Starting fresh & Finding the balance

This is the first “real” blog post I’ve made in a long time. One of
the things I’ve realized since taking over as CEO at Mixercast is that
not only do I need to communicate even more than before, but I’ve got
to over-communicate in new ways.

Somebody may be reading this now saying “Over-communicate? You’re
about 4,000 tweets too late for that. You’re already there!” Maybe,
but is talking the same thing as saying something? Is hearing the same
thing as listening?

If you know me well, or even know me at all, you know communication
isn’t a weakness. I’m big, loud, outgoing, talkative. I’ve had to
learn over the years to try and not overpower conversations, to not
suck all the oxygen out of the room.

Unfortunately when I took over I overcompensated and struggled to find
the balance in communicating with the team. Sometimes I’d try to
divert complex or controversial topics behind closed doors where it
just seemed like I was trying to over-manage the conversation. Other
times I stayed out of the way probably too much when stepping in with
clear communication might have saved a lot of time and confusion. I
was good one on one, and I was good with the whole team but in that
middle ground I struggled between trying to add valuable input and
stepping on the toes of my executives.

Right now at Mixercast we’re a little short handed as we’ve dealt with
the transition out of a few of our team members (silver lining —
we’re hiring so send me your resumes to steve.banfield@mixercast.com).
Combine that with the perfect storm of a bunch of vacations and it
meant I had to step in today to help project manage the last builds of
a key customer deliverable (more on that early next week!). It was
truly eye opening.

I knew that as a team we weren’t communicating well but until today I
didn’t really get to experience that up close and in a personal way.
Deadline pressure and poor communication will eat up a team from the
inside faster than anything. Even in a small team the breakdowns in
communication were tripping us up. However it meant I got to see some
of our key folks in action more directly than I’d ever had a chance
to, and some team members finally felt comfortable enough to share
some of their feelings and feedback with me directly.

That feedback was so deeply appreciated and it sparked me starting to
write this post. Lots of things are going to change within and
without. This is the first real blog post I’ve made in a very long
time (tweets and reposts of viral videos don’t count in my mind), but
it won’t be the last. I used to think it didn’t make sense to write
because “who was going to read it anyway”? Between my 1,000s of
Facebook friends, Linkedin contacts, 2,000+ Twitter followers and the
employees, investors and customers at Mixercast I imagine someone will
read this and find something useful it in.