Know What You Don’t Know: Interview with Sabrina Horn, CEO of HORN Strategy
I recently went one on one with Sabrina Horn. Sabrina is the CEO of HORN Strategy and author of the new book Make It, Don’t Fake It.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Sabrina: As a child of German immigrants, I was infused with my parents’ survival instincts and entrepreneurial spirit. I was raised to strive to control my own destiny. After getting a graduate degree in Public Relations and working for a few years, I wanted to start my own firm. I had an idea for how I would serve my clients with a different, integrated approach to communications. I identified a market of business software companies that would benefit from my services. At 29 years old and with no management training, no capital, no employees and a four-page business plan, I took a vacation day and pitched a startup on my capabilities. By the time I got home, I received a message that I had won their business.
The irony of it all was when I told my parents that night about my big win. They told me they didn’t think I would be successful. Their reasons: I had no formal training or education in business and my chances of “making it” were slim at best. But after a day of self-reflection and re-assessing my risk factors, I decided to proceed anyway. I believed that if I didn’t try, I would never know if I could be successful.
Adam: What do you hope readers take away from your new book?
Through two lenses, as a CEO running my own firm and as a PR strategist to thousands of executives, my goal with Make It, Don’t Fake It is to help leaders run their businesses with a renewed focus on integrity, and to resist the temptation to fake it. “Fake it till you make it” is the worst business advice ever and will only sabotage success. In my book I offer real, workable strategies with firsthand accounts of painful mistakes and lessons learned. I hope to empower executives to disarm fear and organize risk, deal with losing and loneliness, plan for the unexpected, and create a strong brand designed for long-term success.
Adam: What are your best tips on crisis management?
Sabrina:
Preparation -- The worst time to develop a crisis plan is during a crisis. Having preemptive crisis plans in your back pocket that are tailored to the possibility of a global pandemic, cyberattack, war, catastrophic earthquake, product failure or other internal crisis are not an unreasonable precaution in the world in which we live today. The best plans outline the protocol, communication responses, mitigation processes, and recovery procedures for any given crisis.
Honesty is Your Only Policy -- In an actual crisis, never say anything you do not absolutely, positively know to be true. Bad information, like squeezed toothpaste, is impossible to put back into the tube. Truth may evolve as a crisis develops, so add new information as you get it—but only as you get it.
Take Responsibility -- If the situation is due to something you did (or failed to do), you must admit it, own it, and explain it. Then talk about next steps and how the situation will be corrected.
Frequency and Simplicity -- Don’t hesitate to be repetitive in giving instructions. People need to hear your information more than once and through multiple channels, especially when they are being personally affected by a crisis. Appoint only one spokesperson. Always keep your communication simple and direct, using pictures and visuals whenever possible.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Sabrina:
Integrity is the table stakes for leadership. A leader with integrity is unbreakable. Leading with authenticity and honesty will always steer you down the right path.
Humility is a superpower. The best leaders are secure in knowing that they don’t know everything, and they have no problem asking for help, learning from others, even apologizing for their mistakes. Humility draws people in, and drives open-mindedness, understanding, and empathy.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Sabrina:
Be humble enough to learn from your mistakes. Practice doing postmortems with your teams and ask what you could have done better.
Visualize future scenarios. I call it, watching myself in my own movie. How do I want to come across, and how do I want the situation to play out?
Study other great business leaders and apply their lessons to yourself.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
Sabrina:
Always lead with integrity: leading with integrity can be hard because it requires facing reality and the truth. There are no short hacks to business success. Faking it will only sabotage your plans and ruin your reputation.
Hope for the best and plan for the worst: learn how to operate in limbo. Develop crisis and contingency plans for the worst possible scenarios alongside your regular business and operational plans. Make sure your core values, vision and value proposition always remain in alignment.
Build a personal safety net of mentors: it can be very lonely at the top. Make sure you have access to the handful of people who have been in your shoes and will tell you what you need to hear (not what you want to hear).
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading and managing teams?
Sabrina: The best teams of any kind are those whose members possess skills that complement you and one another. Your team should broaden your perspective and your capacity to act. It should not simply duplicate you. If everyone is thinking the same way, nobody is thinking. Whatever skills or expertise you need in your hires, focus on qualities that embody integrity and a respect for reality. And hire people for where your business is headed, not just where it is today.
By the way, harsh as this sounds, the sooner you face reality and get rid of your bad hires -- and you will make them — the better. One bad apple really can spoil the whole fruit bowl, and rapidly. It is critical to take the time and effort to get to the bottom of conflict and resolve it, or failing that, to part ways justly but quickly.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topic of communications?
Sabrina:
Audience: Always, always, always consider your audience. Communication is rooted in psychology. Who are they and what is their predisposition? How will they be affected by what you have say?
Message: Ahead of time, outline the top three key points you need to make. Stay focused on those key points throughout, and then summarize again at the end.
Authenticity: Be honest and direct. Do your homework up front, get the facts and stick to them. Never give false hope or predict.
Communicating in Conflict: Begin by expressing your desire to resolve the matter at hand. Always begin with a positive message. Be very clear with yourself about where you want to end up. Consider interim steps as short-term solutions and progress goals.
Complaints are Gifts: Welcome criticism and be grateful for it. Most likely you will get useful data that will identify a new problem or help you move closer to a resolution. Show understanding and empathy by asking questions about the problem.
Body Language: Is your body turned toward the person or group you are speaking with? Are your hands and arms unclasped? Gestures open? Posture tall (not slumped), yet comfortable?
Tough Questions: In advance, think through the toughest questions you might get (the ones you don’t want to answer). Then come up with factual, viable answers. If you get a question that you don’t know the answer to, it’s ok to say you don’t have all the facts to respond at that moment. Provide a timeframe in which you will respond, and then do so.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing and branding?
Sabrina: Everything a company does – from its sales tactics and marketing campaigns, to its culture and the snacks in the breakroom – reflect its brand. Creating an authentic brand is hard enough. Maintaining that brand’s authenticity over time is extraordinarily complex and challenging, both art and science.
It’s Your Brand, Own It: A brand’s representation of reality begins with and grows under the leadership of a company’s founders, its CEO, and its top executives. Make sure you as a leader, are ever mindful of that, and that the keys to your brand are always in your back pocket.
Core Values: A brand should be rooted in a company’s heritage and culture, connected to a set of core values that are the company’s very reason for being. A values statement defines priorities, business practices, and standards. It defines who you are and identifies to whom you are beholden. Your brand, in turn, is a reflection of the entire operation. When your brand has lost its sheen, revisit those core values to see what is out of alignment.
Protect Your Brand: Understand “efficiency cuts.” Avoid shortcuts that promise to reduce costs or that masquerade as “efficiency.” Any shortcut that compromises thoroughness or quality erodes values, culture, and, inevitably, brand. Make sure you are clear on the benefits and even clearer on the downsides to any proposed shortcut.
Investigate expansion and contraction initiatives. Take the time and effort to really understand what’s behind any proposed expansion into new geographies, product lines, or customer segments. Investigate why certain markets are being cut or why a product is being discontinued.
Monitor employee morale. See and be seen with your people. Go to the cafeteria and eat with them. Attend the family picnic. Talk to their spouses. Spend your time talking with people you never talk to. When those who work with or for you begin to feel dissatisfied, you can be sure that something is brewing.
Listen to the voice of your customers. Depending on your type of business, form a customer advisory council. Pay close attention to your online reputation. In large measure, customers speak with their wallets, but they speak with feedback, too. One way or another, they will tell you when you have disappointed them. Respond with gratitude and address the problems.
Watch for subcultures. As you grow, you need to accommodate and integrate other cultures. Finding new tools to encourage communication across groups and putting an emphasis on inclusivity across the board are vital. Integration specialists can help you avoid disaster in the assimilation of new and differing behaviors, values, and brands.
Be different, not just better. Look beyond your own company and study the competition. Being a competitive brand does not always mean being the better brand, which can be narrow thinking. Sustaining relevant differentiation cuts through marketplace clutter and lives up to your brand every day.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Sabrina: Know what you don’t know.
Running a communications firm, our business was all about dealing with information: finding it, writing and speaking it, sharing and leading with it. Most importantly, it was about understanding reality and getting to the truth. Whether in times of crisis in my own firm or in supporting our clients through their own challenges, my approach was always to disarm fear and organize risk with information. It was also critical to staying level-headed, asking the right questions that needed to be asked, and leading with authenticity regardless of what was coming at me. That quote has been relevant to me in my professional career, but also as a parent and as an everyday citizen.
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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