Identify Sheep and a shepherd in your start up.
Extracted from a podcast
Hey one and all! Team, something much important than anything else to build your business and today i am going to give you an idea to recognize, understand and motivate your team and make most out of them in a good way.
I have always believed there are two kinds of people in any team;a shepherd and sheep and as simple as a binary, either its 1 or 0. Either he/she is the shepherd or a sheep. With every team that you set up you should be able to differentiate the kind of people in your team and know if he is a leader or a follower. It’s obviously the good if 99% of your team, who work for you, is leaders or say are shepherd and its best for a start up to have more of their teams sharing a shepherd mentality. You can always have sheep or followers on a later part of your journey but then again if you can have more leaders, that’s just the best for any company.
Having said this, no matter how much you try to explain people to be a leader; not everybody will wants to be a leader; not everyone will want to hustle through the process to become a good leader.
Now, the question is, what’s the process? What’s the process for Entrepreneur to choose, hire, retain or fire their teams?
The first thing you have to take note of is how often you have to tell the very same person to get a things done. Supposedly, if you have to keep telling them for 10 times to do the same thing then you have to be very clear that person is a sheep and not a shepherd because a sheep, as we all know is something that we have to keep poking to make it walk a way and if you have someone whom you have to keep poking than may be they aren’t a shepherd. And one of the best way you can find a sheep is checking the past, as in how many times did you have to keep them saying to do the very same thing again and again.
Secondly, for some senior team members , you give them access, you give them authority and what I have figured out is majority of people tend to be good, decent and humble to each and everyone in terms of work and output. These are again a sheep and not the shepherd. Why, you ask me, because to be good and humble to everyone is one thing but to be neutral and not take either of the sides in context of work which is a sheep quality. Because to be a leader, you should have to take side not biased though and know what’s good and what’s bad and what’s wrong and what’s right regardless of what other people might think. And in this manner, by giving a senior an authority to control the team or the newcomers you would get to understand if a senior is again a sheep material or a shepherd.
So, these are the two among all of the best ways to understand your employee and know if he/she is a sheep or a Shepherd. Revising, the first thing is if you have to keep on poking someone to do something and second if he/she can’t take responsibility of assigning the juniors and taking responsibility .
Now, coming to the leaders, whatever work you give them, they try to find the fastest and the best way for it to get done and the works that can be done at the moment they do it then. While sheep has this mentality to shift work or if they couldn’t do it today they take it easy to be done tomorrow; leaders opt to finish the work as soon as possible on that very day thinking they can then give time to other works tomorrow. Next approach to understand is, how well one can understand urgency of work and follow as per the deadlines. Leaders know to prioritize work in an order. They are autonomous and need not to be micromanaged.
Now that I have presented you the idea of how to differentiate sheep and shepherd in your team make sure you behave accordingly. You should give growth chances to the shepherd more often. One thing that you should keep in your mind is shepherd get bored easily so you need to make sure that you constantly keep stretching them and motivating them. And if you have by now figured out your shepherd then give them the sheep to handle!
The examples presented here are too harsh and should be taken as an approach to build a mindset than as taking an approach to take direct decision. There are lot of team who are in between and may not be a pure leader material but are important for the company. And at times a shepherd comes out of a sheep so its also a responsibility of a leader to transform a sheep who has a potential by stretching him/her. I hope this will add a value to all the entrepreneur and starter.
