Serial entrepreneur, consultant and TV host Jay B. Sauceda shares his three-part strategy for building executive leadership skills.

“At its core, a company is a set of systems operated by a group of people. But often, people believe they have a company when all they have is a group of people,” said serial entrepreneur Jay B. Sauceda during a season five episode of In Good Companies, where he shared some of the lessons he’s learned about what it takes to be a good business leader and CEO.  

During the past two decades, Sauceda launched and sold multiple businesses while developing a creative approach to leadership along the way. Now, he is a consultant and coach who helps chief executives and entrepreneurs gain traction toward achieving their business goals. 

Sauceda says that when it comes to corporate leadership, “no one is CEO on day one, even if you started the business.” He also believes “leading is not a gift but a skill you can hone.” 

With this in mind, we’ve summarized three key milestones on Sauceda’s roadmap to successful business leadership. 

Embrace humble beginnings

Almost every company has humble beginnings. Leaders often find it takes time to get their vision off the ground, and that’s okay. 

“In the early stages of companies, you're an individual contributor, much like the people you hire. You're in the weeds trying to figure out how to go to market, what the team should look like,”  said Sauceda. “There's very little time to be thinking about the future and a big grand strategy because you're just trying to figure out how to get the first customer in the door and making some tough decisions about what your product needs to look like. With time, as you grow a team from the center out, there becomes a need for more high-minded strategic work.” 

So, your leadership roadmap starts by working hand-in-hand with the rest of your team. Look around and get a feel for your company’s skills and needs. Build from the ground up, not the other way around. Spend time in the field figuring out your team’s dynamics. Ask “What are your strengths?” “What do I need to compliment my leadership skills?”

When you know who and what you’re working with, then you can start thinking about strategy.

Elevate your perspective

As your company grows, the next stop on the roadmap is to be mindful of your processes. Document them. It’s easy to get lost in the details, but a CEO’s role is to give the company direction. So, elevate your perspective, get organized and adopt a flexible approach. 

“Joining Entrepreneurs' Organization leveled up my thinking,” continued Sauceda. “I joined when I started feeling confident about where we were as a business. Then, getting alongside other entrepreneurs I realized, ‘Oh, wow, we've got a lot of room to grow here and these are things I should be working on.’ Finding out how other CEOs and other founders were spending their time sharpened my thinking and helped me figure out where to prioritize.”

Sauceda goes on to say good leadership is about flexibility. A CEO should have a bird’s-eye view over their team and know when to interject to move operations forward. It’s someone who's unafraid to step in and shift things around because, above all, a leader’s focus is on the needs of their business. 

"To me, leadership has less to do with defining how exactly we're going to get somewhere and more to do with being the person who's good at getting above the canopy and pointing out where we're supposed to be going. Seeing around the corner and connecting the dots between the long-term distance and destination you're focused on today."

Jay B. Sauceda

Ask good questions and listen to your team

Sauceda rounds out his leadership roadmap by recognizing over time your business will need to adapt its processes to meet new challenges. To make the right decisions about change, good leaders gather feedback from their teams. By giving people a chance to speak their minds, you create a climate of trust and empathy at all levels. 

“Feedback comes in all shapes and sizes. Some of it is simple stuff like posting something on Slack where people give me a reaction emoji. On the deep end, feedback can be a deck about a project that outlines all the different tripwires, and then we're going to meet and talk about it. Both of these are important pieces of feedback in a corporate environment.”

Getting constructive feedback – often through surveys collected anonymously – usually involves receiving criticism. And because getting criticism is far from easy, Sauceda simply recommends “growing thicker skin.”

“As a leader, you’ll quickly learn that not everyone can be perfectly honest with you. Growing a thicker skin is important because when you read the findings of an anonymous survey you pick up on real issues, things people are afraid to share out in the open. From my experience, as hard as anonymous surveys are to read, they’ve made me better, and they’ve made the company better.” 

Ultimately, Sauceda says, getting feedback is about building community. Every leader needs support to make the right choices. By considering everyone, you can move the whole company forward and grow better together. To build community, you need trust and empathy. 

“It comes down to feedback loops and making sure leaders empathize with the needs of the people in the business. When people talk about really great companies and the places they loved working, the theme you hear over and over is, ‘I loved that boss because they just seemed to get me.’ Or, ‘They spent a lot of time developing me, and they were curious about how I felt.’ That's all empathy,” said Sauceda. 

“For me, facilitating and creating opportunities for leaders to empathize with their teams is the core of what leadership is, and it motivates me every day,” he concludes.