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In Episode 7 of Lead the Future, I spoke with Tiffani Bova, Chief Growth Evangelist at Salesforce. In our discussion, Tiffani outlines some key ideas from her book, Growth IQ, such as the important role companies can play in tackling the biggest issues facing our society. Tiffani also provides some tangible ways that leaders can engage with their employees and customers in a meaningful way to facilitate actionable change and growth. She shares an example of how, mid-pandemic, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, challenged employees to have 1M conversations with customers. She reflects on the importance of the wording of this challenge and the results that emerged. This example serves as a great lesson for growth-minded and customer-centric leaders.
Our discussion concludes with Tiffani sharing a personal story about her career and the lessons she’s learned that can help young people just starting their careers.
Key Leadership Reflection to Listen to
- “The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job.”
- “A lot of soft stuff is far more important than metrics and performance and management in the normal sense. This is how do we be more compassionate and empathetic and listen more, ask more questions, and show up. We’re now kind of in everybody’s homes on a daily basis so there’s very little separation between work and personal life. And so how do you make sure you allow people to set those boundaries.”
- “Business is the greatest platform for change. We need to be more than have purpose over profit. It can’t just be hardcore capitalism. Just think about what we’ve done for the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, you never would have had large pharma companies working together to solve something like this.”
- “This is an opportunity for leaders to talk to individual contributors. Actually ask them, How’s it going?, What’s working?, What are we doing that’s really stupid that we shouldn’t do anymore?, What are we doing that’s really great that we’re not doing enough of?, Capture that information and then be able to work it down in action.”
Meet the leader: Tiffani Bova, Chief Growth Evangelist at Salesforce
Tiffani is the Chief Growth Evangelist at Salesforce, a cloud-based CRM company. Tiffani is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author with her latest book, GROWTH IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business. Tiffani has been identified on the Thinkers50’s list as one of the top management thinkers in the world. Tiffani is also a regular guest on Bloomberg, BNN, Cheddar, MSNBC, and Yahoo Finance.
Leadership Insights to Pay Attention to
- Important characteristics of successful growth.
- The role innovation will play in solving the world’s biggest issues.
- “Coopertition”- getting people together to solve really big problems and open up innovation in a more collaborative way.
- The impact of leaders at all levels having regular conversations with employees and customers.
- “Don’t be like undercover boss.”
- Tiffani’s advice for future leaders; find what you are good at.
Show notes
- Tiffani Bova’s Book: Growth IQ
