An important reminder by Bernadette Jiwa.
If you want to be listened, begin with listening.
If you want to be heard, begin with hearing.
If you want to lead, begin with opening to the people you want to lead.
If you want to sell something, begin with understanding the people you want to sell to.
It is that easy.
The first time I was in a leadership role, I struggled very much to understand the unwanted consequences of what a leader says and does.
The illusion is often that you can still behave like a peer, or a friend.
Yet people will look for direction, not for jokes. They will look for reassurance, not for stress. They will look for development, not for undirected and generic feedback.
Grasp this soon when you become a leader, and understand that your words and actions are now under a different type of scrutiny. The whole team will benefit from it.
There’s a fairly common practice in growing start-ups.
When the headcount ramps up and a more complicated structure is needed, the natural tendency is to promote founders or early stage employees into managerial roles. This happens only marginally because people making or vetting the decision believe those employees are the best for the job. Most of the time, the promotion is seen as a reward: after all, the person has been with the company when things were getting started, typically a difficult moment to be in.
There’s a problem with that, though. The skills needed to do your job are considerably different from the skills needed to have others do their jobs.
In this [new] capacity you have plenty of work to do yourself: setting strategy, hiring and firing, coaching and development, obtaining necessary resources, making certain decisions while delegating others, and embodying the culture you wish to foster.
Ed Batista
Most growing companies ignore this problem, and end up in a situation in which a hiatus develops between managers and employees. Managers are not willing to find the time to do what they are supposed to do, employees are left alone and in the blind. Eventually, one of two things will happen: growth will flatline, as managers factually act as bottlenecks; or value will be destroyed, as negative working culture spreads (think Uber).
Founders and early stage employees can (and should) still be rewarded, but if it is decided to promote them into managerial roles, the company should at least make sure they understand their new responsibilities and get appropriate training and mentoring to deliver on the expectations of their newly formed teams.
I have done some of my best job under pressure and deadlines. Thing is, that pressure, those deadlines, they were not imposed from the outside. They were consequences of me feeling responsible for a project, a document, a team, a deliverable.
If you impose pressure and deadlines, particularly when you do not share clear reasoning (as in “we do this because it helps us this way”), people might still do the job. Great job, though, needs internalization.
Always do things with the long-term in mind.
What type of person do you want to be?
What companies do you want to build?
What community do you want to live in?
If you keep your focus on the long-term, and appreciate that choices you make every day are the building blocks of what long term will look like, it will be a whole lot easier to avoid the allure of shortcuts and of short term gains.
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