Hi, my name is Eileen Burbidge.
I'm a partner at Passion Capital, the early-stage venture fund based in London.
These are My Biggest Lessons.
So, my first lesson is that it's all about the people.
After years and years of working in business, when I've tried to apply approaches
that I thought would obviously work in a book, really, at the end of the day,
it comes down to individuals and people.
And so it's so important to choose to work with and spend time with people
that really resonate with what I'm trying to achieve
or what you're trying to achieve and what's going to sort of serve the best purpose.
With that, it's really important to work with people that you can trust
or that you're going to develop trust with, and also to understand what motivates the individuals
or the people, because at the end of the day, most of the things that we do in business,
that have the highest value creation, aren't going to be able to be automated.
They are going to come down to people, personalities and emotions.
Make sure that you know how to negotiate. This doesn't mean that everyone's necessarily
going to be negotiating million-dollar deals, or large mergers and acquisitions,
but this can apply to everyday life. You might need to negotiate your place
in a queue, in a line, you might need to negotiate with your children,
you might need to negotiate with your boss or with peers or with colleagues,
simply to try and persuade them to your point of view.
But negotiation skills are so, so important. And I think the first sort of sub-rule of this
is to know your worth or to know your position in the negotiation.
You have to know when you're willing to walk away and be willing to walk away.
Because if you're not, you'll have no negotiating power or leverage whatsoever.
Secondly, another sort of sub-rule is that you need to know what's motivating the other party.
Put yourself in other people's shoes. This is a lesson that I learned
when I was a really small child, and I'd watched children's television shows,
but it served me really well. Even at my point in my career,
I think a lot of people seem to forget that other people might have different perspectives.
I think it's incredibly important to think about what's driving other people,
what motivates other people. At the end of the day,
I don't think we can achieve any kind of success on our own.
It requires teams, it requires teamwork, it requires collaboration,
and one has to be able to think about what's motivating or driving the people
that we're working with, in order to understand
how to get the best from that partnership or that interaction.
So, we really need to reflect what other people are going through,
what they might be considering and how that could be different
or similar to what we're going through ourselves. Put in a word, it's actually called empathy.
But saying that makes it sound like I'm just saying, you know,
to be kind or to be empathetic, just for the sake of doing it.
I think it’s actually important, even if you don't want to be kind
and even if one is trying to get one over on something, somebody else,
to understand what that other person is going through so that you can try to maximize that situation,
whether it's going to be for a collective good or to try and negotiate against them.
Another important lesson is to be able to fix your mistakes as quickly as possible.
And this might be referred to as course correcting, or iterating quickly, failing quickly,
failing fast, or even just an agile methodology. When people talk about being agile
and responding quickly to new information, what they really mean, put in a negative way,
is actually if you figure out that there's been a mistake or an error made,
you need to fix that as quickly as possible. One really good example of this,
which I don't think many people think about as often as they should,
is just as we talked about how important hiring is and getting
the right people to build a team, it's just as important to recognize
if there's been a wrong hire made, and to let that person go.
So firing is just as important as hiring. If there's been a mistake made
with a candidate or with somebody to match a job specification,
as soon as that's recognized it needs to be addressed.
It doesn't help, it doesn't help anybody, even if we feel bad for that person,
to just sort of hope that it's going to get better when there's nothing externally
that's going to help make that better. So, the best thing to do is to
actually just fix that, nip it in the bud, and let that person go.
Be yourself and to be as authentic as you can possibly be.
Obviously, we all put on gamefaces or we have to put on a face in order
to present certain opinions, ideas, and to be taken seriously or in a certain way for a certain context.
But really, it's important to know what's really motivating you, or what motivates ourselves,
in order to be able to be as convincing and to have conviction with that particular topic.
Similarly, the best way to be your best self is to take care of yourself.
And there's nothing more alarming or underscoring about this than a global pandemic.
We can only bring our best selves to business and to work
if we're taking care of ourselves and our families at home as well.