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The Best Bosses Are the Ones Who Drive You Crazy
Great bosses push you to do things you don’t want to do that they know will make you better.
BY QUORA
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How can I accelerate my personal growth? originally appeared on Quora – the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Jason M. Lemkin, SaaStr & SaaStr Fund; CEO/co-founder @ EchoSign (acq’d by Adobe)., on Quora:
My uber-learnings:
- Find the best boss you can; and
- Take on every initiative, project, task and endeavor you possibly can from her.
The best career accelerator I ever got was working for a few great bosses. And doing the things they pushed me to do that I didn’t want to do.
I had one great boss who pushed me to manage an HR team. The last thing I wanted to do was manage HR, something I knew very little about. But he was aware that I had very little management experience, and this would accelerate my skills here.
At first, I declined. I said it wasn’t interested in HR. He said he understood. Then, I woke up the next morning, said I was wrong, and took over the department. He was right. Managing a team of six, with their goals, issues, dramas, and needs in a functional area I did not understand, pushed me in new ways. I may not be a great manager, but I think I am a reasonably competent boss, and I learned this from managing this crew.
Without this, I could never have founded two successful startups. Period.
I had another great boss that pushed me to get on the road much, much more often. To stop waiting for customers to come to me. While I thought I understood “big deal” sales and business development, I didn’t enjoy outbound sales and hunting < $500k-$1m deals.
In fact, I didn’t enjoy it at all. My boss pushed me. He said: You have to get on the road. You have to meet all those prospects, all those customers. All of them. Do it until you can’t take it anymore.
He said I had to completely get out of my comfort zone of a barbell combination of occasional huge deals and inbound sales, and work the large space in the middle (i.e., more mid-market deals that were a lot more in volume but still required getting on a jet).
He was right.
If I hadn’t done this, my second startup, EchoSign, would have gone bankrupt.
Great bosses push you to do things you don’t want to do that they know will make you better.
They’re usually right.
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