Focus on being liked or driving performance?

You are hired to get a job done. When you are put in a role, you are put in a role because presumably you are supposed to perform in that role.

For me, the key to that was letting go of needing to be liked and redefining it as an admiration that takes place over time. So rather than I want to leave this room with everyone liking me, I started to realize I want to be the type of leader where, a decade later, people say, 'I would work with that guy again in a heartbeat.'

The hardest part of it is they say getting in somebody else's shoes. The hardest part is taking my own shoes off. Basically going, Yo, okay, I came into this, there's something I wanted, I wanted to get rid of that. Now just talk to this person and try to understand what's going on with them, what they care about for their life goals and motivations, what they're scared of, what they're excited by, how you might be able to help them.

It's critical to ask what kind of experience am I? Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process, but am I a miserable experience? If the answer is yes, don't worry too much about the other pieces yet. You got to fix that first.

People do business with people not ideas, not products, not machines, not tactics, strategies, not even money, they do business with people. So you better get the people part right if you really want to succeed.