What are high performing founders really made of?
What are high performing founders really made of?
The start of a whole new year, what better time to reconsider what it means to be a high performing founder.
Welcome to 2023! Here’s to a happy, high-performing year.
Yep, you heard right. Happy and high-performing – two concepts that we often find difficult to contemplate in tandem but that are actually so closely linked, it’s hard to achieve one without the other.
Let me unpack that.
As founders, we often trade the idea of happiness for a heads-down, bum-up focus on being high-performers; the idea being that we’ll get around to happiness once we’ve achieved success. “I’ll be happy when I can show the spoils of my high performance.” Ring a bell?
The trouble with this all-too-familiar trade-off is that many of the things that make you happy are fuel sources for high-performance in the first place and allow you to optimise and sustain your performance over a long period. For example, feeding your curiosity, exercising your creativity and ingenuity, and a regular dose of learning and development are prerequisites for performance. So are things like sleep, exercise, diet, and social interaction.
Being a high-performing human means tapping into things that are good for you and that make you happy, then drawing on them as you drive your business and your team forwards.
There isn’t any need to trade off happiness and wellbeing for success. They go hand in hand. Self-optimisation is an essential part of high performance.
Sure, it’s no cakewalk, but by learning to harness the things that nourish and support you as a high-performer and folding them into the way you work, you will be setting yourself and your business up for sustained outperformance.
Upside helps startup founders become high-performing leaders by exploring self-optimisation techniques and showing them how to optimise their teams and businesses.
Apply for Upside 2023 now. Final close January 25th.
We’re all a work in progress.
Upside Founder Programs help founders become the very best leaders for their businesses as they grow from pre Series A to Series B, and beyond. Apply to be part of Upside 2023 now.
Upside Founder Programs are proudly supported by KPMG High Growth Ventures and Microsoft Australia.
