Giles Palmer scaled Brandwatch to a $450 million exit by building a strong leadership team, hiring a strategy head, and using anonymous 360-degree feedback to improve his own leadership. He credits attention to detail and removing underperformers as key to high performance, arguing the CEO is often the biggest limiting factor.
Chapters
The most difficult thing for me was getting a really high-performing senior team because I could do pretty much any role in the company. I mean, I wasn't a backend developer, but I'd done sales. I trained as an accountant when I was 20, so I can do finance. I did customer success. I did marketing. product, pretty much anything. And if it needed doing, I'd be like, okay, I can get stuck in there. At some point, that obviously, that doesn't work. But a lot of what you're actually doing is making sure that the company's like running well and your senior team is really harmonious. They know what they're accountable and responsible for. They work well together. You've hired the right people. They're supported. They've got the right resources, not too much, not, not, not you know, not too little. That's a learned behavior. Like, you have to learn that because it doesn't really come, you know, you can manage people, you can be a good manager, but managing a cross-disciplinary senior team and getting them to buy into the fact that this team is the number one thing, like Lencioni's kind of point, is that— That was the thing that I had to learn a lot. And I got a team coach and a personal coach, and I put a load of work into that because basically my senior team told me in my annual review one year, you've got to work on the senior team, it's not working very well, and it's your responsibility. So, okay, so, so that, that was one. Another was like strategy. I would stand up and tell the whole company in company meetings what I thought the strategy was, and they were— and, and then I get like, we don't know what the strategy is. I'm like, I just told you, what do you want about? And then so I hired a head of kind of strategy and, and I realized that actually I wasn't putting anywhere near enough work into it, both into the formulation, the cascading, the communication, uh, the updating, all this sort of stuff. So there, there were certain things that I had to learn along the way that you can do more or less of, but they— you have to do them. You can't fluke your way to success. You have to have a plan. And a plan has to be based on a strategy. Um, uh, and you can't, you can't have a high-performing organization without a high-performing senior team. And so that takes work and effort. So, so those are, those are 2 areas, um, that I was— I had to level up a lot.
Do you remember how you leveled up?
Yeah, well, I hired somebody who knew about strategy, and I put more time and energy into that. And I did the same thing with the senior team. I hired a coach for them and for me, and I put more time, and I took it way more seriously. And I got feedback. I'll give you an example of something that I did. I was at a dinner last night, and I told this guy, uh, one day I woke up and thought, um, like, the whole company gets reviewed, you know, gets a lot of feedback. And I just get my annual review from, you know, maybe my peers and the chairman. Nobody gets to feedback on me really. So I woke up and wrote this, um, questionnaire and sent it out to the entire company the next day, um, and said, I'm, you know, I want you to feedback on me and you can do it anonymously if you want to, or if you, if you'd like to give your name, that would be great because then I can ask you more. And I'm gonna present the results at the next company meeting. And I did that.
How were the results?
They were good, they were good. But, you know, I did get a couple of people gave me 1 out of 10, and I was like, who's that?
Yeah, and you spoke a lot in the beginning about how everybody in the business at Brandwatch were advocating for the business, weren't they? They loved it so much.
Yeah.
Yeah, how do you think you achieve that?
Um, by caring, uh, and by setting a good example and hiring good people and doing— taking care of the— it's like when people walk into your house, like, and they go, this is a really nice house. How— why does that? It's because you've taken care of lots of the small details. You can buy a really nice house, or you can give people loads of money and free lunches. That's not the point. It's actually being caring about the details.
Mm-hmm.
And that doesn't mean being soft and giving people stuff. It actually can mean getting rid of people who are not performing well or who are toxic or don't work well with other people. Or if you've made a bad decision, backing out of it, admitting you've made a bad decision, being honest about numbers and about trajectory, being clear about strategy and where you're trying to go, kind of getting enthusiastic, like showing that you are enthusiastic to make this thing happen and getting other people to like feed off enthusiasm. We pick up on the energy of others. So if your leader comes in and he or she is like, we're gonna fucking do this, and when we do, we're gonna do this, and we're gonna feel great about it, and we're all gonna learn along the way, we're gonna look after each other along the way, it's gonna be a hell of a journey. You will not regret spending the next year with this group of people doing this thing, I promise you. And people are like, okay, that sounds good, you know. So even just small things like that, actually showing up And not allowing the problems and the challenges to overwhelm you. Build a company of excellence and people who want that will gravitate towards it. But then you've got to make sure that, you know, if there are people that are not performing at the right level, then you, you know, gently say, this isn't for you, this— you're not for us. You know, being clear about what you will and won't tolerate, all this sort of stuff. And then making sure that You get feedback. Feedback is so powerful and so few organizations do it well, almost none. Do you know if you, if you as a CEO are part of the limiting factor on the performance of the company? Question. Um, and the first thing is, do you think that it's true that CEOs could be the limiting factor to the growth or the performance of a company? Yes. When do you— when, when can you recognize that? And then what do you do about it? And this is the leveling up. So, you know, you start off with the fact that the CEO's performance affects the performance of the company, clearly, 100%, always. Uh, and then recognizing it, recognizing where that's happening, and then figuring out what to do about it. And then that's you, that's the leader. The next is, okay, well, what about the rest of the organization? Does the same thing apply to the rest of the organization? Of course it does, to different degrees. And then that cascades all the way down.
