Love Them. Lead Them. Leave Them.

I spent three decades in enterprise software, and I was measured, every quarter of it, on one number. Several times I was ranked the number one revenue producer in the world. I closed the many of the largest transactions in my company’s history. I say that as a setup rather than a credential, because here is what all of it taught me.

Love them. Lead them. Leave them.

You love the people who are emotionally bought in. You lead them. And if someone is not bought in, you leave them, because keeping them is not kind to them and it is not fair to anybody else on that team.

That is the whole framework. It took me a long time to arrive at it, and I did not get there through a leadership course. I got there by running teams badly enough, early enough, to notice what was producing the results.

Start with the middle term, because it is the one people think they understand. Leading is not directing. Directing is what you do when you have authority and nothing else. Leading is what becomes possible once somebody has decided, on their own, that what you are building is worth their effort. You cannot require that decision. You can only make it available, repeatedly, by being the same person in a good quarter and a bad one.

Now the first term, which sounds soft and is not. Loving your people means you tell them the truth about their performance, you do not change the standard when the quarter gets difficult, you take the hit publicly when the miss is yours, and you do not humiliate anybody in front of their peers. Every one of those is harder than being demanding. Warmth is easy. Consistency is the expensive part.

And then the third, which is where most leaders fail, and they fail in the name of being decent people.

Somebody is not bought in. The team knows. You know. And the conversation keeps not happening, for a quarter and then two, because it is uncomfortable and because avoiding it feels like loyalty. It is not loyalty. It is loyalty to one person at the direct expense of eight others, and all eight are watching to see whether you will act. Leaving someone well is a skill, it protects the standard and the person’s dignity at the same time, and almost nobody is ever taught it.

Underneath all three sits the condition that makes them work, which is emotional buy-in.

Here is how you know whether you have it. A deal is about to slip. It is the end of the quarter. You pick up the phone and call somebody who has already hit their number and has no reason to help you, and they help you anyway. I have made that call more than once. It worked, and it had nothing to do with my title.

“You cannot buy emotional buy-in with compensation and you cannot demand it. You build it by being the same person every quarter.”

You cannot buy that with compensation and you cannot demand it. It is built over years, and it is built by the accumulation of small consistencies that nobody notices while they are happening.

The commercial result is not soft either. My organization had the lowest employee turnover in the company for years. Not because it was comfortable. My teams were held to a hard standard and not everyone lasted. They stayed because they were bought in, and because the standard was the same every quarter.

That mattered enormously in strategic accounts, where the customers are the largest organizations in the world. Those clients do not want to meet a new person from your company every eighteen months. They want to know that when something breaks, or a project goes sideways, or they need help solving a problem, there is somebody who knows their business and picks up the phone. Every time you churn that seat, the customer starts over. And they remember.

So, the retention number and the revenue number were never two subjects. They were the same subject, reported in different sections of the business review because I had not yet worked out that they were connected.

The last piece, and it is the one I would argue hardest for. You must have good products. You must have services that support them. I am not arguing otherwise. But I have watched the better product lose, more times than I can count, to the company whose team was bought in, because the product does not return the call on a Friday afternoon when an implementation is in trouble, and the product does not tell a customer the truth when the truth is inconvenient.

Over the next several months I am going to write about how revenue engines get built. Forecasting, expansion, compensation design, the manager cadence that makes or breaks a quarter. The mechanism, including the parts I got wrong, and I got plenty wrong.

But all of it sits on top of this, so it belongs first.

It is not a secret. It is a discipline. And it is an architecture.