LEADERSHIP IS LEADERSHIP IS LEADERSHIP

ONCE YOU’VE CLARIFIED your vision and built early momentum, the next big step to tackle is how to keep people motivated and inspired to be part of your fight. Whether you’ve found supporters from scratch by leveraging influencers and social media, or you have a built-in team because you are starting a new company or proposing a new idea within an existing organization, your movement can’t continue unless the support from your team does. Without others supporting you and spreading your cause, you really don’t have a movement.

The good news is that the skills required to inspire and empower people to support and grow your movement are the same whether inside a company, on a sports team, in a classroom, or within the halls of government. Some of the techniques in this chapter are typically used by people who lead more formal teams, but I believe these concepts are useful even for ad hoc teams. Movements often have one charismatic leader at the head, but they don’t work to make change unless everyone involved is invested and feels trusted to carry the cause forward. That’s why we need to remember one crucial thing: a team is made up of individuals—and you build a movement by motivating every single person on your team to fight for the cause.

I first realized this when I was a coxswain on the crew team in college. It’s true for rowers, and it’s true for all the teams I’ve been a part of since. When I was a coxswain, it was important for me to find ways to motivate the whole crew, but it was just as critical to understand how to motivate each individual rower. The way I determined what worked best with each rower was to coach each person individually on the rowing machine, trying different techniques to test what made the difference between a good time and a great time for each person. For some it was encouraging feedback, such as saying, “I know you can do this,” and for others it was competitive feedback, such as, “Don’t let so-and-so beat your time.”

Different motivators worked for different people, and learning how to push them each in unique ways led to better results and more wins as a team. At work, I now use a tool I developed to understand the factors that drive each member of the team.

Many years ago, I was leading a team of talented marketers at Yahoo! when something unexpected happened. In a one-on-one meeting, one woman on my team said to me, “I want you to know that if I ever do a really good job, just pay me more money. I don’t care about recognition or awards, and I’m not motivated by praise. If I do well, just give me a bonus or pay me more.”

I stuttered through a response, feeling a bit taken aback by her comments. But as I thought about the conversation more, I realized something: if this team member hadn’t told me what motivated her, I’d likely never know. What’s worse, I might try to reward her for good work in a way that would be motivating for me but not at all for her, leaving her frustrated and less likely to perform well in the future.

I realized that if I wanted her to be happy and productive in her job, the most helpful tools I could have in order to ensure her happiness were the details of what motivated her. This is true in other relationships, too. It is often referred to as the “platinum” rule: instead of using the “golden” rule of treating other people as you would like to be treated, treat them as they would like to be treated.

So based on this illuminating conversation, I decided that the best way to keep people happy at work was to start directly asking all the people on my teams what motivated them. To do so effectively, I created a tool: the Motivational Pie Chart. I know the name is not awesome. In fact, it was once referred to by an engineer on my team as the most Dilbert-y thing he had ever seen at work. Nevertheless, it is actually useful. Whereas performance reviews let us measure how someone is performing against the objectives the organization has set for them, the Motivational Pie Chart asks how we as an organization are performing against the criteria that motivate this specific individual. Using the tool is pretty simple. You just ask people to do a three-part exercise:

Sample Motivational Pie Chart

If you are using the tool as a team leader, the next step is to have an open conversation with each person on your team to talk about ways you can work together to get your team member to green on the categories they chose. Understanding what makes people happy is a great way to make sure they stay motivated on your team and support your movement.

Since that original conversation at Yahoo!, I’ve used this tool with over a thousand people at four companies, and I’ve seen an interesting pattern emerge. While there are a lot of unique factors that can motivate individuals (I’ve heard everything from “I want to be able to go rock climbing each morning” to “I’d like to be on the cover of a magazine”), there are three key motivational factors that most people share:

These three factors are so common that I’ve seen them, using various naming conventions, in nearly every pie chart I’ve looked at over the past fifteen years. It’s also true that money motivates people, especially if they feel they are being paid significantly less than they are worth. It’s analogous to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: once people feel their basic financial needs are being met and that they are paid fairly for their capabilities, then they quickly move on to focusing on “higher level” motivators like meaning, collegiality, and learning. Note that the pie chart can and does change over time. That is to be expected—just as our lives and careers change, so do our motivations.

Understanding both the unique, individual motivators and these core, common motivators is necessary when building and leading a team of any kind. In the rest of this chapter, I’ll take you through each of the three core themes to show how to put them to work to rally your team into passionate supporters of your movement. If you want to inspire people to support a vision, lead them well by making it clear why that vision has meaning, showing them how their role connects to that vision, demonstrating how they can learn and be challenged by being part of the team, and building a team of people who respect and support each other.

1. CHAMPION PURPOSE

AS I’VE EMPHASIZED throughout the book, meaningful purpose is the key to launching any movement. And as we saw in the pie chart, it’s also one of the best ways to inspire any team. In this section, I’ll cover a few examples of how leaders effectively use purpose to encourage and engage individuals and teams.

PURPOSE IS A BRIDGE BUILDER

Movements are often most effective when they unite many disparate threads and appeal to many different people. A clear sense of purpose can provide a source of unity. Özgecan Aslan, a nineteen-year-old Turkish university student, was murdered in 2015 on a minibus in Mersin, Turkey, as she resisted an attempted rape. She had been the last person left on a minibus when the driver diverted the route and drove into a nearby forest and tried to rape her. When she resisted by using pepper spray, he stabbed her several times and beat her to death with an iron rod. He then called his father and a friend to help him dispose of the body. They burned her body and cut off Özgecan’s hands to try to destroy evidence in the case.

When Gözde Salur, a young Turkish woman, heard about Özgecan, she couldn’t help but feel that such a crime could easily have happened to her. Gözde was also a university student at the time, and she commuted to and from school on the same kind of minibus that Özgecan’s attacker drove. The news scared her, and though she had never been involved in political activism, her sense of connection to a woman she had never met and frustration about a culture that tolerated this kind of violence against women spurred her to act. She said that “crimes against women are a part of our everyday lives. But the brutal murder of Özgecan was a last straw. My conscience, my heart, could not handle hearing that one more suspect had been let off in court just because he wore a nice suit.” That was the moment she realized she wanted to take action.

Gözde started a petition to pass “Özgecan’s Law” to prevent reduced sentences for those convicted of violence against women based on “good behavior” or “unjust provocation.” Soon, despite how fractured her country was politically, she saw that people were coming together around her campaign to mobilize for justice after this brutal crime. A sense of shared purpose had created a community of people united in this one goal, even if they were divided in others. When the signatures on her petition started to increase, she said to me, “It showed me that regardless of political views, social position, and everything else, people can still come together in Turkey to raise their voices in support of such an important issue. I received messages from very, very different people through Change.org and through Facebook and my Twitter account. These people had very different political views. Some of them were conservatives, some of them were very liberal. But they all told me, ‘We are with you. If there’s anything we can do, please let us know.’ And this showed me that we could connect in such moments. This gave me a lot of hope that there’s still many things that this society can do when we come together.”

Gözde’s work paid off: 1.2 million people signed the petition. Those 1.2 million people made hers the most-signed Change.org campaign of all time in Turkey. And while the law has not yet passed due to the ongoing political upheaval resulting from the attempted 2016 military coup, Parliament is considering a draft proposal for the law. Furthermore, the three men convicted in the murder of Özgecan were all given life sentences, showing a marked shift in the treatment of men who commit crimes against women. People from a wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds united around Gözde’s vision for Özgecan’s Law and became part of the movement to create harsher penalties for perpetrators of violence against women.

EXPOSE YOUR TEAM TO STORIES OF PURPOSE

Within existing organizations, leaders are also more effective when they keep the organization’s purpose at the forefront. One of the best ways to do that is by making the stories of people who are affected by your vision front and center. Neil Grimmer of Plum Organics, whom we met in Chapter 1, reminded his team of his vision in a weekly all-hands meeting they held on Monday mornings. Each meeting would end with a section called “The Love Bomb,” which showed a picture and a story from one of their consumers about how Plum had made a difference in that family’s life. Neil calls this catalyzing tool one of the most powerful things they could have done as a company because it helped them start the week realizing that what they do is important. He says, “Even when the work you do matters, you can still feel like sometimes you’re just punching in and punching out. But that reminder, when it’s front and center the first thing Monday morning, gives you that rocket fuel to get past that moment.”

We used a similar process to keep people close to the mission at Change.org. In weekly all-team video calls including colleagues from across the globe, we would often share a video from a petition starter or even have one join the team on the call and talk about how the platform made a difference in his or her life. These stories were almost always very emotional, as the people using the site were usually overcoming major personal challenges. The ability to directly connect people on the team to people using the platform was an extremely powerful tool in ensuring the team felt close to the purpose of the organization and was especially effective for team members whose roles were a bit more distant from the day-to-day purpose, like those with roles in finance, engineering, and other departments.

The organizations that are most effective in reinforcing purpose among their teams find ways to either share stories or make connections between people who use the products and the people who build and support them. There are many ways to do that. You can have a smaller, more frequent meetings like Plum and Change.org do; you can have bigger, less frequent, but more intense events that bring people together, like eBay Live, a conference that brought together buyers, sellers, and eBay staff; or you can do both. My team at Facebook, for example, uses a two-pronged strategy. We regularly bring in different Facebook group administrators to meet with the team and hold big events like Community Summits, where Facebook employees meet and interact with administrators for hundreds of the largest groups. Big events like this can help cement community, not only between your team and the people who use your product or support your cause, but also among the supporters. Even informal meetings can bring critical learning to your team about how to pursue your cause or product in a way that will best meet the needs of the people whose lives you aim to improve. The better you and your team understand the people you hope to have an impact on, the more likely you will be to meet their needs, and the more closely you’ll all feel connected to your purpose.

EXTEND YOUR PURPOSE TO OTHERS

Neil Grimmer talks a lot about how values-driven businesses will be at the center of the new economy, specifically because of how motivating that core purpose is for the people who work there. And he hopes to prove this again in his new business, Habit, which offers personalized health testing and nutrition planning to people looking to have a healthier lifestyle. Echoing Plum’s origin story, Neil started Habit when no other companies existed to meet his personal needs. Although he had been a triathlete in his earlier days, Neil told me that after eight years of running Plum, he had succumbed to what his doctor called “CEO coping mechanisms”—too much bad food, booze, and coffee, and not enough sleep. He had gained fifty pounds, and after finally going to see doctors he found out he was prediabetic and had a high risk of heart attack.

Instead of just stopping with the doctor visits, Neil started bio-hacking and meeting with amazing scientists around the country and around the world; he even had his DNA tested through whole genome sequencing. Through this process he gathered an enormous amount of insight into what was going on with his body. Neil realized that what he was going through was not unique to him and that his personal discovery could be valuable to others. As he told me, “I realized that the insights I was getting about myself, through thousands of dollars and some world travel to visit different specialists, needed to be accessible to everybody at affordable price points, democratized in a way that empowered people to take control of their lives through food.”

So Neil is now building a second business based on a personal experience that made him deeply feel the importance of the connection between health and food. While others on his team (or people he had yet to recruit to join his team) may not have originally shared his purpose, the depth of Neil’s passion helped him attract, hire, and inspire incredible talent for the Habit team, from their chief scientist to their chief technology officer. Neil’s clear purpose was also central in recruiting experts to Habit’s advisory board, like Dr. Leroy Hood, who is one of the founders of the Human Genome Project. A clear purpose can help you not only to keep a team inspired but also to build an amazing team in the first place.

TRACK YOUR PROGRESS

In order to know whether you’re making a difference, you need to track your progress. Often, people track core metrics that have to do with business success, like revenue and audience growth, but neglect to track the metrics that actually correspond to their vision and Theory of Change. Admittedly, it’s not always easy to find metrics that align perfectly when it’s likely that the vision you are aiming to achieve is something that hasn’t been done before. But even though measuring impact isn’t as neat and clean as simply measuring revenue or daily active users, it is critical to inspiring your team. We know that people are motivated by meaning in their work, and being able to measure it helps people see just how much their work matters. Wharton professor and bestselling author Adam Grant showed the connection between meaningful work, motivation, and results in a study he conducted with the University of Michigan’s fund-raising call center. When callers were able to speak to a student who had benefited from their fund-raising efforts and hear the student’s gratitude for the scholarship, the results were striking: within a month, the callers increased the length of their phone calls with potential donors by 142 percent—and increased the amount of donations they solicited by 171 percent. A later study showed continued increases in revenues—by more than 400 percent.

At Change.org, where the vision is a world where no one is powerless, measuring impact meant trying to understand how to measure people’s sense of their own agency. We started by trying to use pure quantitative metrics, looking specifically at the metrics for petition victories. Initially, we concentrated on the number of people experiencing victories, assuming that if someone had been part of a campaign that won, then it likely meant that they would feel more empowered and have a stronger sense that change was possible. That metric grew from 8 million people to nearly 100 million people over a five-year period. While that was terrific on its own merits, we realized that we didn’t have a real sense of whether this truly changed the way people felt about their own power. Ultimately, we created something called the “empowerment index,” which uses qualitative metrics from surveys. Combined with the victory metrics, the company can get a good sense of whether it’s making progress toward its vision. And that, in turn, helps the team believe in the impact they are creating and see meaning in their work.

2. CULTIVATE GROWTH

THOUGH IT MAY be counterintuitive, one of the most effective ways to keep individuals and teams motivated is to continually challenge them. People feel more excited to work hard as part of a team and in support of a cause when they feel they are learning and growing as part of the process. This section will cover some examples of how effective leaders can cultivate growth among the people on their teams.

THE POWER OF HIGH EXPECTATIONS

Research has demonstrated for years that high expectations have the power to improve performance. Experts call this phenomenon the Pygmalion Effect. Named after a sculptor in a Greek myth who fell in love with a statue he carved, the Pygmalion Effect occurs when an authority figure’s positive expectations lead to the improved performance of another person.

The effect was first demonstrated in 1966 by Harvard researcher Robert Rosenthal. He told teachers which of their students (about 20 percent) would be intellectual “bloomers,” saying those students’ results on a test suggested they would have surprising gains in IQ over the next eight months. The teachers were not told that the students on that list were actually selected at random. Eight months later, they retested the IQs of the randomly selected students and found they had improved, especially as compared to a control group. The teachers’ high expectations of the students they were told were intellectual bloomers caused the teachers to change their own interactions with those students such that the students had more belief in themselves and their ability to improve, and therefore actually did improve. The effect has been demonstrated many times since then with people in a wide variety of situations, ranging from military recruits to corporate sales teams.

In 2015, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, who run a leadership consultancy, looked at the performance and engagement of people who worked for managers who gave more high ratings on performance reviews to their teams versus those who consistently gave lower ratings. Even though both sets of managers felt they were setting high expectations for their teams, their teams’ results diverged dramatically. As Zenger and Folkman describe in Harvard Business Review, “The people who’d received more positive ratings felt lifted up and supported. And that vote of confidence made them more optimistic about future improvement. Conversely, subordinates rated by the consistently tougher managers were confused or discouraged—often both. They felt they were not valued or trusted, and that it was impossible to succeed.” The actual belief that leaders had in the people on their team became a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading the people who felt their managers believed in them to actually improve. This is not to suggest that managers should artificially inflate ratings for people on their teams but rather that managers who have confidence in their teams tend to build higher-performing teams.

WHEN YOU SET high expectations for people and then believe in them and support them to reach those expectations, they can soar far beyond what you (and even they) expect. And not only do people perform better when they feel trusted and supported, they also respect and trust their leaders more, too. I’ve seen this as a coxswain and at every company where I’ve worked, but the most profound example in my experience was when I was a schoolteacher myself, early in my career.

When I was in college, I taught during the summers in a program called Summerbridge, now part of a national collaborative called Breakthrough, which helps highly motivated, low-income middle school students get on the path to college. At Breakthrough, all of the teachers are high school or college students themselves. Nevertheless, they’re given full responsibility for curriculum development, classroom teaching, and mentorship to the amazing young people in the program. I was only seventeen when I started teaching there, and to be entrusted with so much responsibility at such a young age was incredibly empowering. Wanting to deserve that trust made me work even harder, so I threw everything I had into being the best teacher and mentor I could be, and to learning as much as I could from the people around me.

Most of the students in this program were going to be the first in their families to go to college, and they didn’t always have an easy road to get there. Many of them lived in areas rife with gang violence; often, they were being raised by grandparents or single parents, or by parents who didn’t speak English. Many had to care for younger siblings at home or work to support their families. Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, they were incredibly motivated—motivated enough to fill out a long and very challenging application with essays and teacher recommendations, which, if they were successful and accepted to the program, would require them to spend their entire summer in school. Instead of thinking about relaxing, they were preparing for six weeks of full-day classes, followed by two hours of homework each night.

And they were excited about it.

It was the first environment they had been a part of where it was cool to be smart, where they could bond with other kids who loved learning, and where they could connect with role models who were just a few years ahead of them, showing them that the journey they wanted to take was possible.

The magic of Breakthrough is the opportunity for true empowerment: the organization and the leadership set high expectations for both the students and the teachers in terms of the outcomes they believe can be achieved. And because those high expectations are made clear and the support to reach them is there, people feel trusted and almost always reach or exceed them. This is true for the Breakthrough middle school students, over 90 percent of whom go on to graduate from four-year colleges. And it is true of the student teachers, more than 70 percent of whom go on to careers in education. It was also true for me. I went on to teach high school and to found my own Breakthrough program in Pittsburgh, which is still running twenty-five years later and has helped thousands of young people become first-generation college graduates. Many of those students came back to teach in the program, and one—Sarah Bachner—even became the director of the program for several years. This is another reason why movements are so powerful—when strong enough, they can continue even after the original leader departs. Other people from within the movement will pick up the torch and keep running.

Breakthrough, started by the incredible Lois Loofbourrow in San Francisco, is now a national collaborative with twenty-four affiliate sites around the United States and one in Hong Kong. All together, Breakthrough has prepared many tens of thousands of first-generation college students over the past several decades. It is precisely this belief in the potential of people and the setting of high expectations for them that causes people to be so passionate about Breakthrough in return.

90/10 DECISION-MAKING

One way to institutionalize high expectations and help people grow is what I call the 90/10 model for decision-making, something I’ve used at Change.org as well as other places I’ve worked. The core idea is that people should be able to make roughly 90 percent of the decisions that are required for them to get their job done. The remaining 10 percent of decisions may require sign-off or approval. If this isn’t happening, either you’re asking people to do things that you shouldn’t be asking them to do, or you’re not empowering them as much as you should be.

One way Change.org implemented the 90/10 model is through a “traffic light” system. Here’s how it works:

Creating structural clarity like this helps to ensure that (a) people get to make enough of their own decisions to feel trusted and empowered, and (b) people have a common language for discussing decision-making in a clear, nonthreatening way.

To see whether you are on track for the 90/10 system, you can use a log to track decision-making. Typically, a decision log tracks which decisions were made, by whom, on which dates, the primary rationale, and who was consulted. A decision log can help in two ways: First, it shows you whether people on your team are actually able to make most of their decisions on their own. If it turns out that’s not the case, the log provides a good starting point for open discussions between leaders and people on their teams. Focus on determining where the decision-making process breaks down and how you can establish clearer expectations about who makes which decisions. Second, it provides visibility for people on the team who weren’t involved in the decision. In leadership-level meetings at Google, we would track all of our major decisions and distribute the log to our full teams following the meeting. It created complete transparency about what decisions were made, by whom, and why.

GROWTH THROUGH DIVERSITY

As you build your team, don’t forget that the highest performing teams are diverse ones made up of people with different skills, different backgrounds and experiences, and different demographic traits such as gender, race, age, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation.

There is an enormous amount of research on this topic from studies spanning several decades showing that diverse teams are more innovative and lead to better financial results, higher growth rates, and even higher quality scientific research results. People who think differently and bring diverse perspectives to the table challenge us to get outside our comfort zone, consider different questions, and push our ideas further. So when you think about how to inspire a team, remember that getting help from people who think differently than you do is extremely valuable. It’s especially helpful as a tool for growth and development because people continually learn when they’re part of teams with a diversity of perspectives to push their thinking.

The person who has taught me the most about this is my husband, Len. He comes from a large German and Polish Catholic family—eight brothers and sisters—and grew up in a modest house in a blue-collar neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Neither of his parents went to college, and Len was able to put himself through college by joining the military. He spent twenty years in the military in a combination of active duty and the National Guard. (He actually flew home on a one-day pass for our wedding.) So much of what I loved about Len when we first met and what I love about him now comes from the experiences that shaped him. He is hardworking, a creative and scrappy problem-solver, always willing to lend a hand to someone else, and kind at his core. I sometimes joke that I married him because whenever we went to someone’s house for dinner, he was always the first person to get up and help with the dishes.

I come from a small, upper-middle-class Jewish family and grew up in San Francisco. While my parents came from humble backgrounds as the children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, they were both able to go to college, get master’s degrees, and become executives in their professions. And though I worked paying jobs from the age of fourteen, I did not have to work to pay my way through college, and I grew up with other privileges that shaped my worldview, like the ability to travel internationally.

Having the combined perspectives of our families is so valuable to both of us and to our daughters. We’re able to appreciate and learn from different religions, different class backgrounds, and generally different perspectives on the world. My daughters have also seen that although we are different, there is more that ties us together than pulls us apart. Understanding that we have so much in common despite the differences in our backgrounds and that we have so much to learn from each other also makes it easier to remain open-minded to the idea that anyone might have something to teach us. In fact, the more different we are, the more likely we have something to learn.

Learning from those who are different from me has been one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about my various jobs as well, even when it can be difficult sometimes to find common ground. My cofounder and I at The Dealmap came from quite different backgrounds and perspectives, and it was the first time running a startup company for both of us, which was a fairly stressful experience. The biggest area of contention between us was our different decision-making styles. He had spent his early years at Microsoft, which has a much more hierarchical, top-down decision-making structure, and I was used to a more input-gathering-based decision-making model. He really wanted me to just decide things, and I wanted to make sure I heard ideas from the other leaders on the team before making a final decision. We spent most of our first year working through how to work together—and it sometimes got so heated that we’d have to go outside or into a car to have discussions so we wouldn’t upset the team. But after many months of working through our different styles, we began to appreciate each other more, learn from one another, and we both came out stronger for it. We were able to build The Dealmap into a successful company together—more successfully than either of us could have done alone—we grew in our effectiveness as leaders, and we remain dear friends today.

At a time when our world seems more divided than ever, it’s also more important than ever to reach out to people with alternate views and experiences. When you look to inspire others, remember you can’t do it alone, or at least that you can’t do it as well alone as you can with the help of those who bring something to the table that you don’t.

SEEK ADVICE

In 2013 two amazing women on the team at Change.org—Sarah Ryan and Michelle Melendez—along with a few others helped to found Women Helping Others Achieve (WHOA), an employee-led peer-mentoring program to build leadership skills and provide a support network for women at all levels of the company. Though they came from very different backgrounds and worked in different departments at our global company, they both felt something was needed to help women succeed at work and in their lives outside of it and decided to try to create a new program to solve that problem.

After discussing it among a small group and getting executive buy-in, Michelle and Sarah decided that the key next step was to get more input from people across the company who would be involved. As Sarah described to me in an interview: “We knew that we had the passion and the enthusiasm and the support from the executive staff. The next step was getting more buy-in, and more diverse input. We gathered together women from every region, from every department, and we made sure that we had a breadth of experience levels in there, too. We knew that we needed this diversity of thought and experience to make sure that the program was helpful and supportive for all women at Change and not just a subset of women in a certain office or department. So we had that take-off call, and it was really exciting. Everybody had lots of great ideas.” And many of those great ideas became critical pieces of the program.

Michelle and Sarah saw a need they wanted to address inside their organization, both for themselves and for others. Although they didn’t have all the answers, they took the leap to get started and pulled in others to push the idea further. By asking for advice, they not only made the program stronger, but they also grew as leaders and gave the rest of the team opportunities to grow as well. And, as an added benefit, engaging their participants deepened the connections that they felt with the program, and with Michelle and Sarah as leaders. It was a successful approach. Three years later, WHOA was thriving within Change.org, with nearly every woman participating, and it had expanded beyond the co-mentorship program to a speaker series, a chat room with shared experiences, and more.

While asking others for advice is a great strategy to promote growth and learning, it is also an effective way to improve people’s impression of your competence and likability as a leader. Research by Alison Wood Brooks and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School showed in multiple studies that when people ask for advice, they are seen as smarter and more likable by those they ask, primarily because people like to be asked for advice—it makes them in turn feel smart and appreciated. This held true in a wide variety of situations across studies by different people, from job interviews to performance reviews and even to speed dating! Being willing to ask for advice will not only help you and your team grow, it will also likely make people view you as a stronger leader.

IMAGINE THE HORIZON

In the same way that you have a long-term vision for your movement, helping your team create a long-term vision is one way to keep them motivated and to encourage their growth as well.

There’s a technique called the Horizon Conversation that I use with my team and that I adapted from David Hanrahan, former head of HR at Change.org. Similar to the Theory of Change that we talked about in Chapter 3, it’s a way of starting with the outcome that you want and then working backward to figure how to get there.

The Horizon Conversation has three parts.

The first is an assessment of the skills you’ve already learned, based on the roles you’ve had so far in your life. The initial step is to go back through your life and say, “These are all of my experiences,” and then pull out the top few lessons you believe you learned in each of those roles. That adds up to your current set of skills.

The second part is to think about a goal you want to set: “What do I want to be doing five to ten years from now?” The objective here is to think big and not limit yourself to options that are obvious or in a “straight line” to what you are doing now. I’ve done this activity with many people and heard goals that vary from starting a business, to going into politics, to becoming an author or an artist, to being a CEO, to wanting to start movements of their own. There are no limits to people’s dreams. I never rein in people’s goals, because that’s the point of the exercise: to look ahead to the vast horizon and dream about what’s possible. Once you have your dreams outlined, make a list of all the skills that are needed for that role you want. If you aren’t sure, you can work with someone who understands that specific role to make a list of the skills required to be great at it.

The third step is to look at the gaps between the skills you have now and those required for where you want to be so you understand what it’s going to take to get there. And then you can think about specific roles and projects you can take on between here and there to make sure you’re on the path that is heading to the horizon, to where you want to be.

It may seem crazy to put huge, seemingly unachievable goals on the table, but the truth is, the best chance people have of reaching enormous goals is to be specific about what those goals are and how to work toward them. As with your vision for your movement overall, the only way to actually achieve a goal is to be clear about what you want and go all in on getting there. And the same holds true for your team. If you want them to be able to truly grow and achieve big dreams, then it makes sense to help them outline those dreams and take steps toward getting there.

YOU CAN TAKE ONLY SO MANY POWER 10S

Motivation of teams and individuals is as much an art as it is a science—and it is crucial to know the fine line between inspiring people to give their all in a positive way and pushing them too hard toward burnout. There is a technique in rowing called a “Power 10,” when rowers in a boat will take ten strokes at their absolute maximum power. They are already rowing at an intense pace, and these ten strokes are meant to lift that intensity even higher, usually to try to move past another boat in a race when it’s really close.

The coxswain decides when to call these Power 10s and how many to call during a given race. What I found, after coxing for years, is that a team can usually take only two or three Power 10s in one race—too many and they stop being effective because the team gets too tired, too few and another team may overtake you with its own Power 10.

The concept of the Power 10 applies to other forms of leading teams as well. The cliché that “life is a marathon and not a sprint” certainly resonates, but what it leaves out is that having some sprints can make us more likely to reach our goals. When we are focused on rallying a team around a vision and on ensuring that the team feels they are being sufficiently challenged, then a few well-placed Power 10s can work miracles. Having a deadline that requires an all-nighter, working together to persuade a particularly hard-to-move decision-maker, or brainstorming to overcome a technical obstacle are all Power 10s that can serve to bring a team together. The key is to use these sprints sparingly, and then to really go all in when you need to. Selectively leveraging “all in” moments will help ensure the team feels like they are being challenged without being pushed too far.

3. FOSTER CONNECTIONS

AFTER MEANINGFUL PURPOSE and a clear path for growth, the third critical area of focus is to build strong, trusting connections, both between yourself and your team and among members of the team. Recent data from a two-year study of effective teams at Google showed that one of the top factors in high performing teams is psychological safety: Do members of the team feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other? In this section we’ll cover techniques and examples of how leaders build trust between team members, resulting in the psychological safety that helps teams operate at their best.

BASK IN RELATIONSHIPS

In the same way that my mom taught me about grit and determination, everything I learned about making connections with people I picked up from my dad. My father immerses himself in relationships with people; he loves learning about them, about their families, their interests, and their backgrounds. And then he remembers—he remembers everything people tell him, making them feel understood and appreciated and etching deep relationships with people over time. (His incredible memory is also the reason he is the king of Trivial Pursuit and knows the words to every song.) He does this over years and years, so now he has meaningful relationships with people from all stages of his life and in many parts of the world.

And he is a storyteller. By combining his amazing memory about what makes someone unique with his gift of storytelling, my dad is able to expertly weave people together like yarn, making connections between new people who don’t yet know each other, and who often end up to be great friends. These skills have not only helped him be more successful in his career through an increasingly large and well-connected network, but also (and perhaps more important), these relationships have given him a lifetime of joy.

These are valuable skills to have when aiming to build connections with your team. Creating an authentic relationship with someone begins by understanding who they are and what they care about. If you start by approaching people with openness and a genuine desire to learn about them, you are much more likely to build lasting relationships that tie you and your team closer together.

THE POWER OF COMMUNITY

In my role at Facebook, I get to see every day how individuals can bring together groups of people with shared identity and purpose into passionate communities around topics as diverse as parenting, shared health conditions, religion, race, politics, professions, and an enormous range of shared interests, from birding to motorcycles, and from science memes to musicals. Sometimes these communities grow over years, adding new members as they learn about the group from other members or friends, and sometimes they explode overnight, like Jennifer Cardenas’s group for Hurricane Harvey and other groups created to help people after natural disasters.

One thing that all the successful communities have in common is one or a small number of group administrators who serve as “hosts” for the communities. They welcome people to the group when they join, they set the tone and culture, they monitor and remove bad behavior when it happens, and they add new content and ideas to the group, especially early on. Caterina Fake, the founder of Flickr, told me that starting a community is like hosting a cocktail party. When people arrive, you need to take their coats, offer them drinks, introduce them to a few people—make them feel comfortable (and step in if someone else insults them). If this early hosting is done well, then the community begins to blossom on its own, with many more members taking on the same types of activities that the initial founders did—adding content, welcoming members, setting the tone. And once many people are participating, these communities really begin to thrive.

While some communities begin with mobilization in mind, such as the disaster rescue groups or those that are set up to achieve certain goals like “Clean Up Miami Beach” or “Save Our Black Taxis” in London, others form as safe spaces for people who share interests, challenges, or ideas to connect and communicate. The thing is, even those groups—the ones not intended to drive change—have the power to mobilize their members if and when they decide that they want to. Communities where people feel safe and connected are an incredible tool to build supporters for a movement, even if you aren’t sure what initial actions that movement should take. The community itself can often contribute ideas and suggestions for a plan of action. So whether you already have a clear vision, purpose, and plan, or if your purpose is clear but you aren’t sure of which steps to take, building a physical or online community of people who share the same purpose is a powerful approach—and a strong foundation for change in the future.

RESPECT IS EARNED

There is a reason why rowing is frequently used as a metaphor in business, and why motivational posters often depict images of rowing (and why I’ve already borrowed rowing metaphors so many times). These images capture the essence of teamwork: a group of people coming together in perfect synchronicity, pushing themselves toward victory. As a coxswain, I learned incredible lessons about how to make that teamwork happen.

One of the first key lessons in coxing is that respect is earned. Coxswains need to be able to motivate a crew to push themselves beyond the limits they think they can reach, during times when they are already in pain. And they need to give constructive feedback to individual rowers in the moment, in front of their peers, or risk losing the race (a powerful lesson about the value of real-time feedback). All of this requires having the trust and respect of your team, and it doesn’t come automatically just because you have a microphone.

To earn the team’s respect and to build trusting connections with them, I needed to prove I was willing to work hard, too—to get in the trenches with them and feel their pain. Nearly every workout we did out of the boat, I did with them. Every hard run up sand dunes, every set climbing the stairs in the stadium, and every ice-cold run in snowy Ithaca I did alongside my team. I also listened to any feedback they had for me about how I could be more helpful as a coxswain. I worked to earn their respect and build connections with them in those moments, and then when we were in the boat, they trusted me to have their best interests in mind, to understand how they were feeling and to give reasonable feedback to them.

This principle still holds true today. When I ask my team to work late trying to reach an important goal or ship a product on time, I make sure I’m there with them—in the office or online—making it clear we’re in this together. And I listen openly to any feedback they have about how I can be more effective. When you ask people to join you to support your movement—whether launching a new product or fighting for a new law—whatever your cause, if you want to inspire people, make sure that you are in it together, working as hard or harder than others you ask to help.

VULNERABILITY = POWER

We often define toughness as one of the most necessary traits for energizing a movement. But it can actually be moments of vulnerability and openness that spark the greatest change, especially when vulnerability serves to build tighter connections between a leader and his or her team. It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that laying bare your most personal struggles can make a stronger impact and help rally others behind you, but it’s one of the most surprising things I learned while working at Change.org and something I saw again and again with people who start petitions. It’s an idea championed by experts like Brené Brown, the University of Houston research professor and bestselling author. Not only does vulnerability make us braver in taking on the world in new ways, it also makes others want to help us do it.

Many of the most memorable movements have a profound emotional story at their core, as we’ve seen. One in particular epitomizes this lesson for me. John Feal was not an activist; he was a carpenter and a demolition specialist from Long Island, New York. He was a 9/11 responder, and while at the site on September 17, a piece of steel crushed his left foot. He twice applied for compensation from the September 11th Relief Fund, and was denied—even though his injury had been deemed “life-threatening and catastrophic.” Because it occurred ninety-six hours after the initial event, he didn’t qualify for assistance.

The experience made John realize that he was vulnerable—and so were other injured 9/11 responders. “When I got hurt on September 17, that was, at the time, the worst day of my life. Little did I know it’d probably be the most important day of my life,” he told me. “My injury was gruesome and horrific. And I know now that it pales in comparison to those who are deathly ill or who have passed away. I am so minute and so small compared to these men and women in uniform and non-uniform that are dying every day or every week from 9/11-related illnesses.”

For the past fifteen years, John has been working tirelessly for health benefits for 9/11 responders who suffered devastating injuries and illnesses in the aftermath of the cleanup work they did at Ground Zero. He successfully fought for the Walsh amendment that reclaimed $125 million for health issues for 9/11 responders, he started the FealGood Foundation in 2005 to further help with medical-related issues and grassroots change, and in 2015 he started a petition on Change.org to get Congress to permanently extend the health benefits covered in the Zadroga Act (which was named after James Zadroga, a New York City Police Department officer who died from illnesses attributed to the rescue and recovery work he did at ground zero).

John described what it was like to recognize his own vulnerability and why that made him even more intent on helping others: “I had to learn that I wasn’t Bo Jackson, I wasn’t John Wayne, and that I was a human, because in my mind I was the world’s greatest athlete and I had to eat a lot of humble pie to realize that I’m fallible and I can get hurt and I can lose half a body part and I can bleed.”

Acknowledging his own vulnerability also made John more effective as a leader of the movement to fight for health benefits for 9/11 responders. When John admitted his own need for help, others felt they could, too. And sharing their personal stories made even more people want to rally behind them. As John told me, “I became known as that guy that can help people. When somebody had a workman’s comp hearing or Social Security hearing, I went to the hearings with them. We had to tell our personal stories, which opened up a lot of old wounds.” But their willingness to tell their stories worked, both to pass the original Zadroga Act and its extension. While John may have started out as an unlikely advocate, he eventually grew into the role. “I’m flawed. I have half a foot. I have a bad knee. I have a bad back. I have post-traumatic stress disorder. I have one kidney. If somebody who is physically and mentally flawed can stop Congress in their tracks, then just imagine what somebody with a higher IQ and who is physically gifted could do. People in the 9/11 community and people outside of the 9/11 community saw the passion and the fire in my eyes and the determination. What I bring to the table is not to accept no for an answer when we’re talking about human life.”

John Feal took one of the most challenging moments of his life and turned it into a fight for the advocacy of others. He’s incredibly modest about his own accomplishments, and he demonstrates so clearly that a willingness to share your vulnerability can be the most powerful tool in making people feel connected to you and your cause.

EVERYBODY’S GOT SOMETHING

PART OF INSPIRING a team is letting them know that you care not only about the vision you are working to achieve but also about the people you are working with. And showing you care means demonstrating you understand that no matter how dedicated people are to the movement you are building, they also have lives, families, and commitments outside of it.

I gave a speech in London in 2015 about how our work and lives are intertwined and impossible to separate, and how that is changing the future of work. To illustrate my point, I had planned a series of questions in which I was going to ask the audience to stand up if any one of a series of incidents had ever happened to them, showing how work and life are inextricably interrelated. I thought that by the time I had asked four or five questions, maybe most of the audience would be standing and my point would become clear.

I started by asking the audience this question: “How many of you have ever received a phone call with serious medical news about yourself or a close family member at work?”

Nearly the entire audience stood up.

Even I was stunned.

It was an intense and powerful moment. People looked around and realized that we all have more in common than we think and that we are all vulnerable and human. Each of us had the memories of those moments rushing back to us, and suddenly it seemed to make sense to have more empathy for each other: you never know what someone else might be going through on what seems like any other average day to you.

One of my favorite books is Everybody’s Got Something, by Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts. It is a memoir about her life, and in particular about her experience surviving both breast cancer and then a rare type of blood cancer, and is all about this humbling idea of perspective. As she writes in the introduction: “In Mississippi, where I’m from, there’s an understanding that hard times do not discriminate. My mother used to say, ‘Everybody’s got something.’” As she told NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday: “I remember . . . when I was unfortunately diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007 and I had that moment of—wow. You know, I can’t believe I’m going through this. Why is this happening to me? And my mother sweetly—I mean, sweetly and gently said, honey, everybody’s got something. And it just really stuck with me. . . . It’s like . . . my something is no bigger, no more important, no anything more than anybody else.”

Remembering that the people we work with may be dealing with major challenges at any given moment can make us more compassionate leaders and can help earn trust from our teams. If we can build the kind of teams where people feel comfortable sharing what is happening in their lives outside of work, then people will be more likely to commit to the company or the cause because they will feel fully supported. I’ve had people on my team who have dealt with the death of a parent or spouse, divorce, addiction, children with mental illness and at risk of suicide, and many more of life’s biggest challenges. And when we’ve been able to let people know that we are there for them through those moments and everything else, it truly creates a bond that is unbreakable.

THIS LESSON HITS close to home for me, too, because I’ve had one of those unimaginable moments that happened at work, when I was so dependent on the people around me to carry me through. I want to be honest: I have been dreading writing this section of the book. My own “everybody’s got something” moment was the worst day of my life so far, and writing about it rehashes so many difficult emotions that I almost didn’t do it. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that we all have times like these. We all go through things we just aren’t sure we can survive, and yet we do. I know that there are so many people who have endured stories so much worse than this, and that if sharing mine could be helpful to anyone else, then I needed to do it.

This story starts on a beautiful spring day, and I was at a winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains with my team from Yahoo! for a team-building meeting off-site. Late in the afternoon I got a phone call from my husband that our daughter Emma had had an accident at the playground. She was knocked over by another child running who hadn’t seen her, and she fell hard, hitting the back of her head on cement.

The school hadn’t called an ambulance after the incident. Instead, knowing that Len would arrive soon anyway, they’d waited. When he arrived to pick her up, the teachers said that she just wouldn’t stop crying and that they knew something was wrong. When Len arrived and saw her condition, he knew it was bad. He called me to say that he was taking her to urgent care. He put her on the phone with me and I heard her moan; she was not responsive to my questions. I knew then, too, that it was bad. I remember instantly feeling sick to my stomach—a feeling that would only get worse when Len told me, minutes later, that when they’d arrived at the urgent care office, the doctors there had called 911 right away and that he and Emma were in an ambulance on the way to the ER.

Emma was seven years old. In first grade.

I could barely breathe.

And I was an hour away, at a winery in the mountains. Nothing could feel less important at that moment, and I was desperate to get to the hospital. We had all carpooled to the event together and I didn’t have a car, but I was able to get a ride down the mountain with a generous woman on my team, Paulien Strijland, who drove me straight to the ER. I was so grateful for her.

When I got to the ER and rushed in to find Emma, the first thing I saw was Len’s face, which was so pale that it was almost green. Emma was in a CAT scan machine so they could examine her brain, and at the moment I walked in she was having a seizure—essentially unconscious as her whole body shook violently. Len and I were terrified as we stood by, completely unable to help our precious daughter. The medical team rushed Emma out of the CAT scan machine and into a surgical room, telling us they would need to intubate her and put her in an induced coma while they monitored her to see if they would need to drill a hole in her skull to let out the pressure that was building from swelling and potential bleeding in her brain. I was so overwhelmed that I could barely stand up, and they brought in a chair for me. And I felt horrible, both terrified for what might happen to Emma and angry at myself that I wasn’t stronger in that moment.

Days of waiting followed as we remained at her side in the intensive care unit, worried that we might lose her. Ultimately the doctors were able to bring her out of the coma when the swelling subsided. That brought an enormous wave of relief. And then came a new set of questions and fears about whether there would be any permanent brain damage from the accident.

I sat by her bedside while she remained in intensive care for the next week, and I vividly remember how each time I saw she was able to do something again for the first time, it gave me more and more of a sense of relief that she would be okay. She stayed out of school for several more weeks, and on seizure medication for several more months, but thankfully she made a full recovery, returning to school just in time for her starring role in her first-grade musical, The Princess and the Penguin. I don’t think I’ve ever been so joyful as the day we watched her perform in that show.

And while those were absolutely the worst days of my life, it has put every moment since then in incredibly sharp perspective because I remember so vividly what it is like when your whole world changes in an instant and you realize just how precious the important things are.

When I think back on that time, I also realize that we’re stronger than we think we are. But I also know from these experiences that the fortresses we have around us—the sense of safety and security—can fall at any moment. Appreciating them while they’re there is important. That’s why I never, ever leave the house without telling everyone in my family that I love them. And I try to breathe in all the moments of joy we have along the way, no matter how small they might be. These moments put in perspective not only how important it is to take time with family and friends and to have gratitude for the good things in our lives but also how important it is to live a life that matters and to do work that has meaning.

As a leader, compassion is one of the most valuable skills we can have. Being able to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, to try to understand the world from that person’s perspective, or at a minimum, to listen and learn more about that perspective, is critical to gaining trust as a leader, no matter your cause.

ASSUME THE BEST

It’s easy to say that compassion is a critical leadership skill, and harder to be consistently compassionate in practice. I’m better at being compassionate at work, but it doesn’t always come easily to me in all aspects of life—especially driving. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’m one of those people who will mutter to myself angrily if someone turns without a signal, or waits too long to go after the light turns green. I can be heard saying embarrassing things like, “That person has no clue how to drive!” When Ben Rattray, the founder and CEO of Change.org, is in the car with me, he reminds me to have compassion even when I’m frustrated. “What if that person just came from the hospital and learned a loved one was dying?” or “What if they just found out they lost their job?” I know he is exaggerating to make a point, but actually, he has a point. It’s a good reminder that you just never know the circumstances that someone else is living in.

Change.org has a Golden Rule equivalent: “Assume the best.” It’s a reminder that we can’t fully understand others’ intentions. There is a lot of research describing what social psychologists call the “Fundamental Attribution Error”—that people often ascribe the negative actions of others to innate characteristics, i.e., “who they are” rather than considering situational variables. And not surprisingly, we tend to do the exact opposite when interpreting our own behavior. While we should certainly be clear about how someone’s actions affected us, it is also helpful to start from a place of compassion and not make assumptions about someone’s intent without asking about it first.

If, instead, we had compassion for the people around us, assuming the best of their intentions, we could develop stronger long-term relationships with less conflict and reach better outcomes at the same time. I’ve also heard this concept referred to as “Most Respectful Interpretation” (MRI), and Brené Brown refers to it as the “hypothesis of generosity,” the most generous interpretation you can make about someone’s intentions, words, or actions.

Assuming the best, or using the hypothesis of generosity, also allows us to be a bit easier on ourselves, too. My friend Kate Gamble Dickman wrote one of the most beautiful posts I’ve ever read after the death of her younger brother Scott in early 2017. It was such a touching and emotional piece about grief, her brother, and the support of family and friends. In my favorite part, she told this story about getting back to the hotel after the service to celebrate Scott’s life and realizing that every time she had hugged someone, her Spanx were showing. As she wrote, “After the celebration, I came back to our hotel room, spent. I realized that each time I raised my arms up to hug someone, my dress would ride up and you could see my Spanx. This made me laugh. I was hugging people all night. I’d hug two people at once. And my sweet little vulnerable, elastic, proverbial underbelly was exposed to all those folks. I’m so glad it was. My eyes were glossy and wet, and my Spanx were out there. There was no filtering, no protecting myself or others, no posturing. My Spanx were showing from feeling safe, from all that love, from holding onto the moment. From celebrating forty years of Scott.”

We’re all wearing Spanx—literally or figuratively, the coverings that hide our fears and insecurities—and the world would be a much better place if we could love and assume the best of each other and ourselves, even with our Spanx showing.

BRING LIFE INTO YOUR WORK

If you start with the premise that we’ll build stronger teams when we first build stronger relationships with the people on them, you can apply several techniques I learned from the social organizers at Change.org to build stronger connections between people in more traditional work environments. It is common in social organizing for people to start by learning about each other and building deep and authentic relationships that help the group navigate challenges together. This is starting to happen in more and more organizations, from schools to companies. Sometimes this is done in ways that may seem “touchy-feely” or over the top to people who are part of more traditional organizations, but after integrating many of them at Change.org, I can say that we won over even the most skeptical of engineers and businesspeople. Here are a few examples of the types of exercises I’ve found effective:

These types of activities build deeper and more meaningful relationships among coworkers, which then helps you work more effectively together. I’ve noticed that it helps with conflict resolution in particular; the stronger the foundational relationship between two people, the more easily these conflicts are resolved or avoided altogether. And knowing more about their colleagues helps people assume the best, as we discussed earlier. In fact, lots of people on my teams will tell you that when they come to me with an issue they are having with a colleague, my advice is “first, go have a beer” (or a cup of tea, you get the idea). If you can get to know someone first, then everything after that just comes more easily.

I’ve met some people who are skeptical that these techniques could work in their organization. Often, they tell me that they think these are great ideas and that they see how they could work inside a social change company, but that they couldn’t work elsewhere. I strongly disagree. If we could get engineers and accountants to appreciate these activities, they can work anywhere. Tools that build deeper understanding between people add value to teams of any kind, from universities to traditional businesses to sports teams. After all, underneath our protective Spanx, we are all just human.

TAKE ONE FOR THE TEAM

ONE FINAL WAY to build trust has stayed with me since my rowing days. (Yes, I promise this is the last time I’ll bring up rowing.) If you read the Urban Dictionary entry for coxswain, you’ll learn that “upon winning a race, the coxswain is thrown into the (often very dirty) water.” Literally, it says that—“the (often very dirty) water.”

This is, unfortunately, true.

In the same way American football players throw Gatorade on their coach after the Super Bowl, rowers throw their coxswains in the water after a win. I am proud to say I have been thrown into many of the dirtiest lakes and rivers on the east and west coasts of the United States.

In the ultimate act of trust, rowers do not see where they are going—they trust their coxswain to steer them, encourage them, and push them to be better as individuals and as a team. And in return for this trust, and their extremely hard work, they ask the coxswain to “take one for the team.” Throwing the coxswain in the water provides an outlet for celebration and release.

It’s the same for all leaders. Sometimes the best way to build trust and loyalty is to let yourself be the butt of a joke or embarrass yourself for the good of the team. There are many times I have agreed to things that allow my team to celebrate and have fun at my expense. I have done everything from playing the cackling wicked witch in a company musical (yes, a company musical) to letting the team vote on which Halloween costume I would wear (one year a purple unicorn onesie and another year a giant hamburger). Haven’t we all been inspired by leaders who’ve done these things? I’ve seen great leaders dress up and perform as Justin Timberlake or get tattoos of their company logos. And an increasing amount of research shows that humor is an effective tool to increase trust and build bonds at work because it sparks a release of oxytocin, a hormone that is associated with social bonding. In fact, some business schools are offering classes in humor, such as Humor: Serious Business, by Stanford professors Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas.

So as you think about how to build trust and support from those who join your team, let them throw you in the metaphorical lake once in a while.

Getting your team working effectively together is a key step in driving your movement forward. And as your movement continues to grow, you’ll likely face one of the toughest challenges any successful movement eventually encounters: criticism. Knowing how to deal with inevitable opposition and even use it to your advantage can make all the difference in keeping your movement alive and thriving.