your people will decide if you're a leader

According to the late Bill Campbell, who established a reputation as the "coach" of Silicon Valley, only one thing determines whether or not you're a leader: the opinions of those you're supposed to be leading....

"Your title makes you a manager. Your people will decide if you're a leader, and it's up to you to live up to that...."

Current Intuit CEO Brad Smith said he got the same advice on leadership from Campbell, too. Sculley and Smith both said it was the best career advice they'd ever received, and that it's stuck with them ever since.

"Basically, how you make that happen is if you believe that leadership is not about putting greatness into people, leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge," Smith told Business Insider. "That's our definition of leadership. We don't think leadership is the same as people management."

Aine Cain

"Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos' mentor used a simple test to figure out who is a true leader." Business Insider. 10/13/2017

between the known and the unknown

Invention… is an active process that results from the decisions we make; to change the world, we must bring new things into being. But how do we go about creating the unmade future? I believe that all we can do is foster the optimal conditions in which it – whatever “it” is – can emerge and flourish. This is where real confidence comes in. Not the confidence that we know exactly what to do at all times but the confidence that, together, we will figure it out. 

That uncertainty can make us uncomfortable. We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where. That requires us to step up to the boundary of what we know and what we don’t know. While we all have the potential to be creative, some people hang back, while others forge ahead. What are the tools they use that lead them toward the new? Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that there is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking. And that, according to the people who make films at Pixar and Disney Animation, means developing a mental model that sustains you. It might sound silly or woo-woo, this kind of visualization, but I believe it’s crucial. Sometimes – especially at the beginning of a daunting project – our mental models are all we’ve got. 

For example, one of our producers, John Walker, stays calm by imagining his very taxing job as holding a giant upside-down pyramid in his palm by its pointy tip. “I’m always looking up, trying to balance it,” he says. “Are there too many people on this side or that side? In my job, I do two things, fundamentally: artist management and cost control. Both depend on hundreds of interactions that are happening above me, up in the fat end of the pyramid. And I have to be okay with the fact that I don’t understand a freaking thing that’s going on half the time – and that that is the magic. The trick, always, is keeping the pyramid in balance.”

Ed Catmull

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House 2014.

to be optimally motivated

Leaders cannot motivate anyone, but what they can do is create a workplace where it’s more likely for people to be optimally motivated. They do that through leadership behaviors that satisfy people’s three psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence (ARC) and facilitate people’s quality of self-regulation through the MVPs of mindfulness, values, and purpose:

1. Encourage autonomy
2. Deepen relatedness
3. Develop competence
4. Promote mindfulness
5. Align values
6. Connect to purpose

Bonnie Marcus

"The Science of Motivation." Women Success Coaching blog. 7/20/2015