Mindset is Important

One of the most difficult things to learn as a young entrepreneur is managing people, learning to be a good boss. A lot of times, many young entrepreneurs learn through hard and painful lessons, resulting in the frequent turnover and replacement of employees. The other difficulty, to my mind, is how to adapt to managing better employees. This being a necessary result of a growing business.

There are many ways a young entrepreneur can learn. The best is to study, whether in enrolling in further education, getting a MBA, or attending seminars. Another is to read and read and read some more. Expanding one’s knowledge will allow one to evolve the way one perceives the challenges and problems of a growing business.

But one thing I find that is not prioritized as much is the importance of having the right mindset as a boss.

How does one develop mindsets needed to manage employees. One of my favorite authors is Robert Sutton, author of the best selling book and New York Times bestseller, “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't”. He is also a Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

I want to share his tips on having the right mindset in order to be a good boss. This is part of his new book , “Good Boss, Bad Boss”. Here are his insights :

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.

2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.

3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.

4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.

5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.

6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.

7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.

8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is "what happens after people make a mistake?"

9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.

10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.

11. How I do things is as important as what I do.

12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

Bob Sutton is really one of the most profound authors I have ever encountered. His classes must be a riot. But he really makes sense: it starts with having the right mindset.

For comments, suggestions or stories that you want to share, email me at [email protected] , or visit www.stirspecialist.blogspot.com