Why Followers Follow: Lesson from the Selfless Leader
I’d like to share with you a story about the power and importance of doing right by others.
Tasso Roumeliotis is a serial entrepreneur, servant leader CEO who built a profitable tech company. He grew up in a modest, immigrant household. His dad struggled with a disability and his family owned a convenience store that their mother ran. She was, and still is, a true matriarch of the family.
Tasso was blessed with two gifts:
the ability to quickly learn and retain knowledge, and
an unparalleled work ethic.
In between school and working at the convenience store, he’d read constantly. In doing so, he discovered his gift of retaining knowledge and invested in it by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. His dad was proud of his son’s big brain that he nurtured daily.
Tasso went on to McGill University. After graduation, he was recruited to Bain Consulting. At Bain he went on to become the highest ranked Associate in his class. He then went on to graduate from Harvard Business School.
His dad once said to Tasso, “I’m the only man that truly wants you to be more successful than I.”
Such moving, heartfelt words said by a loving father to his son. An example that all fathers should follow. Tasso’s mission was to become an entrepreneur, not just for the sake of building personal wealth, but to build wealth for others.
About 15 years after graduating business school, he met his goal by scaling a start-up to hundreds of millions of dollars, changing the lives for many of the 150+ employees in his company while building a product that keeps kids safe online. If you ask him what he revels in the most, the thing that puts the biggest smile on his face is neither the expensive electric car nor his multimillion-dollar home. For this caring and persevering leader, it’s the strength and perspective he gained by overcoming the adverse period in his life, in his teens, not playing the victim, and giving back to those who helped him.
In other words, his achievement is not in the material things; it’s in doing the honorable things. This means hard work, not taking recurring handouts, and doing right by others.
And this lesson runs like a steady current through his business.
One of his company’s values that is engraved on the walls in the headquarters building is the phrase: Win as a Phalanx.
If you’re a fan of Ancient Greece, you’ll recall the Phalanx was a Spartan fighting formation. Your shield served to protect the person next to you and so on down the line. Corporations will routinely say, “We win and lose as a team.” But I’ve always felt Win as a Phalanx has more heart.
Tasso knew this value resonated in his building because the employees gravitated to it. They always knew never to play the victim. If they made a mistake, they owned it and helped their fellow employees with the same.
Few organizations, especially those with almost 200 employees, can say they have this type of culture. But for those that do, this culture stems from their leader and the other leaders with whom they surround themselves, creating a no-victim, meritocratic culture where you get what you earn. And, if you don’t, then you try it again. After all, success rarely happens after the first effort.
As the Japanese saying goes: Fall down seven, get up eight.
I hope you enjoyed this.
Chris
Chris Greco is a dedicated father, husband, and CEO known for his faith, underdog grit, and perseverance. His boundless energy and core values approach have been instrumental in uniting organizations to achieve goals that once seemed unattainable.
Beyond his professional achievements, Chris serves as a Board Director, advisor to growth-stage companies, volunteer, and keynote speaker. He resides in Kansas City with his wife, two children, and their rescue dog.
