I always believed I was good with people, understand what it takes to bring the best in them. I now do believe this more stronger than ever. After a short 2 years of thinking otherwise, the one thing I have always taken pride in, is my ability to manage people and bring out the best in them. Also, my skillset and services is to mentor entrepreneurs and I am bloody good at it, at least that is what my 100s of mentees’ tell me so. This would not be possible if I was not as good as I am in understanding people and the strengths / weaknesses the way I do.
Let me first tell you today, why the belief in myself to manage people is so much more stronger now. It is not due to the success stories that I can share with you, collected through the last 3 decades, it is due to the 2018-2019 crashing of my previous firm, Startups Club that makes me so strong today.
I was told that I do not understand and know to handle people, when all I was doing was doing that, understanding and managing the same people who said that to me in the first place. When people said that I could not identify, recruit or retain good talent, today it is obvious how my primary and only mistake was to take the same people’s suggestions to identify, recruit & retain talent and not go with my own instincts to do so.
Anyway, whats done is done, right? we say, we learn lot more from our failures than our successes, so here I am, so much more wiser when it comes to building a team, a team that would be fair to their R&Rs, deliver their outcomes and value what they get from the firm in exchange. A Team with the right “Intentions”
Intention is a funny word, it is rebellious, it is submissive, it is loud yet it is quiet and so easy and hard at the same time to be identified in people. We all speak about intentions in others & ourselves. How often are you able to identify the right intentions, more so in others than your own self? We do not, we miss it, we miss it most of the times. & if it is the people who work closely with you or for you, it is even more harder to recognise their true intentions.
As leaders, we kinda very easily reflect our own intentions on others, for being in the journey and soon we start believing it and even before you know it, you start justifying your team’s actions to match your beliefs, that is when you loose out on identifying the intentions your team has to stick around in your startup. Once that happens, you lost them even before they are gone.
So, be on watch at all times, remember to clear your thoughts always, that your intentions are just yours, not your teams. Once you are clear with that, you will keep a watch out for your team member’s intentions at all times. You will know when the alarms go off. You will know when things do not happen the way it must. You are after all the captain of the ship, you know exactly when to ring the bell.
But, why are Intentions so important to get the team to deliver for the firm they represent? It is. As humans, our fuel to drive our actions, is our intentions to give everything you have to get those results you intend to achieve. With no intentions in there, the need does not exists and if it does not, there is no way, you can get any outcomes out of them. So, even before you hire them, keep digging to know their intentions to apply to work with you, intentions to accept the CTC that you are offering, intentions to take the goals that you set, intentions to put up with the pressure of work that comes with working in this firm of yours, intentions to keep going… intentions… intentions… intentions… every step of the way…
Finally, let me share with you on how you can identify that the right intention has left the room for your team member?
- When they show their productivity chart and you see 100% work put in & no outcomes that comes out of it
- When they seem to be overly communicative on their love for the job but do not seem to be concerned on the zero outcomes
- When they do not come to you for help before the firm is hurt due to the lack of their outputs
- When they seem to come up with every reason in the book to justify how the company offerings are wrong and has to be re-worked
- When everything you tell them seem to just end with their acceptance but no change in actions or outcomes.
It is time that we let go of our old traditional ways of hiring, looking at resumes (word doc or videos), taking references as an add on, speaking to old employers, all this does not matter if the person you want to recruit or have with you, do not have the right intentions to be there. As per me, I am in look out for people who have the following intentions to join me in my journey;
- Intend to serve passionately to our startups
- Intend to be focussed towards outcome driven actions
- Intend to learn and grow through execution of knowledge received
- Intend to be truthful to the firm, to your colleagues and to yourself
- Intend to stand tall above all challenges for the firm you represent
- Intend to bring growth first to the firm and through it to themselves
- Intend to be recognised for fairness to what you take back from the firm
- Intend to be brave enough to speak out your change of thoughts with your employers
- Intend to not take for granted the connections, opportunities, salaries and position that the firm provides you with
- Intend to be a good person, a good leader and a good team player
Intentions is all it takes. Intentions is that which stands between you and your success and as people are the ones who will drive you towards your success, then let us get real here, we need people with the right intentions to be with us for that drive to happen.
