Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on downsizing with Esi Ansah, executive director of the Center for Leadership at Ashesi University and founder of Axis Human Capital, an organizational development consulting firm. From managing team morale to ensuring your downsizing plan is data driven, Ansah provides a clear blueprint for leaders facing tough HR decisions.

Without a doubt, downsizing is one of the most dreaded tasks – for CEOs and employees alike. Which is why Esi Ansah tries to prepare leaders to handle it with clarity, effective communication, and compassion. And she also reminds small to medium-size businesses that, regardless of size, every company needs to have policies and plans to deal with downsizing.

Key Takeaways

Gather data – before you even think about downsizing

“The most common mistake is the lack of data documentation. It always comes back to bite you. When you need to downsize, you need to justify every decision that you make.”

Honesty can be the hardest part of downsizing

“Sometimes it shocks people because they didn't see it coming, and they didn't see it coming because perhaps the leader in that organization did not articulate it clearly enough or, in the bid to avoid causing fear and panic, they actually avoid telling people the full truth.”

Communicating bad news requires data, transparency, empathy, and support

“One of the best things you can do, especially for SMEs, is: don't wait till all the decisions have been made and then, bam, you just release the information. Once you get a sense of whatever change in your circumstances is driving the need for downsizing, start with just sending out a couple of feelers and, you know, soft communication.”

Always follow your local labor laws

“If you skip any of those loops and an unhappy employee wakes up to the reality that, hey, I don't think I'm being treated fairly, and then off they go – sometimes without coming back to you to say, look, I realize that you've skipped some steps here. They go straight to the labor commission. And then once they call you in, that's not pleasant.”

CEOs shouldn’t offload everything to HR

“Visibility of leaders is extremely important in a time like this. The last thing you want is HR feeling already overburdened and probably handling all the pressure that comes from the team. But when you have a CEO who would go around, you know, walk the floor, talk to people, and where there's anything that he can do, you know, he does it and he makes it very visible.”

Communicate your vision for AFTER the downsizing

“If you focus on the reason why you're downsizing and you don't focus on what you are evolving to do differently, you will have people who see the doom and gloom and there's really nothing that inspires them about the future. That's dangerous. You lose more people that way.”

Listen to Esi Ansah’s advice on how to identify –— and, more critically, avoid – the most common pitfalls of downsizing. Learn how clear policies and transparent communication can help minimize messy post-layoff negotiations and allow leaders to focus on supporting laid-off employees through the transition, as well as those who stay.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on strategic HR with Rokhaya Ndiaye, CEO and founder of Ro&Partners, a human capital consulting firm. Gain valuable insights and strategies for shaping your organization’s long-term goals and aligning your people strategies to meet future challenges.

When it comes to dealing with humans, whether growing a talent base in a global marketplace or downsizing to meet long-term goals, Rokhaya Ndiaye (who goes by Ro) recommends employing empathy, using cultural sensitivity, and making a break from post-colonial mindsets. Ndiaye, whose company is headquartered in Senegal but conducts business internationally, understands firsthand the existing bias that talent only comes from the West. Her mission: to unlock the potential of Africa through its people. And she believes every company – private or nonprofit – should be strategically investing in its people.

Key Takeaways:

Think strategically

“Strategic HR is HR that is supporting the organization for the future. This is everything you do in terms of creating the stage for the organization to have the change management framework to be able to adapt to the changing ecosystem environment, as well as projecting themselves in the future.”

Rethink one-size-fits-all compensation

“The smart companies are adjusting to this global market we are in, they're running away from these international versus local packages. It’s about how you are paying a job, not how you are paying a local versus a national, an international person.”

Consider the impact of downsizing on those who stay

“At some point we have to downsize. But when it comes to people, we need to understand that downsizing has a very negative impact on people, but not only the people that are leaving the organization, the people that are staying as well. So we need to just make sure that we are very transparent and have a strong communication plan.”

Let people go with care

“The better you plan it, the easier for you to get through it as a company because that's not where you want your energy to go. You have to have a level of empathy, especially at a leadership level, to show people that you care.”

Listen to Ro Ndiaye’s advice to entrepreneurs and HR leaders for building strategic HR frameworks that align with your company’s values and adapt to regional and cultural realities.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on leadership with Collins Dobbs, a Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in leadership and a seasoned executive coach. According to Dobbs, becoming a truly phenomenal leader requires a deeper understanding of both yourself and your team, enabling you to navigate tough conversations, develop real connections, and create a culture where people feel safe to offer real feedback.

As an executive coach, Collins Dobbs has worked with senior leaders across industries to help them navigate complex team dynamics and enhance their emotional intelligence. As an instructor for the popular Interpersonal Dynamics course (affectionately known as "Touchy Feely"), he also helps young leaders in the Stanford GSB classroom to foster self-awareness, communicate more authentically, and develop the building blocks for effective leadership in their personal and professional worlds.

Key Takeaways

Be a signal generator

“People are looking for leaders to communicate how they navigate in the good times, but also in the challenging times. Are they open to innovation? Are they open to ideas? Are they open to creating opportunities for success and failure? That's a big job of leaders to generate those signals to say, it's okay. We welcome mistakes and risks as long as we learn from them and fix them going forward.”

Be open to giving and receiving feedback

“We come in and we have thoughts. And often underneath those thoughts are feelings. And so while the thoughts sometimes say what's important to us, oftentimes the feelings signal how important they are. We try to help the students understand both their thoughts and their feelings. And then as they interact with each other, understand their intentions, the impact of the behavior, and what comes up for them and what comes up for others as well.”

Embrace the unknowing

“A piece of leadership is about: What do I do in the not knowing? I don't know exactly what I need to know when markets change, when staffs change, when skills change. That's part of leadership. And part of it is, is a willingness to stand in the unknowing and a trust in oneself and others that we can figure it out.”

Make sure you have the right support system

“I think peer groups are tremendously important. If it's a CEO roundtable, or a group of alumni, do you have a circle of people where you can really be authentic? Because you're not alone.”

Lead with space, pace, and grace

“Can we pause? Can we create an understanding? Can we see where we're missing expectations from each other? Can we state what those expectations are? And then can we make a plan in terms of how we're willing to work together to meet that?”

Listen to Collins Dobbs’ advice to aspiring and experienced leaders on how to become not just a good leader, but a phenomenal one.

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Every entrepreneur understands the critical importance of sales to business success. But often, in the early stages of growth, teams tend to focus on marketing without having a strategic plan or process for how to turn leads into sales. Yann Le Beux, co-founder of a research and design firm in Senegal, and Zia Yusuf, a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group and Stanford Seed consultant, share their experiences and strategies for building and strengthening your sales strategy.

Yann Le Beux’s company, YUX Design, focuses on creating user-centered designs that address the unique needs of African markets, helping their clients to bridge the gap between global tech and local context. But Le had his own gap to bridge — between marketing efforts and sales conversions. Zia Yusuf, who has taught at Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner School of Design, lent his expertise in innovation and design thinking to help Le Beux and his team realize that their marketing and sales strategies must be aligned with the needs of specific customer segments. “You don't sell to companies, you sell to human beings,” Yusuf advises. “You're selling to very large organizations, but they're not your client and it's not even the business unit that's your client. It's not even the head of that business unit. There could be actually two, three different roles – and understanding how to sell to those people and individuals was kind of a little bit of a breakthrough as well.”

Le Beux admits that his small company didn’t grow quickly because it was constrained by talent issues. “But as soon as you start growing, you realize you have to feed all these people ready to work and you need to be much more consistent in your approach to business development and stop behaving like a spoiled child where clients come to you naturally,” he says.

Le Beux’s process started with creating a strong product-market fit for each of his business units, honestly assessing the competition, and transitioning from targeting companies to connecting with key decision makers. Yusuf also advises entrepreneurs to think about the true cost of sales and the effort required to get something. “When you're at an early stage as a company, you feel that every dollar that comes in is fantastic, but it may have taken 60 percent of the company working for three weeks to respond to an RFP which leads to a small dollar amount of revenue. You want it. So you're excited, but should you have spent those three weeks and 60 percent of your team pursuing a different opportunity in a different way?”

Hear how Le Beux and Yusuf worked together to balance marketing and sales while trying to scale, plus stories of partnering with Google and meeting the demands of a tech giant, along with strategic pricing during a global recession.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on cross-cultural dynamics with Michele Gelfand, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor in organizational behavior. Gain new insights and strategies for understanding your company’s culture – from tight to loose – and how you can use that knowledge to build cultural intelligence in your organization, navigate interactions, enhance company-wide innovation, and drive business growth.

Companies and countries can be a lot like people. Some are tight. Others are loose. Neither is inherently good or bad, according to Michele Gelfand, a leading expert on the impact of organizational culture and the best-selling author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World.

Gelfand says this important and often invisible force can drive behavior and ultimately performance – which is why she finds the subject so fascinating and why she believes entrepreneurs should pay attention to culture as they build their leadership and business.

Key Takeaways

Culture matters

“If we don't understand culture, we're putting ourselves and our businesses at risk. All cultures have rules, and they're really one of our best inventions because they help us predict each other's behavior and coordinate. They're the glue that keeps us together.”

Tight vs. Loose

“Tight cultures have strict rules and very reliable punishments for when you deviate from rules. They restrict the range of behavior that's permissible in any context. Loose cultures have weaker rules, their wider range of behavior that's permissible.”

Strive for flexible tightness

“Loose cultures are more creative, but they don't necessarily scale up. Tighter cultures are better able to implement and scale up, but they're not as good at coming up with these really novel ideas. And so the big trick here is: How do you bring together both of these elements?”

Watch out for resistance to cultural change

“Try to balance accountability and empowerment, but pay close attention to pushback. Extreme change can be very threatening for people's sense of control, predictability, and order that's really needed in these contexts. And what we know is that we need to manage these sources of resistance.”

Listen to Michele Gelfand’s advice to entrepreneurs for creating culturally ambidextrous organizations and learn more about her future research. Don’t forget to take Gelfand’s quiz for determining where you and your team fall on the tight/loose spectrum.

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Is AI part of your business strategy? Well, if it’s not, it probably should be. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Arun Jagannathan, two-time entrepreneur, enthusiastically agree on that. In this episode you’ll gain strategic insights and practical tools from an AI visionary and hear how one intrepid entrepreneur is pushing himself and his company to embrace AI.

Arun Jagannathan is the founder of not one, but two, startups in India. CrackVerbal helps students prepare for exams and make smarter career decisions, and Yzerly enhances corporate communication through innovative training programs. Jagannathan says, “Many employees today are asking: What is our AI strategy? Because nobody is in a bubble. Everybody is hearing this, right? And they know that if we are on a growth path, on a growth trajectory, then AI has to be a part of the strategy.” So, he’s experimenting and adapting across different facets of his business to reap the full benefits of AI.

Ethan Mollick is here to help. He’s a professor, blogger, and best-selling author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, a practical guide for thinking and working with AI. Mollick’s practical experience, deep research, and endless curiosity enable him to guide entrepreneurs on the AI journey so they can tackle it more practically, systematically, and creatively. He begins by asking entrepreneurs four questions in the face of AI: What special thing have you done that is no longer important? What impossible thing can you now do? What can you move down market or democratize? What can you have upmarket or personalized?

“I think if you think about those sets of ideas, you end up in pretty good shape,” Mollick says. He also places great importance on keeping “humans in the loop” and so does Jagannathan. “What AI does is, it makes good very easy, but great is still very hard,” Jagannathan explains.

Hear how Jagannathan answers those four important questions and learn how to ask them of yourself and your company while navigating the challenges that companies and employees face when integrating AI into their businesses.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on going global – a guide for expanding your business beyond borders. Steve Ciesinski, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in entrepreneurship, walks you through the pitfalls and possibilities of making the move from local venture to global enterprise.

It goes without saying that having an outstanding product or service is key to business success. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when you want to expand your business – regionally and/or globally. According to Steve Ciesinski, scaling introduces additional challenges, including cultural and regulatory differences, economic and political risks, language barriers, supply chain struggles, and more. However, he believes that entrepreneurs who plan carefully and execute flawlessly can create value on a global scale.

Steve Ciesinski has had plenty of experience advising entrepreneurs on global expansion. He’s a Stanford GSB lecturer in entrepreneurship, past president of SRI International and other Silicon Valley firms, and an investor and board member of growth-oriented tech companies and mission-based organizations.

Three Key Takeaways for Going Global:

Your product market fit might not fit in a different market

“Things are very, very different and very subtle sometimes as you get into a marketplace. You have to be very agile. You have to be super flexible.”

Find the right person for the right place

“If you're going to go to another country and you're not going to be there personally as the founder, then who's going to run that country for you? You have to have somebody there that you completely, 100 percent trust, because things will go wrong.”

Regulatory compliance is a tricky business

You have to be very, very careful. You have a choice. When you have a new thing, do you try to cooperate with the government? How long will that government be in place? You have some choices early on as to what you do in whatever country. You may be successful in Nigeria, but in Kenya, or if you were trying to go across the pond to Mexico, you may not be so successful with your product.”

Listen to Steve Ciesinski’s advice on what to keep in mind when entering new markets so you can scale with less friction and more success.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on AI — a practical guide for experimenting and engaging with artificial intelligence. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, AI visionary, and best-selling author walks us through the hype, fears, and potential of this transformative and complex technology.

AI is reshaping business, society, and education with unprecedented speed. Ethan Mollick urges business leaders and educators to get in there and figure it out for themselves — to experiment and discover, rather than sitting on the sidelines waiting for AI to come to them. His latest book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, is a practical guide for thinking and working with AI so you can determine how and where it can be utilized most effectively.

Mollick believes that AI can help entrepreneurs at every stage of business, including coming up with the very idea for the business itself. “AI out-innovates people in most cases,” he says, “so you should probably be using it to help you generate ideas.” In fact, he encourages us to think about AI as a co-founder to bounce ideas off. Mollick also acknowledges that people need to push through those initial couple hours of resistance when exploring AI. “There's a lot of reasons people stop using AI. It's weird. It freaks them out. It gives them bad answers — initially. You need to push through, like there is a point of expertise with this, where you start to get what it does and what it doesn't. Ten hours is my loose rule of thumb for how much time you have to spend using these systems to kind of get it.”

Mollick’s Four Essential Rules for Integrating AI into Work and Life

1. Always invite AI to the table.

“You don't know what AI is good for or bad for inside your job or your industry. Nobody knows. The only way to figure it out is disciplined experimentation. Just use it a lot for everything you possibly can.”

2. Be the human in the loop.

“The AI is better than a lot of people in a lot of jobs, but not at their whole job, right? And so, whatever you’re best at, you're almost certainly better than the AI is.”

3. Treat AI like a human

AI models are “trained on human language and they're refined on human language. And it just turns out that they respond best to human speech. Telling it and giving tasks like a person often gets you where you need to go.”

… (but tell it what kind of human to be)

“AI models often need context to operate. Otherwise they produce very generic results. So a persona is an easy way to give context. ‘You are an expert marketing manager in India, focusing on technology ventures that work with the US’ will put it in a different headspace than if you say you're a marketer or if you don't give it any instructions at all.”

4. Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.

“We're early, early days still. I mean, there's a lot of stuff still being built.”

Listen to Ethan Mollick’s insights on how AI can level the playing field for startups and how entrepreneurs and teams can use it to enhance creativity, efficiency, and innovation. Also, be sure to subscribe to Mollick's Substack blog/newsletter One Useful Thing, a research-based view on the implications of AI, where Mollick offers free resources and prompts.

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