a story about a mindset shift towards extreme ownership and empowerment in leading teams. And setting the goal of "to be more fun than Dota 2"
To be more fun than Dota 2 đź¤
In hackathon no. 3, I had reframed my perspective towards extreme ownership.
We had a business degree non-technical teammate who had one job – make the slides and give a good pitch – this teammate was watching Dota 2 gameplay for a few hours before the deadline rather than practicing his pitch or refining the slides.
I was puzzled, but assumed he was confident. I trusted him to deliver.
Outcome: He fumbled his pitch, stuttered throughout, went over his time, and gave me no time to demo the data dashboards I built for the past two days.
I was pretty annoyed considering his approach to preparing for the pitch, and he had prevented the team from showcasing our technical work.
A day later, I paused – and thought,
- Wait, this is like any group project.
- Didn’t I see what was wrong?
- Surely I can do something about it?
- Why did he watch Dota 2? Because he was bored?
- Could I have made the team dynamic more fun than Dota 2?
- Would that possibly make him more engaged to contribute?
- Don’t I take partial fault for realising he seemed unprepared for the pitch?
- Couldn’t I have reached out and offered to practice the pitch together?
My key takeaway:
I got to make working with me and being in the team more fun than Dota 2
Since then, it’s been extremely empowering to influence teams and facilitate what we can do.
In such a small and new team, you have a lot of power to influence and set the vibe. Why not make it a fun one?
Fun teams do more, do better and have fun doing so :)