Permission to Screw Up by Kristen Hadeed & Simon Sinek

Author:Kristen Hadeed & Simon Sinek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

5 UPSIDE DOWN AND INSIDE OUT

“Chug, chug, chug, chug!”

Rowdy college students crowd into a living room, red Solo cups in hand, as Lil Wayne blasts through the speakers. The bass is so loud the pictures shake on the walls. Miraculously, the cops haven’t shown up yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Empty beer cans litter the floor. The bathroom has been out of toilet paper for hours. The trash is overflowing, and the Jell-O shots are almost gone.

In the middle of the crowd, two of the drunkest people hold up the legs of a girl who is upside-down, grasping the top of a keg in both hands, and drinking Bud Light straight from the tap.

She gets some beer up her nose but keeps going, and the crowd goes wild.

She’s wasted.

—

Keg stands are never pretty, but this one was particularly horrific for a few reasons:

Reason #1: It was my living room.

Reason #2: I was the girl.

Reason #3: The people holding my legs worked at Student Maid.

I know what you’re thinking. After all I’d learned about leadership, how could I do something as stupid as this?

Well, after Erin left the company, things really took a turn. . . .

Totally kidding. This party went down a long time before that. I threw it in honor of my college graduation, right around the time I gave up a career in finance and chose to stick with Student Maid instead. Back then, I didn’t understand that slurping Jell-O shots together was just one way to build relationships with the people on my team. I hadn’t yet discovered I could also form bonds with them based on trust, vulnerability, empathy, and mutual respect, and that that kind of relationship would benefit me—and Student Maid—so much more than the kind that left everyone with nasty hangovers.

I’ve told you how I hired the right people to join my team, but now it’s time for my favorite part of the story: how we went from holding up one another’s legs to having one another’s backs. How we actually became a team.

—

No matter how embarrassed I am by that keg stand, I can easily see how I ended up in such a compromising, upside-down position: I was the same age as many of our students when I hired them, and I saw them as friends more than as people who worked for me. I was a student running a business full of students. We went to the same pool parties and hung out at the same bars. We rooted for the same football team and hit up the same tailgates. A couple of us were even taking the same classes.

The fact that students had to pick up and drop off their cleaning supplies at my house back then didn’t help either. Before the incubator days, it wasn’t unusual for our students to come by on Saturday mornings and find me (and sometimes my roommates) sitting on the couch in pajamas, bed head and all. On payday, the students would

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