Startup Leadership by Derek Lidow

Author:Derek Lidow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Step One: Tapping Into Core Motivations

Keri started her process by examining who she was at that moment.2 She made notes on her motivations, traits, and entrepreneurial skills. She asked herself whether she wanted to run a large successful company badly enough to sacrifice time with her family (not to mention sleep) and endure the stress she knew she would feel dealing with contentious issues and business matters.

Keri felt that she would need help and support if she was going to take on an enterprise-building project. She first sought emotional support from her husband and from her older sister, with whom she was very close and whose personal judgments she trusted on whether she could lead a substantial company (her sister was a marketing executive at a major mail order company). Whether Keri would aggressively dedicate herself to creating a valuable company or just keep it as an activity to produce supplemental income would depend heavily on her husband's support and on her older sister's opinion of her chances. The toughest question both her husband and sister asked was, “Why do you need to do this?” This question prompted Keri to reevaluate her core motivation—the one that needed to be strong enough for her to shoulder the pressures of being an EL. It took Keri three weeks to come back with her answer: “I need to feel that I am a great example of a woman who can raise a wonderful daughter and also be in charge of my own life. That will be expected of our daughter, and it needs to be expected of me. It would also be my fantasy to someday turn a successful business over to our daughter. I hate to think that I could not achieve these goals.”

Keri started her personal leadership strategy with the right first step: determining her motivations and making sure they were credible to people who knew her well. It turns out that in Keri's case these motivations were not new to her; she had been aware of them for at least five years, since she and her husband had gone through a year of couples therapy to get their marriage back on track after their baby was born. It took three weeks for Keri to reconnect to these core motivations. The “What do you need, and why do you need it?” question focused Keri on how she would feel like a failure if she did not set a good example for her daughter—it made her tremble to think of not being someone her daughter respected. Once she reacknowledged this burning desire, Keri was able to passionately answer her sister's and husband's question and the many follow-on questions about what she would do under different difficult situations. It was obvious to them that Keri really wanted this, and they let her know that her feelings and reasoning had convinced them that she could succeed and that this quest was something they would help and support.

Keri had begun her process of making a

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