154 - Can Your Team Tell You? With Micah Rowland

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them." --Ernest Hemingway If, as a leader, you're always the last to know what's going on or no one is asking you hard questions....there might be a problem.  Can they trust you?  Do they know you have their backs? On this episode I get to talk with Micah Rowland, the Chief Operating Officer of Fountain and we talk about creating a culture where....the questions I posed above get answered and he shares some great strategies for creating a culture that gets stuff done.  I know you'll dig him as much as I did. CHEERS! More on Micah... Micah Rowland isn’t your everyday builder. Maybe because he doesn’t build homes, cabinets, or even the software that he built during the earliest stages of his career. As Chief Operating Officer of Fountain, Micah builds people, teams, and processes that have taken multiple companies from 50 to 300 people and beyond, and $5 million to $35 million in revenue. After starting his career as a software engineer, Micah earned a Stanford MBA before switching tracks to management consultancy. This unusual path from engineering to business led him to roles with industry leaders, such as McKinsey & Company and Starbucks, where he worked in global strategy and brand management before gravitating toward startups in the SaaS space. Over 17 years, Micah has worked with companies ranging in size from 30 employees to over 100,000 and multiple startups from Series A to Series D funding — companies he helped take from $5 in revenue to $35 million. Through this journey, he has learned how to solve problems in everything from leadership and organizational development to operations, strategy, and pricing. With Fountain, the Series A-funded startup providing hiring automation software for today’s high-velocity service economy, Micah now helps to solve problems on a different scale. He credits being allowed to make mistakes and learn from them for sharpening his leadership, coaching, and human development skills. In fact, developing those skills has led him to discover what he most enjoys about his work — helping people grow both personally and professionally through the rewarding friendships he's been able to build in the workplace. Check out Fountain:  https://get.fountain.com/