Your team is borrowing your optimism
Readtime: 2.5 minutes
You're probably more cautious now than you were ten years ago.
You'd call it experience, and a lot of the time you'd be right. You've seen more things go wrong, and you know what they cost.
But I spent a few days last week somewhere that made me wonder how much of that caution is still doing useful work.
The Glastonbury for Business
Ideas Fest calls itself the Glastonbury for Business. It's a bit different from the music festivals I normally go to (although there were still bands and DJs in the evening).
One session has stayed with me. Simon Alexander Ong interviewing Richard Harpin.
Richard founded HomeServe and exited for billions. Simon has an energy and optimism that fills a room.
What struck me was how little distance there was between them on that front. The optimism came from both.
It was the same across most of the talks and conversations I had. From people who had exited for billions to people only a few months in, the resilience and optimism sounded pretty similar.
So optimism didn't seem to depend on how things had gone. If anything, it looked like it came first.
Where the caution comes from
As you get more senior, you have more to protect. A bigger team, a bigger reputation, more people relying on your decisions.
A lot of senior roles also reward you for seeing what could go wrong. You spot the risk in the plan or the flaw in the numbers before anyone else does. It's a valuable skill, and it's probably part of why you were promoted.
The difficulty is that caution builds up gradually. Each cautious call makes sense on its own, so it's hard to notice when caution has become your default setting.
In a large organisation you can go a long way like this, because the structure carries a lot of the load. The brand, the client relationships and the people around you keep things moving.
Founders don't have that. It's hard to raise money, hire people or win a first customer if you don't believe it's going to work. So optimism is part of the job from day one.
Your team borrows yours
I think the same is true for senior leaders. It just isn't written into the job description.
Your team takes a lot of its cues from you. When you're cautious, people bring you safer ideas, or fewer of them. When you're optimistic about where things are heading, they're more willing to have a go at something. In practice, you're supplying the optimism for the people around you, in much the same way a founder does.
Shane Lopez drew a useful distinction here. Optimism is expecting good things to happen. Hope is more practical, the will and the way to make them happen.
What I saw at Ideas Fest looked a lot like hope. People had something they were building, and their optimism was pointed at it.
The resilience had the same quality. It seemed to come from wanting something, which is probably easier to sustain than just enduring.
I don't think everyone should be an entrepreneur. It's a hard gig. But I think senior leaders can gain a lot from spending time around people who are.
If you haven't had a proper conversation recently with a founder, or with someone right at the start of their career, it might be worth finding an hour for one.
It makes me wonder what your team would say you're optimistic about right now.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. If your team could do with a shot of the optimism I saw at Ideas Fest, I have a few dates left in October and November for away days, conferences and leadership programmes. Let me know if you’d like a chat.