What motivates you?
I had an early morning meeting with an entrepreneur last week. He’s located in an area that historically has a lot of traffic congestion to begin with, not to mention the large construction project that began on the interchange there about six months ago. I hate to be late to meetings, so I left with plenty of time to spare.
For whatever reason, traffic was very light and I breezed through the construction. With a good half hour to spare, I took the opportunity to stop into a Bob Evans for breakfast. I love breakfast yet seldom go out for it, so this was a treat for me.
I was seated at a table by a window looking out into the parking lot. I had the morning paper with me, but glanced out into the lot every once in a while. Eventually, my gaze was drawn to an employee that had been sent out into the lot with a broom to sweep up the random bits of trash and cigarette butts in the lot.
Not the most glamorous job in the world, and this guy’s demeanor definitely reflected it. His energy level was way down, his shoulders were drooped and he just oozed “I wish I was doing anything but this”.
Like just about everything, it got me to thinking. First impressions are very important, and a clean, well maintained exterior speaks well of any establishment. Obviously, with a restaurant, quality of food and sanitary conditions in the kitchen are also pretty important. But that first impression out in the lot can really set the stage for what to expect inside.
So here’s this kid doing fairly important work, and he’s wanting to do pretty much anything but. Somewhere, there was a disconnect between the importance of the task to the organization and the motivation and involvement of the employee performing the task.
So what motivates you? Is it the task or the value of the task?
If you are a leader, how good of a job do you do communicating the importance and value of your assignments? Do you assign “tasks”, or do you ask people to add value to your organization?
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5 steps to sustained personal change
I’ve been using this concept of a “crucible” or intense life event as a backdrop lately for some of my posts. Today, I’d like to talk a little about something that has been an element of my current crucible, and what I have learned from it.
The topic is change, specifically personal change. Even more specifically, addressing the question of not simply how to change, but whether we can change, especially aspects of ourselves that are part of “who we are” and we would consider central to our personality makeup.
I’m not sure I can answer any of those questions yet. Change is a complex, complicated process and my experiences over the last year have shown me that while fundamental personal change is possible, it’s making the change permanent that is the real challenge.
In this post I’ll talk about the 5 steps I identified as essential to any attempt at sustained personal change. I’ll end the post with a few quick thoughts I’ve taken away recently from my “crucible”.
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Stories from the field: Passion and Commitment
While being exposed to creative business ideas day in and day out is a fun part of my job, probably the best part is getting to meet the entrepreneurs behind those ideas. In talking to one recently, it really reminded me of a couple of the core entrepreneurial qualities: Passion and Commitment.
The Story
This woman (let’s call her Jill) has a good job, as does her husband, and a couple kids. They would do quite well for themselves in their current jobs and be able to provide anything their children might need.
The problem is, Jill came up with a good idea. Then she got passionate about it. Then she committed to it.
Like many first time entrepreneurs, Jill had the idea but didn’t know how to get started. She was smart enough to do some research and had started a business plan, but needed help honing in on what was most important during this phase and what really needed to be in her plan. A friend of hers I had met with before referred her to me.
In the course of our conversation, Jill told me that her and her husband had decided to “downsize” their life by selling their house and buying something smaller, in order to free up a sizable chunk of equity for the venture.
Normally, when we hear something like that, we send up the red flags immediately to the entrepreneur. With a “fail early, fail cheap” point of view, we get very nervous when we hear entrepreneurs talk about spending their life savings or taking a second mortgage on their house to finance their ideas, especially when they don’t even know if they have something anyone wants to buy.
But in this case, Jill’s decision didn’t send up any red flags. She wasn’t planning on going into debt, merely freeing up some capital to get started. She and her husband obviously had the business experience to do this correctly and more important, Jill had the passion and commitment to take advantage of this short-term personal sacrifice.
I was glad to be able to help Jill get focused on next steps to get her closer to her goal, but I suspect I got more out of the meeting than she did.
The Leadership Lesson
Commitment is making a sacrifice to achieve our vision. Passion is feeling like it’s not a sacrifice.
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Essential qualities of entrepreneurship - ver. 1
Okay, time for you all to speak up and tell me what you think. After taking my own notes as to the qualities I think are essential for entrepreneurship, I posted a question on the topic over at LinkedIn’s Q&A section and got some great additional feedback. So in this post, I will quickly outline three lists:
- The qualities I believe are essential for successful entrepreneurship
- Qualities “on the bubble” that I can’t decide are essential or not
- Some ideas on what might be missing from the first list
I’m looking for your feedback. As I’ve said numerous other places on this blog, I want to develop this topic through not only my own thoughts but a rich dialogue with everyone reading the blog. Please comment early and comment often.
The yardstick I am using for these essential qualities is one of “necessary and sufficient”. That is to say that each of these qualities not only has to be present for successful entrepreneurship (e.g. it is necessary), but possession of all these qualities is all you need(they are sufficient). Therefore in your feedback tell me not only what is missing, but what can left off. If “entrepreneurship” is not a familiar term to you, then evaluate these qualities from a leadership perspective.
The goal of this post is not so much to examine the qualities in detail, as to simply start the process of getting a list we all agree on.