Daniel Hoffman of M5 Networks, recipient of Winning Workplace’s 2006 Best Boss Award, shares Four Leadership Secrets.
Daniel Hoffman Daniel Hoffman might not be the perfect boss, but he’s pretty close. He even won one of Winning Workplace’s 2006 Best Bosses Awards — after building his company, M5 Networks, so well that it was named to the Inc. 500 and Deloitte Technology Fast 50 lists. M5 Networks is one of the country’s leading outsourced IP phone system providers — in no small part because of Hoffman’s leadership. So Success asked Hoffman: what makes a boss good?
Hoffman says that the first key is this: “My business can only grow as fast as I can as a person.” That means that he himself is always growing and learning, a process he shares with employees. According to Hoffman, “Employees love that we all learn together, me and them.”
Focus on training is also big part of what makes Hoffman such a good leader; he feels that good training and follow up conversations will aid employees in the long run. Training extends to reading, too. Hoffman will provide any business book he’s asked for, provided that the employee who reads it will sit down and talk about it. As a result, Hoffman’s employees gain new perspectives through conversation, making the book a more valuable tool. But unlike some other bosses, Hoffman doesn’t think of training as a quick fix. “ROI on training is slow,” Hoffman cautions. “People change slowly.”
Hoffman also makes sure his employees aren’t afraid to tell the truth — to him or to customers. In fact, truth-telling is an integral value at M5, which gives a Trustworthiness Award to employees who (among other things) deliver unpleasant news to clients on the rare occasions when something goes wrong. He wants his clients and employees to know the company is honest in all of its dealings.
Finally, there is the way Hoffman handles communication. To keep the lines open, Hoffman makes sure to socialize with his staff, considering them “professional friends” rather than just employees, and staff members appreciate Hoffman’s casual manner.
Although all this sounds like it must have come naturally, Hoffman admits he had to experiment with leadership techniques for a while to get to where he is today. “I have an MBA from Wharton that covered none of this.”
