do it my way you probably aren’t going to like it. So…

Irene: That’s right.

Steve: Well thank you for sharing that. Now I’d like to ask you now, what you actually like most about being a leader?

Irene: Oh my goodness. I like so many things. Again because I am production-oriented I love seeing things get accomplished and so I like helping in that process. So I like setting directions and setting steps and then I love seeing people work in their areas of strengths to help pull that together and then have a finished product. So that gives me great joy, to maybe set up the pitch and then pull it all together and then we go out and we do something and we make a difference. Whether it’s in the community or it’s for a cause or it’s in our company, we make a difference. We all feel great. And so we need a leader to help us set the vision, set the mission and then encourage us in our areas to participate so that as a team we can accomplish a job so I think that gives me the greatest satisfaction.

Steve: That is awesome, well, thank you for sharing that with us and I just have really enjoyed hearing your perspective today and I kind of believe that where we are right now and if you would I want you to impart some final wisdom to our listeners. What would you tell our listeners that they can begin to do today that they could begin to make a change toward a successful management and leadership career. If you’ve got one or two things that you would like to encourage people to really concentrate on so that they might be one of those types of people that you are looking to recruit in those executive positions. What would your advice be today?

Irene: You know, I really look for… I’ve just been sharing a couple of different things on my LinkedIn postings around encouragement and praise and I think a positive outlook as a leader is just vitally important. We all make errors, we all have challenges. But if we can set the tone as a leader to be positive, to be an encourager, to give praise where praise is due, to step in and shoulder a burned for someone else. Where you are starting out in your career or you are already in a position of leadership you will be recognized as that positive influence and a potential leader and as you step out and praise and encourage and just keep that positive outlook. I don’t want to say that too many times but so many people don’t have that and it lifts up an entire room. It lifts up a company and I guess just keeping your eye on excellence. So if your attitude is one of excellence you’re positively, you know, geared towards excellence and success… what we see and what we speak and what we think is usually what we get.

Steve: That is awesome.

Irene: That’s what I would say.

Steve: That’s wonderful, what great advice today and I totally concur with everything you just said and I share with people my way of saying that is that when you really start to conquer those things that is when you become the leader that others want to follow. And they are looking for people just like that. Irene, thank you so much for sharing today with our Manager Mojo listeners and we wish you the absolute most success possible in every endeavor you take. Thank you for joining us.

Irene: Thank you so much Steve, it was a delight.

Steve: Awesome, thank you.