Chris Heaslip Joins the Board of Leadr

The last 9 years of my life have been consumed with Pushpay.

There's a famous quote that says, “You should be a musician if you couldn't live with yourself if you weren't a musician.” I think that’s true for startups. They aren’t something you do, they’re a way of life and therefore, the right reason to do a startup is because it’s a calling and you couldn’t imagine doing anything else with your life.

To put it in more dramatic terms, great startups aren't ideas arrived at through market analysis. They're wrongs with the world that you're seeking to right.

After finishing as Pushpay’s CEO last year, I was fortunate to be able to spend the last season with my family and today I’m really proud to announce that I’m joining the team at Leadr as the Executive Chairman. As part of my new role we’ll be relocating to Dallas, TX this coming summer.

I learned in my experience at Pushpay that the single most important predictor of success is great teams. Great teams are made up of great individuals. But the number one predictor of success is the leader. You can take an underperforming team, insert a great leader and results will immediately improve. When the leader gets better, the team gets better.

Many organizations seek to solve this problem by hiring in leaders from the outside. But that's slow, expensive and often those leaders aren’t culture fits. They come with a lot of bad habits.

Because of this, great organizations develop leaders, they don't hire them.

At Pushpay we embraced this approach wholeheartedly. Our VP of sales had never done sales before coming to the company. Our VP of Customer Success had never done customer success before. Our VP of processing had never done processing before. The list goes on...

I’m not saying that developing leaders is easy, nor is it a fit in every role. But when I look back on what I’m most proudest of in my time as a leader, it’s the people I developed along the way. Think about the things you remember most fondly, it’s the times when people showed faith in you, took a chance on you, believed in you and took the time to invest in you. 

I’m certain that decades from now, when the memories of revenue and customer targets have faded, those interactions with people are what I’ll remember. 

Leadership then is a privilege and an honor. 

It’s something that we have to take very seriously. We’re dealing with people's livelihoods and careers. 

We owe it to the people who work for us to steward that responsibility carefully. To not just go through the motions and put in the time - but rather to invest in our teams like we would want someone else to invest in us if the roles were reversed. Investing and growing our people isn’t a part of our jobs as leaders, it IS the job of a leader.

Unfortunately, we’re busier than we’ve ever been. And as much as we know we should invest more in our people, at the end of the day, execution takes priority over coaching. That’s why I believe so strongly in what we’re doing at Leadr. 

There is a very real wrong that needs righting: People development and project execution don’t have to be at odds. 

To solve this problem, we have created a platform which empowers managers with the tools they need to go from busy, inconsistent, and disconnected to prepared and effective coaches who develop leaders at all levels of the organization. 

Our software is based on a 3-part framework, which, at its core, utilizes the one to one meeting to its fullest potential, allowing you for the first time to get better project outcomes while developing your people. 

Leadr will become a full HR suite over time, but we’re starting by tackling the most important part first. No one should have a bad relationship with their manager. 

There will be more updates coming soon, and I hope you’ll join our mailing list as we figure out how to help organizations grow and develop high performing teams. I’ll be sharing some of what I’ve learned from trial and error, and our incredible team will be producing world class content on leadership development.

Today is day one, and the Leadr team couldn’t be more excited to build a long term enduring company solving a huge problem that exists in the world today.

Chris