Candice Carpenter
As the CEO of a fast-growing new media company, Candice Carpenter doesn't have time to wait for leaders in her organization to grow at the usualpace. So she uses an approach she calls "radical mentoring," which she describes as "moving people along faster than they want to go.
"Anything you can do to shed people of pride is good, because pride doesn't really doesn't help you much," says Carpenter, who got her own leadership training as an Outward Bound instructor and working for the likes of Barry Diller.
In the typical view of life, you start out learning, master what you need to know, then lead and finally serve in a philanthropical capacity in your old age. But in Carpenter's view, you can get to mastery and creation ( leading and serving at the same time ) much faster if you can just master yourself. The good news is that if you get past self-mastery to creation, you're likely to be happy, effective, and focused on what you're trying to create -- not obsessed with proving yourself. It's a relaxing place to be.
The best reason to be a radical mentor to someone is to put them out of their misery -- in six months you can get them over proving themselves and into their own game of creation.
How seriously does Carpenter take this methodology of leadership? At her company of some 200 employees, there are only five senior people hired from the outside, everyone else is grown from the inside.
Creating Creators
If you're going to break someone's knuckles, you have to have a contract with them that they'll let you do it, otherwise it's simply abuse, Carpenter says.
The Contract:
This is not about looking for unintended victims. If you're going to do this, try saying to the person: "I would like to help you move along faster, are you game?" If a person doesn't want to, they're not going to succeed or be able to handle it. "If you have so much pride that you can't imagine moving along faster, it wouldn't work very well anyway. Willingness is the whole gig," says Carpenter.
Reality Therapy
Most people have never had an experience of being called on to be their best. Young people who get this kind of attention are thrilled to have this experience. Lots of people who grew up as superstars are like trained seals. They need external approval constantly. They won't be creators, because they're too focused on "me, me, me."
What you're trying to do is create a culture where the work is its own reward, instead of winning praise from upper management. The creation should be the point, not the ego-stroking of the creator.
The most imporatant technique to bring people along quickly is to give them more reality than they usually would be getting: "Let's talk about the work, not about you."
For a start-up, this kind of attitude is essential: "If people come to work and say, 'How can I contribute?', not, 'What about me?' then we have a company. Start-ups help focus the mind a lot. If you don't practice this stuff in a small company, then you don't have a company."
If you want to radically mentor yourself, make a list of 12 things that you want to accomplish, "12 choices that I keep going in my life" and wake up everyday and choose to do those things. It's not about setting goals -- because goals are things that you see how you can reach them -- it's about setting milestones, not being afraid to reach for things that seem impossible at the moment. If you make that commitment to doing something that you really want to do that seems unfathmably hard to get to, you'll figure out a way.
Some of the 12 choices that are ruling Carpenter's life right now:
Your choices should be independent of co-opting anyone else. You never say -- "I choose to marry Joe." That's infringing on Joe's rights.
Complaining is so much less interesting than creating --so you would only complain if you didn't know how to create.
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