A short YouTube talk by Jason M. Lemkin about leading across departments and driving consensus. The speaker—drawing on experience leading sales at Tanium—describes the risk of speaking publicly about issues outside your domain too early (it can make you appear unfocused or off-target), and frames this as a key lesson learned since leaving a larger company.
And when you see challenges in the business that are maybe outside of your domain. My job is to lead the sales organization. But if we have challenges with product or with customer success or with marketing, the way that you drive consensus, the way that you get everyone on board with that, is often where people move themselves out of a job where maybe they're winning in the game itself. You might be doing well against the target, but you're failing on the game within the game. And I think that's probably the biggest lesson I've Learned in my 6 years since leaving the big company is like, how do you get everyone on board with what your vision is for the company and where you're seeing challenges? And I think the big thing that I did when I was at Tanium, I was vocal about some things that were outside of my domain within the first few months, and that didn't go very well for me because it makes it seem that you're taking your eye off the ball, and I was not. But if you have a quarter, that's tough. Then the board and the executive team has to wonder, is our sales leader on top of what we hired?
