Theme.
This week's #founderhacks come from the fantabulous Ed Francis on the theme of creating brilliant culture.
Seen.
Do you do culture?
In many successful businesses we work with culture is not accident. Culture is the glue founders create that sticks their organisation together.
We've seen a number of businesses use Dan Pink's seminal thought piece on motivation as a springboard. To put in place actions, processes and habits that cause a culture that works to drive the business forwards.
Maybe writing job descriptions as a team, can unlock autonomy, as people feel free to take on what they see as the most important priorities.
Maybe clear metrics and measurement gives confirmation people are doing a good job, and can have pride in mastering in what they do.
Maybe coming together to understand what good your company does can provide people a sense of purpose, and an appreciation of why what they do helps make a better world.
We've long seen that culture is something successful businesses do.
Read.
Sharing the load
How often do you think about your relationship with your business?
The E-Myth by Michael E Gerber shares some fascinating thinking - that as a founder - your relationship with your business is critical to your success.
Many founders only discover once they start that there is quickly an enormous list of things they have to do, in order to do the thing they want to do.
The solution many deploy in response is to work harder. And harder. And harder.
The E-Myth calls upon founders to think differently. If the growth, or success, of your business depends on you as founder simply working harder, two things become inevitable: your business will never grow beyond the amount of work you can do in 24 hours, and you will be miserable.
Avoiding it means keeping up with the change in what your job is as the business grows.
Learned.
Un-discipline
The story we heard was from a founder who went through a tough period with his mental health which resulted in a break down in his business discipline.
Maybe discipline doesn't exist. We can all set wild ambitions, then we deploy this concept called discipline to try and get there. When we fail we blame ourselves even if the original goal was faulty or completely unachievable. We were not disciplined enough.
But what if discipline was a myth? What if "being disciplined" is itself an unachievable goal?
Instead could it be better to focus on understanding your own rhythm. To discover the best way that you find yourself do the right things in the right order.
It might be spending 16 hours in deep focus sometimes. Other times it might be doing a few emails at 5am then going back to bed.
Perhaps we should value ourselves based on the sustained progress and output we create, rather than bashing ourselves on the head with an externally imposed set of success/fail criteria?
And finally.
Recently, one of us had our first work lunch meeting since March 2020.
It was quite remarkable how much it unlocked. 3 introductions (each way), scope for a whole new area of collaboration, some free off-the-record advice, and the realisation we'd missed a trick to do something together (they had an international office we'd not known about).
When was the last time you met someone you like and respect without an agenda? What could come out if you did that?
Don’t forget to check out the accompanying podcast version of #founderhacks for a tantalising live experience of team atomex!
