Ellie Mirman's Startup Marketing Blog

I've been reading a great leadership book for new leaders and, in addition to learning some great tips on communication and coaching, I'm also realizing (again) how unique a place HubSpot is.

Earlier this week I traveled down to toasty Tampa, Florida for Social Fresh Tampa. It was my first time attending Social Fresh, and it was a fantastic time. I got to see old friends I hadn't seen in months, and got to meet a lot of great new friends.

When I was learning to drive, I had the problem that I drove too close to the right side of the road. Or maybe it was the left. It changed, depending on my point of comparison. Meaning, I was driving in relation to the lines on the road. This frequently resulted in me doing a little offroading or getting too close to the cars in the opposite lane.

I was listening to this recent HBR podcast on The Persuasive Power of Uncertainty. In the podcast, Zakary Tormala, associate professor of marketing at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, talks about the finding that being uncertain is surprisingly effective. It made me realize how important it is for a CEO in particular to show uncertainty with his employees.

There may be lots of articles and books and podcasts about what it takes to be a great leader, but this audio podcast presented by Bob Sutton had some great hallmarks of great leaders.

Over the last three years, I've learned that I'm a startup girl. I love the chaotic, exciting, difficult life of a startup. Honestly, it surprised me. I'm not sure why - I've always loved working in small, hard-working groups. My university had 18,000 undergrads and yet I ended up in a program where I knew almost everyone in my 60-person (hey that was a decently small size!) classes.

This boston.com recent article (or, republished article) on the "college rejection letter" got me thinking how important it is to actually get those rejection letters. (Hat tip to @KylePaice for tweeting out the article.)

I'm excited to share a video that was posted by one of very own blog readers (and of course fellow HubSpotter extraordinaire), Yoav Shapira. This video presentation, "Broken meetings (and how you'll fix them)" had some great tips that I just had to pass on, despite finding that the presenter himself was a bit annoying (sorry).

I'm a big believer in the power of your mindset over your success and happiness in work and life. A positive mindset has pulled me through a bunch of hard times and a negative mindset has dragged me through the mud even when things were going pretty darn well for me.

I was surprised to find that, in this leadership interview with VMWare CEO Paul Maritz, he cites "self-awareness" as a key quality when hiring employees. He shares that his favorite question to ask in an interview is, taking a project they've done in the past, "Thinking about it now, what would you have done differently? What did you learn from that?" If the answer ends with a lot of blame placed on someone else, for example, you can conclude that the person didn't learn much from the project and that they're not very self-aware.