Many of our Jewish community professionals have a dream to create something new. All they want is to fulfill their dream. Provide these superstars with the resources and confidence to make their dreams a reality. Place their passion at their foreground of their work to help them, in the words of Theodore Herzl, “will it, so it is no dream.”
Entrepreneur.com advised how we can identify the type of person who has a relentless pursuit, a dream, or the spirit of an entrepreneur. We can start be asking our employees the following:
- “What do you truly believe in?”
- “What would you show solidarity to or stand up for?”
- “What actions have you taken or would you take to show this?”
Just as we seek to best understand our employees, their self-reflection will enable them to better understand themselves. So we can best value and motivate them by getting to know what they truly believe in and would stand up for. Asking them these three questions could reveal the extent to which they have their own relentless pursuits.
If you find your employee lighting up with energy and passion, sharing a clear vision for something new they want to create or a big idea they wish to bring to fruition, then your employee may be best motivated by championing their relentless pursuit.
How We Champion Their Pursuit
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has written about the 5 characteristics of the innovator. Our job is simply to nurture these characteristics. These include:
- An opportunistic mindset – Allow them to act on their ideas and vision they share with you
- Formal education or training – Provide them opportunity to gain skills to support their drive
- Proactivity and a high degree of persistence, – Encourage them to take initiative and to not give up when the going gets tough
- A healthy dose of prudence – Advise them to take calculated risks, thinking through their innovative ideas thoughtfully and with care
- Build Social Capital – Connect them to experts, partners, funders, who can help make their dreams come true
Plan of Action:
11 managerial steps to foster motivation in the employees driven by their relentless pursuits:
- Help our employees identify their passions and place them at the center of their work
- Nurture the innovator characteristics as espoused by Chamorro-Premuzic listed above
- Expose these employees to different environments, help to expand their world view
- Provide unlimited agency – let them feel autonomous in driving their passion forward
- Allow their creations to take on different forms
- Remove the Rosh Katans (people with small minds who stand in the way of their dream) from their work and environments
- Regularly Recognize and nurture their ambition and perseverance
- Continuously allow them to dream – give them work time each day to think and ideate
- Encourage them to exercise self-control – including boundaries to pause their work and then return to it
- Place constraints to encourage creativity – insert variables that requires them to think differently (similar to the SIT Model of Innovation)
- The power of the “Way to Go” – When they accomplish or progress, make sure they know you see not only their efforts about how they are driving their dream forward – be specific with your expressions of recognition and accomplishment.
Our Portrait: Carine Warsawski
Carine Warsawski, the founder and CEO fo Trybal Gatherings, is one of those remarkable individuals who can teach us that perhaps the most important thing we can do as managers and leaders, especially for those with this kind of vision and spirit, is to figure out how we can best feed their spirit, support their vision, and then get the heck out of the way so their vision comes to life, benefiting us all.
Carine is a Jewish community professional because her heart beats in service to her dream. Her talents and drive are beyond impressive, and there is no doubt that she would be paid a lot more if she were an innovation consultant. Yet she has chosen to dedicate her prime working years to a vision and idea (Jewish summer camp from younger adults) that fuels her soul twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week even though, as of yet, it is not filling up her bank account.
Her journey can help us reflect and advise how we motivate, value, and support the hundreds Jewish entrepreneurs, as well as, intrapreneurs (those who innovate and create within organizations), types in our field.
Questions for Reflection:
- Who might you know work with that have the characteristics of an innovator? How might you find out? Then, consider whether you can apply the learning from this blessing to help this Jewish community professional pursue their dream.
- Practice the SIT Model. To form a new idea or program, how might you subtract one normal element or add to it in order to encourage Jewish community professionals to innovate? More simply, how might you consider placing fair constraints on people’s work in order to maximize creativity?
- How might we be more intentional when we express compliments (way to go!) and gratitude (thank you!) to strengthen internal motivation and feelings of validation in employees’ work?