Champion Story 25 | John Mavriyannakis
Recorded on December 20, 2018
Biography: John Mavriyannakis is the Partner, Growth at Maverix Private Equity, a fund focused on technology-enabled growth and disruption. He is an expert in envisioning, planning and executing successful, full-cycle business initiatives. He is a Business Transformation, Product, Sales Executive with 20 years of experience, who has led and advised organizations in Canada, the States, Europe and Japan in the development, evolution, and execution of their transformation strategy.
Thank you for taking the time to do this, John. I know community is important. There is a real longing for community in our industry. Every time I speak at an event or conference about mental health, I always get several people who reach out wanting to chat. A lot of people.
What's surprising is most of them were founders too.
Yes, for sure. One of the things that I try to do through my work that's so important is to connect people and create an environment of communication between founders, their team members, and their peers. So much of what a founder does is built on very long hours. It can be a very isolated job.
Sometimes you just feel like you're the only one. It is through discussion and communication that you start to realize that the challenges, the ups, and the downs are consistently felt by everyone.
Feeling isolated is not an isolated feeling. Everyone goes through it regardless of level, role, or background.
The other part that is incredibly important is that this needs to be brought forward and given a voice. People need to feel comfortable to talk about their mental and emotional state. We need to get tighter on what definitions are, what interpretations are, moving stigmas from things. To know that it's okay to talk openly and be vulnerable, to ask for help, and have the support of those around us.
There's two sides to everything including being a founder.
There's the great part of being a founder, you're creating, you're building, and you're growing this community of people who genuinely believe in your idea. There's this vision that you had and now customers, peers, your team and your family are all in to help you achieve it. It is at this point you realize that the vision is a double-edged sword. It is the realization that this vision comes with all these people relying on you. The elation can become fear and anxiety, "How do I make sure these people get paid? How do I make sure that they are safe and protected” They have bills, school debt, kids, and partners, each decision I make impacts all of these people and me.
As a company grows, it’s no longer about the founder. It is now a family of 15, 25,50 or 250.. It can become a very isolated world as you stack all of the pressures of what all of these people require of you on top of each other.
This is a lot for a person who may be in their mid-30s. Some a little bit younger, some a little bit older. They're thrust into this thing, and without having the right coaching and people around them to help them learn how to lead, how to govern, and how to work through these things, it's a very, very difficult place to be. It can feel very isolated, and it can weigh heavy. Along with all the other things they have going on. None of this stuff's in isolation, it just gets added to the pile.
Yeah. The stress can be so tough, especially as we scale and people depend on us. I’d really like to ask: I know you support a lot of founders. What is it that founders themselves could do to improve their own mental health or emotional wellbeing?
Prioritization is at the top. There are always so many competing needs that prioritizing and saying no become two incredibly powerful tools. After we decide what our focus and objectives are the next steps is what is the right playbook to achieve?
There are a lot of tech founders that are great at prioritizing a technology product and have put in place the tools to manage scope, requirements, issues, etc. This comfort zone for many tech founders can also leave a potential blind spot when it comes to team and culture. Part of what I try to do is to support founders’ understanding that team health and culture are as or more important than product and the process to put in place a playbook to build and maintain it. The goal is to build an environment where the culture brings people together and creates a place that people want to be a part of.
Culture and team health can be a challenging concept for some founders. Sometimes I ask them to picture a holiday like Thanksgiving when their entire extended family comes together. I want them to think about the difference in how they feel in the lead-up and at the events when it is full of great, open, and supportive people versus when everyone is fractured. Then I ask them to picture themselves as the hosts of the event and that it is Thanksgiving every day. That is what they have signed up for. Without getting the culture right it is almost impossible to get the product right, or certainly not without a lot of additional time and cost.
After prioritization comes communication. Whether that's professional or personal.
In professional sports, there are sports physiologists who live and breathe with the team. They ensure players communicate and express their vulnerabilities, fears, anxieties, etc and put them on the table. To really hone not just the physical, but the mental aspect of their game. You see this now becoming more prevalent in the industry, specifically finance. In my opinion, we need to see this role across all organizations and verticals available at all levels. This is a key Talent and HR capability that is missing. This is a professional function and needs professional staff on hand who are there to listen, assess, diagnose and support. This needs to be a call to action.
Right. I love that you brought in the sport's analogy as well. I was just thinking about Kawhi Leonard and his recovery this past year. How he had a whole team helping him with his physical and mental recovery so that he could play for the Raptors.
They're such high performers and they have a whole team around them. I feel like founders are like the professional athletes of the tech industry.
And as in every industry, we need to look outside of our silo for stuff like this to see where success comes from. When we look at what others have done, we realize that there is no stigma around having a sports psychologist and spending time with them. Athletes use them to hone their game and their mental toughness. The fact that they are leveraging psychologists to help the mental aspect, why aren’t we doing the same for founders or in all business?
We have founders who are incredibly brilliant, why shouldn’t we have people to help them hone their mental and emotional capabilities even more?
Mental and emotional challenges can have a direct negative impact on employees, customers, or peers. Regardless of size, these can have a massive impact on the success of a company, which is magnified even more in a scaling business.
The pressure isn't just at the founder level, it's at all the levels. To go ahead and only focus on the founder is a mistake as well. Everyone's role is so interlinked that any failure in the organizational fabric is felt throughout. A sustainable company cannot exist without a strong culture and healthy team, emotionally and mentally.
Yes. We need to be prepared for the lows and the highs, but unfortunately, that safety net isn’t there for most companies.
One of the best ways is to be able to have people who you can trust and have those conversations with, communicate with, get feedback, get guidance, and feel like you aren't alone. You need to give trust and be vulnerable and when we have the right network it can be powerful.
Everyone wants the secret sauce to success. I don't think there is a silver bullet but one ingredient has to be feeling like you are supported and not alone. When you're able to reach out to a friend, peer, or person in the space next to you; tell them you are scared, anxious, or tired and they disarm and invite you in with a simple, "Me too." Knowing you are not alone. You're not isolated. These things you're going through are what everyone is going through. You have someone to talk to and understand how they're coping. At a minimum, you can take a step back and share the experience with.
It's vitally important because when you're able to talk about something, it can become more real and less scary, simpler and more understandable. You take some of the noise that you create in your own mind away.
That’s quite special to have a community like that. People you can trust.
A trusted network of relationships become so vitally important in what can feel like a disconnected world. It allows us to connect and have that sense of belonging to something real and tangible.
Social media, the focus on a perfect veneer, and the lack of open and honest discourse can heighten people's feeling of isolation. One of our primary needs is to belong and social media makes this into something very superficial.
We need to find that network that wants to support us beyond the veneer and actually be engaged and present in the discussion. When someone reaches out for help it is on us to support them as best as we can.
I got to ask then: How do you cultivate those deep relationships?
This is a great question. Like every rom-com, someone has to take the first step. I try to instill the notion that the founder and senior leaders initiate. They take the first step, the leader must lead. They are vulnerable first, they set the tone and eat their own cooking. You expose yourself, which is, "Here's the situation that I've gone through and this is where I'm at,” and you give them an ability to feel safe to bring up their stuff.
But it's always a challenge of whether people recognize it. Are they ready to go ahead and engage? This takes time and takes trust. Our role as leaders is to continually cultivate the culture, mental and emotional health of our team. It's kind of cliché, but step one in any program is the admission that you need help. We have to create an environment that is ready when they are ready, people have to reach out on their own.
More and more, there's a realization that it's okay to say that there's a problem. That it's okay to talk about these kinds of things and there's a much greater openness to have those discussions.
When you speak about this, I feel there's hope in the industry right now, because now, more and more people are talking about this. Even at Web Summit, Alexis Ohanian from Reddit did an incredible keynote that talked about mental health and fatherhood.
This is exactly what we were talking about a moment ago. Others feel comfortable talking about it by somebody else being vulnerable first. By Alex being vulnerable on that stage and being very open, all of a sudden, you see there's a lot of people that want to join the conversation.
My wife's a female founder who has founded several companies. The one thing that's always been the greatest strain on her is this notion of work-life balance. Asking, "Am I spending enough time on my family? On my work? Am I a good parent"
This is me being vulnerable now. This is a very personal story. She was traveling significantly and I was home with our boys. We felt the greatest lesson we could teach two boys is that we are both parents and we both share parenting responsibilities. What became clear they had no sense of traditional gender-based parenting roles, those blinders are taught. Sadly, those blinders were full-on for my employer at the time. I still remember the day a senior member of the organization pulled me into a meeting and told me that if I wanted to continue to progress my career my wife would have to stop traveling because of the optics of a senior male leader as a primary caregiver (this is not the language that was used of course). When escalated with the national head of HR it was dismissed under the umbrella of ‘some people are tied to an old way of thinking’ and dropped.I always hope that in today’s world it would have been handled differently. This was one of the most painful situations I have had, not for me but for my wife. Take the mental challenges of being a parent away from their children, leading a growing and high-stress business, and to have added mental and emotional burden that her success is impacting that of her partners. I quit shortly thereafter.
We have shared this story with our kids. They need to see that while we have created a world where parents support each other, work together and celebrate one another's success this view is not shared by everyone. It's up to us to choose what we do as we go forward
I always tell people it’s not about work-life balance, but work-life integration.
That's absolutely right. I am using this.
Since your wife is also a founder you raise a family together, how do the two of you make it work?
Not surprisingly it is a lot of what we have talked about; prioritization and communication.
It comes down to her and I communicating and managing each other's calendars a great deal. We are flexible, we each sacrifice for one another and we try to leverage technology as much as possible to keep it all organized.
Leveraging technology makes the world smaller. If we are traveling for work our boys wake up and FaceTime us. This became a lot better when they learned about time zones. They take screenshots of homework questions or things they have written and send them to her for help of review. We have all these things available to us. For the kids, they just learned to be flexible and plan around schedules, cities, and time zones. And when we are together, we are present and engaged. It is exactly what you said, work-life integration.
When we give up on the stigma tied to gender bias and all that crap, we have the realization it's actually not that difficult. We realize we are actually pretty resilient. Sure, things go sideways sometimes, but things go sideways sometimes regardless. We learn to deal with what we have, and we communicate and work through it. There are ups and downs and there are hard times. That's what part of being part of a team is though.
There's no one's marriage, there's no one's family, there's no one's company, there's no one's team, that's as perfect as it all sounds on the outside. There's no perfect, there's no silver bullet. This is the curse of social media that makes the world seem this way. It's a random walk. There's the luck we create for ourselves and everything else that goes along with it.
There's a lot of hard work. Whether it's family. Whether it's work. It all takes investment, it takes time, it takes the ability to be flexible and go through and understand what other people's challenges are too.
Perspective is so important, but sometimes we lose that when we are at those lows. Especially when we are stressed out and overwhelmed. What helps you regain that perspective, that resilience?
I give this advice to everybody: talk to as many people as you can. I engage my trusted network whether they are a tech founder or a restaurateur, "This is the crap I'm stuck in right now. Where do I go from here?"
Sometimes I need to vent, sometimes I want to get their assessment on a situation, sometimes I want to talk about how to solve it and where to start, and sometimes it is all of the above. The goal ultimately is to figure out how to start pushing the rock forward. Life is Newton's Second Law. A body in motion just tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to stay at rest. If you start moving forward in the muck, you're going to get through the muck.
When you're in the muck, the biggest problem is you never see the forward momentum. You don't see that things are actually getting better. You just see that the muck feels heavier, wetter, and more clay-like. It is those trusted people on the outside who can actually see the progress and outside perspective and feedback that it's actually getting better.
Having that trust in people to talk to is helpful. Having them look at it from an outside perspective. Whether professional peers, trusted confidants, friends, or people you don't know at all, it's so important to have those conversations and get some of those insights.
Find those people that you can communicate with and are really invested in seeing you be successful.
Thank you for doing this interview. So grateful.
Thank you.