Transcript of a video by the founder of 7 Cups: Leadership on 7 Cups.
Forum thread: Leadership on 7 Cups (+ a video from our founder)!
Everybody!
Ah…Laiba asked me to do a quick leadership minute with you all, so…delighted to be here and chatting with you. I just want to share some quick points on what I think being a leader on 7 Cups means.
Being a leader really just means becoming aware of how you influence others. The average person influences thousands of people in their lives. Being a leader just means you become aware that you’re having that influence, and then you do it in a more deliberate way to better help people.
Sometimes we think of leaders and we imagine that it’s very difficult to be a leader, or it’s something that only certain people can do, and that is not at all the case. Leadership development is a skill. Anybody can develop it. We are going to be rolling out a course soon—it’s some other capabilities to help you further build your leadership skills.
So, just like any skill—dribbling a basketball, or kicking a football around, or learning an instrument—just like all those things can be learned, leadership can be learned, too.
There are different ways of thinking about leadership—so there’s different discliplines. The discipline that we believe in here on 7 Cups is what’s called servant leadership.
So, on some organizations the triangle is like this and the leader’s at the top. And the people all serve, kind of, the leader at the top.
We are more of a servant leadership model, where the triangle is at the bottom . So the person at the bottom is serving all of the people in the community and other areas. So it’s much more of a focus, not on people serving you, but on you serving others.
So being a leader is not something like an accolade, or status thing, or something that you can brag about. It’s more, “Hey! I’m committing, I’m pouring in, I’m sacrificing, I’m caring, I’m serving.” And so that’s really what servant leadership is.
The other key things I think is [sic] important about leadership is what I call HHA, so: humility, hunger and accountability.
Humility basically says, “Hey, I don’t know how everything works. I’m not necessarily an expert. I’m going to figure things out. I’m going to work hard. I’m going to work with others. I’m going to ask for feedback, and I’m going to figure it out.” Being humble, that’s it. It’s super important, super helpful.
And it’s OK to make mistakes along the way. Like…I tell our team routinely, failure’s a good thing, making mistakes is a good thing. It’s how we learn. It’s how we grow. We don’t have to be ashamed of that at all. The key is, you want to try to not make the same mistakes over and over again. You want to try to make new mistakes so you can increase learning.
Another thing that’s important is being hungry. So…being active, figuring things out, learning, not taking a passive approach and saying, “Hey! I’m going to become a leader. I’m going to become a master of this domain. From working in the forums, from working in quality, these are things that I’m going to let myself really master, and really understand, and learn how to do a better job doing, and learn how to develop other people in doing those things so that we collectively can do a much better job.”
A third characteristic is accountability. So…having some mechanism, whether it be tracking stats, whether it be asking for feedback, even simple things like, “Hey, how am I doing on a 1 to 10, said to help you get a baseline of saying, “This is where I’m at”, and then “This is where I’m going.” That’s key.
We’re big believers in this idea of high warmth and high expectations on 7 Cups. So if you have high warmth but low expectations, you can create a team of people that are having a great time but they’re not really making an impact in helping other people. Contrarily, if you have low warmth and high expectations, then you might make an “impact” but you’re going to burn people out along the way, and there’s probably going to be infighting in your team, which isn’t especially helpful.
So the trick is to have both high warmth and high expectations. This is what creates the best kind of environments, the best trusting environments, and it’s what helps people grow. People want to develop new skills. They want to be aware of their strengths. They want to be able to impact people. So if you support them, and you’re kind and you’re compassionate, but you’re also helping them, you’re also expecting positive impact from them, that’s really helpful too.
We’re a community of millions of people. Our last tally was 411,000 listeners, over a thousand leaders—this is really significant. You, as a leader of 7 Cups, you’re saying, “Hey, I want more responsibility. I want to be a servant leader. I want to make more of an impact.” And thank you for that.
The community team, we see the efforts. Me, everybody on the team, the other leaders, we see the behavior, we see the activities. We see reaching out, we see responding all the time. Thank you for that. Thank you for your hard work. Thank you for your kindness, and thank you for your service.
Look for more from us in terms of a new leadership course, and more opportunities soon.
Thank you all! Bye!