Wishful thinking

If you are a leader and complain about the fact that people in your team are not as committed, as present, as hardworking, as involved as you are, here are two things to think about.

You are the leader, and in most situations this comes with some benefits (not only monetary) that other team members do not get. So, the fact you care more is absolutely normal. You should care more, they will care less.

To change the situation, to some extent at least, you have to put in extra work. And that is an additional challenge. You have to sell a vision, a purpose, a reason (beyond salary) for the team members to feel that they are part of something bigger. You have to make it so that if they follow you they will enhance their public and self-image. You also have to praise them for their work, and to thank them for their contribution. You need to be present for them when they need it, and hide when they can go alone. It’s a difficult balance to strike between freedom and ownership, and it takes trust and time. If you have none of that, you are stuck at point one.

Any other approach to such a natural situation is delusional wishful thinking.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s