Good leadership is about stripping away the self-gratifying illusions and driving the company toward a goal, superstar technology industry CEO Marissa Mayer told an audience of tens of thousands at last night’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
In crafting a paradigm shift at internet colossus Yahoo! Inc (NSDQ:YHOO), Mayer views herself as a defensive player within the company, helping her business teams drive good ideas into the end zone by removing barriers.
"Good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they do things," Mayer said. "Your job is to play defense. The team is offense, they’re going to move the ball. Your job is to say, ‘Hey, we’re running in this direction,’ and then clear a path and get the obstacles, the process, the bureaucracy, the naysayers out of the way and help people run as fast as they can."
It’s a strategy that has served Mayer well in her relatively short time in executive roles at top-tier technology firms.
She’s made quite a name for herself, thanks in part to a slate of highly visible roles at Google (NSDQ:GOOG), where she is credited with the look of the search engine’s pristine home page. She was also integral to a slate of projects from Gmail to Google Maps and just about everything in between, leaving the company as vice president of search products and user experience.
She joined Yahoo last year as president and CEO and has since presided over a 120% increase in the company’s share value. This year she was the 1st woman named to Fortune magazine’s top 40 under 40 in business.
During an informal fireside chat with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Mayer attributed some of her tactics to lessons learned from mentor and former boss Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google. Schmidt helped her understand that her role, once she moved from designer and product manager to executive, was no longer to directly shape products, but to align the company in a shared direction and then clear the way.
"You don’t really design the products," Mayer said, with a hint of nostalgia for her former role as designer. "You do get to design the organization. You get to design the strategy, you get to design how does it feel to be an employee at Yahoo, you get to design how does it feel to be a user of Yahoo."
"It’s one of the most complicated and interesting design problems I’ve ever worked on in my career," she said.
