“As a leader, you have to supply the glue that holds the team together,” Cyndi Williams, CEO of medical technology company Quin, explains. “I discovered out when one of my co-founders decided to quit and the company went into a tailspin.” Quin is the creator of a diabetes-related app. Ms Williams claims that her co-founder quit before the app was finished, and she was afraid that the team she was counting on to build it would fall apart. She needed to come up with a plan to encourage the employees to stay. It was successful. The app was released six months later and is proving to be very popular. Williams and her collaborator began developing the Quin app seven years ago. It uses data from monitoring equipment, such as blood sugar levels, to advise diabetics on how much insulin to take throughout the day, especially before eating and drinking. image courtesy of Quin Last year, the app was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland, with “tens of thousands” of downloads, according to Williams. Quin will be available in the United States later this year. Quin, on the other hand, could not have been on the market at all. Because the app was her colleague’s invention, she claims that when the co-founder departed the company, it threw the company into a “existential crisis.” “She was the project’s visionary,” Williams explains. “She was the one in the middle of it all, driving the product ahead. Would the squad lose faith in itself if she wasn’t there? Would they be willing to stick with us and see it through?” Quin has sixteen app designers and computer coders on staff. Each of them has played an important role in the development of the app. “”We would have had to start designing the software from scratch if any of them had departed,” Ms Williams explains. We may have had to scrap the project due to the amount of money it would have cost the company. I had severe concerns about four or five folks leaving.” copyright to the image QuinWilliams had worked as a manager at significant IT companies in the UK and the United States for numerous years. She devised a retention strategy based on her previous experience. “When determining whether to stay or leave, people think about three factors. Is it true that I am growing and learning? The second question is, do I have any buddies at work? The third question is if I’m having an impact – does the world or something in the world improve as a result of my presence?” Williams arranged a series of talks with her employees to persuade them that working at Quin was worthwhile on all aspects. Every member of the team agreed to stay. “The lesson here is that leadership is important,” she says. “It can mean the difference between a company surviving and prospering and a company failing.” As a manager, you must ask yourself if you are looking at your people and your team and truly understanding what the underlying glue is that makes everything work and stick?” What am I doing to ensure that something is built and invested in so that it can be a source of life for the company?” EntrepreneurshipDiabetesApps
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