Show people progress is possible
TED 2024 Day 1 Lesson: Leadership Goal Setting
Welcome to Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans.
As a leader, your team will not work on hopeless or impossible goals.
The best quote from the opening night of the 2024 TED Conference was:
"Idea: show people progress is possible"
— Angus Hervey (Founder, Fix The News)
Angus was running down a list of positive world statistics rarely reported, such as the amount of wind and solar power deployed, and reducing the world's use of fossil fuels.
His point was that the current news environment focuses on the bad news, which can make many of us feel hopeless. The world is at war, personal rights are under attack, and the planet is doomed to overheat anyway.
There is a "doom loop" risk of bad news inside your company as well.
Repeated waves of layoffs. Few promotions because the company is top heavy. Small raises because of tough economic times. The list of bad news can go on and on.
As a leader, you have to give your team hope.
Teams watch leaders incredibly closely.
They read you for signals. If you do not believe the goal is possible, the team will quickly pick this up.
Most engineers and many others are familiar with one form of this, the fantasy ship date.
"We must ship this by June 1st!" — only everyone knows that the product is not even code complete and is full of bugs. Everyone knows that a slip and a schedule change are coming.
Why work extra hours when management is putting forward an obviously false date?
If you lead a high-performance team, the people on it *want* to excel. They want to hit hard goals. These people are used to getting top marks on exams and they are very willing to work hard to feel successful.
But this behavior has limits. No one likes to feel like a fool or a sucker.
Your job, as a leader, is to try to make sure that the goals are "merely" hard, rather than unrealistic, and then to inspire your team to strive for them.
Other things I saw on my first day at TED.
There are more speakers on AI than on any other topic.
We started with Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind.
I had an AI deepfake of me created as part of a “Democracy + deepfakes” event by TrueMedia.org
I will write a whole post about AI once I hear from more of them this week.
If your story is good enough, you do not need to be a great public speaker. Many of you ask me about executive presence. I saw at least one TED talk where the speaker struggled, but her content carried her. I'm seeking an interview with her to go deeper into how she succeeds as a CEO.
TED attendees are just as fascinating as the speakers. I met a marketer for a global whiskey brand who has been coming for 15+ years, he views it as a “Vacation for the brain.” (a good reminder to never let vacation expire).
As many of you know, my mission is to pay forward my good fortune to help you succeed in your career so that you then pay it forward. My first TED “Discovery Session” (discussion through workshops led by experts) is on the science of generosity with Elizabeth Dunn. This will help me with my Life Mission Launchpad (launched first with paid members):
To help you discover and refine your life mission.
To let you find others with life missions you want to join or support.
To have others find you if they wish to join you.
I saw a demo of Google's Project Starline, a new immersive, 3D video conference space. The summary is good 3D without glasses.
Fun tidbit, part of dinner was fries made from cut Spam.
More on TED each day this week, stay tuned.
Additional TED posts
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