Keep learning, embrace risk, build your brand: leadership advice from tech innovators

Poor leadership can ultimately have disastrous consequences for a company - just look at Blockbuster, BHS or Northern Rock. So how can you make sure you are motivating and inspiring your team to propel your company to a bright future? 

Top tech leaders recently came together in Edinburgh for the annual Turing Fest - and we were there to pick up their insights… and hear about the people who inspire them.

Learn continuously

From Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg - who famously finds time to read a book every two weeks, while heading a company worth more than $1.5 trillion - to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky - who lived in his own company’s rentals for six months to truly understand the business - a burning curiosity drives many of the most successful leaders.  

“The most successful CEOs I know are all just voracious learners,” says Mark MacLeod, a former CFO at Shopify who now coaches some of the world’s top CEOs. 

He points to his old boss at Shopify, Tobias Lütke - “another absolute relentless learner” - as a great example of harnessing continuous learning for continuous improvement. “He talked about getting 1% better every day,” Mark explains. “That could just be a cheesy poster in the hallway, but he had a process to make it happen - he would go home and replay his day every single day. Then he would course-correct either that same day or the very next day. 

“If you graph 1% improvement per day, that is a 37x transformation in a year. It’s really, really powerful.”

Embrace risk… but recognise you can make mistakes

Mark also praises tech titan Susan Wojcicki for her willingness to take risks. Employee number 16 at Google, she was their first marketing manager and, later, the CEO of YouTube. Though she was a humanities major at university, she discovered an interest in technology and went on to become “the most powerful woman on the internet”, according to Time magazine. 

Wojcicki was fearless from her beginnings at Google. Five months pregnant when she made the move from Intel, she would go on to be Google’s first employee to take maternity leave, and a powerful advocate for working mothers. 

But her biggest professional swing was persuading Google to buy YouTube back in 2006. By 2023, when Wojcicki resigned from her role as CEO, the company’s brand value was estimated at $29.7 billion. By the following year, it hit $31.7 billion. 

Still, when speaking at the University of California in 2019, Wojcicki urged students not to fall for their own hype. “Remember,” she said, “the Titanic was about a person with hubris who made a big mistake, and people died as a result. It’s really important to stay humble and aware and cautious that you can make mistakes.” 

Listen to your customers

The rise of generative AI is having a profound impact on society, with enthusiasts arguing it can improve efficiency, enhance customer experiences and drive innovation. But for true insight, it can’t replace old-fashioned customer conversations - according to Hannah Parvaz, award-winning growth expert and founder of marketing agency Aperture. 

“Most of your potential customers aren’t ignoring your product. They’re ignoring your message,” she explains. The only way to “unlock scale”, therefore, is to actually talk to your customers and find out what drives them: “You can’t prompt your way to product market fit.” 

And the good news is, this is one simple way you can set yourself apart from the competition. “Over 70% of the founders I talked to have never spoken to a customer,” Hannah continues. “So this is where most teams go wrong.”

Build your personal brand

Successful personal branding can help leaders drive business growth, says fractional CMO Oren Greenberg. It can play a role in generating leads and expanding sales pipeline, validating ideas, and even recruiting the best people. 

“Why build a personal brand? Because it helps your company,” he argues. “It creates trust, creates connection.” 

Oren has worked with scale-ups and startups for the past 20 years to help them crack growth. He’s also a whizz at using LinkedIn to drive his own brand, posting content that drives millions of organic impressions. With average CPM (cost per thousand impressions) at LinkedIn sitting at around $36, that’s tens of thousands of dollars in media, he points out. And that’s before you count the resulting invites to guest on podcasts and appear at events (like Turing Fest). Or the leads who get in contact with him directly through DMs. All of which gives you a head start in “the authority-building business”.

So how can you follow in his footsteps? The key, Oren says, is to be useful. Every time you post, think: how can I be of service to my audience? 

Maintain a healthy work-life balance

Elon Musk may like to boast of working 120 hours a week (that’s a mammoth 17 hours a day, including weekends) but there are plenty of leaders now pushing for a healthier relationship with work. 

Basecamp’s Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work argues that long hours, an excessive workload, and a lack of sleep shouldn’t be seen as a mark of honour… but rather a mark of stupidity.

After burning out early in her career, co-founder and CEO of Canva Melanie Perkins now prioritises boundaries - using weekends for “real breaks” and meditating every day. “Social media is quick to glamorise working all hours and pushing through without taking breaks,” she recently wrote on LinkedIn. “Now, I intentionally carve out time to recharge. Giving myself space to pause has been transformative - it helps me reset and approach the week ahead with clarity and energy. Contrary to what I originally thought, taking breaks helps me to ‘work smarter, not harder’.”

It is a trend that Mark MacLeod is glad to support. “I tell my CEOs all the time, today’s performance began last night - based on when you went to sleep and the quality of your sleep,” he says. Mark also recommends practising mindfulness and taking exercise. “The more clarity, the more focus you have, the better decisions you’re going to make.”

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