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One of the most common questions I get from CEOs is: “How do I get my team to move faster?”
These are teams of talented people, working at companies that have ambitious goals and sustainable advantages. You would think that moving fast would come naturally when you have a lot going for you! Unfortunately, the opposite is true.
The natural tendency of all business is to slow down.
The bigger your company gets, the smaller the contribution of each individual employee. As the contributions get smaller, the urgency naturally goes down. Each employee can believe that the rest of the team will push things forward, so they don’t have to push as much themselves.
It’s not that the team lacks ambition, or that the incentives are incorrect. It’s that you cannot give someone urgency, they either bring it themselves or they don’t have it at all.
Sure, you can yell and scream at your team. You can pound your fist on tables and maybe the team will hurry up in the short term. But fear is a horrible motivator and that urgency will be very short lived.
You could implore them to work faster, and show the necessity of the business and the costs of not doing so. You could watch their work and remind them about deadlines. That too would work in the short term, but fade quickly. You can’t look over their shoulders forever, and as soon as you look away the urgency will fade.
Early team members always feel urgency. That’s partly because in the early days of any business, failure is an imminent possibility and you need to fight to survive. It’s also partly because the people who choose to be on an early team are typically self-motivating and hence bring urgency with them. If you choose to be on an early team, you want to move fast.
That last point is key. Self-motivated people always feel urgency. They want to move fast, do better and win. They push themselves, without you needing to do so. Instead of worrying if they are moving fast enough, you worry if they are going too hard and at risk of burnout.
If you want your team to feel urgency, you need more self-motivated people.
So, how do you find them? You need to make it a hiring criteria. People don’t put “self-motivated” on their resume, and even if they did you shouldn’t believe it. But there are signals you can look for that someone is self-motivated:
Life-long students. Someone who is always learning new skills is self-motivated. Learning is hard, especially if it’s neither expected or required, and requires self-motivation to see it through. This is not someone who picks up a bunch of activities casually, these are people who learn things, master them and then move on to something else. As a bonus, these people have mastered the “beginners mindset” and typically lack ego, as they are accustomed to being beginners who know nothing.
Continuous improvement. While most people want to do well at their jobs, few continue to improve continuously for years on end. You can see this through consistent promotions, more responsibility and incremental rates of achievement. Anyone can jump into a new job to learn it, but it requires self motivation to continue to invest in improvement after many years.
Early team members. As mentioned before, people who choose to work on the early team of any business are typically self-motivating. Simply the choice to take the risk and push against impossible odds shows that the person is motivated to excel and isn’t going to take the easy path when offered.
Self motivated people are easy to spot in any organization. Self-motivated salespeople are pushing themselves to generate more pipeline without you hounding them. Self-motivated engineers are learning new technologies and finding ways to improve how you work. It should be simple to look around your organization and see who’s self-motivated and who is not.
It’s okay not to be self-motivated! Not everyone is driven, and many need external motivation to do their best. But that motivation needs to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is often the self-motivated peers on their team. The self-motivated folks become a kind of peer pressure, increasing the urgency across the entire team.
Even better, self-motivated people attract more of the same. Many companies have a culture of “move fast” but in my experience what they really have is a culture of self-motivated people who hire other self-motivated people. This virtuous cycle is ideal, since it means you won’t lose your urgency as the company gets bigger.
If you feel like your team urgency is low then you likely have a low number of self-motivated people. Instead of trying to use fear or persuasion to get them to speed up, hire more self-motivated people that will push them for you. You’ll be amazed at the difference.
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