COLUMN: Don’t Forget To Bring Your Team With You

CRN Executive Editor Jennifer Follett says that solution providers should take to heart a leadership lesson from LogicMonitor CEO Christina Kosmowski.

It was roughly 30 years ago heading into her sophomore year as an industrial engineering student at Northwestern University when LogicMonitor CEO Christina Kosmowski learned what she calls “the single most important lesson I’ve learned in my career.”

She didn’t learn it in a lecture hall, a library or a computer lab. She learned it on a soccer field.

In her freshman year, Kosmowski had played as part of the first recruited class on the university’s women’s varsity soccer team. Used to the success she had found as a high-school player, Kosmowski was devastated after the team that year won only three out of 22 games.

“It was a very frustrating experience, and I was furious,” Kosmowski told me recently during a fireside chat at Amazon Web Services’ Women of the Cloud College Tour at Boston’s Northeastern University. “I couldn’t take it. I cried after every game. It hurt my heart more than anything.”

And so she vowed that year two would be different.

“I got super ticked off and really trained like a madwoman,” Kosmowski recalled. “I just became obsessed.”

As a result, she turned up at preseason training that next summer in peak condition, besting her teammates at every test their coach laid out for them.

“All my teammates looked at me and they were like, “What? What are you? You’re just a freak of nature. What happened here?’ And I got really angry at them,” Kosmowski said. “I’m like, ‘Freak of nature? I’ve been working my butt off. I’ve been training every single day, and maybe if you guys did half of what I did, we would be a better team!’”

And that’s when her coach pulled her aside and delivered the words that would forever shape Kosmowski’s view of what it means to be a leader.

“She said, ‘I love the leadership of you calling them out and being accountable, but why the heck didn’t you drag them with you to all your training sessions?’ And it was just an incredible leadership moment for me to realize, ‘Yeah, I just went at this completely alone.’”

Kosmowski said it’s a leadership lesson she continues to draw on again and again.

“I even still struggle with that, especially as a CEO. Sometimes things are so crazy. I’m like, ‘Just do it, we’ve got to go do this,’ or, ‘I’m going to just go solve this.’ But if I can’t bring everybody else along with me on this journey, then I can’t be successful.”

So far, she and LogicMonitor have been pretty successful.

The company at the end of November announced an $800 million funding round that values the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based observability vendor—whose SaaS-based, AI-powered platform keeps tabs on infrastructure, cloud services and application performance—at $2.4 billion, inclusive of debt.

The leadership lesson of not forgetting to bring your team along with you is one that solution providers should take to heart in this age of constant change.

Channel businesses are continuously under pressure to adapt to the next big shift, whether that’s technological, like cloud computing, digital transformation and GenAI, or business model changes like the move to selling everything as a service and focusing on delivering business outcomes.

As we look ahead to 2025, it’s critical that solution provider leaders stay ahead of the curve. But it’s equally important to share your vision with your team, stoke their passion for what could be, calm their fears about the unknown and tap into their ingenuity to help you get where you need to be.

The worst thing you can do is get so far out in front that you’ve left your team behind.