How to become a leader

At Alconost , we are very fond of slim thought in good terms. That is what Ben Horowitz writes, in the distant past - an ordinary programmer, and today - the co-founder of one of the most successful global venture capital funds. In his spare time from investing, Ben shares all his knowledge on his blog. We can not be silent. Were impressed and translated one of his posts, he is very good and useful.

Managers, fly!
')


"She has a big ass,
I call her - Big Ass "
- 2 Chainz, Birthday Song

My friend once asked me: “Are leaders born or becoming?” I replied: “It’s as if you asked where the sweets come from: they grow themselves or someone makes them. Managing people is extremely unnatural work. ” As soon as I finished the sentence, I noticed a sincere surprise on the face of a friend and suspected that maybe everything was really not as obvious as it always seemed to me.

Thinking more, I realized that in fact most people are sure of the opposite - that leaders are born, not made. I often witness the same situation, when investors and board members assess the founder at once and conclude: it is made “not from the director's test”. I do not quite understand how they define it so quickly. It usually takes years for a person to develop managerial skills, and it is extremely difficult to determine in advance whether he, as for me, will succeed.

Some of the disciplines of athletics, such as the sprint, can be mastered relatively quickly, because they are associated with the improvement of natural movements. Mastering others, say, boxing, takes much more time, because you have to memorize a lot of unnatural things. For example, to step back, you must first rearrange the back leg; an attempt to simply step back with the front foot, as in natural walking, will end with a knockout, if the opponent strikes at that moment. It takes a long practice to learn how to perform such an unnatural step naturally. The same thing happens in management: using natural methods and approaches, you risk being unconscious on the floor.

To lead, you need to do a lot of unnatural things. From an anthropological point of view, attempts to please other people are natural - this increases the chances of survival. But to become a successful leader — and people will like them for a long time — you will have to do something that will upset them in the near future. Unnatural things.

Even the simplest actions will seem unnatural at first. After all, if a friend tells you a funny story, it will be very strange first of all to pay attention to his presentation skills. It would be absolutely inappropriate to comment like: “Oh well, disgusting. This story has a certain potential, but you are not the best way to start, but in the end it was already carrying nonsense. I think you should still work on this story, review the submission and submit it to me again tomorrow. ” Such an action would hardly be perceived as normal, but this is exactly what the manager should do: evaluate the presentation qualities of people and constantly give them feedback. If this is not done, then it is more difficult with tasks - reviewing, recapturing the territory, defining policies, establishing compensations or dismissing people - is unlikely to be able to cope at all.

Maintaining feedback is one of the unnatural atomic components of a whole managerial complex of unnatural skills. But how to master the unnatural?

Shit sandwich

In the terminology of experienced managers, a popular and sometimes effective feedback technique for beginners is called a “shit sandwich”. It is beautifully described in the classic management text “ The One Minute Manager ”. The basic idea is that people accept feedback much more willingly if you start with praise (this is the bottom piece of bread), then move on to unpleasant things (a layer of crap) and cover it all with a reminder that you greatly appreciate the strengths of each person. (top piece of bread). This sandwich has a positive side effect: the feedback is aimed more at behavior than at personalities, since you emphasize the value of the personal qualities of the employees. This is the foundation of feedback.

The shit sandwich method may work when dealing with younger employees, but has its drawbacks:

• Often it is overly formal. You have to plan a sandwich in advance, so that it is formed as it should, and therefore the process may seem to your subordinates to be formal and judgmental.
• He is a one-time. Apply it several times - and it will stop working. The subordinates will think: “Well, it has begun ... He praises me - it means that after that he rolls out in the mud”.
• Employees of higher rank usually recognize this method “from the first notes,” and the shit sandwich starts working against you.

In my practice, there was a case where I tried to feed a carefully prepared shit sandwich to a senior employee. He looked at me as if he were a child, and interrupted him: “Deliver me from these courtesies, Ben, and just say what I did wrong.” At that moment, I was more than ever sure that I was deprived of a managerial gift by birth.

Basics of the basics

To become a master of feedback, you need to rise above basic techniques like a sandwich with shit. You need to develop your own style that matches your personality and your values. And this is how it is done:

• Be yourself. It is extremely important that you believe in what you say to people, and not just manipulate their feelings with the help of memorized words. If you try to artificially create such an impression, people will surely feel false, no matter how skillfully you play.
• Come on the right side. You give people feedback because you want them to succeed, not out of a desire to criticize them and push them to failure. If you really want someone to succeed, let him feel it. Expand your sincere intention. If a person feels it - feels that you are on his side - he will listen to you.
• Do not go to the personal level. If you decide to dismiss someone - fire. Do not try to prepare a person for dismissal. Prepare him for success. If he does not accept feedback, this is a completely different conversation.
• Do not humiliate people in front of colleagues. In cases where it is better to give feedback to a group of employees at once, try not to embarrass any of them in the presence of colleagues. If this happens, the main effect of your feedback will be that a) an employee in an unpleasant situation will be very uncomfortable, and b) he will hate you for it.
• Do not invent a universal feedback method, it is not. All people are different. Some employees are very sensitive to comments, while others are exceptionally thick-skinned, and it is often impossible to break into the heads of the latter. Your tone when communicating with an employee should depend on the characteristics of his personality, and not on your mood.
• Speak bluntly as it is, but don't be insensitive. If you think that the presentation is no good, do not say: “Everything is very good, but you could use another approach to reinforce the conclusion.” Even if it seems too harsh, you better say: “I didn’t understand what you wanted to say, and here’s why ...” Blurred feedback can do a worse service than its absence, as it misleads the employee and confuses him. But do not overdo it with harsh statements! Do not make a whipping and a demonstration of your superiority, otherwise fail the whole venture. Correct feedback is a dialogue, not a monologue.

Why dialogue?

Even if you, as managers, talk about something that you do not like or with which you do not agree, this does not mean that you are right. Your subordinates probably better than you in your business. They clearly have more data. You may be wrong.

So, you should be interested in the feedback to open, not close the discussion. Encourage challenging your own opinions and advocating alternative points of view. Aim for carefully thought out, measured, balanced decisions. Stimulate discussion and demand the highest-quality judgments, but remain open to notice you are wrong.

Feedback non-stop

Once you have mastered the basics, you must practice them continuously. As a leader, you must have your own opinion about everything. You should have an opinion about every forecast, every product plan, every presentation, and even every comment. People need to know what you think. If you like someone's comment, let him know. If you do not agree with the employee, provide feedback. Tell me what you think about this. Express your opinion.

Thus two critical effects are achieved:

• Feedback in your company will not be personalized. If the supervisor provides constant feedback, everyone just gets used to it. No one thinks: “Damn, what did he want to say with this remark? Does he dislike me? ”Everyone naturally focuses on tasks, and not on muffled, random assessments of their performance.
• People will be comfortable talking bad news. When employees can calmly discuss with each other what they are doing wrong, then it becomes very easy to talk about what wrong steps the organization is taking. In companies with high culture, bad news spreads like lightning, good news more slowly. In companies with low culture - on the contrary: there people behave like the evil witch of Gingham from the “Wizard of the Emerald City” who did not want to hear any bad news at all.

So heads are born

To successfully lead, you need to master many more skills (for many of them I wrote in a blog), but in order to feel that you were born as leaders, you must master the unnatural.

If you are a leader, feeling insecure and lacking competence in performing any of the above actions, convinced that all this will not work when your company grows to a hundred or thousand people - welcome to the club. I was exactly the same as you. And exactly the same was every manager I've ever met. This is a process. That is how leaders are born.

Ben Horowitz is one of the world's largest “superangelov” investors who invest in cutting-edge Internet startups. The company Andreessen Horowitz , founded in partnership with Mark Andressen, by the beginning of 2011 became the first venture fund owning shares of all four of the most expensive social media companies - Facebook, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga. The fund also invested in Skype, Digg, Airbnb, Foursquare and many other Internet projects. Having started in 2009 with an initial capital of 300 million dollars, today the company has 2.5 billion.


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