I’ve noticed some thing since I’ve been working for myself.
Other jobs
I never liked “staying late.” In most jobs, staying late meant: “I’m giving you more hours but you’re not paying me anything extra.” I also rarely found the internal motivation to create something extraordinary at the expense of my own free time. Working FOR someone else felt like just that, FOR someone else, NOT for myself.
The only job where I ever wanted to stay late was when I was a waiter, because I knew that staying late meant that I was earning extra money, I was incentivized. I also had the motivation to generate higher sales and higher per person average than anyone else. It was a game, a contest, and I wanted to win; desperately. Several (perceptive) managers even picked up on this, and began publicly commending me on my sales and pitting other servers against me to have higher sales, it worked! Everyone else’s sales went up and so did mine.
Building something extraordinary
Whenever I’ve felt that the direct results of my work benefitted me, I worked my ass off. Perhaps that is one of the shortcomings in the management of many of my prior employers, they didn’t know how to get me to feel like I was working for me. In building my own company, I’ve never thought about staying late, it’s never felt like extra work…quite honestly, it’s a joy!
A Management Lesson for Me
As I build my company, I’m going to do my best to keep people working for themselves while working for me…in fact, let’s just say they’re working with me. People want to learn and grow, they also want to be acknowledged. If I want the best from people I have to be sure to avoid the temptation to control them and feel like they are my worker bees…unless that’s how they like to work best. How does one cultivate a culture of entrepreneurialism?