💡 Weekly Thought Exercise: How Successful Founders Build a Loyal and Excited Team

This week's thought exercise is inspired by Leila Hormozi’s approach to team building that creates loyal, excited team members who get sh*t done.

I like taking business advice from Leila because she 1) built 3 successful businesses she exited, and 2) now she talks to business owners day-in-and-day-out.

Her mind (a.k.a. her trained LLM 😉) has so much pattern recognition of what works and doesn’t work that I can trust what she says.

Peter Drucker, management consultant and author of Tobi Pearce approved book The Executive in Action says,

As a founder, when you accidentally use negative reinforcement (EVEN if you think you’re speaking positively) you create an environment of secrecy.

• Your team becomes afraid of revealing mistakes because they don’t want to be punished

• They don’t tell you problems they see on the horizon

• They start to build resentment because they feel like their autonomy is gone

Leila calls this the “cost of punishment.”

And her entire ethos in her portfolio company is to put 100% focus into positive reinforcement to create an environment of security.

• Encourages mistakes (and risk taking!)

• People come to work earlier and stay later because they like being there

• There’s a loyalty and stronger bond with other team members

Perfectly put, “Negative punishment works in the short term; positive reinforcement works better long term."”

Leila has 3 Principles of Positive Reinforcement, and today’s thought exercise will walk you through all 3 of them in one conversation.

A quick summary of each principle:

1. Latency vs. Intensity: The timing of your response to a positive behavior matters more than the power of your response.

2. Criticism vs. Insult: Critique communicates the difference between the actual behavior and the ideal behavior and insults just compare the subject to something aversive

3. Future vs. Past Focus: Direct people into the future instead of resurrecting them into the past by focusing on what they can do right tomorrow instead of what they did wrong yesterday.

Here are your instructions for this thought exercise:

• Copy and paste the prompt into your AI of choice (as always I prefer Claude)

• You won’t need to add any context - AI will walk you through each part of the conversation

• You don’t need to understand the 3 principles - AI will guide you through the conversation and teach you them along the way

Here's the 483 word prompt to copy and paste into Claude.ai:

(And as a reminder - on Tuesday, September 24th the price of ThinkWithAI increases to $29/month for new subscribers.

You can lock in the $20/month price for 6 more days.)

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