THE LEAFLET

June 06 2024

reputation as butterfly, 3 founder strategies, growing top performers

REPUTATION AS BUTTERFLY

“Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.” -Henry David Thoreau

I would argue that a good reputation among your teammates is like this, too. Trying to look good all too often means looking fake. Trying to control or influence how people think of you may get you some early “wins” in the personal PR department. But people pretty quickly figure out that you are running a personal PR department. And then you have a much harder job because people see that you have assigned yourself and pay attention to two jobs - 1) doing your job and 2) influencing the way people see you doing your job. People bring much harsher judgment and less generosity to their evaluation of your second job - the PR-y, political, influencing job - and their judgment of your performance as a personal salesperson will color their judgment of your performance in the other job (the “real job”, the one you were hired to do).

Save yourself time, energy, neurons. Hustle, share credit, own mistakes. Practice willful ignorance about what people might be thinking of you. Eventually, this makes you look good…because you are good. You are competent and virtuous. You have left the gymnastic vanities to the amateurs. They twist while you fly.

-Eric

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THREE STRATEGIES OF EXCELLENT FOUNDERS

Here are the simplest things startup founders succeed with: 

1. “tight on what, loose on how” — at bare minimum, by the end of the first quarter (or the first year or 3 years), we must have accomplished X, Y, Z. We’ll experiment with a variety of ways to achieve X, Y, Z. 

2. illusion of tightness (in the “loose on ‘how’”): Experiments with the “how” are run quickly and systematically with a great deal of rigor. See: OODA loops.

3. Assess the “how”: Evaluate the impact of your efforts ruthlessly, then make changes decisively, even if you might like having more data, more consultants, more certainty. Try, measure, change - fast.

-Ben

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GROWING TOP PERFORMERS

When prepping your one-on-one meetings, in addition to the usual battery of questions about your report’s goals + needs, add a question for yourself: “If this person were to take over for their leader (could be you or someone else), what gaps would show up?”

The actions that fill those gaps are the things you assign that person to unlock their next level of growth.

With this question prepped, I’m always ready to go somewhere new, big, exciting in a meeting if everything’s looking great. The person reporting up / reporting out doesn’t have many questions and there aren’t obvious things to fix in the work they’re already doing. We can cancel the meeting, in this situation.

Or! we can use the time to level this person up with a usefully daunting new assignment. And I’ve already thought about how to do that.

-Ben

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COMPELLING QUOTES

Columnist David Brooks on kids asking questions:

The average child asks about forty thousand questions between the ages of two and five.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli on bodies:

The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous

Economist Tyler Cowen on discovering who people are:

Personality is revealed on weekends.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric