UnLeadership

55Leadership Is the Killer App

Tim Sanders is the vice president of client strategy at Upwork, the world's leading platform for freelancers and contractors. He is also a prolific author, including the New York Times bestseller Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends.

(Highlights from our interview, recorded July 7, 2023.)

THE AVERAGE LEADER HAS THE mindset of wanting to acquire talent full-time, which is a heavy process that can take months and is high risk, low information, and can lead to friction because long-term hiring is a hard decision. At Upwork, we focus on demand and are increasingly fractional. I talk to leaders about shifting their mindset from full-time first to what I call scientific or smart hiring, where we focus on the work and less on acquisition. When I think about talent gaps, these dependencies stand between work vision and reality. I speak to organizations once they have a vision for a deliverable and guide them toward employing talent to make that possible upstream.

There are two schools of thought on how to move leaders to think in new ways; endowment and scaffolding. Jonah Berger wrote a fantastic book, Catalyst, in which he identifies key barriers to change, how to mitigate them, and how to help others take their foot off the parking brake rather than pushing it harder. Leaders are invested in the way that they do things. Simple things such as getting a leader off printing or file cabinets for financial management are harder ...