Forceless Power Makes Your Competition An Afterthought — 5 Ways To Hire For It
Possessing ‘forceless power’ is the key culture trait to hire for a high performing organization.
It leads to a high state of operating that’s fulfilled, satisfied and content — which creates powerful communication and collaboration between colleagues.
This is critical at your company.
Forceless power isn’t driven by ego, and most importantly, it doesn’t create counter force, which is what ruins culture at work.
Counter force was the difference between Ghandi winning independence for a billion person nation in a way that sustained vs. Hitler’s excessive force which created so much counter force the whole world rallied against it.
I use these larger than life examples to demonstrate this principle applies to ultra large numbers of people working together, so it should be much easier to implement at your organization!
At Bisnow Media, where I was the second employee and first sales hire, I experienced this first hand building it’s sales organization for six years.
We got to 80 people over time and I worked with a CEO who embodied the forceless power principle to a tee.
As much as people would come at him (myself included!) with force on a daily basis, I never saw him react forceful back.
He was so present, so poised, and it commanded tremendous respect.
Most of the time people weren’t able to point to what it was but we knew he was special and therefore followed him — myself included.
Now I see that he was forcelessly powerful. He was always giving and there was nothing you could take from him.
This is a powerful position to be in at political organizations and it had tremendous impact on the day to day culture at the company.
Working for someone like that makes all the difference in your day to day action.
Selflessness, humility and caring are words that came to mind. It wasn’t about the money but about the mission — and you could feel it.
The mission to transcend media and sell the company.
We went into a dry and boring industry and boldly created news that was funny and fun.
We were criticized a lot, laughed at and fought against by established incumbents.
Without taking a dime of outside capital, that company sold for $50 million, a very strong exit. It changed peoples lives and employees got rich from it.
Many of them stuck around for a long time. 4–8 years and some of them still run the company today.
Mind you, we began publishing one little email newsletter out of our founders home, in competitive media industries like commercial real estate, technology and legal.
We ate the competitions lunch every single day because we worked faster and harder and grew to publishing 30 email newsletters and 300 conferences a year.
As our original founder and that CEO both taught me, to transcend an industry and leave the competition behind, you need individuals who possess keystone traits for the organization to perform at it’s peak level of excellence, as often as it can.
Your Start Up
The first hires at your start up are absolutely critical.
One person can change the culture of the whole team and slow the progress of the company down.
Whether you’re going from five to ten people , or 30–50, hiring at these stages is critical and set’s the tone for the culture of the organization — which should be focused on from day one.
It’s harder doing a culture turnaround when you get large, though culture becomes that much more important at that stage, which requires an emphasis on it as early as possible.
Ie. Tony Hsieh had a relentless commitment to culture when he first got to Zappos, which about ten years later went on to sell for $1 billion and continues to grow under his watch.
He attributes it all to culture — and he’s right.
As an entrepreneur, a commitment to being #1 in your space, and a dedication to being competitive is required when trying to create a movement to fulfill a vision.
As you get larger, competition becomes even more fierce.
I believe hiring for forceless power is the key to winning over the long run.
People who are forcelessly powerful create internal communication and team cohesiveness that leads to a high performing organization.
The problem with all who consider ‘power’ as being ‘forceful’ is that whenever you apply ‘force’, you’re creating an equal or greater ‘counter force’.
And that’s not considering the added complexity when dealing with humans.
Ie. if you apply x amount of force to me, I can apply x or 100x amount of force back which can lead to out of hand situations and time wasted on politics.
So you want to be powerful, without using force.
This is science, not philosophy. For every force, there’s an equal or greater counter force.
Force can’t last over long periods of time, power does.
At an individual level in the work context, it starts with that persons consciousness, defined in this context as someone’s mindfulness, emotional fitness and general emotional intelligence and resilience.
An understanding of selflessness, to benefit the tribe, team or organization, so both the individual and organization can win in the long run.
Forceless power is very hard to achieve company wide, but a great standard to strive for as an organization.
It can’t lose because there’s nothing to take from it.
Forceful people are takers, powerful people give and receive with ease.
They don’t keep score they just act and go with the flow.
If you add the human traits of forceless power to your hiring filters, over time, you can create a high performing culture.
Even Phil Jackson, who’s led teams using the 1–5 framework I’m about to describe, would push his teams to work from ‘stage 3’ (60 to 70% effectiveness) and say they needed to reach ‘stage 4’ (80 to 90% effectiveness).
You’ll understand the numbers later but for now assume 100% effectiveness would be the ultimate goal at stage 5.
Mind you, this is a man who’d led highly competitive men in a highly competitive league to 11 world championships and considered the best NBA coach of all time.
I like this quote below on what I’m about to get into, by philosopher, geologist, paleontologist and priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
It encapsulates the fusion of team dynamics, individual excellence, vision, collaboration, team alignment and consciousness.
“There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.”
Your organization should be thought of as a collective consciousness, and the higher that consciousness, the higher it’s potential and better the organizational results.
This begins with the culture which begins with the individual traits of your people.
People of high consciousness flow through their work and live life as a journey toward mastery, not just of their craft, but mastery of their moment to moment existence.
Every moment is on the line with top performers and the purpose is maintaining presence.
Here’s Josh Waitzkin, both a chess prodigy and world champion martial artist on the power of presence in competition:
That commitment to excellence itself is the by product in creating the peak performing culture you want.
As in, the goal is not directly winning by will, but winning is the by-product of quality action.
In an effort to create the highest quality work, forceless power puts the quality of the individual’s existence first.
This is what Viktor Frankl talks about when he says: “Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself”
An individual that possesses forceless power is able to selflessly care about the quality of their colleagues existence, creating team cohesiveness in the process, and knows they win if their team wins.
This was the result of the academics and authors of the legendary book, Tribal Leadership.
The frameworks Tony Hsieh at Zappos and Phil Jackson of the Chicago Bulls used to reach the highest states their organizations could reach.
Jackson was well known to practice Buddhism which was the foundation to his buy in of the Culture Map below.
The Culture Map is the framework, with ‘innocent wonderment’ being the trait of existence it’s absolute peak, with ‘tribal pride’ being the core attainable state of a high performing tribe or organization.
5 Ways To Hire For Forceless Power
1. Hire People Who Believe In Their Beliefs And Understand The Biology of Belief Itself
Most people see then believe.
People with power understand and believe that belief creates the reality they see, which is a skill to be learned.
“I was exhilarated by the new realization that I could change the character of my life by changing my beliefs. I was instantly energized because I realized that there was a science-based path that would take me from my job as a perennial “victim” to my new position as “co-creator” of my destiny.” — Dr. Bruce Lipton
2. Hire People Who Prime Their Minds Each Day And Exemplify Ownership of Their Day
In start ups, you’re only as good as what you can get done.
Having more good days than bad is critical.
Priming your day takes radical ownership and control of one’s day.
Every day I meditate on the day I’m going to have and reality I’m going to create.
Believing in the power of visualization is critical and owning that skill is key.
3. Hire People Who Focus on Being Over Achieving
People who focus on being rather achieving and people who believe ‘success’ is the result of living a mindful existence for it’s own sake are committed to excellence on a different wavelength and have the traits of leadership.
These people are the ones who are able to see the big picture, zoom out and operate in a high state of consciousness and uplift everyone around them.
People who strive to achieve through competing are the masses who compete at the midlevel. The cream rises above that level.
4. Hire People Who Religiously Meditate Or Exude a Meditative State
A regular meditation habit can only be cultivated by those committed to a mindful existence.
“All of humanity’s problems stems from mans inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal
If you had a room full of 100 meditators, your company would work well together no matter what that company was working on.
5. Hire People Who Are Passionately Curious
Einstein said he wasn’t a genius only that he was passionately curious which made him live a life long voracious life of learning.
The greatest life teacher of all time said that ‘passion without motive’ was the key to winning in life.
Voracious learning and people who find learning and creativity to be the highest form of human activity and therefore always worth the time are people who are passionately curious.
Conclusion
Forceless power has the capacity to transcend your organization. By raising the standard and transforming the culture.
Consider implementing it to your hiring filters and watch the culture of your organization change.
Thanks for reading. I’m co-founder of Traena, an SF and Chicago based start up that helps makes knowledge sharing software for the enterprise. Please consider a clap below if you made it this far. Warmly, Aram
