Giving up ownership is hard, especially when you’re early in your career. But it never really gets easier. Developing new initiatives and big bets requires your ideas, your relationships and contacts, and your time and energy. For that reason, you’ll want to control how those are used and to feel some ownership of their success.
But big bets require not only attracting new partners but also getting them to feel some sense of control over the bet itself. It’s the only way they’ll do everything required for success.
To make large-scale change, you may have to give up some ownership and share with partners, especially those with different aims but greater reach.
You must be willing to give up control.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to control things, here are a few tips that will make giving up control easier.
- Remember your mission. You need to constantly remind yourself of what is driving you in your work and keep the big bet at the heart of your decision-making. When you keep the mission front and center, giving up control might still be bittersweet, but it will be easier to do.
- Define a goal and find others to innovate. You can’t control every breakthrough, so give people the ability and incentives the help you find new solutions.
- Offer your knowledge and expertise, even to those who want to profit from it. If the goal is to scale quickly, you’ll need to work with whoever can make that possible.
- Adapt to attract partners. If the goal is scale, you’ll need to be willing to adapt your mission and approach to build an alliance with many, often unlikely partners.
- Let go. If you’re succeeding, your big bet may take on a life of its own — and even go off on its own with your best people. Be willing to say goodbye and do everything you can to help them succeed.
From the book:
Fighting energy poverty in the developing world required me to accept that I cannot control every element of a big bet. That mentality carried through to the biggest bet in the history of The Rockefeller Foundation: creating the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP). Getting others to feel equally invested in a mission starts with giving up control. The wider the alliance that has a stake in the outcome, the more hands will be pushing it forward.