Thanks, Sarah, for inviting me.
I'm really really excited to be here.
As I was noting before we got started, I'm terribly
terribly sleepy for some reason.
So, I'm hoping to feed off of your energy to stay awake and we'll make it a reciprocal cycle for us.
So here is with what I'm going to start.
I want to start with everyone here, all right?
Since have a good number of people in the
room I would just love to hear your name
and what you hope to learn today.
Let's start over here, sir?
-I'm Steve Kettle, I go to Tandon.
I'm an undergrad, senior.
I just want to learn great attributes of leadership.
-Great, Thank you.
Let's go across.
-Yujane, college of dentistry.
I'm faculty at Dental School.
-Great.
What would you like to learn?
-About interesting starting up new companies.
-Mmhmm, ok , thank you.
- I'm Marina Kaiser, postdoc working for doctor
Yujane at the Dental School.
And the same thing, we are looking to maybe make a start up and learn something about it.
-Great. Thank you.
-Victoria Shu from SPS.
We want to know more about the institute and
we are planning to make a startup company.
-Ok.
Good luck.
-I'm Sicilia. I'm just interested in what a startup looks
like and this is the first course to go.
-Ok, ok.
We're glad to have you.
-My name is Elizabeth Cook.
I'm working on a startup of my own.
I've worked on startups as far as being a
founder and as an employee.
I actually didn't know that this was being
run by the leadership initiative before coming
and I'm really stoked that it is because I've
heard a lot about it.
I'm graduating in two weeks.
-Oh, ok, so we get to...
-At least I'm happy that I get a little bit before I graduate.
I've loved all this startup school programs,
so I'm back for more.
-I'm Chad Fanword, i'm adjunct from SPS.
I'm starting up a company and I'm pretty convinced that putting a right team together is cruitial for succeeding.
-That's right.
-That's what I hope to learn today.
-Ok, ok.
-James Rally, the Silver School of Social
Work.
I'm interested in building relationships and
certainly building relationships tied directly with leadership.
-This is great, thank you.
-So I definitely hope to learn more about
the presentation.
-Thanks.
So I'm really excited for the conversation.
As I said, I work for NYU Leadership Initiative
and I'll get to that in a second.
What I want to do, just to give some context of a little bit of my perspective, is start before I came to NYU.
I graduated from university of Chicago, and studied
economics and art when I started there and
and eventually moved over to public policy, and then African-American studies in public policy.
What I had the opportunity to do at Chicago was work on this outside from children of age from 3 to 21.
That's where I got my early start in education.
During the summers of my college I was working
at Columbia University at the program called
"the Summer"...  some program, it is called "the high school program," it has many different names.
The internship itself was called "the internship
in building community."
And so, these were some core skills that I got in the early stage of my career.
In understanding people, in seeing people, in supporting communities and people within that community.
I took all of that work with me when I graduated
and eventually became a teacher
at a high school called Culture Fieldston School.
This is a very prestigious private school
in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
I taught middle school there and when I started
this building did not exist.
So, I was part of a team of founding teachers
who built this school literally from the ground up
and in a very kind of complex environment
at Fieldston with nuanced culture that required
us to do a lot of heavy leg work to build a
new institution, to set the traditions in place,
and to make a meaningful environment
for students, which is what we were trying to accomplish
At the same time I was also in the community working as an activist,
as a community builder, starting a nonprofit.
I found that there was a real gap in the opportunities in my community of Harlem that I wanted to address,
So I came to NYU. I came to NYU to get an MBA and an MPA and graduated in 2014.
And when I graduated I joined Leadership Initiative.
And the Leadership Initiative is a team whose whole
purpose is to help develop NYU graduates
who were competent to confront complex challenges
and to be good people while doing it.
It's a very complex ever-changing world that
our graduates enter into.
This team, which was created just 4 years
ago to serve in this role for the university,
was created with the intention of ensuring
that all students regardless of their background
or their disciplines have all the necessary skills they need in order to enter into the workforce and thrive.
And so, this work is robust.
I am the program coordinator and director,
so I run a bunch of programs, but I also teach
two classes - graduate course and an undergraduate
course.
In all that work we cover, the whole range of leadership topics, I'm going to try to cover a lot of that today.
I'm going to do it as the foundation for this
broader conversation of building leadership capacities of our teams.
In this dialogue expect the first half to
be about leadership, second half will be about
applying those principles to specific issues
within your startup, just so we are clear.
So, our agenda for today is that we are going
to discuss meaning of what leadership is.
We are going to explore how to decide roles
in early stages of startup, we are going to
examine strategies to recruit and engage talent,
and we are going to hopefully understand
how we can build an adaptive organization.
Sounds good?
Awesome.
Let's start with the first question.
What is leadership?
I'll give you a couple of seconds and then I'll just ask for two people to bravely share their thoughts.
Ok, what do we got? Mmhmm
-So I would say it's effectively organizing and mobilizing resources that your dispose to accomplish a goal.
So these resources could be money, they could
be people, people's talents, they could be... whatever.
-Absolutely, absolutely.
Thank you.  What else?
-I have an a little bit opposite opinion from him.
-Sure.
-I think it's not organizing, it's actually aligning people,
-Aha
-like give directions, like prototyping directions.
You should have a broader vision to align
people that are right for the position to put that in
it's not just organizing to put people in whatever
position that is empty.
-Mhm, so there's some mindfulness about the connection between the people and the work that needs to be done.
-Yeah.
-Mhm, thank you for that.
I know I said two, I'll take a little bit
more.
Great, thanks.
-I agree with both of the things that have
been said, but I think it's also setting an example
for people, for their behavior, and providing
a good example for culture.
-Mhm, ok.
The first thing is this and I always say this
in the beginning of our workshops.
If you are coming here for a one-size fit
definition of leadership you are going to the wrong place.
The challenge to everyone is to take the concepts that we've discussed and to figure out what works for you,
what feels right, what can I wear, what
do I want to push off and ignore.
This is a process of ownership and learning
all the way through.
So this is going to be my call to you just
to take all of this with a bit of a critical
eye for the purposes of figuring out what
fits best for you and your practice of leadership.
But I am going to run through some of the
important components in our knowledge and
understanding of what leadership means to
help guide your own process of learning.
First one, leadership is contextual, it varies
from place to place, time to time.
It's formed by lots of factors, external and
internal, cultural and individual,
which shape and reshape the various demands upon leadership.
So if we look at America in 1950 and America today,
our understanding and our expectations of leadership will have changed.
If we are looking at America's expectation
of leadership versus expectation of leadership in France
or some other country, again because the context
is different, the expectation will change.
What it means is that we have to be comfortable
with this shifting term that we use all the time, alright?
We have to get comfortable with that.
Secondly, when you look at the research about
leadership development our understanding of
the concept of leadership has changed as well.
I think we are all familiar with the idea
of a heroic individual: someone who is endowed
by prestige power or birth with inalienable talents that make them above all others capable of leading.
This is a framework that is embedded in stories
that are all this time about the rugged individual
or the person who is going off on this journey
on their own and capable of succeeding on their own.
Our conventional notion of leadership is very
much wrapped up in the concept of an individual,
but in research people started to question
that.
I don't know how that works if it's just a
person by themselves.
There was clearly a dynamic at play, and that's
were the language shifted to a leader or follower framework.
Clearly to someone saying something that person
has always had those gifts we talked about
before, but there is an interaction between
that person and their followers, all right?
The followers are the ones who are taking
those words and doing something with it.
So we have to give some credit to the agency
of the followers who need to bring them into
the larger equation of what we imagine the
leadership to be.
Over time that definition still felt one-sided
and we moved to a relational framework for
leadership which says two very important things.
One, that leadership is not bound by a position.
Leadership is positionless, that anyone at any position
can demonstrate and practice leadership.
And the second thing that is says, 
which is pretty self-evident,
is that leadership happens at the interaction with people.
We step in and out of leadership all the time.
We have a fluid relationship with the concept
of leadership.
One second I might step up and say here's
where we need to go and how we need to do it,
therefore, I'm being a leader, but there
are just as many times when I step back and
say "alright, I'm going to listen to what
you have to say."
So cognizant to all kind of identities that
we are given at any moment we embrace a more
fluid notion of leadership that's rooted as
we said in the importance of relationships.
So relationships are an essential component
of leadership.
It's not about a leader and a follower rather
it's about individuals working together to
accomplish a shared goal, a task.
So for us, as learners of leadership, it helps to reorient our focus to the things that are actually critically important.
Why are relationships so very important?
It's pretty self-explanatory.
Especially in this day and age the problems
of the world are far too big, complex, interconnected
for a single person to solve alone.
You need to draw upon multiple sources of
intelligence, perspective, and strength.
And so, if there is ever a person who says
you "I and I alone can do this" they're probably
diluted about the scope of problems in front of them because it's literally impossible for you to do alone.
It's important for us at a developmental stage
to begin to embrace what does this mean for
us as a leader, as an individual.
Well, the first thing is that leadership is
a process.
It means that as an individual we need to
be cognizant of how that process operates
and plays itself out in order to practice
this skill effectively.
And so, as was mentioned before, direction
and alignment are critical parts of the practice
and process of leadership. It's pretty self-explanatory.
What we do here at Leadership Initiative is
use really simple frameworks that are easily usable.
And this framework applies to working on class
projects, to building a team, to running a government.
You need these three components: direction,
alignment, and commitment.
Direction very clearly being where we going,
what is our goal.
Alignment being what roles do we take up in
the service of that work.
And then commitment I love the most, because commitment speaks to the fact that we are human and fallible.
It says we're busy people, things pop up in and out of our lives that pull us away from this shared work.
In those moments what are the shared values
that we can draw from to bring us back to that work?
Why does this matter?
And as we said before, leadership happens at interaction and exchanges of people and shared work.
Which brings us to our last point because
you need a process of leadership in order
to facilitate leadership because leadership
is messy and leadership is messy because you
are dealing with people, you dealing with
people.
Leadership is the process of dealing with
the messiness of people.
And before you jump into that process you
need to be self-aware about who you are
as you step into that environment.
You need to know your ideals, your values, your
beliefs, your strengths, your weaknesses,
all of those things need to be serviced in
the service of your practice of leadership.
So we ask everyone who starts this journey
of embracing their leadership potential to
first think about who they are and what they bring to any space of the work that they want to accomplish.
Because you are dealing with people, everyone
that is involved in your team or your organization,
or your club is going to have to go through
this process as well
to be able to uncover who they are and what they can bring to the table
in order to work effectively with one another.
Makes sense?
Alright, at the end of the day when you really
strip it down leadership can be broken into two different things.
One, the idea of a leader being fundamentally
self-aware, two, the idea of leadership being a process.
When you accept those two things it means
that anyone can embrace their leadership potential
regardless of whatever position you might
hold, regardless of what you know and
what you don't know, we all have the opportunity
to practice and embrace our leadership potential
and use it to contribute to shared good.
Like I said, in order to get there we need to be a cognizant of who we are and what we bring to the table.
My question for you is this.
Take a couple minutes to answer these questions,
alright?
When did you first imagine becoming an entrepreneur?
What aspect of entrepreneurship makes you
most excited?
What are you 2-3 core values as an entrepreneur?
I'm going to take a minute just to let people
reflect on that.
Since we stress reflection I also stress writing
things down.
I'll get back to you in a minute.
Ok, so here's what we are going to do next.
This may be unconventional for this space,
I'm not sure, but I would like everyone to
break into pairs and particularly pairs of
people you don't know, alright?
What I would like you to do is to share your
responses to these questions in a certain way.
So one person is going to respond first, go
through all their responses, the other person
is going to listen attentively and, dare I
say, aggressively and then you're going to
flip and it's after both sides go that you
can enter into a conversation about what you shared.
And I would like to focus on two questions,
I don't know if they are for your reflection one.
Did you learn anything that you are curious
to learn about from the other person?
Did you learn anything about yourself?
Alright?
So let's just go with those to questions.
I trust that we can break up into groups where
you don't know each other and let's try to
make that happen right now.
Alright, let's start bringing it back. And
as we are getting back into the conversation
let me just ask you this question which is
- how was the conversation?
Good?
Good?
Alright?
Did you learn anything about yourself?
Maybe?
You learned anything about the other person?
Absolutely?
Great!
So what I want to do here is underscore a
critical leadership skill and realization.
One, narratives matter.
I think you've just seen this by the example
of your conversation because they reveal not
only how we see the world but they're also
opportunities to build meaning and relationships
based on that sharing, alright?
Yes, I'm actually really glad you are doing
this.
Go ahead!
-I remember the source but I just sent out
this thing to my class.
There was an article about Jeff Bezos.
-Mm-hmm
- He forbids to use the PowerPoint
-Yep
- What they do is write a six page narrative of your idea
-Yep
-And then in the management meaning what happens
is that they spend 20 minutes reading a six
page thing
-Yep, all together sitting there silently reading
-And, you know the question is - is it a narrative
that's compelling, right?
That's so important, it's a bunch of bullet
points
-Yes, yes, absolutely right.
No, please also interrupt all the time, alright?
This is not me up on a pedestal talking and
that's absolutely right.
Narratives matter so much that we're infusing
them in different ways within the lifecycle
of a business or in the daily operations of
the business.
We're really growing to understand the importance
and the values of using narratives to move
through obstacles, to build, just to perceive
opportunities that might have not existed beforehand.
And they matter towards this work of leadership.
Storytelling can accomplish a lot of 
really important things, right?
They can create and communicate meaning, they
can build relationships, and, as I just said
before, they expand our view what's possible.
So I used to teach history and it's really
easy to take this idea and apply it to the
civil rights movement or any large movement
for social change, right?
In places where people were oppressed or marginalized
in certain way, they on their own said "we
need to reimagine ourselves," I need to create
a new story for this, I'm going to use that
story to fight for something different, to
fight for justice.
It's true leadership and it's true in one-on-one
relationships. When I can start to share with
you what's exciting and important to me and
I do that in a way that I'm connected to that
meaning, you are going to feel that, you are
going to see that, and you are going to reflect that.
We're going to build on that point in a little
bit.
So storytelling is not just limited to one-on-one
conversations as budding entrepreneurs we're
all familiar with doing a 30 second pitch,
alright?
So there are some of the questions that you
are often expected to answer.
There is nothing novel in these question,
but I think it just reflects that this goes
beyond just the interpersonal relationships
we develop.
On organizational, on a business level we are asked to present compelling narratives
often.
So just as a summary at what we are at so
far, not the overall workshop, the summery
is very important.
First one, leadership changes over time, right?
If we are drawing any lessons from this initial
conversation about leadership, it's that leadership
changes all the time, but throughout that
change relationships are critically important.
You can leverage relationships to create the
change you wish to see.
As I noted before about the importance of
leadership being personal, you need to lead
yourself before you can lead others, alright?
You need to become aware of who you are, what
you bring to the table, how you work in certain
spaces when you are stressed, when you are
excited, all that needs to be known and surface to you.
Leadership is not about you, it's about what
you and other people can accomplish together.
So a big part of this leadership thing is
suspending your own ego or your own sense
of self in the service of the work that is
in front of you.
Before I get into this conversation about
who gets to be the CEO I think that's really
important transition here, which is all of
us are very familiar with the go-go-go of
being in the startup world, right?
You are always driving, you're always talking
to people and so much of your identity gets
wrapped up in the growth of your business.
So as your business succeeds, all of the sudden
you fell like you are validated as an individual and as a leader.
This idea of leadership not being about you
means that you have to suspend some of the
ego that comes with this work very naturally,
and one place where ego is going to obviously
pop up when you are starting a business with
the founding team is who gets to be the CEO.
So what I want to do is just to take a reflection
and then build.
To this question of who gets to be the CEO
as we noted leadership is personal, you need
to know who you are to be an effective leader,
you need to have a practice of reflection and self-awareness.
So let's do another activity.
This is a personal reflection we're not going
to share out, but for you these are going
to be really important questions as you begin
you journey towards leadership in a startup.
What kind of roles do you end up taking formally
or informally in groups?
What kind of work makes you feel most energized?
What do you believe are you top two professional
strengths?
And what's your conflict style?
Some of these questions you just going to have to fly, but I see to your pants and I'll explain more later.
Let's take another two minutes or so to reflect
on these questions.
Again, if you can you should write this down.
So one of the ways, rather one of the things that we just said is that it's important for leaders to be self-aware.
At the Leadership initiative we really stress that self-awareness is intrinsically tied to emotional intelligence.
That's why I asked repeatedly how does it
feel to share your story with another person.
That's why I asked this question what type
of work makes you feel most energized.
We oftentimes overvalue the rationale at the
expense of the emotional which grounds us
in our work and ourselves.
So part of your self-awareness comes from
precessing what it looks like and what it
feels like when you're excited or you are
in conflict with another person.
How does that wear on your body?
How does that change the timbre of your voice
or sharpen how you might question  another person?
And we also stress that to understand yourself
you need to think about formal roles and informal
roles, or formal spaces and informal spaces.
That's why this question about what roles
do you generally take up in professional and
non-professional spaces is so relevant, right?
Because that gives you an indication about
you you can't but be in those places when
you're not asked to be anything in specific.
So, my question to you is did you see any convergence
in those informal-formal spaces related to
the role that you take on.
There is no right answer here.
Some people I see are nodding "yes," for other
people may be a little more exploration that's needed.
Were people able to answer the question about
what you believe your top strengths are?
Could you limit it to two?
So that's going to be a very important thing,
learning how to be able to put that into a
prioritized list will help you understand
what you bring to the table in the moments of need.
And then lastly, conflict style.
Could people answer this question?
Yeah?
I'm curious, what did someone say was their
conflict style?
Yeah
- I'm just trying to see things from another person's perspective
-Ah, your conflict resolution style is you understand the other person's perspective
-Yes, understanding the other person's perspective
-Great, thank you.
Anyone else?
-I have another effective conflict style which is being logical and rational.
-Logical and rational? Aha-aha
And use that in the pursuit of what?
-Being right
-Uh-huh uh-huh, thank you for that.
I appreciate that.
Yes.
-Well, my second mom taught me this some time ago
that in a conflict being able to look yourself
in the mirror and to say what did I do?
Was there something I did I could have done
something better to avoid this conflict?
My principle in this and once you get that
question basically you are able to engage
that person in a meaningful deep way to basically
come to some sort of understanding what is
that agreeing to disagree or mutual agreement
for the, to understand where you are coming from. So, so...
-So your style is surfacing your own empathy
for the other person, right?
-Right, but also being able to be aware of
where I may have gone wrong basically in that
conflict,  be able to identify my slights or whatever.
-Thank you for that.
Anyone else wants to share with their styles are?
-Well, I think it depends on the priority
of this issue.
-Oh.
- If it is a simple issue and needs to be
hand solved in several minutes or it's an
emergency I'd rather have someone who is responsible
to decide what should be done, but if the
conflict is in the meeting I would suggest
that people give their opinions and their
reasons and all the members talk about it
together.
Because if you want to make sure the conflict
can be understood by other people and the
work will be done in the group every member should, you know, understand and accept the concept and the ideas.
I think in this way it may help the members
to work together and build their relationships.
-Very important point that you just made.
We can't avoid conflict, conflict is going
to happen.
You can't run from it, but what you can do
is turn it into a learning opportunity that can strengthen relationships.
How you approach that conflict will certainly impact the strength of that relationship on the other side, right?
That's why it is very important as leaders
to be mindful of what of what our leadership
or what our response conflict style is.
It turns out that there are only five ways
to resolve a conflict and they are on the screen.
You could avoid, you could accommodate, you can compromise, you can collaborate, or you can compete.
That's it, that's all we got.
Now often if we had this in a different context I would have you say what is your dominant style, right.
In two seconds you could probably look at
this, listen ti me like "oh, that's what I
do" almost all the time, almost all the time.
And I stress almost because the research shows
that you also have a secondary default style,
so there is probably another one up there
that you use in tandem which probably makes
up the way that you respond to, let's say, ninety percent, if I'm being generous, of the conflicts that you are involved in.
So for everyone terms of self-awareness it's
important to pick out what are my two default styles.
For those who may be unclear about the difference
between accommodate and compromise I'm going
to share an anecdote that was shared with
me that works perfectly for this.
There are two people, there is one orange.
How do you solve that problem?
They both want the orange, it's the only orange
that is there.
You split it in half.
How else might you do that?
How do you solve the problem?
Silence, I like it.
They both want an orange.
Can't go outside the rules.
One orange, two people, that's all they want.
-Give them the orange and ask for something
in exchange.
-Okay, that might be one of these conflict
responses.
That might be avoiding, right?
I'm just going to let you take it.
Yes?
-Eat the orange
-That would be competing.
I'm going to eat this orange and dominate.
Yes?
-Have a conversation and figure out if you want half the orange or you want two slices of the orange.
-You are getting to the right place. So if
you were to approach this from the lens of
compromising he answer would be "splitting the
orange in half," if you are looking from the
perspective of collaborating, what might the
response be?
-Let the person get the orange.
-No, that would be competing.
So how do we both win from this?
-Maybe you get it today and you get it tomorrow
-One orange.
Don't try to make me part with this rule.
Yes
-You share what's important to you and find
out what's important to the other people and
see if there is a way that you can both have
-Correct
-integrative parting versus...
-That Stern degree is getting put to use.
Alright, so one person actually just wants to make orange icing, the other person wants to make orange juice.
So the collaborative response and resolution
of this would be - one person gets the skin,
the other person gets the pulp.
So for those who might be curious how to distinguish
compromising from collaboration, there you go.
So again, we are bringing this up because
conflicts happen all the time with co-founders
in the founding team, right?
We know this to be true.
How you engage with conflict, how you deal
with conflict, you default style is going
to obviously form the nature of the conflict
you may experience with your co-founder.
Before I jump forward, it's important to note
that even though people pretty much default
to two styles, all five are appropriate and
can be used by any person at any given time, right?
So, we have more power within us that we generally
don't access, but we can and in this type
of moments of co-founder conflicts it's pretty important to generate as broad as possible a resolution as you could.
So here are the ways in which a conflict happens.
Some of it is obvious, some of it is not.
Refusal to create a clear hierarchy for decision-making,
right.
A founder in the CEO role who doesn't want
to be CEO, right, or a founder and CEO role
that is not suited for that job, right.
A lack of genuine relationships between co-founders
which when combined with this lack of clarity
about decision-making can lead to a whole
lot of conflict.
If there is no genuine relationship, if their
relationship is completely rooted in the startup
when problems arise you will not have anything
to turn to, alright?
Or co-founders that avoid conversation to
begin with.
A whole of these things happen.
All of these things happen and so for you
as burgeoning entrepreneurs who are going
to be successful co-foundersor founders in
you lives it's important for you to take stock
of this, to be mindful of this, and to help
prepare yourself for how you might enter these
types of conversations and that requires
reflection and communication.
So, going back to leaders must be self-aware,
you need to reflect and communicate honestly
in order to avoid these pitfalls that leaders
will encounter and founders will encounter.
And you need to do that reflection to figure
out what the best place for you is.
And so, one of the frameworks that we use
is this person-role system.
It's a framework that helps to understand
the roles that we naturally take up in that
and a whole bunch of different environments
and systems and can be used as the development
tool to help pinpoint what roles you should
be taking on in professional context.
This is why I asked what roles you generally
take on.
So with that information that we've already
done you might be able to say not necessarily
based on the diagram, but based on your reflection
"oh, I end up being the organizer, alright,
I'm the one the who like gets everyone excited, so if that's my role maybe I should do sales or something", right?
Thinking about the connection between the
informal,formal roles they take on, and the
professional they can take within the context
of the founding team.
Alright, leaning on your prior experience
to help chart what you future possibilities can be.
So, for all of you this helps deconstruct
why I asked that question and gives a little
bit more meaning for how you can re-engage
in this question of what are the roles that
you formally and informally take on as an
exercise in surfacing what roles might you
take on in a founding team.
Are you naturally a CEO or are you naturally
COO, are you CFO, or are you whateverFO, alright?
It's up for you to figure out.
But given the understanding of the prevalence
of conflicts that arise, the necessity of owning
you own identity and skills in order to navigate
those conversations effectively and the need
for the founding teams for as they grow over
time to grow into the right positions, alright.
It's important work for you to take right
now.
One thing I do want to say, and we talk about
this slide our work in leadership initiative,
is that it's important for people to distinguish
between the roles and their responsibilities.
So, the roles are going to be the formal titles
that you hold, the responsibilities that you
have as a founder and a leader are going to
be far beyond that, right.
You are going to be a steward of a growing
organization and you responsibilities may
fall outside of the clearly defined boundaries
of your job title or your formal role, right.
You may be the COO, but you also might be
the one who, I don't know, creates the sense
of community and culture on your team, right?
And so, be mindful of that fluidity between
the numerous hats that you may wear, despite
the formal roles that you seek out because
there is a difference between starting a business
and building an organization.
Starting a business you could read about it
on google, there are things you need to do
in order to get the two from A to B. Check
those tings off and boom, you've started a business.
Have an idea, test it out, get some customers,
now you have a tested product.
Use the product, get some support from some
investors, now you have seed funding.
You're a business, congratulations.
An organization is something a little more
organic, a little more dynamic, and that in
ways that are oftentimes ignored can inform
or undermine success of your business.
An organization is a living breathing collection
of people and you as leaders and founders
are going to have responsibilities not only
to hitting your benchmarks for your business
but to building your organization that's going
to to world over the long term.
And so, what I want to talk about for the
rest of this is what should you be mindful of
as you're building that organization and building
that team, and how can you bring your natural
strengths to the table in order to facilitate
that process.
So, first thing is how do I grow our team?
So, let's say that we've moved out from the
founder stage, you've gotten a good product,
now you want to grow the people that are on
your team.
How do you do that?
As our reflection and review, relationships
are key to leadership.
Problems are too complex and interconnected
to solve alone,
point being tat you are going to need people, alright?
All of you are going to need people.
As we said, the narratives matter.
So all of us have a 30 second pitch about
our business and we believe that is going
to be helpful in securing that support that
we're going to need to advance and grow that business.
So, let's imagine you have a 30 second pitch
and let's do another quick reflection, alright?
What is a 30-second pitch of your business
or your idea.
And then, what parts of that business and
that pitch you think would emphasize is you're
trying to grow your team?
So, let's take a minute with you on this one,
right.
Not everyone has a business in mind, I'm sure
most people have an idea, but if you were
to pitch it what would that pitch be?
Again, leaning on narrative leadership here.
And how could you use that narrative leadership
to foster excitement in someone who might
join the team and what do you think would
get them excited.
All right.
Do people here in the room have business ideas for startups that they were able to reflect specifically on?
Before I move forward just one or two people
why don't you just go through both of them?
What's your pitch and what do you think you
would emphasize in potential employees?
Would anyone be so brave to volunteer?
-I've got one.
-Great.
-Mine is pretty simple
-Would you like to be on camera?
[Laughter]
-Yeah, yeah, please come up.
-Yeah, I mean, mine is pretty simple.
Two sentences for both of them.
-Come over here just because of the camera.
-So we'll probably say that we have this wonderful
technology and we are looking for somebody
to help us to promote it.
-Mmm-hmm
-Simple as it is, we are looking for a right
partner to promote it.
-Right, and what would you emphasize to get
that right partner?
-We are going to sell the technology, how
wonderful it is, its going to benefit a lot
of people and we'll se if we can find the
right person.
-So, if I'm a potential employee, I'm going
to get excited about what part?
-More marketing, because that's what I lack
of.
-Uh-huh. So you've seen the gap that you personally
have in your skills, the opportunity for impact
with organization, the need for a specific
skill, and you are here saying "I need this
skill in order to help get to the next level,
can you do that?"
-Looking for the right person, right pattern
-Great,
-Thank you
-Thanks, someone else.
Yeah, go ahead, come on up.
-Alright, I'm working on a business called
"Hi Artists" we produce arts and culture experiences
for young professionals in New York City.
So, I would say, as far as I would tell, so
I'm just going to read what I wrote.
-Yeah.
- We are building a platform to experience
the performing arts, we help break down the
barriers that exist between arts lovers and
dance, and between people and artists, we
encourage in foster relationships, relationship
building between artists and non artists through
culturally enlightening and fun experiences.
As far as what I would highlight for a potential
employee, dance is really like the hidden,
I refer to it as the hidden gem of New York
City Arts and Culture scene.
It's a very siloed community that a lot of people can't access if they dont't have past experience with dance.
So just emphasizing that there is this new
and, like, kind of uncovered part of New York
that they can't experience on their own, and
introducing, breaking down the barriers between
artists and non artists, and really fostering
that ability like you can meet cool artists
and you can meet other people be cool artists
and we are at a time and society when I think
we really need the arts.
-Great, thank you.
So you would argue about the opportunity for
these employees who experienced this gap that
the organization is trying to fill.
-And to play a role in helping others, expand
on that, not only you experience this but
you can play a big role for other people.
-Anyone else?
Okay, so thank you for that.
When we think about what is going to get people
excited to join on,
there is a range of ways in which people kind
of think about this.
Why do people get excited to start a startup
or a new company?
The idea for merit-based recognition.
I'm going to be able to put in work and i'm going to
get recognized and rewarded for it, right?
In a place that is slightly different, in
a more hierarchical structured organization,
when it's flat everyone is on the hook and
I'm going to be able to prove myself.
So, maybe that might be your appeal the works.
The opportunity cognizant where people want to go in their careers is he gain of critical professional experience, right.
So, you may not be passionate about the arts but
here is an important role that we need filled,
right, and you can get that critical experience
while also helping us out and that's a double win.
For some people equity, in some cases that
might be the appeal, the opportunity to learn new skills.
You know, you maybe have a burgeoning interest
in this thing but here's going to be a place
where you can deepen that skill set and we
need you, right.
Also, hey, like you just mentioned, an opportunity
to collaborate with like-minded people.
Alright, so you might be passionate about
the arts and here's going to be a space,
an opportunity for you to contribute to creating
a larger space for people who share that affinity.
There are lots of different ways that you
can rationalize our people, rationalize why
they make theses choices.
What I want to stress is that there is something
on this list that is missing that is critically,
critically valuable and that's community,
right.
A lot of people walked in mentioning "community
is a really important part of this business
thing" and it is because people want to be
in places where they believe they can grow,
right.
People want to be in places where they believe
they can grow.
So the more that you can cultivate and communicate
that your business is a community where that
is possible, the larger net you can cast
in bringing the right people into your organization.
And as founders who are now moving into a
larger role where they are almost becoming
stewards of an organization, of a culture,
of a community that's going to be important
to communicate and to hold on to, okay?
And this is important on the front end when
you are searching for people , so not only
the hiring process or the outreach process
but the on boarding process should be rooted
in this transparency, right, because on boarding
is a critical part of building leadership capacity.
And why is that?
Because you demystifying, you are bringing
people into the process by communicating to
them about the constraints and the opportunities.
That's huge.
The more that you know when you walk into
a situation, the more prepared you are to excel.
And so, you as the leaders need to
be comfortable sharing the ins and outs, and
the ugly, and the beautiful parts about what
you are doing.
The good, bad, and the ugly, you have to be
willing to put it out there and when you do
that you are beginning a really important process
of building inclusive leadership by modeling it.
An inclusive leadership is going to be a critical
part of the work that you do as founders and
as leaders, so let's talk about what that is.
Edwin Hollander is a researcher based here
in New York City who has done some seminal
work around inclusive leadership, he is a
part of the CUNY system.
And the important thing to note here with
inclusive leadership is that it's a two way relationship.
It's not a transactional relationship where
I am taking from you what I need for my own
purposes, it is about creating a context where
we are mutually sharing and giving to one
another in an additive and in a way that helps
us grow as individuals and as a group.
Hollander, like I said we used really simple
frameworks here, his frameworks is the four
Rs which are respect for others, alright,
so finding out as an individual how you can
work with people and confer to them or respect,
whether that's based on the understanding
of our own mutuality as human beings or a
faith code.
Whatever gets you to that place where you
can respect people and you can communicate
that respect that is a touchstone and foundational
cornerstone of practicing inclusive leadership.
Second, you give recognition for their input,
when you succeed you don't try to take their shine,
you are not trying to take credit for
what other people do.
Third, when they have questions or concerns
you're responsive to them.
You are responsive to those concerns because
you have a moral code and a personal set of
responsibilities, integrity for you own actions.
I think we all can read this on the screen.
Let's add it up though.
When you do these four things, when you offer
them respect and recognize them for their
contributions and you're responsive to your
concerns and you operate from the position
of integrity and responsibility, what does
that build between people?
Trust.
Trust is the greatest currency you can have
in any fledgling organization because you
are going to be confronted by challenges and
issues that are unpredictable, and if people
who are bound together simply by work and
not by something larger or more transcendent,
then it's going to be hard to generate the commitment that you need to be successful over the long term.
And so, it seems like so simple that you shouldn't
note it but the four Rs is an inclusive leadership
is literally the glue of your organization,
your ability to help people feel seen,
to feel valued in a space will have a direct impact on their desire to contribute and engage in that work.
If they think that the work they are doing is valued and important, they're going to give their all to it.
And you want to build
that genuinely, not by, you know, speaking words that
expect to say or what you think they want
to hear, but being honest about what's going
on and how they're needed.
As we said, inclusive leadership builds trust
and empathy between people and I want to stress
empathy for this reason.
As you are moving to a new role as founders
you're going to feel relieved that you don't
have to do the old stuff you did when you
were getting things off the ground.
So, many might feel like "okay, I got our
team, I feel good to go, let's leave them
to the work that's what they were hired for."
There are your frontline problem solvers,
these are the ones who are seeing on the ground
in real time what's happening, who may have
skills that you can't even bring to the table,
and so that mutuality and trust is really
important to avoid any feelings of dismissal,
of derision that comes from not being valued
for what you are bringing to the table or what
you are contributing to the organization.
And I want to stress to you as leaders that
that's important to cultivate.
If you want to build an organization for the
long term, it is your responsibility, not
necessarily your role, to make sure that people
feel valued and engaged, and included in the
shared success of that organization.
Does that make sense?
Ok.
So, we entered the last question which is:
how do I lead teams effectively?
And this is a bit of a misframed question.
I'll explain why.
But as a review, as we said, leadership is
a process and what we talked about was this
process of the DAC model, right.
Again, if you are working in a club or running
a team or a government, if you have a directional
aim and commitment you know that you are moving
in the right direction.
The DAC model is effective in helping you
manage leadership process and steer teams effectively.
That's true, having a framework will also
allow you to navigate any unanticipated changes
that night occur. That's true, but I don't
want to equate this management with innovation.
When we think about the excellent companies
and startups whether it's Uber or Steve Jobs
with Apple, right, they're famed for being
innovative. And oftentimes we describe that
innovation in terms that locate the innovation
solely in the founder.
And so by this model, the DAC model, you might
be confused to say "well, I just need to be visionary
leader and tell everyone else what to do and
then we're going to get everything done" and
like we talked about before in the go-go-go world of entrepreneurism that can feel like success, right.
I've made decisions, I've told them what to
do, they're doing what I told them, we're good.
I want to push us to strive for a higher bar
though, alright, rooted in this idea of purposeful
communities and inclusive leadership there
is more that we can do in order to make visionary
leadership the province of more than just
a single leader.
So, Linda Hill is the head of leadership initiative
at Harvard Business School.
She has done really important work around
innovation in organizations, how it happens,
what the conditions are, what's required by
leaders in order to build an innovative organization.
One of the main things that she says is "innovation
is not about solo genius" which sounds a lot
like leadership is not about you, right, it's
about collective genius.
Yes
-Excuse me, what her name again?
-Linda Hill.
Alright it's about collective genius and that
means something very important and very specific.
She and about three other researchers produced
this book called "Collective Genius" and,
if I remember correctly, I believe it was
during the time of her research with this
book and from her research for this book that
the notion of leading from behind got repopularized.
But what she says is that innovative organizations
are bound together by a sense of community.
And that community is buttress by three different
factors.
Purpose, why do we exist, all right.
This is the value proposition of any 30-second
pitch.
All right, who are you, what do you do, why
are you special?
Shared values, again, a reflection of who
you are and what makes you special is why
do we, it's how you put these beliefs into
practice.
So why do we think this is so important?
What are the values that we hold on to as
an organization that make us who we are.
And the rules of engagement.
When bad things happen because, we know that
conflict happens all the time, how do we engage
in shared work, how do we engage in one another?
All of these things together create the context
for innovation and change and more to the
point for the creation of an adaptive organization, one that is responsive to unforeseen changes and challenges, okay.
And the job of a leader in this environment
is not to dictate, not to mandate,
not to decide for others but rather to simply create
and hold on to an environment that harness
talent throughout the business.
so, if we went backwards for a second, and
I forgot to say this earlier for the previous
section of building a team, what you should
constantly be doing as a founder, as a leader
is hiring brilliant people and doing it all
the time, all right.
You want to hire brilliant people and these
brilliant people are going to be gravitated
to your work by virtue of how you presented
and the opportunity for them to grow, right.
That is going to be the substance that brings
on support and future hires.
When you hire them your job is not done like
we said because the relationships and the
conversations that you have about who they
are are not only generative for trust but
also generative for information that you are
going to need to guide that organization.
Once you know the interests and the motivators
of all the people on your team it's up to
you to mobilize that to actually accomplish
work and you do that by harnessing to channel
the talent, all right, not just simply by
laying out parameters, it's about making sure
that talent feels visible, recognized, valued,
and included in the shared process of work
that's going to draw out what makes them unique.
This is what harnessing talent actually means
to Linda Hill at all.
All right, there are three components to leveraging
collective genius, let's put it that way.
One is creative abrasion, which says very
plainly that you generate ideas through the
messiness of discourse and debate.
Again, we are people so we've got to just
be compelled and feel like we can share these
things with each other.
If we are in an environment that we can't
generate ideas then it's going to be hard to be innovative.
Two, creative agility means that you have
to be willing to fail.
You have to test things out and you have to
fail.
I want to put that in stark contrast, the
pressures that we feel as early stage founders
to achieve and to meet our benchmarks.
So we see a tension between the idea of demonstrating
that we're growing or we are growing the right
way in alignment with what our investors or
others might be wanting of us to do and the
need to create an environment where people
don't feel merely bound by the responsibilities
or rather their roles in their job description
but have the freedom to bring new ideas to
the table and to try them out.
And then lastly, you need to be able to resolve
those tensions in a creative way and sometimes
that means holding up the failure in front
of people to say this is why we're not doing it, right.
There are a lot of ways to resolve conflict,
the responsibility of a leader in this context
is not necessarily, as I said, to mandate
and dictate but rather to facilitate, right,
to facilitate conflict resolution, to facilitate
discourse about new ideas, right, to facilitate
the testing of new and failing of ideas.
Alright, it's not the glitz and the glamour,
it's not the positional Authority that we
oftentimes associate with being in charge.
You are now a steward of a community and it's
a culture and a community that yo've brought
together with people that you believe are
talented, and so, your job is to hold, I should
say your responsibility, is to hold that talent
up to each other, to let them see the brilliance,
and to leverage that brilliance to generate
new ideas and new practices in ways that might
not have been expected.
That only happens when employees feel a sense
of ownership.
And that ownership is going to come from something.
As I'm, hopefully you hear me pause it to
you, it's going to come from the sense of
connecting it to or connectedness to the organization and trust with the other people who are part of that business.
You were constantly trying to bring them to
a place or ideally they're going to share
ideas even if they know that it's going to
be turned down.
You want people so motivated to to succeed
collectively that they're willing to put their
own perceived brilliance on the line in the
service of the success of the organization.
And that's what it means to build an adaptive
organization.
When you root an organization, and community,
and conversation, and knowledge sharing and
trust, you're building an organization that
is more capable of being responsive to the
various pressures and shifts, and challenges
that you are going to encounter as a startup
and overall as a sustainable, invested, long-term
business.
And what I want to just underscore here is
that there is a little bit of a tension that
I've been holding up here.
We are wired to believe as leaders we need
to be successful all the time, we need to
accomplish all the time, that we need to constantly
be going, go-go-go, and that if we want to
grow our business we need to meet the expectations
and the pressures that other people are putting on us.
And so , if our investors say that we need
to hit this benchmark by this point, we need
to drive all of our focus to that work in
order to get there, but there is a tension
between just focusing on the work and focusing
on the organization.
And there is a trade-off that you as the leader
and founder are going to have to navigate and balance.
There is not, like I said, there is not a
right way or a wrong way you're going to figure
out the balance for your specific business.
How much do I invest in hitting those benchmarks
and those rules versus how much do I invest in building
a team or a sense of community within that
business.
We're all going to be resource-constrained,
we are not operating in a perfect environment,
but for you as leaders you're going to have
to make those choices in real time, to figure
out how to straddle those two demands if you want to build a sustainable organization for the long-term.
I think it's really easy...
I shouldn't put it that way.
It's definitely not easy to start a business,
but I think starting a business is not rocket science.
Like I said, you can find all of it on google,
you don't even need to go to Stern.
I say that as a Sterny.
The difficult work is building an organization,
right, because that involves people, and like
I said, people are messy and you are messy
and imperfect.
And so, embracing your leadership potential
allows you the space to be both purposeful
and productive when you find yourself in the
leadership position.
It allows you to make a choice.
And I do want to say this, leadership is a choice.
I didn't say this yet, leadership is a choice.
All of these different components that we
just shared, right, your ability to self reflect, your ability to build trust, your ability to think critically about the
landscape around you, know what differentiates
you from others, your ability to reach out
to people in moments of vulnerability and
need and to say with honesty and humility
"hey, I need to draw on your genius in order
for us all to succeed."
That's a choice.
All right, that's a choice.
We can choose to practice that, we can choose
not to.
What I'm suggesting to everyone is that you're
going to benefit by creating a space where
you're not only able to make those choices but
your employees are too.
So the riddle for building your leadership
capacity for your organization is building
an organization that increases the leadership capacity of
everyone involved, right.
You have to, you have to be mindful of what'
required for your specific business in order
to generate the leadership skills of the talent you bring in and to help foster and grow that for the long-term.
And if you do that, I feel pretty hopeful
that you are going to build an organization
that's in a business that's sure
to succeed.
But don't take my advice for it, like I said,
I'm not the end-all be-all, this is up to
you to practice, to experiment, but I feel
really excited about the prospect of you putting
this into practice and using it for your own
benefit and good for the world.
So, that's my part of it, but are there questions because this should have been a dialogue the entire time.
So are there questions about any of the topics
or or the things or resources that you might
want to explore further?
Yeah.
-What would you suggest as far as how to know
what you need to change, what you should change?
I think like the Stern experience for me has been
really very informative because I've learned
a lot more about myself and I feel like we
are taught our whole lives "identify your
strengths and weaknesses and improve upon
your weaknesses"
-Yes
-And I'm trying to embrace like what are my
weaknesses that aren't going to change, what
are the strengths that are most valuable for
me to really amp up and how do you know that.
-Yeah.
-Yeah.
-So I'm going to try to go back this
slide about person-role system because that's
really what we're getting at here.
There are different schools of thought when
it comes to how you grow as a person.
Do you build up your weaknesses or you just
focus on your strengths?
I think you've got to make a determination,
but that determination should be grounded
in what you want to accomplish.
So, this is where purpose comes in to play.
What do you want to be doing in your life?
Where do you feel most energized and fulfilled
in the work that you do?
What are sectors or industries where you can
take that feeling and do good work, right?
And what are the type of roles where you can
do that work every single day?
When you answer those questions it then becomes
much easier to identify how you need to grow
in order to get there, right.
And so, I think for all of us the reflection
comes before the determination.
And, in this case, if you've done a considerable
amount of reflection about you, who you are
as an individual, what your strengths and
weaknesses are, the question is reflecting
on how you want to bring that self into the
world and do good with it.
Makes sense?
Thank you for that.
Anyone else?
Okay, so like i said, I think I actually have
three summary pieces.
So, the first summery is "there's a difference between starting a business and building an organization."
Second one is "leading your team means empowering
them to take up leadership."
And the last one is "innovative businesses
build inclusive and risk-taking environments."
Right, all of these things might seem counterintuitive
to just getting it done but they will help you get it done.
So, like I said, thank you for your time.
If you have any questions about our team at
Leadership Initiative we're actually right
next door [laughs], right next door.
you can see is at 12 Washington Place or follow
us at any of our social media sites.
And I think we went through questions, so
thank you for your time.
