A quick search on Amazon for “books on leadership” returns over 112,000 results. What qualities constitute great leadership will be an ongoing debate for for generations to come, because great leadership takes on many shapes and sizes. In many ways it’s like being asked, what’s the best move in chess? There is no best move, there is only the best move in a a given situation. With that said I want to share with you a story about corporate leadership that I experienced not too long ago, which highlights what types of decisions a great leader should be expected to make.
I work at a startup attempting to navigate the chaos that is the United States healthcare industry, and am fortunate enough to be working with one of the most morally outstanding CEO’s out there. Obviously as a young company every bit of revenue counts, not to mention a long term commitment from one of the most successful insurance brokers in Washington DC . When one of our existing clients got wind that their competitor was to being working with us our CEO received a call letting him know about some questionable business practices and alerted him to the fact that this large potential client regularly used very unsavory sales tactics.
It would have been very easy to for our CEO to overlook these expressed concerns as competitively motivated, but that’s not how he operates. He quickly made a call to the President of this new potential client and was very clear with our expectations for anyone he gets into bed with. If he ever got wind they they were leveraging our platform in a predatory manner against any of our clients we would terminate their license on the spot. Obviously, they we not thrilled to learn we added an immediate termination clause into their license, and would have been well within their rights to decide not to enter into a long term relationship with a young company, who clearly had a conflicting value systems. That didn't happen.
I happy to report that in the months since this episode there have been no complaints from either side of the isle and all parties loving our software. Our CEO knew that the potential revenue from one customer would not make or break the company’s future but having clients who believe you don’t have their best interests in mind would. That is true leadership. It means looking past short term gains because as Warren Buffett puts it, “it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”