Memo to a Young Leader
What kind of boss are you? Here are five make-or-break questions that you need rock-solid answers for to be an inspiring leader
by William C. Taylor
Posted on Game Changer: May 3, 2008 2:40 PM
I lavish a lot of time thinking and writing surrounding the challenges of gifted young people frustrated with life inside big organizations—game-changers who spend much of their allotted period questioning authority. In this post, I’d like to turn the tables and address talented young people who find themselves exercising authority: leading a project team, running a product-development group, starting a new business unit.
If you’re the new overseer, how do you make sure that you don’t repeat the bad habits of the old bosses who drove you crazy? My advice is to develop solid answers to five make-or-break questions for of high leaders.
1. Why should great people want to work with you? The best leaders understand that the most talented performers aren’t motivated primarily by money or status. Great nation want to work on exciting projects. Great people want to feel like impact players. Put simply, great populace paucity to feel like they’re part of a portion greater than themselves.
Early on in their fellowship’s history, Google’s founders made acute that they considered the power issue a make-or-break strategic issue for the future. So they published a Top Ten limit of why the world’s best researchers, software programmers, and marketers should labor at the Googleplex—and never once did they mention stock options or bonuses. Reason #2: “Life is beautiful. Being part of something that matters and working on products in which you can make nay doubt of is remarkably fulfilling.” Reason #9: “Boldly go where no one has gone before. There are hundreds of challenges yet to solve. Your creative ideas matter here and are worth exploring.”
What’s your version of Google’s Top Ten list? Have you set out the most compelling reasons for magnanimous rabble to work on your team, in your apportionment, at your company?
2. Do you know a great person when you see one? It’s a lot easier to have being the right kind of leader if you’re running a team or department filled with the right kind of populate. Indeed, being of the class who I reflect on the best workplaces I’ve visited, I’ve come to appreciate how abundant time and energy leaders spend on who gets to be there. These workplaces may feel different, but the organizing spring is the identical: When it comes to evaluating talent, personal traits counts for as much as credentials. Do you know what makes your star performers tick—and how to meet with other performers who share those attributes?
3. Can you find great people who aren’t looking for you? It’s a common-sense insight that’s commonly forgotten: The most talented performers trend to be in jobs they like, working through people they take pleasure in, on projects that keep them challenged. So leaders who are content to fill their organizations with people actively looking for jobs risk attracting malcontents and mediocre performers. The trick is to win upward of so-called “passive” jobseekers. These people may be outside your meeting of friends, or they may be in a different department from inside your company, but they won’t work for you if not you work diligently to counsel them to append.
4. Are you principal at breeding great people how your team or company works and wins? Even the most highly focused specialists (software programmers, graphic designers, marketing wizards) are at their most wise at the time they appreciate how the whole business operates. That’s partly a matter of sharing financial statements: Can every person learn how to judge like a businessperson? But it’s mainly a matter of shared understanding: Can smart people labor on making everyone else in the making smarter about the business?
5. Are you of the same kind with tough on yourself as you are on your people? There’s no question that talented and ambitious youthful people have high expectations—for themselves, for their team or company, for their colleagues. Which is why they can be so tough on their leaders.
The ultimate challenge for a new boss who is determined not to be the same as the old boss is to demonstrate those same lofty expectations—for their behavior as leaders. One of my favorite HR gurus, Professor John Sullivan of San Francisco State University, says it best: “Stars slip on’t drudge for idiots.”
So here’s hoping that your team or department is filled with stars—and that they never think of you as an idiot.
From: Memo to a Young Leader
