I Done This Support First-time entrepreneurs often think building a product is the same as building a company, but experienced entrepreneurs know better.
To 3 seasoned entrepreneurs, building product is just the first step in a long journey, and it’s not even the hard part. Building product is hard, but building the machine that builds the product is even harder.
—Dennis Crowley, Co-Founder/CEO of Foursquare
As an entrepreneur, you spend a lot of time psyching yourself out. You’re your own harshest critic.
However positive your intentions, however, driven and wonderful your team is, every day is not a good day. And because you’re the founder, overseeing the life of your business, those bad days can be terrifying.
Jess Lee, CEO and co-founder of style and social commerce platform, Polyvore, explains this familiar mental trap, where founders often fall into “moments of extreme unhappiness” and stress — even when your company is doing well.
Why does this clash happen? Lee explains: “Humans are terrible at understanding absolute values. We are best at understanding acceleration and deceleration, or rate of change.”
In other words, your state of mind pegs itself to whether your company is doing better or worse than yesterday, rather than overall. It’s easy to lose perspective.
The risk of being too hard on yourself and getting knocked around by rates of change is possibly making poor decisions and feeling miserable, which can also have serious implications for your mental and physical health.
The counterintuitive solution that leads to better decisions, increased motivation, and less unnecessary stress is not to work and push harder but to slow down your thinking.
You’re stuck in the trough of sorrow. No matter what you do, nothing in your company is improving.
You look around you, and everyone you know is crushing it. Their companies are getting acquired, they’re raising huge funding rounds, and they’re announcing new product features that people love.
But not you. You’re stuck in the trough of sorrow, and it feels like you’ll never get out. It’s emotionally trying and tough to handle psychologically, and you’ll want to quit. That’s why famed startup investor Paul Graham has said that the number one underlying cause of startup death is that “the [founders] become demoralized.”
How you handle those plateaus, psychologically, will determine whether you remain stalled there forever and your company ends up in the startup graveyard. You’ll face these three psychological traps — avoid them, and you’ll have a chance of making it out alive on the other side.
This post was originally published at the Zendesk Sell blog. It has been republished here with permission.
While many sales teams might think they’re productive, did you know that the average sales rep actually spends only 22% of their time actively selling?
To determine if your own sales team is productive, measure your productivity according to the definitions below:
Productivity increases when you realize that “productivity” isn’t a goal; it’s a side effect of being a healthy and happy person.
That means the root of the problem isn’t laziness or lack of motivation, but the certainty that we’re human beings and we run out of energy. Our bodies shut down when they’re not treated properly—as do our minds, our motivation, and our productivity.
We’re going to offer a few tips on how to prioritize your health, boost your workplace productivity—and do it all without going completely bonkers.
We’ve written before about the secret to happiness and motivation at work. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer wrote a whole book about it called The Progress Principle. They found that the number one driver of a positive inner work life, the key to motivated, engaged, and productive employees, is making progress on meaningful work, even if that progress is a small win.
In a recent 99U conference talk, Professor Amabile shared the best way to achieve those small wins and leverage the progress principle in our daily lives: keeping a work diary. We’re so pleased that she suggested using iDoneThis as an online work diary tool, and we thought we could break down how iDoneThis contributes to the four benefits of keeping a work diary that she identifies:
This post was written anonymously by a current Google and former Microsoft employee. It details the author’s perspective on her first-hand experience with Google’s performance management review system.
“Confidence… thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.”
–Franklin D. Roosevelt
Institutions are built on the trust and credibility of their members. This maxim holds true for employees and their employers just the same as it does for citizens and their government. Whereas the electoral process in modern democracies allows you and me to rate our government’s performance, performance rating systems make employees the subject of evaluation. In both cases, however, faith in the integrity of the process is the only thing that ensures order.
Managing a performance rating system that motivates, rewards, and retains talented employees across an organization tens of thousands large is a grueling, never-ending challenge. How does an organization balance values core to its DNA and its continued success — merit, openness, innovation, and loyalty — all while maintaining perceptions of fairness?
The exemplary manager is often shown as the outgoing guy that gives his team pep talks and high fives. In truth, though, that stereotype couldn’t be farther from the truth.
To four highly effective, seasoned, and successful executives, being a good talker isn’t just overvalued, it can actually be detrimental. Rather, there’s a subtle, often-overlooked ability that’s one of the most vital skills you can have as a manager — the ability to write.
“Written communication to engineering is superior [to verbal communication] because it is more consistent across an entire product team, it is more lasting, it raises accountability.”
—Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz
When managers write, you create work product — white papers, product requirement documents, FAQs, presentations — that lasts and is accessible to everyone in the organization. From marketing to sales to QA to engineering, everyone has a single document off which they can work and consult.
The upshot is that the manager also takes public responsibility for what happens when the rest of the team executes on the point of view taken by the documents. That ratchets up accountability through the organization.
To Horowitz, author of Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager, the distinction between written and verbal communication is stark and, in fact, it’s what separates the wheat from the chaff. Good managers want to be held accountable and aren’t looking for ways to weasel out of responsibility. And so, good managers write, while “[b]ad product managers voice their opinion verbally and lament … the ‘powers that be’.”
Powerful leaders are often mythologized as stubborn and bull-headed, and that ignoring the advice of others is a virtue.
But researchers at NYU’s Stern School of Business conducted a study on the influence of power in decision-making and they confirmed what many employees already know: people with more power listen less, take less advice, and are ultimately less accurate in final judgments.
The researchers gathered survey data from hundreds of working professionals, and they conducted controlled laboratory experiments where they primed participants to experience varying levels of power and then presented them with advice from others.
They found that greater power meant a reduced tendency to take advice from others. The reason was that the powerful had an elevated confidence in their snap judgments, and that meant that they didn’t listen to valuable advice of others that could’ve changed their mind.
That’s why to successful tech entrepreneurs Andy Grove and Jeff Bezos, bad listening is one of the worst decisions you can make as a manager—because it makes the quality of all of your manager decision making worse.
Changing your mind doesn’t have to be impulsive or accidental; you can purposefully choose to put your beliefs to the test too.
First, decide what your most fiercely held beliefs are. Then, throw your very best arguments against them until you believe something else. Going out of your way to change your mind in this way is the key to growth.
As physicist Richard Feynman explained: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
He also said, “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong.”
The more you challenge your beliefs, the more accurate they will be, leading you to make better choices. This is the larger benefit changing your mind offers, but there are many more.