You don’t need another article that tells you how to get what you want to get, no other “how-to” or “five steps” guides to determine what you are going to do today.
All you need is a starting point and a destination.
In between is the journey.
Let it be your own story.
In December 1997, Los Angeles Lakers played the Bulls in Chicago. Many consider that the first real face-off between Kobe Bryant (who had been drafted the year before) and Michael Jordan (who had already won five championships).
During a break in the game, Bryant is close to Jordan. Bryant grew up watching Jordan play, he’s his idol. Bryant is bold enough to ask Jordan a question about his game: “how do you feel the defense when you turn around on your jump shot?”.
Now, Jordan could have done many different things here. He was the undisputed star of the NBA, he was going to win another championship that year. Yet, he knew that could not last forever, and many thought Bryant was his successor, the new rising star destined to take his place in the hearts of millions of fan.
Jordan could have done many different things. He could have walked away, he could have laughed it off, he could have hidden his secret, he could have shared the wrong information, he could have told the newbie to come back after winning five rings.
And he decided to share his expertise. “You feel them with your legs.”
Knowledge is no longer a limited resources (provided it ever was). Knowledge is incremental, and every time you share your knowledge, you add another person’s perspective, experience, take to it. Knowledge grows, and eventually it makes a community (whether it is the National Basketball Association, your team, your neighborhood or your family) better.
Mentoring is the very act of sharing knowledge. We can make of it a practice and be generous with what we know, be open to give it away, and perhaps see it returning in time with some new twists.
And if you are in the young Bryant’s shoes, be bold enough to ask.
This is the practice of leadership.
You are never the best judge of your own work. You cannot be.
Sometimes it is because of sunk costs, other times because of laziness, more often than not simply because your perspective is narrow, as it takes an incredible effort to see the world as others might. And so, we are often in tension between judging our work too harshly or too softly. Either way, it is never an appropriate measure for how we are doing.
This is valid also for groups. Going beyond the boundaries of what is known, liked, achieved is extremely difficult. Sometimes, we can mitigate this with diversity, and we should certainly try. But in the long term, a group will always appreciate their work with some degree of distortion.
Of course, this should not stop us from doing the work. Actually, it is an additional reason to put our work out there as soon as we deem it good enough. To see if there’s a fit, if it resonates, if it works, if it can spread. And if the answer is no, go back and repeat.
What we should never do, on the other hand, is protect the work from others, from feedback, from criticism, from admiration. We should not become executors that see a delivery (or a missed one) as the final stage. What we should never do is give that tension too much power, because eventually tension breaks down. You might be too far, too lost, too blind by that time to get back on track.
In the urgency of now, we often make the mistake of looking at systems as if they were uniform and uncomplicated.
Technology increases the chances of such a misunderstanding. We are led to believe that tools and apps magically solve incredible problems as we look at their success ex post, failing to consider the various factors that have contributed to it, or the pains they have brought about, or the multiple reiteration they had to go through.
And so, nowadays, when we have a system that does not work, or that could work better, we usually look at technology for the solution.
The problem is that by doing so we focus our attention on a manifestation of what is going.
Change rarely starts at a superficial level. The only way to make it effective is to start from the roots of the problem, moving gradually horizontally and laterally, preparing for what is about to happen and managing the different circumstances.
There is nothing magic in such a process.
When you are a founder or a co-founder at a startup, you ARE a leader.
You might be inexperienced and you might also be not so happy about it. But that is no excuse to not own your responsibilities towards the people in your team. It is no excuse to treat them poorly, to pressure them with your stress, to not be transparent, to act like a friend and like a baby in two consecutive interactions, to shout and lose your temper, to not provide vision and guidance, to be bossy and micro-managing, to pretend people’s growth and development will magically happen.
There’s plenty of help to be sought out there. Coaching, training, consulting, mentoring. Reach out to somebody and let them help you.
You might not feel like a leader today, but it is today you have to start becoming one.
You've got this 