Amy Howe was an athlete as a kid growing up in Buffalo, New York, but she always expected she and her twin sister would take over their father’s food broker business someday. But after a BS from Cornell, an MBA from Wharton and then nearly 20 years at first Andersen Consulting and then McKinsey, she took a different path.
“I’ve had many sliding-door moments in my career,” she says when asked how she ended up in her current role as CEO of the online betting and fantasy sports behemoth FanDuel. “I didn’t plan any of it.”
An opportunity to work for a former McKinsey client brought her to Live Nation, first as the COO of Ticketmaster and then as president of the North American business. “Running a technology company was new to me, the sports world was new, but it felt like I was always made for that,” she says. “It was just a great fit.” Four years ago, she was recruited to FanDuel.
The job has gotten her back to a central idea in both sports and business: how to build a great team. As the rare woman at the helm of a sports or technology company (let alone both), and with still relatively few female CEOs in the business world, Howe brings a unique perspective to the challenge, which she’ll share at our next Women Leaders Connect online discussion on June 18, Leading Dynamic Teams: Lessons from Sports (join us!). Howe spoke with us ahead of the event to share some of her key ideas.
Your work is all about following teams—and also building teams as a business. What are some of the keys to creating really dynamic, well-functioning teams?
It all starts with a shared vision and making sure that you’ve got a team that understands where you’re going, and is excited about going there with you. It sounds easy to say, but oftentimes when you come into an organization, especially in our world where sports betting and gaming is a very, very dynamic space, making sure that we’ve got clarity of vision and that we’re being intentional around what our priorities are—and importantly what our priorities are not—is critical. So getting everybody aligned and excited around that north star and where you’re going.
The second thing is getting the right team in place. Having a team of all quarterbacks, or running backs or wide receivers is not a recipe for success. So continually looking at the composition of the top team and the organization, not just for today, but importantly for where you’re going.
If I look at my business right now, we are at a very interesting inflection point where what got us to the No. 1 position today will not be what’s going to strengthen our position over the next three, five, 10 years. Continually evaluating the team construct, what kind of complementary skills do we need to build into the organization? And also sometimes that means making some really tough decisions around certain leaders who may have gotten you here, but may not be the right leaders to actually take you where you need to be.
Then there’s a third key, which is in the bucket of very easy to say, but can be very difficult: creating the right environment, starting at the top of the organization and filtering it down. One based on trust, respect, but also that feeling of, for lack of a better term, psychological safety. Your employees will do their best when they feel they are protected, that they can take some risks and push themselves, or they’re being developed, but they need to feel safe. And it starts at the very top of the organization.
There’s a lot of uncertainty out there for businesses right now.
There are a lot of ups and downs for any company in our sector right now. And so I think creating a culture where there’s a sense of safety is really, really important. The world is so dynamic and we’re in a very uncertain time right now. So, how do you create resilience and adaptability into your team is key.
It’s about how you operate and how, if you need to pivot, you do it quickly and clearly. Again, this sounds easy and like common sense. But how you actually achieve all of that and get the organization to that outcome sometimes can be challenging. It’s hard work. Sometimes you feel like the chief therapist more than you do the chief executive officer.
Are there partners you look for or you really depend on for this? How important is the CHRO or mentoring in this moment? Drill down on some of the concrete ways to achieve a healthy culture.
It’s a really good question. I don’t think there’s any one silver bullet. It’s a combination of things, some of which you just mentioned. I’d say a couple things. One is as CEOs at the top of the team, we have to walk the walk. One of the things that really drew me to FanDuel was they have a set of values that everybody can recite. When I get up at my town hall, we celebrate certain principles or values and actions. I’ve never seen an organization where the top team lives the values the way they do with this organization. That takes hard work, but you need to keep reminding the top team that we have to role model these values, or the values are meaningless.
How about when the team falls short?
Yes, we celebrate people upholding our values, but we also acknowledge when we fall short. We continually do surveys and say, Hey, there’s two or three values that we’re just not doing as well on as we need to. How do we actually move the needle on those?
The chief people officer is an absolutely critical position to get right. I have a chief people officer right now who is outstanding. She is a thought partner to me on a whole range of people-related issues. She has professionalized the function. She’s smart and gets the business, but also understands how to bring real discipline to the way we manage what is ultimately our greatest asset, which is our people.
Have you focused on talent a lot as CEO?
Absolutely. I’ve made a lot of changes to the organization, the leadership team. I did a big reorg and really changed our operating model. We went from kind of a functional to a business-centric organization. That was a massive change. And working with the CPO, having somebody that can help you think through those issues is important. Because there’s as much art and judgment as there is science when you’re doing these things. It’s not like a growth strategy, where there’s a bit more black and white and there’s a commercial analysis you can do.
People are unpredictable.
Yes. At FanDuel we always say, there’s a little bit of an alchemy to how our team works together. Assessing cultural fit is not the easiest thing. And when somebody is in an organization and they’re not the right cultural fit, you have to acknowledge when you got a hire wrong. The wrong fit can cause a very toxic environment. The wrong hires can change the culture in the field, at the organization, overnight. You have to make sure that you’re not just building the right skillsets, but you’ve got the right composition of human beings for your organization. For us, we want people who are competitive. Humble and hungry is one of our greatest values. And it takes real work to make sure that you can continually attract those kinds of people.
And admit when you aren’t winning, to use a sports metaphor.
You know what’s interesting? How quickly this sector moves. So I don’t necessarily even talk about it as failures. I’m a firm believer in, if you got something wrong, move on it quickly. Especially as a tech company, a big part of what you have to do is get products into the marketplace and learn fast. And once you know that either something is going to be successful and you should scale quickly, or maybe you missed the mark and either you need to reposition or kill it all together, that skillset is quite important.
Has any of this been harder to navigate as the rare woman CEO in your field?
The honest answer is, the challenges that I’ve had have nothing to do with being a woman.
I love that.
It’s been like this my entire career. As a partner at McKinsey, running Ticketmaster in a big live entertainment company, and then stepping into the CEO role at FanDuel, where I was the first female CEO to actually run an online sports betting company, I’m used to being the only woman in the room.
If I reflect back on it, when you are trained in a place like McKinsey, you’re taught a toolkit, a skillset. You’re apprenticed early on, and you develop a certain level of confidence because you are working at one of the preeminent consulting firms in the world, and you’re getting pounded. So that’s where you get a little bit of the grit along the way.
My challenges were not about being a woman in sports or technology, or even in a new field. It was really more about entering a new sector at a very senior level and being new to the organization. When I stepped into the role at Ticketmaster as chief operating officer and then president, and when I stepped into the role at FanDuel as president and then CEO, I really knew very little about both sectors. Which can be…you’ve got a very steep learning curve.
So how did you handle the pressures?
You have to have enough humility to know what you know and, importantly, know what you don’t know. You have to listen very carefully, but you also have to come up to speed very, very quickly in order to be able to run the organization and to add value. And that was a skill that I learned at McKinsey. I had that confidence, but it was not easy. Especially at FanDuel in particular, where I was kind of thrown into a situation where I thought I was going to have three to four years to settle into this, and if things went well, I would transition to the CEO role. And three months after I joined, my predecessor announced that he was going to be leaving.
You need to cultivate some internal strength fast.
If I think about my leadership profile, and in the most humble way possible, what also worked was I have always checked my ego at the door. I was willing to bet on myself, but I just checked my ego at the door and I was like, I’ll prove myself once I get my foot in the door.
I’ve been good at building relationships, understanding how organizations work, listening to people. I think some of this goes back to being an athlete and being on a competitive team. I’m really good at building high performing teams. Again, you don’t want a team that has all quarterbacks. You need diversity of thought.
