I’m honored to introduce you to career eCommerce Sales Leader Avi Lax in Season 4, Episode 2 of ManagerMirror! Avi has been tapped repeatedly to lead international expansion.  Past employees have praised him for his ability to deliver financial results while prioritizing the customer experience and developing his staff through honest and direct communication.   He’s agreed to share some stories from his people management journey and discuss some go-to techniques he uses with his own staff!  You’ll hear him talk about coaching employees through career development using a DONUT and he’ll share how moving out of people-management helped him to become a better manager the next time around. PLUS, some decision-making strategy on automation versus headcount growth. 

I’ve invited Avi to the show because he’s the leader that gets recruited to build international strategy, hire large teams and deliver results and I want to this audience to hear just a little of how he does it and why his approach is so successful.  Avi started his career by taking on the management of 3 ecommerce verticals at Clixie before he even graduated college.  He put 6 years in and ascended to the GM role overseeing 20+ professionals before taking his first role with Amazon in 2015.  At Amazon, Avi first contributed as a sales producer before moving back into a people-leadership role… and a big one at that.  After delivering sales results, learning the business, and earning trust among his peers and stakeholders, Avi was promoted to Head of Sales for the Amazon Mexico expansion in 2016.  Avi built teams, developed SOP, and collaborated with stakeholders to deliver top performance and was again tapped to shift to a new role leading the Amazon Business Asia-to-US expansion where we met!  Avi’s teams not only exceeded performance targets, but produced a consistent list of long-term employees who rotated into other departments, expanded roles, and took on people-management themselves.  Today, Avi is the Sr. Manager of Product Management – International – at Glassdoor and he’s here with us to share his story and hopefully some tips you can put into practice with your team!  Follow Avi on LinkedIn to stay current with his content, and find a detailed diagram of the career donut he described HERE (thanks to aimleadership.com).