🔑 1 - Mentors

Codie’s post gives you a system for finding mentors.

Think of your mentor roster like a basketball team. You know you need specific roles and skills. Do you have them filled?

I encourage you to find 4-5 people for each of the categories above (12-15 total).

Why so many mentors? Different mentors will help you in different ways, and some will be too busy when you need them.

Make a plan to build your “bench” of mentors, and go after it every week.

You will likely need to connect with 10 good people before you find 1 great mentor. So that means you should plan to connect with hundreds of potential mentors in order to build your bench.

Don’t be intimidated. Today is a great day to reach out to two new people. Make your personal pitch and kindly ask them to get on a call with you. Then ask them nicely to be your mentor :)

If they don’t respond to your emails, don’t give up. Follow-up to each email with a response. Busy people miss emails sometimes, and they appreciate persistence.

Repeat the outreach process daily for 4 weeks. Eventually, you’ll succeed.

A simple strategy you can use to find mentors:

Make a list of impressive people who share similarities with you. I find that people who are similar in some way are more likely to respond and help me.

Here are some similarities to look for:

• people who went to same university as you
• people who went to same high school as you
• attended the same sorority, fraternity or school club
• look like you (race, gender etc…)
• love the same sports team (or other affiliations)

My friend Sam coined the phrase “stalk and talk”.

It means you spend hours researching the people you want to meet, and then you reach out to chat with them.

When you have a call with them, share the similarities you identified to quickly build rapport. You’ll need to balance being friendly and not sounding creepy. It takes practice.

Here’s the best hack I’ve used to meet impressive people.

1. Host events (dinners, or larger events)
2. Host a Mastermind
3. Host a podcast / Youtube channel

When you are the host that brings people together, it’s free for you. It just costs your time.

If you can land 1 interesting person, you can use their brand to encourage other interesting people to come. By being the host of the event people automatically assume you’re someone interesting too.

Host these over and over again. Eventually, you’ll have an amazing network of mentors around you.

🔑 #2 - Managing & Meetings

I’d like to introduce you to a tool you should be using as a manager. I call it the accountability sandwich.

When I was managing a lot of employees, I hated telling people what to do.

I want my team to set their own goals, and I want them to be accountable to each other to complete them.

I don’t like reminding folks of a task or telling them to complete something they committed to.

To achieve this as a manager, you can implement an “accountability sandwich”.

Here’s how it works:

Part 1 👉 Get a verbal and written commitment that a task will be accomplished

(the task gets completed)

Part 2 👉 Get a verbal and written commitment that the task was complete

Format I use for the meetings:

Create two separate shared Google Presentations.

Each person gets their own two slides on a Google Presentation. Each slide, they answer the following questions:

1. What did you accomplish?
2. What do you plan to accomplish? (exact outcomes only)

I have two types of meetings per week (each has their own slide deck):

Meeting #1 - Weekly Planning Meeting

Meets Monday 7:30am for 45 minutes; then again Friday at 4pm for 45 minutes.

• Monday - answer the question what exactly do you plan to accomplish this week. Write it in bullet points. No more than 5 bullet points per slide. If it can’t be completed by Friday’s meeting you don’t let them list it.
• Friday - what did you accomplish this week? Write out each bullet point (up to 5). Write two bullet points on things you missed and why

Sometimes people are working on longer projects that may take 2-3 weeks, and it’s hard to state what they can accomplish in 1 week. DO NOT let this explanation slide as a manager. Your job is to ask a series of questions to tease out what exactly each person can commit to

They didn’t build Rome in a week, but they surely laid some bricks for the Coliseum in a week.

You’ll observe a few beautiful effects from this exercise:

1. Organized thoughts - folks will come prepared, and know their priorities by the time the work week starts.
2. Employees get good at dissecting large projects into achievable chunks.
3. Encourages you to challenge each other’s time assumptions for a project. Instead of something taking two weeks, can you get the same project delivered in two days?

These three behaviors will compound over the time as your team “hits their stride” with this meeting structure.

Your team will be more strategic and begin to deliver products faster and faster.

Meeting #2 - Daily Standup (Tue, Wed, Thur, Fri) at 8:00am

This is a 15-minute meeting (no more) with my direct reports. Each person answers two questions: What did you accomplish yesterday? What will you accomplish today?

Do not let people talk about “things they worked on yesterday”. You ONLY want to hear about accomplishments. If they “worked” on something, they can save that update for another day when they actually complete it.

The accountability sandwich is designed as a social accountability exercise. People generally want to seem ‘good’ in front of their peers.

If someone is making commitments and missing them over a couple weeks, they’re going to feel bad. Then they will either get better at predicting their workload or they will work harder to meet their commitments.

It works for all levels in the company. We used this meeting structure for senior executives, and also to manage 200 college ambassadors at my first company.

This format is particularly helpful for remote teams, where accountability may be more challenging.

🔑 What I’m reading this week

📜 Book of the Week - Keeping At It - Paul Volker’s memoir.

Paul was chairman of the federal reserve in 1980s when interest rates were soaring in the US. He raised interest rates to 20% 🚩 by June of 1981 in his effort to break inflation (and succeeded).

I’m interested in this book because the country (and world too) is experiencing record inflation, and I believe history repeats itself. This is my way to understand what will happen next.

I just started it but can already tell I’m going to enjoy this one.

📫 Favorite Newsletter Graphic - Mindset by Brian Feroldi

The main difference between people who invest well, and those who don’t is the ability to sit still and do nothing.

Some call this emotional fortitude.

When the market is falling apart and you see your stocks tanking, what do you do?

Sell?

That’s usually a bad idea.

You can’t time the market and you may be selling at the bottom of a cycle.

When you sense the world is in panic, and everything is falling apart…usually that’s a good sign to buy (an index, not individual stocks).

📫 Interesting Newsletter - Nanoflips - I’ve been fascinated with the rise of Microacquire and Flippa. These are websites where you can buy small tech companies.

In his newsletter, James discusses his experiences buying and selling these small tech businesses.

🔑 My Simple Ask

If you’re enjoying this newsletter, I’m sure you have a friend or two who may enjoy it as well.

Can you please forward this email to 1, 2 or 3 friends? They may enjoy learning about managing teams or finding good mentors.

I spend a few hours a week writing and making sure this newsletter is kick-ass for you. I’m enjoying the process and would love more people to have access to these lessons.

Thank you ❤️

You can check out last week’s newsletter here.

Have a fantastic week,

~ Sieva