Hey everyone, it's Kula from Three More Questions. And before we get started with today's interview, I want to remind you to pick up your copy of David's brand new book, How Leaders Learn. It's been so fun seeing all the great reviews that have come in. I want to read you one from Indra Nui. She's the former CEO of PepsiCo. She and David worked together for a number of years. Indra has read the book and here's what she says about it. "Beautifully written. Easy to understand the examples he cites and the lessons. In a typical David Novak, Folksy style, the book is fun to read. You'll feel you are in those pages. Get a copy and sit back with it. You are going to love the book." Indra Nui loves the book. There are hundreds of others who have already gotten their copy and are loving the book as well. So if you haven't yet, order your copy of How Leaders Learn today. And I promise you're going to love it. Welcome to How Leaders Lead where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. If social media has ever felt a little mystifying to you, then you hit play on the right episode today because I'm sitting down with Irina Novaselski, the CEO of the Social Media Management Platform, Hootsuite. She's got a lot of practical tips for you today on how you can improve your social media strategy and actually start to dial in the return it gives you. But that's just the beginning. When you hear Irina's story, which starts in the Ukraine, you'll see how you can transform your career by making bold connections. Her ability to boldly defy conventions while also building relationships is a powerful combination. And it's a mentality every leader needs to develop. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Irina Novaselski. I was just talking to you before we went on and you said your dad called you today. Tell us about that conversation 'cause I loved it. I was telling him about a problem I had at work and he called me back and goes, I have an idea. You should put it into chat GPT and they'll help you figure out the answer. And it was just such a humbling moment of you're constantly supposed to be learning. - And how old's your dad? - He's in his late 80s. - Yeah, so he's learning as we speak, right? - Chat GPT might be his personal advisor at this point. (laughs) - I love it. And now I understand not surprisingly that you start your day on social media. What does that routine look like? - It's embarrassing. And I finally have a job where it is considered work and it's okay. (laughs) It's, you know, in all the health books that you read, you're supposed to go straight into sunlight. You're supposed to be outside. The last thing you're supposed to do is look at your phone. But I literally do that. I pick up my phone and I just go through all the social media channels. It gives me such a great sense of what people are talking about, what's trending, what is top of mind for our customers as they're targeting their own customers. And so it is my way of just staying in the loop before I dive into the whole of work. - Well, I can't wait to dive in and learn how you're leading Hootsuite. And first of all, I want to take you back and start at the beginning. What's the story from your childhood that shaped the kind of leader you are today? - I would probably say two things. We came here with very little financial resources. And one of the things that I learned really quickly is it's not how much you make that determines the character of a person or the value of a person. And it materially just changed my perspective on having a successful job doesn't make you a successful person. And seeing how people just work really hard and sometimes don't have the luxury or the luck in life to get into a role that they're passionate about, that they just have to work because it's financially important. And it just immediately humbles you when you think about that. And it's a gratitude that I've kept throughout my life. It also has enabled me to see potential in people outside of the experience. So one of the things that I really appreciate is I don't really care so much have you done the job. It's can you do it? And I think that stems a lot from just watching the people around me just do things. And they may never have had the experience to learn or someone teach them how and it's just that character of perseverance and figuring it out. That's one, I think the second thing is a little bit of this power of no. I think if you are, as an immigrant when I came here, if somebody told me how hard certain things would have been, I don't know if I would have had the gumption to go and power through it. But one step at a time when somebody tells you that's not possible, you see all these people around you that come and learn a new language and find a job and overcome all of these obstacles that it puts your own day to day paths of no in perspective to think, okay, well, if you can move to a whole nother country and start over, I can solve this little problem where this no is not really a realistic no. And so it just changes your whole perspective of what's possible. - You know, speaking of jobs, tell us about your first job as a kid. - I've had a lot, David, one of the things that, you know, I as a kid you want things. You wanna buy ice cream, you want, you know, and I don't know, toys, whatever it is. And the environment I grew up, there was no way I was gonna ask my parents. I knew how tight financials were. And so if I wanted anything, I had to earn it myself. And one of the things I saw in my development and it was everything from we would have garage sales, I would have my parents go to Sam's Club at the time and buy water bottles and sell them for a dollar. I would do yard work, I would do car cleaning. You name it, I had a candy business on the side in middle school where I almost got kicked out. But it was all about I liked getting people together 'cause I would definitely enlist all the local kids. And I liked watching something grow, how you could take one thing and turn it into something else. And it was nice to be able to buy my own candy. - Yeah, I love this story I heard about you. Would you mind sharing with us how you spent your 16th birthday? - This is real. So this is kind of what brings me full circle to you. So Taco Bell was a luxury in our home. And anytime we had something really fun to celebrate or important, we would treat ourselves and go to fast food. And I come from a family that we did not spend money on restaurants or anything like that. And so Taco Bell was the treat. And so around me, all of my friends were having sweet 16s and this wasn't something, A, an Eastern European culture you celebrate. B, there was no way I was having a sweet 16 party. And so my mom at the time said, "Well, why don't we go to Taco Bell?" And you can order anything that you want. And I remember taking my good friend at the time and you know when you walk in and I just ordered four or five things off that menu and I felt so rich to just be able to go crazy and wild on this menu. And we sat and we had the taco supreme. We had, I mean, we ate it all. And it was one of the happiest birthdays that I celebrated. And it's, I still to this day, whenever I go on long car rides, I cannot drive by a Taco Bell without a stop. And my new favorite orders is the Dorito Tacos, the cool ranch, but it held a really special place in my childhood. - I'm gonna get David Gibbs, the Yum CEO to send you some coupons so you can even save more money. That'll be great, you know? You came over here as an immigrant from the Ukraine and you say being an immigrant gives you both hunger and hope. Talk more about that. - You know, I think that there's two lotteries in life, two main ones. One is the parents you're born to, you don't control that and it influences such a material part of your life. And the second lottery is the geography. And I did not win the geography, you know, I was born in the Soviet Union, but I won the parent lottery and they were able to take me out of that geography and put me in an environment that is a meritocracy where maybe I didn't have the same things that my peers did or I didn't grow up understanding that you have to take your SATs to get into college. There's a lot of things that I had to learn, but it was one of those things where I feel so grateful to be in a country where I can work hard and in one generation go from refugee to CEO. And it is a gratitude I carry with me that it just puts everything in perspective of how do I help influence people around me? How do I help teams around me? How do I help people realize their dreams in an environment that also drives similar values? - You know, that's interesting because people always ask me about, you know, what was my biggest break. And I tell them basically the same thing, you know, that I was born to son of Charles and Gene Novak and I was born in the United States of America. And when you have loving parents and you're born in this country, you're so much ahead of the other, you know, - 100% - 7 billion people in the world. It's really is amazing. I'm a serious note here or more serious note. You know, you see all that's been happening over in Ukraine and you come from that part of the world. You know, what do you think America should be doing about it? Are we doing the right things or what's your thoughts on it? - I wish there was a simple solution. I will tell you that when I was watching the war and I was watching it started, one of the things that really hit me. And I was actually in the process of finalizing and assessing taking this Hootsuite role. And I watched how social media materially changed the future of a country that otherwise, it would have had a very different result, probably similar to what happened with Bella Russia and Crimea. And one of the reasons that Ukraine as a conversation are able to have right now and not just part of Russia is because social media happened. And all around the world, people were talking about what was happening and how this was not okay. And it just raises what a group of people can do even against one tough opponent, that the unity of a team, no matter what the team is, whether it's this combination of world citizens coming together to say, "Hey, this is not okay. We can fight this. We can do better than this." Just had such a powerful impact on me that where we are today, there isn't gonna be a clear answer and clear resolution 'cause this is a tough situation where there's no really good answer on how to get out of it. But one of the ways to help make sure that it gets to something that's more positive than where it is today is continuing to talk about it, continuing to raise awareness around it. I think it's when the bullies have a pulpit and nobody standing up is when the world gets really dangerous. - Oh, great point. That's a perfect segue and jumping ahead and talking about what you're doing today. Give us a snapshot of Hootsuite and the business that you lead. - So we are here helping our customers around the world unlock the value of their social media relationships. And I think you'll relate to this a lot, I believe, and we believe that relationships is the number one thing that matters most. Whether it's one-on-one interactions, whether it's with your team, and especially on social media. We have over five billion people that are on social media spending almost two and a half hours a day. And David, I'm convinced that that's that is highly underrepresented 'cause people are embarrassed to actually tell you how long and how much they're actually spending on it. But it's one of the last channels where you can have a two-way dialogue with your customers. And they're telling you what they think about your product, your services, what they like, what they don't like. It is such a powerful tool to be able to not only listen, but also respond to your customers. And so we are on a mission of taking our secret sauce, which is all about relationship building and arming our customers on how do they do that on social media to drive impact for their businesses. - And you say that people online want to engage with people, not necessarily brands. Give me an example of a brand that really does that well. I'll give you a few examples. First, I think we do it really well. It's just fun, but the example I'll give you is Sesame Workshop. They're great. They get into Elmo's character and they write social media based on an Elmo voice. What would Elmo do? How would Cookie Monster react? And you are just so addicted to following this because it's fun, it's engaging. They're building a relationship with you. And one of the things that we see is most customers don't want to hear about a brand, just like most people in a dialogue in a relationship. If you're doing all the talking, they're not really interested. And so we ran this study where brands talk 70% about themselves and only 30% about the customer. And people on social media, they want the reverse. They want to hear, what are you doing for my problems? How can you help me? They don't want to hear about you, the brand, or you, the company. And so we talk about how do you give something nine times? How do you give nine pieces of info that a customer values and then you take only once? And so the really good brands, they do that. They build authenticity, they build a relationship, they engage you, and then they'll quote unquote sell only once. And you're learning during those other nine times. - When you think about social media, there are brands that use it to drive revenue. But most people think that, you know, it just, you get impressions, you know. But if you're going to drive revenue, what do you have to do that the other people don't? How do you turn these impressions into dollars? - And that is the part that we're most excited. The last 10 years about social media has just been about FOMA. It's being on social media because our competitors are and you just have this fear of missing out. Versus we think the next 10 years is all about driving revenue and impact to your business. And the three things to do different is one, just like you would with any relationship, listen. It starts with actually listening, what do your customers care about? We just actually bought this business talk walker that allows us to help our customers really zone in and target and personalize the listening based on geography or topic or conversation. And it's one of the best ways to build a relationship. Talk less, listen more. The second thing is talk about things that the customers care about. So it's nobody wants to get sold to. They want to learn, right? And we were talking about your book earlier that you're teaching leaders how to actively learn. It's the same thing on the customer side. Nobody wants to get sold at and told stats, tell us what we can do better, educate us, give us knowledge that when we see brands when they're educating, here's what you do to get a better price for your house when you put it on the market. Here's what you do to better manage your finances by giving some of that education out. You're building a relationship because you're giving customers something. And then the third piece that we see that are really good customers that are building revenue from social media are the ones that are vulnerable. The ones that, just like any other relationship, if everything is great and you're not scared of anything, it's really hard to build trust with someone. You want to know what do you mess up at? What are you bad at? There's no way you're great at everything. And so it's the same thing with a brand. How do you be vulnerable about the things that don't work or that do work? How do you ask for help? And social media is one of the easiest places to get fast feedback. Hey, we launched this product. It looked like it didn't get a great response from you. Here are the three things we think, why do you agree? Why do you think it didn't work? And so the brands that we see have a lot of success are vulnerable and just ask. - You know, vulnerability's a hot topic for leaders today. How easy is it for you to be vulnerable and how do you show your vulnerability? - Yeah, and it's an amazing thing to talk about because I started my career in finance and being vulnerable in my mind was not something that was okay. That was weakness to me in the sense of you just didn't do that. And it took later in my career and it wasn't until I met other leaders and I heard them talk about where they messed up, their failings and I thought, oh my God, I have all of those. We're allowed to talk about them. This is okay. And you just realize that you are a human at home and the human you are work can't be two different things. And so who you bring to work has to be your most authentic self. And part of that is the things you do right and the things you do wrong. And I don't think we talk about vulnerability enough as leaders and we don't make it okay. For me, anytime I do something wrong, which happens often, I call it out. Or if I give wrong direction to my team and they were right, I make sure I make a really big deal about that to say, hey, you were 100% right. In fact, you shouldn't have listened to me. You should have challenged me more. It's still your fault. I hear some high I did it wrong. And just calling it out to say mistakes are okay. And I think mistakes are healthy. Because one of the things that, for me at least, I see that teams that prefer the best are those that have psychological safety. And vulnerability and trust is one of the biggest ways to build that psychological safety. And it starts by showing I can mess up. - What do you see as like two or three things that every leader should be doing or thinking about when it comes to social medias today? - One is posting and being on social media. And I say that because before joining Hootsuy, I was an observer and I would sometimes dabble in it. But I've made a commitment over the past year to really post two, three times a week. And the first post, David, was really hard. It felt so vulnerable. It felt like I was inviting people into my brain. And I was just not ready to share this personal aspect of there was a thought, an opinion. It just felt so strange. And your teams look to leaders to see what are they doing. And that's the behavior I wanna emulate. And so just posting and being out there. The second thing is getting involved in others' comments. One of the things that I got to see in witness as you were kind of moving through your podcast series is how you interview people and seeing the comments that were happening and getting involved in those conversations. And there's this magical thing that starts happening is that when you interact with somebody on their post or in their comments a few times, you start to develop a relationship with them that you start to feel like you know them. And it goes from this strange, I don't really know you to a few posts and interactions later, you're like, "Okay, we've been friends for a while. "I now understand this." And you can see how relationships just get built. And then the third thing is just being open to learning. I mean, there's a lot of people who do it really well. And I had a team, thankfully, because I'm at Hootsuite that basically said, "Here's what you're doing wrong, Irina. "And here's what we could do better." But just being open to trying new things. - I'm pretty good at posting, but I'm not very good at commenting 'cause it takes time. If social media is really important in today's world of marketing, you better take that time. - 100%. And it's interesting because the comments is actually what gets you, your audience. So the posting is definitely helpful, but the commenting in their algorithm is what gets you the most followers and engagement and gets you the most audience. - On LinkedIn, you have this header image that I love, which says, "Ruffle some feathers." How would you say you're ruffling feathers at Hootsuite? - I would hope that we're ruffling them every day. I am a big believer of removing bureaucracy and process and hierarchy. And so we are flattening and enabling decision making. We are putting people in spots to be enabled and accountable and taking risks on people. I think one of the things that I have been the beneficiary of, that I try so much to give forward and encourage our teams to do the same is people is the biggest investment that you can make. It can also feel like the biggest risk. Where sometimes we wait so long to give someone a chance to just do the job. Okay, but if you know their character, you know their values, you know their work ethic. And by the way, you've worked with them, that to me is the least risk that you can make on as a business decision. Go give them the job, go give them the chance. Even if they've never done it, just go watch what they can do. And you see magic happen when that person is given ownership and responsibility to go try something and to fix a problem. And so I spend a lot of time encouraging people to raise their hand with problems they found. And then when they show up with the problem, I task them to go figure out how to solve it. (laughs) - That's good, that's a good approach. You know, speaking of ruffling feathers, give us a specific example where you know you ruffled some feathers and it had a great outcome. - When I started about a year ago, I replaced 80% of my leadership team. And that is a pretty big change. - That's ruffling some feathers. - That is ruffling some feathers. And it was a good leadership team, just wasn't their right team for what I wanted to do. And it is hard to change leaders out. It comes with a lot of risk. But you have to take what are you trying to do for the business? You're trying to keep in mind all these teams and employees that are kind of counting on you to make the right decisions. And it was a tough transitory time. I was probably pulling three or four different C-suite hats at the same time while I was trying to figure out how to hire some of the people that I didn't have. And it was arguably probably one of the best decisions that I made and the thing I learned every time over and over again is making change fast. And it is, I think, the biggest sign of respect to people because everybody wants to be in the role that they feel good, that they can impact change, that they can be where they can be successful. And the minute you see that that person doesn't align with the vision or doesn't have the expertise or cannot realize success in that role, the best and the most respectful thing you can do is give them the opportunity to go find it somewhere else. And so taking this kind of band-aid approach, ripping it off fast allowed our owls at Hootsuite to kind of go through the change once and set up a little bit at a time over long periods of time. - You know, that's a really hard thing to do. How did you learn how to be tough-minded? You know, and I do think there's a big difference between being tough and tough-minded. That's a very tough-minded decision that you had to make. You know, is that just in your DNA or is that something you've had to learn? - And I love how you said that 'cause it's tough-minded 'cause the thing that I think is so important and the two can exist is you can be kind and you can be relationship focused, but you can still make the hard decisions that are necessary. And I think a lot of first-time leaders, they think the kindness and making decisions and sometimes cannot sit mutually. And for me, I made mistakes that helps. I waited too long sometimes to take leaders out and I saw how it impacted A players underneath, how it impacted the teams underneath, how it slowed down the results and what gives me confidence is my overarching goal of we wanna build a strong business. We wanna enable all of our owls to have promotion opportunities and to grow their careers. And I have one job. One job is to put the right leadership team in place and then get out of the way. And so when I think about having tough conversations, I think about who am I letting down by not doing this? And so to me, it gets a little easier every time. This is actually your second CEO role. And your first was the CEO career builder, but I wanna hear more about your journey to becoming a CEO. And I understand you were a full-time student at NYU Stern School of Business. While you also worked full-time at Morgan Stanley, what were some of those early skills that you developed in that role? - Time management was real. (laughing) And you get this belief in yourself that you can do things that seem really difficult and hard. And you get comfortable being the dumbest person in the room. And there's a confidence that comes with that. So I would show up to these Morgan Stanley meetings. And again, I was trying to do full-time, but my brain was occupied with student things and running around and doing everything I was doing. And so I was just learning at such a pace that any meeting I was in, I was always behind on the conversation. I never fully understood what the goal of what we were doing. You're just constantly learning and you're not the smartest person in the room. And there's a freedom to it to realize it is okay. And it's a skill set that I have kept with me that I am okay asking the dumb questions. I am okay to be the dumbest person in the room. I am okay to actively be learning. It's being comfortable and the uncomfortable. And it is an amazing thing to learn young and early in your career. And the second thing is I've learned that naive-ness is really powerful. I remember I worked on this project with this MD and I spent the whole weekend working on it. And on Monday, I delivered it to him and his meeting was Monday afternoon. So I showed up and I said, "Great, can I come to your meeting Monday afternoon?" And he said, "Yeah, sure." And I remember going back to the bullpen, which is what we called the area of analysts that were sitting there, who's you can't ask an MD to go to a meeting. And I said, "Why not?" I spent all this time working on the materials for us, but that's not the way it works. There's hierarchy. You can't just go and ask to go to a meeting. And I didn't know any better, David, 'cause if I probably knew the rules, maybe I wouldn't have gone and asked, but it just seemed so common sense to me at the time. Like, why wouldn't I go and hear how the stuff was being presented? And you just learn time and time again that sometimes naive-ness or ignorance, within reason is a pretty healthy superpower. - And what was the learning you got from the reaction from the managing director as you were breaking that rule? - His reaction was, "Of course you can come. Nobody's asked him if an analyst previously can go to a meeting." And so there's almost some of these unwritten rules, and I see this in leadership a lot, where there's teams or leaders will assume something because, "Oh, it's improper," or you can't do that at this level. Why not? If you need to call a customer, call a customer, who cares what your title is or what you need to do, or the other day I sat in on a social media manager. And I remember the team saying, "Irena, there's no C-suite here. You don't need to join." Great. Do you know what I'm gonna learn by listening to you talk to one of our day-to-day users? This is amazing. I'll listen, I don't need to talk. And so it just sometimes just taking, you know, the importance of things a little out of it helps a lot. - Tell me the story of how you got into investment banking and the investment banking program in the first place. - One, I need financial security. David and somebody told me, "You make the most amount of money in investment banking, and if you're good at math, that's a good place to go." There's very little math. It's mostly addition and subtraction. But at the time, it paid the highest coming out of college. And so that was my goal. And nobody was hiring freshmen into the investment banking program. And I somehow got a back office job at Morgan Stanley in their controlling group, which was a really tough job for me. And I would spend the evenings emailing investment banking division MDs and asking if they would get coffee with me. And this one MD who was a little bit of a ruffle-the-feathers kind of guy at Morgan Stanley, Harry Van Dyke, he was a role-breaker and a builder. And he responded. And he, out of hundreds that I sent out, he responded and said, "Meet with my VP." And I had coffee with the VP, Jonas Nielsen. And he told me, "Why don't you go graduate? And we'll talk when you have a degree." And then six months later, he called me and said, "Hey, we're actually doing a sophomore internship program. "You should apply." And if I didn't knock and if this person didn't respond and if didn't lead to the coffee, I would have never, ever had an opportunity to participate. - And I love this quote of yours, which is, "Stand near closed doors and knock." - Yeah. - Great things happen when that happens, right? - Great things happen. And you just, it's a powerful concept of, I'm not a big believer in no. And I see that with entrepreneurs and new-time leaders, just it's so easy to get marred in the no. You're either asking the wrong question or you're asking the wrong person and it's a state of mind. And so, okay, there's a door, go knock. Someone will open something. It'll give you some opportunity. And if you do nothing, 100% will get nothing. - As you were moving up in your career and getting more and more experience, did you have a mentor that really took you under their wings and gave you the boost you needed? - Yes and no, I think the mentorship concept is so hard because I remember and when I read your book, I was so hungry to look for a mentor because how are you supposed to know the things that you just don't know, where are you supposed to get it from? And mentors is a tough relationship to build. And people that I've seen do it poorly, just email out of the blue and ask you to be a mentor. And it's hard. And where I've had success is I've come across or networked with interesting people and I just bring them into my world of problems. And so when I have a problem, I call them and I ask for advice. And after the second time and the third time and the fourth time, they're invested. They can't go anywhere. And so you kind of just bring them in and it becomes this very organic situation where it's not necessarily a mentor or not. But the second part of it is when I left finance and moved to the operational side, I was very focused on which CEO I wanted to work with. And so I went on a nine month journey where I probably interviewed over a hundred CEOs where of course they thought they were interviewing me and I was looking for someone to take a chance as I was changing careers and really didn't know much about the operational world but what I was looking is a person that I can learn from who had similar values to me, who had a similar approach that I wanted to emulate. And I was fortunate enough to take my time to find somebody that I wanted to learn from that was aligned to what I was looking for. And so they didn't realize probably that they were being my mentor, but every day at 7 a.m. I would set up meetings and say, hey, here are the questions I have. What are your responses? How would you answer this? And after a few weeks, they don't really get a choice in the matter. (laughing) I think I know the answer to this, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. What was it about you that helped you rise through the ranks and land a CEO roles? So early in your career, as I understand it, you were in your early 30s, I believe, right? - Mm-hmm. A lot of luck, I think being in the right place and being willing to knock and just keep knocking. And then outside of that, it's I am hungry to learn. I believe in solving problems. And one of the things that really was eye-opening for me and moving from finance into the operational side is, and you talk about this a lot too, is building people with you, building the teams with you. And finance, you can sometimes be a single person sport. When you move to the operation side, you really can't get done anything by yourself. Part of the magic of what you can do on the operation side is being able to inspire and motivate a team and take them along. And one of the biggest things that I learned is I want a team that's better than me, smarter than me, can find whatever problems I can't think of, challenge me, say no to me. And so once your mentality shifts in that way, you're able to scale and get leverage and drive results in a completely different way when you're empowering and enabling and motivating people around you to act instead of like a group of individuals, like one powerful team. - I'd like you to share with me what you would see as the biggest leadership lesson that you learned the hard way. - I think a few come to mind. One of them is you think that as a leader, people are supposed to adapt to your style. And the biggest one is my job is to adapt to my team's leadership style. And so I'm the one that needs to mold and to bend and figure out what drives them, what are their strengths, how do I take what makes me good, but bend it? - How'd you learn that? - The hard way. I'll give you an example. I am a pusher, I want more, I believe the impossible is nothing. And the way I communicate is the way that works for me. But one of the things I learned is there was an exec on my team who needed praise. She needed me to just give her some positive feedback. Her love language was words of affirmation and recognition. And that wasn't the way that I motivated. You don't have to say a lot of positive things to me as long as I see people developing and growing. And she basically showed up and almost quit. And I asked her why, because she was having such a great time. She was so well respected and her response was, well, I don't feel like I'm driving value for you. And it was such an eye opener of how could I have such a player think that she wasn't important to me. And it's because I never took the time to highlight to her in a language that she could understand why she was. And I thought I was because the results were going up and to the right, what else would I need to say? It's working, but that's not what she needed. And I kept learning this lesson over and over that. You get really good at managing a type of person that's really similar to yourself. And the skill set that I'm constantly learning is, how do I manage and lead people that are really different than me that aren't motivated the same way? - We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Irina in just a moment. You know, making bold connections is really important. It also takes a whole lot of courage. In my conversation with Maritza Montiel, the former Deputy CEO and Vice Chairman of Deloitte, you can learn from one of the most courageous leaders I know. - Don't be afraid to have a minority position on something. What's important is to be heard. And I think having the courage to take risk without risk and without failure, you'll never learn anything. I learned more from my failures and my successes. And the important thing is not that you fail. The important thing is how you come back up and how you apply yourself to the future from that failure. And I learned a lot more from failure than I did from anything else in life. So have the courage to fail. You'll learn a lot. - Learn how to tap into your own courage when you listen to my entire conversation with Maritza. Episode 105 here on How Leaders Lead. - Taking you back a little earlier than your Hootsuite days, you became the CEO of Career Builder. And what was the biggest challenge you faced as a first-time CEO? - I didn't realize it at the time, but I learned it as the second time, is when you're a first-time CEO, you are really working hard on pleasing your board, on pleasing your investors. And as a second-time CEO, you realize that you're in there to get a lineman on the strategy and a goal. And there's a subtle difference, but it's really important. And so the board is there to question and challenge and debate with you, but at the end of the day as a CEO, it's your call to make and you have to make it. And I think as a first-time CEO, you sometimes defer on some of those big important decisions and you don't realize that that is your job. And the second part of it, and I learned this also the hard way, is you don't always know the answer coming in. And sometimes listening is more important than the doing. And coming into Hootsuite, one of the things I was really conscious about is, even if I saw a problem that I've seen a few times before, there's this easy bias to say, "Oh, this is a circle. "I know what goes in the circle. "I know how to solve this." And every business, every industry, every company has its own little bit different flavor. And what I did differently here is I'd identify the strategy, I'd identify where we focus, but I didn't come with this is how I think we should do it. And instead, I put a team together and let them figure it out. And I think you call this take the team with you or bring the people along and you get better with it, with experience, but that was probably two of the biggest differences. - You know, at career builders, you learn all about career building and helping others do it, obviously. And what's something that you wish that leaders understood more about finding great talent? - Two things. Leaders look for pattern recognition that is really similar to their own background. And I think that can be really dangerous because then you're just gonna get a bunch of like-minded people that have a similar perspective, a similar background to you. And what you wanna do is what are the character traits, what are the qualities, what are the problems that people have solved that you wanna bring on? And changing that frame of reference, I think is really important. And then two, I see this a lot with leaders is they're worried about hiring people that are better than themselves. They're worried that if they bring in someone smarter or better, that they're gonna come and take their job. And it is the most backwards thinking because where you're most at risk is when you don't have a strong team 'cause you're not scalable. You also can't get promoted because there's nobody to take your spot. And so you want to bring in people that are smarter, that are challenging you. 'Cause again, the power of a team is so much stronger than any individual. - I understand that you're really, really passionate about the fact that you should take time to really write great job descriptions for the jobs that you have, which is something that I never did. I have to tell you, maybe I had some other people work on it, but I never really paid a whole hell of a lot of attention in that, what are the two do's and not to do's in that aspect of your leadership? - It's similar to solving a problem without knowing the goal that you're going after. And so, I think Amazon got famous for this, that before they build products, they write out the press release of what they want the product to highlight and what pain point it's gonna solve. And similar for a job description, whether it's writing out the actual job description at this point, you have AI doing it, but solving what is it that you want this role to achieve? What success in this role? And then what does this type of person look like? And without putting it on paper, there is so, and I've made this mistake so many times, I think it's very black and white in my brain and that I don't need to vocalize it. And then somebody else thinks it's a completely different idea and then a person appears and like, how did this person get here? They don't match what I'm looking for at all. And how could they? We never had the conversation to agree up front and now you've wasted all these people's time interviewing going through the process and the candidates time. And so, so much of writing up front what success looks like just makes the whole process more efficient and effective and increases your chances of landing the person you want, which at the end of the day, it's all about building the right team. - You know, I understand that you've had a little bit of learning on the use of the word rock star in a job description. - Yes, we had technology that ran and one of the things we saw is job descriptions are very gender biased. And so when you put rock star, most of the applicants would end up being male and many women would not associate with a rock star definition and wouldn't apply or replacing that with ninja or, you know, strengthen certain skills would materially change who and how the application process worked. And it just highlights the inherent biases that we all have and trying to get the most diverse pool of candidates that you can. - Yeah, I wanna move back to Hootsuite, which you're obviously very passionate about these days. You know, what brought you to Hootsuite and what really drove that career decision? And you had to be good at making it after being a career builder. - It was two things. One, I wanted something that was at this catalystic change. I wanted something that was between communications and technology that was on this precipice of disruption and social media is sitting there. Most businesses haven't figured out and we did the study that 95% of businesses are on social media and yet almost 60% have no ability to understand the value that social media drives to their business. And if I were to tell you that somebody's 95% of the audience is on a tool that they don't know the value of that tool, you would think that is an exciting problem to go solve. And to me, I think it's one of the biggest challenges and opportunities, 'cause again, where else can you find five billion people that are checking in every single day for three hours a day? This is a problem that has to get solved and will get solved and I am excited that I got to find a company that can help solve it. And I love the owl. The brand just got me. It is just a fun, cute owl and you know, sometimes you just have to have a little fun in life. - You know, you mentioned earlier that you have your own recognition award, is it an owl or what is it? - Yeah. So one of the things that I got from you is used to this rubber chicken and in the remote world, one of the things that I've started doing is every week we have a hoot check where we check in with our owls for 15 minutes. Every week it's global. We have the majority of company join and we recognize people for either a deal that they signed, a new product launch, you know, a customer success event that they did, whatever it is, every week it's different. And we use this as 15 minutes of bringing a global workforce together to recognize our owls. And it was in the big part of hearing how important reward and recognition was in your leadership style. - You know, you mentioned earlier that you just acquired this analytics firm called Talkwalker. I love to get in to the head of how leaders make decisions and take us through this decision to make an acquisition, which is always a game changer or should be a game changer for your company. It takes a lot of guts to step up and make an acquisition. How did you make the decision? Take us through your thought process. - One, it started with listening to our customers. And so when we pulled our customers, one of the biggest things that we saw that was gonna help drive this unlocking of value of social media relationships was all around listening. The listening analytics, what are customers saying? The listening allowed you to target on customer care. The listening allowed you to expand customers. The listening knew who were the right new audience to go after. And so while we had the same listening capabilities as everyone else in the industry, none of it was really next generation. None of it was leapfrogging. And so we took a step back and looked at what companies are breaking the mold, which ones are using AI to do it differently, which ones are the best in the space. And so we narrowed down to Tockwacker, which was the number one. And we went and got it done. And part of the excitement is, when you look at diligence for a deal, most deals don't work. So there's a lot of scariness that comes along with it. As you know, there were two things that really stood out. One, we saw the product demo and it was just like my entire product and dev team were like kids in a toy store. They just were like, what, how is this possible? And the way that they do it is really interesting, the way they listen, the technology behind it and the AI and happy to share about it. And the second thing that really stood out, and this is the thing that with any relationship is the key. There has to be a chemistry, there has to be a fit. And you can have a great product, but the people just don't work. You have different values, it'll never work. The integration will just, the culture of the company will just mutiny. And one of the things that was amazing to watch was not just the power of the product capabilities and the platform, it was that we had similar values. We had the Snow Asshole policy, we had the customer comes first. When I asked the employees to talk, "Why'd they stay for all these years?" Their number one answer is the relationships, which was the number one answer. Owls at Hootsuite gave me. And seeing the similarities in the culture was really what brought me into kind of finalizing it. The product is great, but making sure that the culture alignment was critical. - Do they work virtually as well? - We're a mix, we have offices all over the world. And so some offices they're coming in, some are virtual. I would say we're a really good mix where there's people that come in several days a week and then there's some that are not near any office. And when you think about the integration of Talkwalker and Hootsuite, who have you gone to to learn on how to really make that a success or what are you going to do to make it work? - I have been part of lots of M&A just given my own background. And one of the things that I have seen that makes M&A really successful is really narrowing the focus because you can integrate for years and years and years. And so starting with what is the biggest problem that you're solving for our customers and really staying focused on that? And so for us, it's taking all these listening tools and analytics and bringing it to the fingertips of our customers. So you can go now, it's already live, we're integrated. We worked on that before the deal announcement which allowed us to get to market faster, but you can go in and you can type how leaders lead and you can see how many people are listening. What's the sentiment? What's the market share? Where are people talking about you the most? And so bringing some of those things that our customers care about the most into the tool fast is really important. And then two, just keeping people focused on the execution of what it is that they need to do. Everyone had full time jobs before and it's easy to kind of get into the drama in the mix of I have to travel, I have to do this, I have to run around and just keeping people focused on really clear targets for success. - You know, Irene, this has been so much fun and I wanna have some more with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? - I'm ready. - The three words that best describe you. - Energizing, motivating, authentic. - If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be? - An astronaut, I would love to seize your gravity. - What's your biggest pet peeves? - The word no, just getting told no. - Who would play you in a movie? - Audrey Hepburn. - What's your favorite social media platform? - Oh, how many get in trouble? You can't pick among children, but I really am into LinkedIn these days. - What's the number of hours you spend on social media every week? - Every week a lot, probably 30 plus hours and that's probably being kind. - What's something about Ukraine you'd only know if you're from there? - The Piedmianye are delicious. - Describe how you felt the first time you ate at Red Lobster. - I've never had lobster before, so it was amazing and it was Le Guini Alfredo or whatever. It was, I remember it to this day. I am so impressed you found that. (laughs) - What's your favorite fact about Abraham Lincoln? - That he was born on the same day as I was. - If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? - Ochenewevers, sienco la fiesta. (laughs) - What's something about you few people would know? - I dance almost every day and I put myself in professionally scary situations where I am terrified at least once a week. (laughs) - I gotta ask you this one. What's your go to order at Taco Bell? - Oh my gosh, the Cool Ranch Dorito Tacos and they're always out of the Cool Ranch so then I end up getting the other one. I forgot the red one that I got, the regular Dorito one. - Dorito's, yeah Dorito's Locust Tacos, there you go. - Yes. - All right, fantastic. You put yourself at risk at least once a week. Get out of your comfort zone. Last big risk. - Doing a deal? (laughs) - There you go. - Doing M&A is so scary and especially when you know the stats of, I mean it's like marriage, anything. You go in and you're taking a really big risk on how do you make it work and you have a lot of people counting on you 'cause it's their job and their career and you wanna make sure you do it right. - You know the highest performing companies always seem to have something bigger to focus on than just themselves. You know, I like to call it your noble cause. What would be the noble cause for a Hootsuite that you're inviting your team into? Paint the picture of the compelling vision that you have. - Yeah, so one of the things that, there was a Harvard study that followed people around for 70 plus years. It was one of the longest running studies and they asked humans at every age and then right before their end of life what is most important? And there was one universal answer that kept coming up and it was about relationships. That whether wherever you are in life, the thing that is most important is the relationships that you build. It's the quality, it's the length, it's how much you invest the vulnerability, the trust and the mission we're on is building relationships with each other, helping our customers build relationships on social media and the world is powered by relationships. It's the number one reason that owls stay at Hootsuite. It's the number one reason customers buy Hootsuite. I'll give you a fun fact. 90% of our business comes to our front door through references, referrals. All of that is based on relationships. And so we're here to help the world to figure out how to build better relationships. - I think that's a great noble cause. You know, about five weeks ago my wife passed away and I think of our 49 years together and that relationship was, it transcends everything. So if you can build a company that can help people build relationships, I think that's very, very powerful. Last question, what's one piece of advice you'd give to someone who wants to be a better leader? - It's gonna be relationships. I think it took me a while, especially coming from finance, to feel comfortable, to be my authentic self. I think it's really easy to view things in a very transactional way. And you end up spending the majority of your time with the team that you work with. Most of your awake hours are the people that you work with. You come back a little bit of a raisin, right? All the energy is taken, you're tired and whatever's left, you're kind of figuring out in the evening. And so, you know, if you have the luxury of being able to do what you love, which I think is a luxury, not everybody gets that, then picking who you do it with is really important. And as leaders, you want people to think about you fondly. You want people to think about, I learned with this person, I got pushed with this person, I built a relationship with this person. 'Cause at the end of the day, you're spending all this time with someone. You wanna enjoy who you're doing with and it's a two-way street. I wanna learn from my team. I hope my team learns anything from me, but it's build relationships first among anything else. - Irene, I have to tell you, I just love this conversation. When you meet a leader who can be so inspiring and knows what they're doing and is focused on doing it the right way, it's always inspiring to me. And you're obviously one of those leaders. And I'm so honored, I got the chance to have this conversation with you. - David, I am so honored. I was telling you how I was just consuming your book years and years and years ago. And this is just a full circle moment for me because it's hard people talk about their successes and they never talk about the how or the lessons or the failures that they've done or the very practical guide on how to become a leader. And I found your book did that. And it was so humble and no ego and you just led with this human first approach. And it's something that just has really resonated with me throughout my career. And as I'm looking on continuously being a better leader myself. - Well, thank you, you just made my day. (laughs) - Well, there's no doubt about it. Irina is a bold leader. She isn't afraid to defy conventions and ruffle some feathers. And I love how she pairs that boldness with the desire to build authentic relationships and bring out the best in people. Let me tell you, it's a powerful combination. And I hope it's gotten your wheels turning about how you can bring that kind of relational bolders to your career. For starters, consider Irina's advice to stand near closed doors and knock. What door feels closed to you in your career right now? What would it look like to knock on it? And what's keeping you from taking that bold step? Consider those questions this week. And hey, let's apply Irina's insights and connect on social media. Reach out to me on X at David Novak-Ogo or on LinkedIn and tell me your big takeaway. So do you wanna know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders make bold connections. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Eric Church, CMA Entertainer of the Year and 10 Time Grammy nominee. Business music, it's all the same. It's all about getting to where you wanna go. And for me, that has been clear throughout my entire career. If you don't have the vision, you can't expect anybody else to have it for you. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of How leaders lead where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you'll become the best leader you can be. 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