Yeah, we quit – Shutting the doors on the Real Leaders Project

As of yesterday, the Real Leaders Project is officially closed. I’d like to share our closing post. Real Leaders

Dear friends,

We’d like to share the news – the Real Leaders Project will be shutting down as of today. After a long heart-to-heart discussion, we decided that it was time to call it quits. We’re big believers in the importance of persistence and building projects for the long run. So, this was a hard decision for us. However, we believe it is for the best. We’d like to share with you the reasons for calling it quits as well as our learnings from the project.

So, why are we shutting down?

1. We screwed up on our culture. Every team has a culture. We would never have believed it if you told us that a team of 3 friends who had worked with each  other before could really screw up on our culture. But, it is true. We made it a habit to avoid discussing and taking action on the hard issues, we hid under “iteration,” we never focused on the end goal, we weren’t values driven and we were consistently tardy. This wasn’t a pleasant mix and these habits stayed. We are reminded of the quote – “If you don’t know where you are going, you will end up somewhere else.” We did end up somewhere else and we didn’t like it. It ended up creating a lot of baggage and negativity. The alarm bells rang when we realized that our behaviour was very different on a new project with a stronger and intentional culture.

2.  What got us here won’t get us there. We did okay on this project but we also realized along the way that we weren’t going to be able to produce a world class product with our current method of operation (Skype calls). We wanted to be world class and quality technology felt beyond us for the near future. When we asked ourselves if we saw ourselves shipping a better in the near future, we heard “no.” This was a great experience over the past 3 years. However, we’d like to spend this time and energy on creating better things.

3. Other areas of focus. We also became very deeply engaged in a new charitable trust – http://help2grow.org. We have limited time and our attention was being dispersed. This was a smaller contributor but a contributor nevertheless. The good news is that we’ve not screwed up things so bad that we don’t want to work with each other. We’re just focusing this attention on a different project.

Aside from the learnings from the process of thinking about shutting down and then reflecting on what contributed to that, we all took away many lessons from our journey on RealLeaders.tv. They were –

EB

“1) Know your ‘why’: My personal “why” affects how much I contribute especially to a project. Unless I buy into the project spiritually, I don’t give my 100%. It helps to clarify periodically why I am here.

2) Be comfortable letting go: There are certain things that I’m not excited about and I’ve grown a bit more comfortable being okay about it. The Real Leaders experience was an eye opener about being focused on getting the priorities right.

3) All happy families are alike: Most of our ‘Real Leaders’ were obsessive about what they did, were clear about their whys, had healthy routines, their priorities and defining moments were their family, and most importantly were pleasant people to talk to.

Learning aside, I’m most thankful to Rohan and Dhanya for letting me be a part of the Real Leader journey. Both of them were always there to cover for my mistakes and my inabilities. I will always cherish the 1 hour calls that we had as a team every Saturday. I’ve learnt a great deal from you both and I look forward to working to many other projects.”

Dhanya

“1) The world belongs to those who try and reachout – I learnt that I could talk to anyone in the world, anyone at all! The world is out there. With social communication and the internet world – anyone is reachable, anything is doable. You can sit in Singapore and help kids go to school in India. You would’ve never set foot outside Japan, but you can talk to a man in Canada – both of you could be sharing the same opinion on world economics! You have to reach out and ASK!

2) Persistence – Reaching out once is something – reaching out till you get what you want is another. The second is what we went for. Rohan was my role model – I learnt an important lesson in persistence these 2.5 years.

3) Great people are nice first – We’ve met many people – our website is the proof of their variety and experience. And we’ve seen many common trends amongst the opinion they shared. But one thing stayed true – great people are nice people. I remind myself at work every single day about this learning.”

Rohan

“1) You can reach and have conversations with anyone. Literally anyone. I never imagined I’d be able to have conversations with my favourite authors (Dan Ariely, Dan Pink, Cal Newport, Bill Bernstein, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Roy Baumeister, Jonathan Haidt), meet amazing venture capitalists (Bijan Sabet, Albert Wenger, Brad Feld), and all the other incredible people I had the good fortune to meet. This idea will live on – I hope to continue to do this on my blog.

2) This was a leadership experiment that didn’t work. I experimented with a detached style on RealLeaders.tv. We started this at a time when I had doubts about whether my strength of personality was a deterrent to relationships and teams. It may not work across all situations but leading a team without being myself is a recipe for disaster. I’ve grown up a bit since then and learnt to be comfortable in my own skin. The learning came at a price though. Leadership is lonely and the teams you build when you lead mirror your strengths and weaknesses. I think I began building real leaders when I was doubtful and tentative and, in many ways, the team we built moved with a lack of cohesive purpose and intent.

3) Culture matters – be intentional about it. Take a stand on what sort of team you want to build and build that. The worst thing that can happen to you is when you spend years build a team and then realize you don’t feel inspired to work with each other. Luckily, we are still great friends.. but I definitely screwed this up.”

We started this project to spread great ideas, meet great people and learn. It turned out to be a tremendous learning experience and we know we couldn’t have made it happen without all your support and encouragement along the way. We know we will never be able to thank you enough and, in many ways, this post is our thank you. We wanted to end it by sharing what we learnt – hopefully there’s a great idea in our closing act too. :-)

Thank you for your support and wishing you the best!
Dhanya, EB, Rohan – The Real Leaders Team
contact@realleaders.tv

As some of the long-time regulars here would know, this project was born on this blog and started with an interview of my mom here. It was a tough decision to call it quits. But, that was a learning in itself. Thank you to all of you for having shared your support and encouragement for the project via your comments, likes, and emails. It wouldn’t have possible without your encouragement.

The Pratfall Effect – The 200 words project

Here’s this week’s 200 word idea from Give and Take by Adam Grant

In an experiment where people were asked to listen to candidates make an argument over the phone, they typically listened more carefully to the superior candidates over the average candidates. This wasn’t surprising of course.

But, when each candidate was asked to say – “Gosh, I spilt some coffee on my suit,” the persuasiveness of the superstar candidates increased while that of the average candidates decreased. The researchers call this “the Pratfall effect” – where a top candidate is liked when they feel more human.

Hence, superstar performers in fields that require them to work with and move people are those who give themselves completely to their teams/audience and are thus willing to be vulnerable and human. People who are too obsessed either with being perfect or with getting something from the people they work with forget that it is necessary to be a prat.

PS: don’t try this if you are average! :-)

The-Pratfall-Effect

Source and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com

‘Everybody is scared of looking silly or looking like they don’t quite know. The truth is that we don’t mind if someone doesn’t have the perfect answer if they’re natural and honest. Much more important than getting it right is being real.’ | Patricia Ryan Madson

When the challenges are related to a goal you care about..

..stop and give thanks. Yes, stop what you are doing and take a moment to be grateful for those sorts of challenges.

The challenges will come anyway. If they’re related to your most important objectives, consider yourself very lucky. They’re inadvertently keeping you focused on the main thing – good for you. Overcome them. Win.

Uneasy feelings and the warrior state of mind

How do you think the warrior feels on the day of the battle?

I think the answer is that it doesn’t matter. He just better be at his best. He better be beyond feeling because it is a matter of life and death. The warrior has no time to deal with the resistance. He just banishes it. 

I felt a certain unease the other day as I was heading to lunch and found myself wondering why it was the case. I also wondered if the unease would lead to a less productive day.  So, as I began typing this thought out for a potential post on uneasy feelings, I thought of the warrior and realized that the feeling of unease didn’t matter in the big scheme of things. I wouldn’t remember my feelings on unease a month down the line but I’d remember not doing my job. I had a job to do for the rest of the day. I’d worry about the unease when I was back in my tent after the day’s battle if it still lingered.

It was an important small decision as it changed the way I looked at the day. I moved from feeling like a victim of the unease virus to feeling in full control about whether or not to let it affect me. As Eckhart Tolle would say, you are not your thoughts or feelings. You are the awareness within which you experience these thoughts and feelings. Be aware. Don’t react to everything. Respond instead. And, when you do decide to respond to feelings of unease when you need to get something done, summon the warrior state of mind.

Building Help2Grow.org: Getting to our mission and values

Help2Grow.org was registered in end January this year. As I’d shared in the first post of this series, it felt like the resistance did everything it could to stop this from happening. It felt like a big win.

But, now, we were into February and back where we started – we were a group of about 20 close friends and family who had expressed interest in the idea. 14 of us were serious about making Help2Grow.org a commitment. None of us had ever run or worked in a charity before but were keen to make a difference. We now had to convert this energy into a team that added value.

There were 3 interesting lessons from this period.

1. It is great to start afresh with no baggage. I am not going to make an argument against experience. This is just about a group of us who set out to change things with very little domain knowledge and a lot of desire . It was a clean slate and it felt great. Every once in a while, it is fun to engage in a project like this – new territory, new kinds of challenges, and complete freedom to define things the way we want. We often get caught up in the way things are. It is easy to forget that these things we take for granted in our world were created by human beings just like us.

2. Never assume alignment – take time to discuss what you want. The larger the group, the more important it is to never assume alignment. Yes, we had all started with discussions around the same idea but that didn’t mean much. We needed to take some time to align ourselves around the kind of organization we wanted to build. We all agreed that this could be an important piece of our life’s work. So, we wanted to approach it like a 100 year project and we wanted to do it right. Yes, the whole thing might not work. But, we wanted to give it our best shot. This was an important phase and took 4 weeks at a time when we might have been happier to hit the ground running with field work. Sometimes, however, it pays to go slow before you go fast.

3. Defining our mission, values and guiding principles. Our first 2 team calls defined many ground rules and ways of working that have stuck. But, the highlights were intense debates on a couple of topics – our mission, values and guiding principles. The end result of the debate was –

Mission:To support the underprivileged to sustainably work towards a better quality of life

Core Values:

  1. Integrity – Make and keep commitments
  2. Transparent about intentions – Be transparent, honest, and open about why we do what we do
  3. Respect and responsiveness – Respect everyone’s time, needs, and opinions

This was a messy process as it was a debate held on Google Hangouts with members of team calling in from across continents. We used Google spreadsheets to put down ideas, vote on them and then discuss them. We literally debated every word of this mission statement. Our focus has narrowed since we started and we might have to update it at some point but it has been very helpful in guiding us. The key word in this statement is “sustainable” – with this, we agreed that we wouldn’t do one time donations to any partner (e.g. a birthday lunch). We would engage with a partner for 2-5 years and contribute to them consistently and sustain-ably.

As far as our core values went, we picked those that resonated strongest with us. These are tough values to live by and we have our difficulties living them.. but that’s a topic for a different post.

This blog post was been posted on the Help2Grow.org blog.

5 guidelines for being constructive

Here are 5 guidelines I have developed for being constructive over the years –

1. Listen a LOT more than you talk. At least 3x more. I won’t go on about the benefits of listening – just do it. And, when you do, try not to do it the way I do it and give people time to finish what they want to say. (I’m working on doing it right)

2. Quantity never equals quality. When you spend time with people, make sure it is as constructive as it possibly can be. It’s okay if it is less – let it be good.

3. If you sense yourself in a non-constructive mood, stop. Get out. Get some space. This is a critical move if you’re an introvert who needs to recharge. The other way to judge this is when you are in a low willpower state – lack of food and sleep can do this to you.

4. Only give your opinion to those who really want to hear it. Opinions are like backsides. Everyone loves airing them but it’s perhaps best not to do so in public. What you think is only valuable to people when they want to hear it. This can be extremely different if you are generally outspoken / used to expressing yourself.

 

5. Don’t discuss what to think, discuss how-to-think. Speak about how you’d approach a problem rather than your proposed solution. This is always valuable as it enables a generally constructive discussion how to approach problems.

Being constructive is a lot about managing your style. From my experience, you learn more by making mistakes than by watching others do it right. Watch for whether your conversations end constructively and think about what went right or wrong over time. You’re not going to get a 100% constructive hit rate and that’s okay. But, we can get better. As always, a touch of awareness and a touch of reflection followed by action can help us work magic.

On relationships that didn’t work

It is easy to classify people we have known as those we liked and those we disliked based on whether our relationships remain positive or ended either negatively or with a sense of “good riddance.”

I find it helpful to add a third category – the ones that didn’t work – and separate them from the truly bad relationships. I tend to believe that 9 out of every 10 people we meet have good intentions and it’s just the chemistry that doesn’t work.

When I think if this third category of relationships, I think of many relationships that, well, didn’t work. In fact, just thinking of them this way takes out nearly every relationship that I’d previously written off as “bad.” In most cases, these were relationships that became that way as we grew, while, in other cases, it took us a while to realize things weren’t working. In some cases, I pulled the plug and, in other cases, either the relationship just drifted away or the other person pulled the plug. Some of these lasted many years with earnest attempts at making then work while others didn’t.

In every case, however, I learnt something about myself. I learnt about my core values, my chosen approach to life and about my own level of openness to different traits and value systems. These tend to be particularly instructive when I think about some professional relationships that didn’t work as differences in “approach” or “the how” features as a reason for it not working as much as the value system.

The beauty about thinking about what didn’t work is that we get much better at spotting doomed relationships. That, in turn, means we get better at picking future friends, project mates, partners and team members -> less time wasted and more happiness.

It is tempting to write off relationships that didn’t work as bad investments we ought to avoid thinking about. It’s much better if we remember the good times (and there generally are a few), understand why they didn’t work and apply what we understand in our life going forward.

We are never going to be perfect at this but we can get better..

The hard thing about self awareness

If you are completely oblivious, you wouldn’t know it.

So, how do you get better at self awareness? By surrounding yourself with people who are self aware and asking them to help you become less oblivious. The first step (ironically) is still awareness.

You can’t stop being the sucker on the table if you didn’t know you were the sucker in the first place.

Study groups and learning – The 200 words project

Here’s this week’s 200 word idea thanks to TheBuildNetwork.com and our RealLeaders.tv interview with Mark Suster.

In 1986, the Harvard university president wanted to know if there was a way to predict whether a particular student would succeed or fail in college. What was different about kids who succeeded as undergrads?

The subsequent study revealed the single best predictor of college success – it’s all about with whom rather than how you learn, i.e., it wasn’t GPA or SAT scores or a number of any kind. It was a student’s ability to either create or join a study group. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.

Venture capitalist Mark Suster applied this in his own career by creating peer learning groups of fellow CEO’s when he ran his own start-up and of venture capitalists when he started his career in venture capital in Los Angeles.

Perhaps it is time for us to create our own peer learning group.

Study-groups-and-learning

Source and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com

‘I felt that when I was being open and willing to talk to other people about what my issues were and then tried to solicit from them, that the table actually discussed things. You can do that. Anyone can do that.’ | Mark Suster

Needing luck

When you follow a good process, you lessen the need for luck. It’s when you follow a bad process that you gravely need luck.

The last time I found myself fervently hoping for luck, I reminded myself that, if this didn’t work out, it was because I was paying the price for a bad process.

Hoping for luck is something I seek to eliminate – good skill trumps good luck in my book. Luck is always welcome, of course. But, skill is more reliable.

And, I’d take consistency over sporadic brilliance any day.