Ben is an engineer by training and spent over 10 years in the Royal Engineers in the British Army career before moving to McKinsey. In 2002, he moved to Coca-Cola where he ran teams across Eastern Europe before turning around the Indian business leading 12,000 salespeople. Ben then moved to Google where was COO of UK and Ireland for 2 years before being promoted to COO Europe where he was responsible for writing the monetisation blueprint of Google’s various properties. This involved defining the role of ad units, properties, interactions with agencies and partners, and devising how auctions should work. Ben then ran a Yellow Pages turnaround before running an ad-tech business for 6 years which ran $200m of ad spend through the major technology platforms. Ben is the author of Marketing for CEO’s and is on the Board of The Oxford Foundry where he is a mentor and investor to multiple startups.
All armies focus heavily on leadership because war requires leadership and lots of it. The first thing I would say — and I still think back to this monthly and have done for my whole career, even though I left the army twenty years ago — is the motto of Sandhurst. Sandhurst is the equivalent of West Point; it’s the officer training academy in the UK. The motto is, “Serve to lead,” which I think is a really important concept for all leaders. Leadership is not about the leader; it’s about the team. If you can make the team successful, you will be successful.
Too many leaders think, “It’s all about me. I have to tell people what to do. I have to know the answer to everything. I have to look good no matter what.” They will fail at some stage. It might take a year or two, but they will fail. Whereas if you say, “I am a serving leader, my job is to do what it takes to make my team successful,” it will lead to a lot of right behaviours. “My job is to help you do your job better,” and if you do that with a team of six, eight, ten people, whatever’s in your team, then collectively, you get more done. “My job is to make sure you have the motivation, skills, and tools and that you understand the split of responsibilities within the team because if I help you succeed, we all succeed.” It also leads to a happier team, better retention of employees, etc. as well, so there’s a whole load of other benefits than just getting jobs done successfully.
Good question. To serve probably means you’re serving a goal, collectively, so yes, you have a position of leadership, you are the boss, the buck does stop with you, but it’s not about you. It’s about the mission, the goal, the task. When I was in Bosnia in the army, the goal was to end the civil war. That’s a much bigger task than me or the general who was my boss. “We’ve got to end the war collectively. How do we do that? We have a plan, but if anyone has a better plan, let me know. I don’t know everything.” At Google, the mission was to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Pretty cool mission. Collectively, we need to organise that information. There’s other stuff we had to do as well like making money from ads to pay for that organisation of information, but ultimately, it kept coming back to organising information.
Having a mission or a vision or a goal that everyone is motivated by and says, “Wow, that’s big, that’s cool, we’re all in this together,” is probably the best way to make people realise it’s not about the leader, it’s about the goal, the mission, the vision. That also means you don’t only need to define it but also communicate it and make sure people understand what the vision is, what it means in reality, and what they can do to contribute to achieving that.
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Ben is an engineer by training and spent over 10 years in the Royal Engineers in the British Army career before moving to McKinsey. In 2002, he moved to Coca-Cola where he ran teams across Eastern Europe before turning around the Indian business leading 12,000 salespeople. Ben then moved to Google where was COO of UK and Ireland for 2 years before being promoted to COO Europe where he was responsible for writing the monetisation blueprint of Google’s various properties. This involved defining the role of ad units, properties, interactions with agencies and partners, and devising how auctions should work. Ben then ran a Yellow Pages turnaround before running an ad-tech business for 6 years which ran $200m of ad spend through the major technology platforms. Ben is the author of Marketing for CEO’s and is on the Board of The Oxford Foundry where he is a mentor and investor to multiple startups.