Journal of the Wantrapreneur : Team Assemble

Assembling your team

Once we have our vision it's time to start thinking about how much time and what sort of skills will be needed to achieve it. While it may be fun to think we can just learn up on a skill to avoid the need for asking for help, the truth is that achieving any goal is going to require you to interface at some point with another person. It is much easier to make progress by finding the right people who want to help, and recruiting them. They could be friends, family, or similarly minded people at a meetup, so long as they share you vision, have an interest in helping, and relative skills and or experience.

Before you actually invite them on board you need to ensure they are the right person for the job. People, especially myself, get caught up in the excitement of our project and end up recruiting anyone that wants to help. Unfortunately what this means, is that you run the risk of setting up obstacles for yourself in the future. Recently I had to ask my vice-president to resign from the board, we had a conflicting vision on how to move forward with the project. Asking for his resignation was a very painful process but was required for progress, and worse, it was completely avoidable! Had I calmed down during our first meeting, I would have realized the value he saw in this project was vastly different to mine and the rest of the members.

So how can you avoid this problem? Communication! While we all want progress, making sure we are progressing in the right direction is imperative. A failure to communicate properly could lead to doing a lot of backtracking. Ask potential board/committee members how they view this project, or why they think it's important and see if their views match up with yours. In addition you want people who want to help, or in a single word, have initiative. Trying to chase up everyone to see how they are going with progress should not be required unless your tasks rely on the progress made with their tasks. Our time is limited and so wasting precious hours trying to get a hold of people who don't have a keen interest in seeing things progress should not be tolerated.

Lastly, we will come across people who will want to help, have initiative but may not have the relevant skills to help you make the progress you need. This doesn't mean they can't help, but when running a company or board, less is more. There is nothing from stopping you getting them to help from time to time, but when it comes to making decisions, you want people who are either agreeing with you or are being objective about things from an experience/skills context, not because they are excited about the same things you are. That is your job as the leader to spread the excitement!

Be patient, getting things right the first time will save you a lot of pain in the future. This doesn't mean to be hesitant, follow your gut when it comes to this process and over time your intuition will evolve into a valuable asset!  

Impartial Decision Making for Leaders

One of the most pleasurable moments in life is when we achieve that "aha!" feeling of understanding. Many of these moments occur when taking a look into our past experiences with a newfound perspective. My new perspective was after reading The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, specifically a chapter titled "experiment and take smart risks smartly" (Heiftetz, et al., 2009). Within this chapter, decision making when we think we should not be making any decisions is discussed. Many believe that we can only make a confident decision if the odds are in our favor. From this confidence, we are then able to put our heart and soul into carrying out our decision. The tolerable level of risk for this decision may be 90-10, or 80-20. The analogy used in the Practice of Adaptive Leadership is “getting married” (Heiftetz, et al., 2009).

Photo credit high achievers network

When you get married you are as close to certain as possible that you are about to wed the "one", almost 90-10 certainty. The 10 percent could be the belief that somewhere out there you know, there is another person you could love more than the one you are about to marry. Would someone still get married if the ratio was 60-40? This situation may be more common in our lives than we realized (Heiftetz, et al., 2009).

Adaptive leadership requires us to take an almost “experimental mind-set”, so we do not get too attached to our decisions (Heifetz, et al., 2009). It takes bravery and courage to be confident in our actions when the odds aren't favourable, while holding a competing idea. Thinking experimentally also allows us to be open to failure, which allows the decision maker to learn, and gain valuable experience and insight into the situations they are faced with. This means negative emotions will not get in the way of taking the course of action with the highest chance of success (Mather M,. 2006).

Looking back on my time in the US Navy, I now realize I have witnessed this first hand on an almost daily basis. The military is an organization built upon following orders without question. Those who carry them out correctly are rewarded, while those who don't follow them are punished. This may seem pretty obvious at first, but after dwelling on this subject for a while, an emerging pattern began to arise. 

In the military there are two tiers of authority, officers and the enlisted (grunts). The officers were trained to lead, and the enlisted were trained to carry out the requests of officers. Problems occur when the enlisted rose in rank. The higher ranking you were in the enlisted tier, the more you were accountable to the officers for the enlisted who ranked bellow you. Unfortunately there was never much in the way of leadership training provided for the enlisted as they rose in rank. Rank was normally decided purely on what you knew and your time in service. Moving up in rank with the mentality of never doing anything wrong begins to cripple many in certain situations (Mellers, et al.,1999). For example, decisions had to be made often while officers were not available to give guidance. Many supervisors would prefer not to make a choice until the officer was available to provide more insight, this often led to groups falling behind schedule in maintenance. Their level of certainty in their actions was not great enough for them to avoid getting in trouble and so they would not act.

A supervisor of mine, Nathaniel Hathaway, was a natural leader (or made it look easy). He was confident with every decision he made, even when the choices he made seemed as likely to fail as they were to succeed. He was used to it, and after a while, so were we. We became more confident in his approach, which indeed was experimental like. When things did not go as planned, he would remain impartial and immediately make alterations where necessary. Acting to the best of his knowledge at the time was imperative, not taking any action in a time that calls for action, is bound to leave you worse off than you were. We don't always have time to wait for the risks to lessen, but when we treat our actions as well planned experiments, the worst case scenario is that, you'll know what not to do next time.

Heifetz, R., Grashow, A. & Linsky, M., 2009. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

Mellers, Barbara; Schwartz, Alan; Ritov, Ilana., 1999, Emotion-based choice, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol 128(3), Sep 1999, 332-345. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.128.3.332

Mather M., 2006, A Review of Decision-Making Processes: Weighing the Risks and Benefits of Aging. National Research Council (US) Committee on Aging Frontiers in Social Psychology, Personality, and Adult Developmental Psychology, National Academies Press ,Washington DC, USA, Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK83778/

Would you trust some one who has never failed?

"Failure is success in progress"

-Albert Einstein

http://taptotransform.com/uncategorized/releasing-the-fear-of-failure/

  If a society won't accept failure it wont understand what progress is.  Society has an overwhelming obsession with the word "SUCCESS", but is this justified? Why is there such a large emphasis on success, but not on what comes before?  

The way success is portrayed and communicated to us, the people, is without a glance to what supersedes all successes,  failure.  The result? 

 People become disheartened when they fail, they lose self esteem, they go from a "can do" attitude to "never again". They say to themselves..."well I guess it was just not meant to be."  They think the only right outcome is success.  

Eduardo Zanatta says in a TED Talk, "We fail at something and quit because we create this story that says, this is going to happen again if I try again, so why try?"

I've stated in a previous post, this isn't our fault for thinking like this, a lot of this comes from our development at an early age.  Our success used to be measured by the outcome, not the effort, but its changing.  

Denis Waitley-

"There are no failures or mistakes, only lessons and successes."

 I find myself very fortunate to be part of an educational "experiment" at the age of 29 at Monash University Clayton.  Part of a program that is designed to depart on its students a very important trait,  Self-actualization.

  We are even more fortunate, to be the audience to Politicians, Leaders and entrepreneurs alike.  One speaker, our first speaker, Sam Prince, was among my  favorite speakers, but before he mentioned any of his failures I felt as if he were a god.  Something I could never become, standing on some precipice far beyond where I could reach. I was dwarfed and intimidated by his successes.  Until he talked about his failures.  

Failures are something we can all empathize with, because we all encounter them.  The second he showed he was not perfect, my respect for him rose exponentially, we all have our flaws.  What made him cool, was that he wasn't just cool talking about his flaws, he accepted them. 

In a world where people stop after the first failed shot on goal, who are our leaders?  Those, that have succeeded. Yet most of us only focus on the shots they made, ignorant to how many they took to get where they are.  

"I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed."

-Michael Jordan

Today, do you think people are hired based on their failures or their successes?

Maryling Yu, wrote for Forbes and said

 "...Failure, however, offers ample opportunity for growth, self-awareness, and personal development. Those who do take this opportunity emerge as better employees – they are humble, teachable, thoughtful, and more likely to succeed the next time they try something..."

Michael Powell, President and CEO at NCTA, wrote for LinkedIn and said - 

"The ability to learn from failure, not pure talent alone, is the greatest predictor of success."

Failure, and our leaders

Think of who you consider a leader, past or present, and I'm positive their successes will be the reason why you remember them. I guarantee they have failed and the lessons they learned from those failures, were more important than any lesson they got from succeeding.  

Einstein; Failed at school constantly, now recognized internationally for his reasoning and intellect.

Henry Ford; Started a motor company before Ford Motors, and it sucked.  Then he made Ford Motors and his vehicles dominated the nation and parts of the world.
  

I hope I have redefined what success is to you, to me, it is turning any outcome into a win win.  Either victory, or a lesson learned.  Hopefully we can empower those around us in society to feel this way.

I'm going to leave you with a question, Feel free to answer it in the comments below.

Is it possible to be a good leader without having failed? 

I think you know my answer, but what do you think?

Resources

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130924104253-271580474-how-i-hire-i-look-for-your-failures-and-your-character

Eduardo Zanatta - http://www.innosight.com/about-us/eduardo-zanatta.cfm

Open 2 Study - Entrepreneurship and Family Business (Entp)

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_75.htm