Today’s piece is all about learning to lead, and specifically we’d like to share some insights with anyone who’s either stepping into a leadership role for the first time or is getting ready to lead a team through an important project.
Even if you’re a seasoned business leader with years worth of experience on your CV, it never hurts to take another look at those tried and true methods and consider updating a few of them.
We plan to do all this by sharing some excerpts from a conversation we had with tech CEO Alkis Pananakakis, founder of social media phenomenon Gospic and, currently, the head of Vuel, LLC, a competition-based social media startup located in the world-famous Silicon Valley area.
Gospic thrived on a core concept of gamifying the standard social media photo-sharing experience. It soon became the largest social media platform from Greece, and it also won a major tech accelerator.
Similarly, Vuel revolves around gamification by allowing users to challenge each other to specific challenges. At the end of a set time period, the post with the most votes wins.
Pananakakis also recently expanded Vuel, LLC to offer UX and UI design services to other tech startups, which is just one way in which Pananakakis has continued to glean insights from other business leaders as a way of continuing to develop his own leadership style.
Now that introductions are taken care of, let’s begin our tour of Pananakakis’s approach to leadership.
Evolving leadership
We’ll do our best to describe Pananakakis’s leadership style throughout the piece, but by his own admission, it can’t be easily summarized because it changes frequently. More accurately, it changes when there’s a clear opportunity for improvement.
“I’m a big believer in the idea that leadership style should keep evolving. Past and new experiences always play a big role in improving my leadership. Testing different things and seeing what works and what doesn’t has been a significant factor in evolving my leadership style over time.”
Other factors that have informed Pananakakis’s leadership approach are the industry he’s working in and the specifics of the team he’s leading, as well as the culture of the country he’s working in.
In a fascinating comment, Pananakakis explained that between Europe and the US, workplace attitudes and understandings of work-life balance are actually quite different, and as a result, transplanting a particular leadership approach from one environment to the other just wouldn’t work.
Regardless of what he’s working on at the moment, Pananakakis is always gathering information and using that information to experiment as much as possible.
One technique that works just fine this year may not be appropriate the next. We’ve had stark examples of this in the recent past, in fact, which is something that we will be touching on tangentially later in the article.
Prioritizing Communication
Workplace hierarchy is a complex topic, and it’s also one that has sparked many casual and professional discussions about the nature of workplace structure and leadership.
While Pananakakis hasn’t done away with hierarchies altogether– he’s still the person in charge, after all– he has taken a critical look at how hierarchy and even just team structure can positively and negatively affect communication within a company.
One of Pananakakis’s biggest incentives for using more innovative structures is simply the speed at which products need to be delivered. The world is moving faster, so companies need to find ways to keep up.
In Pananakakis’s view, efficient communication makes it easier to deliver quickly, and that communication is supported by structural choices.
“Promoting clear and fast communication between different departments and different employee levels is important. People work in cross-functional teams and contribute many different ideas from their unique perspectives. Also, they are free to reach out to any company member whenever they feel it’s necessary.”
So this isn’t a single-level hierarchy, but rather a flexible one, where team members in various departments won’t feel it’s strange to reach out to someone they’re not normally in contact with for input or advice.
There’s still a sense of authority and leadership, but it’s not so rigid that employees feel confined to their own tiny corner of the process.
Having a Vision
Here’s a quick question for anyone who’s ever worked on a team project of any kind, whether in school or in the workplace: have you ever been midway through a project and felt like you still didn’t have a clear idea of what the end goal was?
Unfortunately, this is a pretty common situation, and it’s not fun to experience. It can feel like your work is going to waste, or, in a worst-case scenario, like you’re tied to the mast of a sinking ship.
This represents a failure of leadership. From day one, every member of a team should know exactly what the finished product is supposed to look like, and it’s the leader’s responsibility to communicate a strong vision to all team members at the very start.
What if that vision changes? That’s fine, and in certain cases, it’s basically inevitable, but those changes also need to be communicated to everyone involved.
“Having a vision is like having a compass that guides everybody towards the right destination. When team members do not have a leader that drives them toward a common vision, then execution fails. On the other hand, when there is a common vision in a company, it motivates everybody to think and work on a common goal.”
In support of this idea, Pananakakis reminded us how successful tech giants like Facebook (AKA Meta) and SpaceX find ways to remind employees of big-picture goals, either through direct communication or even via visual design elements in the offices.
In addition to giving a team a strong sense of direction, this can also motivate employees, as they know where they fit into the process and what they’re contributing to on a daily basis.
Hybrid Structure
We’ve already covered team structure, but what about the structure of the workplace itself? Driven by the Covid outbreak, hybrid work structures seem to be the likely future for many companies, including those that had, in the past, relied on 100% in-person office spaces.
This transition was set in motion years ago, but the world-changing events of the past two years have moved the timetable forward.
Now, many business leaders are adjusting to this reality, some more gracefully than others.
On the subject, Pananakakis separated companies during COVID into two main categories: more traditional companies that had invested heavily in office space, and smaller companies that had already discovered some of the possibilities made available through remote work.
This latter group was far better suited to make the jump to full remote or hybrid work.
Pananakakis is proud to identify his company as being part of the second category. There’s still work to be done in terms of fully optimizing remote collaboration and communication, but in his opinion, the effort is definitely worth it.
“Although hybrid work has created some additional communication challenges, most of them are easy to deal with, and overall, it has worked to our advantage. I’d say it has been a little challenging to create a smooth workflow and establish a center of communication between these tools, but we are deploying many different solutions to address these problems.”
Pananakakis also notes that, once again, the relatively small size of his company, Vuel, is a benefit in this instance, allowing the team to build a hybrid workflow from the ground up, as opposed to trying to adapt an in-person structure that had been in place for years.
Those more traditional companies will eventually make the transition as well, but in the meantime, more agile companies will be quicker in discovering new opportunities and possibilities.
Listening to other Leaders
This shouldn’t be too surprising given Pananakakis’s philosophy of evolving leadership, but he actively tries to avoid working in a vacuum.
Pananakakis regularly tries to speak with other leaders to learn more about various approaches and broaden his leadership horizons.
He even named a favorite book on the subject: “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz. Specifically, Pananakakis finds great value in the book’s discussion of many different failures, which of course represent crucial learning opportunities.
“I’m always making it my priority to expand my network and connect with other business leaders and like-minded people. I’ve found having conversations with other leaders gives incredible insights to both parties.”
This doesn’t mean that his leadership approach changes with the wind, but having access to insights from other successful business people can bolster existing tactics or open doors to new options.
Advice for Aspiring Leaders
Before we parted ways, we asked Pananakakis to provide some advice to aspiring leaders who are just now learning the ropes.
The first piece of advice is definitely an extension of what we’ve been talking about at length: learn, learn, and learn some more.
“Acquire as much knowledge as you can, whether it’s from other leaders or from your own experiences. Testing different strategies and learning from them is increasingly valuable as well. Then, use this knowledge to adapt and change your leadership style.”
Lastly, Pananakakis stressed the importance of making your company the kind of place where people want to work. This will make it far easier to attract talent now and in the future.
“Creating an environment where the company’s vision is clear and the overall conditions create a pleasant environment for employees to work at is one of the most important things right now. Companies are competing for talent like never before and employees have many options. To convince them to work with you, you’ll need to illustrate the impact your company is going to have on your industry.”
When all these ingredients come together, after a great deal of effort and evolution, employees won’t just be punching the clock– they’ll actually be excited to be at work because they’ll know that they’re part of something incredible.
It’s no small task to become a successful and innovative leader, but it’s more than possible, and there’s nearly no limit to the rewards that follow.