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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Belsky
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October 24 - November 11, 2018
With fewer resources and options, you become more creative with what you have.
When you don’t have enough money, circumstances force you to be virtuous. Once you’ve raised a lot, you have to force yourself to be virtuous.
As you assemble your team, look for people with excitement about the idea, ability to contribute right away, and the potential to learn.
Initiative is contagious, expertise is not.
Past initiative is the best indicator of future initiative. Look beyond the formal résumé and ask candidates about their interests and what they have done to pursue them. It doesn’t matter what the interests are—bonsai cultivation, writing poetry, whatever! Instead, gauge whether the candidate has a history of being proactive in advancing their interests.
Initiative comes from obsession. The more infatuated you are with something, the more likely you are to know (or want to find out) more about it.
Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.”
Age or accolades have never mattered to me when it comes to hiring or investing in talent: What matters to me is maturity and perspective. As you build your team, seek people who have endured adversity. Ask prospective team members about their most defining challenges. Life matures you a lot faster than time, and a lot of life can happen in a very short amount of time.
spark. I call this kind of fire-starting ability aligned dynamism, which is when ideas vary but energy levels and a value for the mission align;
Build a team of people dynamic enough to make every conversation a step function that is more interesting than the one before it, and smart enough to make the complicated simple and accessible to everyone.
If you avoid folks who are polarizing, you avoid bold outcomes.
Fighting for bold solutions to old problems, especially within a larger company, requires a willingness to defy the typical process. In this way, being a little aggressive is a feature, not a bug.
Most of the time, the immune system (the doers) needs to be strong enough to hold the foreign germs (the dreamers) at bay so we can stay productive and on track. But every now and then, teams need to suppress the immune system so that the dreamers—or any new leader with new ideas—can give the team an organ transplant in the form of fresh ideas, and fundamentally change a process or a product. Much like the Behance team initially struggled with Will, the new organ.
With every new hire, and in every cycle of innovation and execution, be mindful of your team’s immune system. Let it do its thing, but in times of critical change, take the necessary steps to suppress it.
Don’t just recruit great members; graft them, too. This is about a lot more than onboarding new employees: It’s about identifying with their experience, shining the spotlight on their strengths, and becoming a thought partner, coach, and advocate for them. Setting up new talent to succeed is an active process that doesn’t happen on its own. Grafting talent is about empathy, integration, psychological safety, and real-time communication.
One of the best ways to set up new talent to succeed is to align one of their specific strengths with an important task, right from the beginning.
You can always provide more formal skills training over time, but building confidence up front is a critical ingredient in unleashing someone’s potential in a new team.
But as companies become more structured, a tolerance for taking risk and new ways of thinking must be prioritized and built into the system, as it does not occur naturally. When people start to fear losing their bonus or getting dinged in a performance review, they stop toeing the line.
There is always the chance that new blood will kill you, but without it, you’ll die.
This era of apprenticeship is now a relic of history. Somewhere along the line we decided to economize and scale education.
Apprenticeships are mutually beneficial, as you’ll prepare emerging leaders on your team to take more senior roles while developing a culture of constant learning and teaching. Make apprenticeship an expectation.
But comfort also breeds complacency. As learning curves plateau, we lose interest in learning for the sake of learning, and our curiosity wanes. We stay engaged as we attempt to master something that interests us, but we start to disengage as soon as we gain control over tasks and our interest dissipates.
The more voluntary suffering you build into your life, the less involuntary suffering will affect your life.”
The stories a team recalls and shares about itself serve as a continual reminder for everyone of why they’re there and what makes the team special; they reinforce the foundations of a business and the aspirational elements that tie people together.
At one point, for Behance’s 99U initiative to educate creative leaders, I outlined a manifesto of sorts to help leaders build their teams to accommodate the unwieldy but powerful force of these so-called free radicals.
Who are the free radicals? We do work that is, first and foremost, intrinsically rewarding. But when we make an impact, we expect extrinsic validation. We don’t create solely for ourselves—we want to make a real and lasting impact in the world around us.
We have little tolerance for the friction of bureaucracy, old-boy networks, and antiquated business practices.
For this reason and more, we often (though, not always) opt for transparency over privacy.
With less friction and fewer obstacles than ever before, free radicals are becoming masterful stewards of twenty-first-century ideas, and, as such, they are one of our greatest assets. As you assemble and manage your team, do whatever you can to accommodate free radicals and keep them engaged.
Finally, and most important, don’t be frugal when it comes to paying your team. When you think about compensation, think about how indispensable someone is—or has the potential to become.
So many companies and organizations preach the importance of innovation and efficiency, yet they burden their people with tools that constrain flexibility and consume resources.
We knew that the environment we worked in would influence the products we created and the type of people we hired.
Each person’s expertise becomes clearer, and the team is naturally supportive of those empowered to lead certain projects, regardless of their seniority. Respect is bred for those at the source of the work rather than those a level up. With such alignment, decisions about who should do what are supported by the larger team rather than being questioned and doubted. Here are some principles that drive effective attribution in a team:
Just as teams must challenge conventional wisdom to build extraordinary products, the same goes for building extraordinary organizations.
When you have the right people, there are no rules for how the team must be structured. When your A players are playing their A game, you can be creative with how they work. In fact, you need to be.
Embrace best practices until you need to change them. Then break them.
The conundrum of process is we all need some, but too much is lethal.
Audit your processes frequently and always try to cut them down.
It is healthy to have some degree of process intolerance—an innate disdain for undue procedures and waiting; after all, waiting for a green light never gets you there first (though red lights certainly prevent accidents).
Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday,” she concluded, “the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.” She
Whether you are sharing an idea with colleagues or pitching an idea to investors, be less polished and more real. A little texture in the form of uncertainty and admission of challenge is helpful for everyone. The right partners will see your challenges as potential rather than weakness, and your honesty will set the right tone for future collaboration and navigating the ups and downs of the journey together.
But among high-performing teams, delegation is as much sought as it is received. In such teams, there is a genuine collective drive to free up those with the rarest or least scalable talents.
Unfortunately what feels good for us feels bad for our people. No one ever did anything awesome or great because they were told to. The degree to which we order people around suppresses any opportunity for greatness. Telling people what to do is the opposite of responsibility …. The danger is people are “doing” their jobs, not “thinking” them. Often these actions inadvertently have the effect of reducing the employee’s drive toward empowerment.
Employees struggle because they don’t have control over what they are ultimately responsible for.
Your job is to find and identify a single person to be responsible for every kind of task being completed.
As Adam explained to me, there are three things leaders must do to make sure DRIs are effective. “First, make sure responsibilities are clearly defined—well known by the person who is responsible, but also by others. Second, make sure it is also clear who the person is accountable to—the person who is responsible for holding the person responsible. And, third, accountability is about understanding why something didn’t work and what needs to happen to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Ironically, when something goes wrong or a member of your team was careless, sometimes they need more authority, not less. By giving them more autonomy and control, they’ll either seize it and work hard to keep it, or they will fail faster, which is a good thing for weeding out who is on your team for the right and wrong reasons.
Writing up handoff notes and determining DRIs is just half of management—and it’s the easier half. Giving the feedback to refine how others are taking your direction is more important and comes less naturally.
As your project and team scales, get into a rhythm of distributing responsibilities to others, entrusting them enough to feel ownership, and then debriefing to increase the quality and efficiency of the execution. Great management is this delegate, entrust, and debrief cycle on repeat.
Is this a one-way share of information or is it conversational? Email is a great way of blasting off information for people to consider on their own schedule; they can respond whenever they like, and you are likewise not pressured to reply until you’ve gathered your thoughts. As casual as it can sometimes feel, however, emails are not conversational: They lump all of your thoughts together rather than allowing two people (or more) to spar point to point. This means they also come with a high chance of misunderstanding. Email is an effective way to inform people of something, but if you’re
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