Leadership Lessons of College CEOs
Three successful students share tips to improve productivity
By Cal Newport, Dartmouth College

Babson College student and serial entrepreneur, Kevin Colleran, faced numerous leadership challenges when he founded his youth-targeted marketing strategy firm, BlabberForce Inc. His company uses the power of word-of-mouth buzz to promote events and products aimed at college-aged consumers, a concept that requires a workforce made up almost exclusively of students. As many student leaders can attest, managing your peers is one of the most difficult aspects of running an organization. But for Colleran and his investor supported business venture, this difficulty had to be solved.  A lot of time, money, and effort depended on it.

Fueled by the atmosphere of innovation and urgency that is common to energetic young start-ups, BlabberForce quickly instituted a simple but powerful “no-bossing” policy. The central idea of this approach is that a self-motivated employee is much less susceptible to petty scuffles and a bad attitude than an employee being bossed by a peer. In the words of Colleran, “we try to make everybody feel as if they are on a common ground by ensuring that they share the same ideas, vision, and goals for the company.” At BlabberForce, senior employees don’t assign duties to junior employees; it’s simply not allowed. Instead, employees are always part of a “team effort,” where everyone is assigned equal amounts of responsibility. The result: no more tension between senior and junior employees, and thus, a much more effective and energetic working environment.

Though Colleran’s “no-bossing” approach was formed specifically for a student business, it’s equally relevant to any student organization. Student leaders who may have been previously held back by the negative effects of speaking down to his or her peers could maximize organizational productivity by following the BlabberForce approach.  In a “no-bossing” organization, assigning tasks is replaced with an environment where self-motivated students are given equal responsibility to help move the team toward a greater accomplishment.

The relevance of Kevin’s BlabberForce experience is not an isolated occurrence.  Having worked with many incredible student entrepreneurs over the last several years, I’ve noticed time and again that there are few better examples for any student in a position of leadership then that of a college CEO. These ambitious few who have the confidence and drive to delve headfirst into the fast-paced world of business at such a young age are constantly faced with leadership challenges under the harshest of conditions. Typically, with significant sums of money, employees, and client relationships on the line, student business owners are forced into becoming masterful leaders, or they quickly fail.  It’s with this in mind that I approached three outstanding young entrepreneurs with an interest in learning about the leadership lessons that they learned from the process of turning their ambitious venture ideas into successes. For any student in a position of leadership, the following lessons will hopefully provide some inspiring and helpful examples of how your student organization can be brought to new levels of effectiveness by the following the practical lessons of college CEOs.

To Revolutionize, You Must First Take Small Steps
“Every action has a pre-action,” says Ryan Allis. It’s a lesson this successful student entrepreneur has learned well. While still in high school, Allis’s fledgling web development business led him to a job running the on-line marketing efforts of a local medical goods merchandiser. Allis’s efforts created over a million dollars in new sales and launched his career as an ambitious young entrepreneur. He is currently CEO of his own successful software company, has authored a book on youth entrepreneurship, and is a popular syndicated e-columnist. This is in addition to taking leadership responsibility as the president of the Carolina Entrepreneurs Club and founder and president of the Entrepreneur Coalition.

These head-turning accomplishments all source from two small root steps: starting a web development company and networking with local business owners. These simple acts initiated the momentum that led Allis to his current successful position.  The fact that accomplishing small steps often lead to unexpectedly powerful results is what Allis means when he says “every action has a pre-action.” In his words, “every important action [your organization] will take will be preceded by thousands of lesser actions that without which you would not have had the opportunity or knowledge to accomplish the final important accomplishments.”

This logic is of great relevance to any student organization that desires to experience monumental advances in effectiveness and importance.  Allis’s experience teaches us that overly ambitious efforts to create great advances all at once are often unfeasible and lead to disappointing failures. Instead, completing many immediate small steps that move you in the right direction is a surprisingly powerful strategy that has been proven again and again to create necessary foundation of knowledge and accomplishment that will lead to phenomenal advancement for your organization. “Once those initial smalls accomplishments begin falling into place, inertia will take effect as these new possibilities snowball you up the learning curve closer and closer to your goal,” Allis says.

Delegate To Strengths
Michael Simmons got his start as an entrepreneur when he co-founded a technology consulting company as a junior in high school.  By the time he made his way through his freshman year at New York University’s Stern School of Business, he had won a slew of important prizes, including three major New York City entrepreneur of the year awards. Since then, Simmons has gone on to author his own book on youth achievement, publish several successful articles, and give keynote speeches and lectures at student venues across the country.

With this impressive list of accomplishments fresh on my mind, I was surprised to hear that one of the most difficult challenges he’s had to recently face was taking over the presidency of Stern’s well-known Entrepreneur Exchange Group. With characteristic modesty, he enumerated the numerous difficulties involved in motivating and focusing a large student organization.  But true to his form, Simmons managed to make the club a success story with accomplishments such as arranging for dozens of highly regarded business leaders to come give talks and attracting sponsorship for high visibility activities like business plan competitions. His secret? Applying the skills he learned as a technology entrepreneur.

Working with a talented but admittedly disorganized group of overseas contractors back in the days of his start-up business, Simmons quickly discovered that the key to success in working with a large group is delegating to people’s strengths.  The overseas computer programmers Simmons worked with were quite adept at and motivated by solving technical challenges, but they were hopeless when it came to logistical planning. The solution to the situation was the creation of an on-line project management system that automated the logistical details of running a project and allowed the contractors to focus on what they did best: solving the technical problems as they arose. Simmons maximized his team’s effectiveness when he allowed them to focus on their strengths as opposed to trying to overcome their weaknesses.

Be it a group of computer programmers or a student funding committee, trying to force individuals into a mold is almost always counter-productive.  “Trying to fit people blindly to my agenda of what needed to get done—not surprisingly—did’t work well,” say Simmons speaking of his initial experiences with the Entrepreneur Exchange Group. “When I instead assigned people to tasks that they showed an interest or aptitude for, my effectiveness as a leader increased exponentially.”

Though it’s tempting for student leaders to blindly assign roles to organization members in order to accomplish as many tasks as quickly as possible, the lesson learned by successful young entrepreneurs like Simmons makes it clear that taking the time to find and promote the individual strengths of your membership, not fixing weaknesses, will lead to a much stronger group in the long run.

Compensate With Empowerment
When Colleran was first building BlabberForce, he discovered a truism well-known by most student leaders: “it’s nearly impossible to keep college students motivated on a job when they are so distracted with academics, sports, and leisure.” For Colleran, this wasn’t just a distraction, it was a fundamental problem. His business model relied on the efforts of engaged teams of students, and he quickly discovered that they were just not motivated by $7 an hour salaries. Once again exhibiting the innovation-under-fire ability that defines so many successful young entrepreneurs, Colleran discovered a much better way to reward his student employees. “We realized that the best way to compensate college students for their efforts and to keep them motivated is through empowerment.”  With this powerful realization, Colleran began rewarding his workforce not with money and praise but by giving them leadership and power incentives, and even allowing particularly successful members of his team to become owners of his or her own BlabberForce franchise.

Colleran’s approach is crucial for any student leader facing the challenge of membership motivation. Rewarding your members with empowering leadership and power incentives, and not relying solely on material compensation and praise, is the key to many energetic and supremely effective organizations.

Planning, Planning, And More Planning...
Though decidedly unglamorous, the act of planning properly is a crucial component to the successful operation of any organization. This is a lesson Allis learned early on when, as he describes it, he discovered that “marshalling the necessary resources to get the right matter and the right people in the right place at the right time doing the right thing in the right order is [much harder] than I imagined.”  Successful leaders understand that to maximize the effectiveness of their initiatives, it’s crucial to overemphasize the logistics.

Realizing the importance of proper preparation, Allis developed a simple but powerful two-step approach to follow for any planning process: First, find someone with experience to help alert you to hidden obstacles and advise you on ways to increase the effectiveness of your initiative. Second, estimate how much planning time you think it would take to pull off the event, then double your estimate.

“Leaders are blessed with the ability to 1) rearrange matter and 2) influence future events for the better,” Allis says. In order to accomplish the latter in a manner that maximizes your organization’s success, it’s necessary to put an unequal amount of emphasis on the former.

Cal Newport is a junior at Dartmouth College where he studies Computer Science and is the editor-in-chief of the college humor magazine. In addition to the Student Leader, Cal has written articles for several other national student-focused publications, including CollegeBound Magazine and Business Today.

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