The best startup advice I ever gotI was having difficulty leading a committee of people that did not want to be on the committee and did not like one another. I felt that my boss at the time was setting me up to fail. An organizational psychologist I knew told me that chances were that I was making things worse and not better. I consider myself a good and caring person, so this shocked me. “Why?” He told me that when I described to others that the committee was dysfunctional that I had given permission for everyone on the committee to act out. His advice was, “The easiest and fastest way to change the behavior of others is to change your own behavior.” He explained that when as leader of the committee I change my behavior, then everyone would have to adjust. So, I changed my behavior in three ways. I first started by asking a different set of questions. At the beginning of every meeting I would start by asking, “How can we finish the work we’ve been assigned even faster and more effectively so we can get this assignment gloriously done and over with?” This was something that we all wanted, so everyone was motivated to come up with answers and ideas, from which we would choose the best and easiest to do.” The second change I made was to give recognition and reward to the team members who started working together to get things accomplished. I wasn’t trying to bribe people with reward money, I was making sure people felt good for having done good. The final thing I did was focus my work on helping make everyone’s job a little easier by removing roadblocks or pitching in myself to help with some of the tedious stuff. What I tell people now: “The easiest way to get others to change is to 1) ask a different set of questions, 2) give recognition and reward for answering the questions, and 3) make it easy for everyone to keep getting answers” If you want to become masterful as a startup leader who can motivate others to help you with your vision, then check out our Sprint 11 that is titled, “How to motivate others to help you.” More generally, sprints 7 to 17 offer a series of exercises that will help you become a more effective startup leader. With gratitude, Derek and Ben P.S. If you like what we’re doing, please consider recommending this newsletter to another person you think would benefit from us. It really helps us build out our free content platform.
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