BOOSTING YOU:
The Book that Helps You Become a More Successful Executive
Team YOU
There are a number of professions that allow you to achieve great success without the need to manage a team: for example, you can be a great surgeon, a gifted trader, a brilliant attorney, a celebrity actor or a star consultant. In all these examples, you are billing your time to society for sometimes-astronomical sums of money and your revenues, though limited by the amount of time you have, will be astronomical.
But your purpose in life is not to make large amounts of money; it is to add value to this world. And maximizing your added value means making your skills available outside the limited amount of time you are able to devote. It means leveraging your skillset through a team that can grow and reach many more people than you could on your own.
Concretely, almost everyone, including those in professions listed above, will need to manage a team. Managing people is being taught at all business schools and has been the focus of thousands of books. In this section, I will tackle the subject through a practical approach, ignoring the classical concepts that have become part of our culture, to focus instead on areas where my practical experience will provide valuable insights.
Before we delve into the nitty-gritty of managing your teams, let me share with you two such insights and let them become the guiding principles behind the chapters that follow:
- Having a team means you have power. Power is necessary to achieve your goals, but it also corrupts: the larger the organization you are managing, the more power you have and the more boost to your ego. You will need to channel all that power into achievement and remain humble. If you let power go to your head, you will be capable of the worst mistakes. Jesus Christ, possibly the world's greatest leader by number of followers, washed the feet of his disciples.
- Leading means managing energy. We saw in the previous section that emotion is the key source of energy in our life. Your team is a collection of people with their emotions and energy. Your job as a leader is to understand this energy flow and enhance it, direct it and manage it.