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Too Much Teamwork Can Kill Creativity
Teamwork is essential to organizational success but too much teamwork can be deadly. This is because it encourages the establishment of collectivism and group think. Instead of coming up with a variety of different and unique ideas, the team unites and don’t come up with as many ideas. The challenge for leaders is to balance individual needs with team directives. To do so they must avoid collectivism and facilitate collaboration. The secret to effective collaboration is individuality.
Know What Your Coworkers Really Think About You
When you do have some power, you can lose the sense of how you’re behaving and who you are, and you don’t want to do that. It’s dangerous.
Nothing’s more helpful than finding out how others see you. If you can conduct that exercise in an impersonal way, you have information you can’t get any other way.
Hire People Smarter Than You
What I try to do is hire people who are smarter and more experienced than I am. I’ve really had to learn not to micromanage. It’s hard but crucial. To grow a company, you need to hire smarter, more experienced people, give them clear metrics for success and the resources to carry out their tasks and then get out of the way and let those people get the job done.
By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes
The world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learn far more effectively than an animal punished for a bad behavior. Later studies have shown that the same apples to humans. By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment.
Humans don’t desire too many things, but few things people crave with insistence that will not be denied. Some of the things that most people want include:
1. Health
2. Food
3. Money and things money can buy
4. A feeling of importance
Challenge Employees And They’ll Rise To The Occasion
People love to be challenged. If the challenge is reasonable, or even slightly unreasonable, they love it and they rise to the occasion.
People love to be challenged and they love to show off their skills and talents.
Attitude Trumps Skill
The word we like to use is ‘attitude.’ We say this almost in an exaggerated fashion, but just to make the point, we almost want to take attitude before skill — the right attitude, the right desire to get it done and never give in.
Smart people in the neighborhood of the skill set we need will do better every time than the expert that may have done it four times before but is showing up with sort of a laissez-faire attitude.
Avoid The Rock Stars And Hire Someone You Like
Look for people you like, because no matter how talented they are, the negative is always going to pull down any positive. The second- or third- or fourth-best candidate who isn’t a jerk is going to ultimately provide way more value. Be guarded against that sort of rock-star culture.
They say all the right things in interviews, and then they come in and really make people’s lives miserable. You spend at least a third of your life at your job. You should have a place you’re happy to go to every day.
Let Employees Ask About Anything They Want
Try this. Every Friday at 10 a.m., tell people: You’ve got an hour and we’re going to talk about anything.
It is completely open book, we could talk about anything, and people can ask any hard question. Not everyone shows up, because people have a lot going on. But it just creates this sense for people that they’ve got access to anything that’s going on in the company strategically. It’s a really helpful thing.
Look For Clear Ideas That Can Be Explained In 30 Seconds Or Less
It is important to encourage staff to develop ideas. Allow them to describe their ideas in 15 to 30 seconds. If they can be concise and come up with an idea in a really clear way, it means they are onto something.
Hire People Who Are Smarter Than You
If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.
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