Founder Fuel: How do you motivate and inspire your team?

Leaders can lead in different ways, but some of the best leaders have been truly inspirational. They may inspire people to invent new things, or produce better work, or just provide enough motivation to put in 5 extra minutes. The Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) can work, but can also backfire if people don’t believe they’re possible.

It’s been really enlightening to see that clear vision and inspiration can break through walls, but that once those walls are broken others quickly follow behind. This happens in sport – the 4 minute mile – once broken more and more people started to do what was previously thought impossible. It also happens all the time in technology – Landing rockets, now that SpaceX has done it, the Chinese are copying it.

Inspiration is required to get the first people to unlock these barriers.

How do I inspire? I hope to inspire by setting a good example. By working hard. By being informed enough to provide good reasons for decisions. But it is hard. Inspiring is not a skill learned in high school, though perhaps inspirational writing should be taught right after persuasive writing.

I believe that more times than not inspiration comes from good story telling. The story you tell yourself or that you tell others.

It’s not something that I feel confident I have excelled at in practice. But through writing down these thoughts I have a little bit more clarity on how I might learn and improve.

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