Scaling Yourself as a Leader

http://firstround.com/review/our-6-must-reads-for-scaling-yourself-as-a-leader/

• You’re guaranteed to feel overwhelmed, burned out, uncertain, and defeated;
• Able to scale yourself. Not just your skills, but also your energy, the way you manage your time, how you delegate, how you recharge, how you teach others, and more.
• Energy management:
  • Physical Energy;
  • Emotional Energy (How you’re feeling at any given moment — excited, anxious, hopeless, etc. It dictates more than half of your behavior and decision making.);
  • Mental Energy (The highest order of energy, only achievable when you have the physical and emotional stamina to be observant, perceptive, and focus.)
  • When these three buckets build on each other, people have a chance to reach what Verresen calls their “performance-plus” state. Some might call it flow, or “the zone”
• Avoid decision debt: build structures, processes and rhythms at the company that didn’t depend on one’s involvement, and ideally would eventually make his presence obsolete.
• Evaluate roles and responsibilities, monitor the status of high-level goals, plan and prioritize, manage emerging tensions, reflect on past work done to learn.
• Internally-referencing: people make decisions based on their own internal standards. They say “only you can decide,” “you know it’s up to you,” “what do you think” and “you might want to consider,” as this language reflects how they make choices.
• Externally-referencing people seek outside information and feedback to make choices. The language they use includes “_____ thinks,” “the impact will be,” “the feedback you’ll get,” “the approval you’ll get,” “others will notice” or “give references.”

Motivating People

https://hbr.org/2017/03/motivating-people-starts-with-having-the-right-attitude

• Many leaders don’t understand that they are an integral part of the motivational ecosystem in their companies.
• Employees feel valued, trusted, challenged, and supported in their work
• When we judge an employee to be irredeemably unmotivated, we give up on trying to motivate them. A vicious cycle ensues, in which our attitude and behaviors elicit exactly those behaviors we expect from an unmotivated employee, which in turn reinforces and justifies our verdict and approach. Everybody loses: The organization is deprived of the employee’s full contribution, the leader acts unskillfully, and the employee grows increasingly disengaged.
• He complained of being saddled with an underperforming team member he couldn’t fire: “He’s basically useless. All I can do is contain him so he doesn’t screw anything up — and lean on my capable people to get our work done.” The leader gave the employee routine, low-value work to do, didn’t share important information with him, didn’t bother to meet with him, and never sought his input or contribution to important projects. “Why bother with him? I can’t change him, and I don’t have time to waste on someone who’s unmotivated,” he insisted at first. Through coaching, the leader came to appreciate that these choices, which he initially saw as rational responses to a motivational deficiency in the employee, actually worsened the problem. He realized that seeing his employee as useless was only one of many possible perspectives he could take — and that it limited his leadership effectiveness. After shifting his approach from containment to facilitation, he saw substantial gains in the employee’s outward motivation and performance, to the point where the employee became a valuable member of the team.
• I believe that most interpersonal problems that arise in the world, whether in relationships, companies, or nations, come down to the fundamental difficulty humans have in seeing things from others’ perspectives.
• When we make assumptions about what employees believe and value, interpreting their behaviors according to our assumptions, we reduce their humanity and their complexity.

Avoid Co-Founder Conflict

1. Trust, trust, trust.
2. Don’t be too quick to pass judgment: you should avoid jumping to conclusions before hearing his side of the story.
3. Keep your business and everything else completely separated and professional. Diluting your argument with non-business related issues only trivializes the gravity of the disagreement and serves as a catalyst to conflict.
4. Make up quickly: You need each other, so make up sooner rather than later.

Co-founder conflict

• Too little conflict:
  • The mistake that my co-founder and I made was in avoiding the dynamics of our co-founder marriage altogether. We rarely spoke directly and honestly with one another. We didn’t stop to reflect on what he needed or I needed. We never sought professional support to ensure the health of our partnership.
  • embracing conflict and resolving it.
• Too many conflict:
  • Don’t agree on something? Don’t leave the room until you have a resolution.
  • Make a list of all of the areas needed for your business. Then figure out who is best at each part, and assign one person to it.
• Help:
  • T-Group
  • Co-founders need to be able to trust each other.