How To Lead? (From The Hard Thing About Hard Things)
Happy Wednesday! I wanted to share my notes directly from Ben Horowitz's book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Building A Business When There Are No Easy Answers.
The book has been a tremendous resource so far, and I wish I had found it earlier. His chapter titled, "How to Lead?", I found particularly enlightening.
So What makes me people want to follow a leader?
3 Key Traits:
- The ability to articulate the vision
- The right kind of ambition
- The ability to achieve the vision
1) The Ability to Articulate the Vision
- Can the leader articulate a vision that’s interesting, dynamic, and compelling?
- More important, can the leader do this when things fall apart?
- IE: Steve Jobs got the employees of Apple to buy into his vision when the company was weeks away from bankruptcy.
2) The Right Kind of Ambition
- For some reason there’s a huge misperception in our society that a prerequisite for becoming a CEO is to be selfish, ruthless, and callous.
- In fact the opposite is true.
- The first thing any good CEO must do is get really great people to work for her or him.
- Truly great leaders create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares more about the employees than she cares about herself.
- In this kind of environment, an amazing thing happens:
o A large number of employees believe it’s their company and behave accordingly! - A truly great CEO would happily sacrifice his own economics, fame, glory, and rewards for his employees
3) The Ability to Achieve The Vision
- The third leg of the leadership stool is competence.
- If I buy into the vision, and believe that the leader cares about me, do I think she can actually achieve the vision?
- “Will I follow her into the jungle with no map forward or back and trust that she will get me out of there”