Author: Fabrizio

Popular ideas

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Some popular ideas are challenging to understand, and they deserve more respect than what they get nowadays.

For example, it is very easy to mistake psychological safety for an environment in which everybody feels safe to do whatever they want, as they won’t ever get any criticism. It might hurt them.

Similarly, it is easy to mistake culture with the way your office is organised, the amount of ice cream or healthy drink options your employees get, the number and the coolness of off-sites and team days, the rooms dedicated to hobbies and free time, and how they are named.

Or to mistake leadership with busyness, the necessity to provide answers, feeling like you have to be right.

The popularity of a concept should make us want to get it right, not bend it to our needs and the closer shortcut.

What matters

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It’s normal to want to please others. It’s naive to try to please everybody.

Eventually, you’ll have to say some nos, whether you’ll do that explicitly or implicitly. The different commitments you have taken are going to clash with one another, and at least a bunch of them are going to be left behind. Your work is going to put off some people, and in the attempt to smooth the corners, you’ll end up losing those who used to like it as well.

When you try to please everybody, it’s highly likely you’ll please nobody.

Instead, start by asking some uncomfortable yet important questions. Who am I trying to serve? Who/what does matter to me? Who do I think highly of? What should I do today to achieve what I set out to do tomorrow?

It sounds counter intuitive that by looking for answers within ourselves we’ll end up serving others better. You should give it a try.

Will you take us to Mount Splashmore?

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How much do you have to insist before your customers say “yes”?

My bank sends me a text every day to tell me there’s a message for me in eServices, regarding changes to Terms and Conditions. I should go there, read it and approve it.

I still haven’t done that.

Facebook sends me daily updates of what my friends are sharing on the platform. I should re-install the mobile app and do not miss any of it.

I still haven’t done that.

LinkedIn has a new offer every other day to make me go back to Premium. I should take it, as it is unprecedented, and enjoy all the benefits (?) of their premium offer.

I still haven’t done that.

While navigating the net and Facebook (desktop), I get targeted with ads of cars that are nowhere close to the league of cars I am interested in. I should really check it out, and perhaps consider a lifestyle change.

I still haven’t done that.

Dumb repetition can get annoying pretty quickly. It breaks trust and it lowers the expectation of you actually having something interesting to say. And perhaps, like Bart and Lisa, eventually you get a “yes!”. Does that sound like a victory?

If you have to repeat yourself too much before inspiring action, you have either the wrong message or the wrong audience. Making it louder won’t help your case.

In corpore sano

Fabrizio1 Comment

I am a lazy person, and I have so far failed at taking care of my body.

Despite being very active in my teens and early twenties, I have basically refrained from doing any type of regular physical activity in the past fifteen years.

This year, I have decided that I am also going to change that. Because I am getting old, and a healthy body is important and shapes the impact you want to have in the world. And so, after taking on light exercise in the form of Tai Chi training from January, today I have started (lightly) a more intense training that will hopefully take me to run a half-marathon in two years.

Wish me luck.

Are you engaging?

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Around the world, only 16% of employees say they are fully engaged with their work (see also here).

It is possible that your company is an exception, and yet research shows that it is a whole lot more likely it is not. This means, most of your employees approach their work as just a job.

How do you turn this around? How do you make sure that people you hire remain motivated in the long term and do not start planning their next career move within the first six months?

Leaders need to take a step back.

The power they have is not in telling others what to do, or arguing they have the right answers, or playing games to favor their ascent. Nor it is in hiding behind “busy”, in travelling 90% of their time, in delivering what is not necessary and failing to deliver what is, in being late to meetings.

They can bring people together around a purpose, and then work from the sideline to support team members at every stage of the journey. The power they have is in making others better, not in making themselves better.

It is a radical shift that still has to concretize. And who gets there first, will have a considerable competitive advantage for a long time.