Category: culture

Care enough

FabrizioLeave a comment

Your colleague does not know how to proceed with their project, there is not much you can do about it.

The executive team has made a decision about a new direction for the company, there is not much you can do about it.

That member of your team is demotivated and you are pretty sure they have started looking for a job, there is not much you can do about it.

The agency is not delivering the quality of work you were expecting for the price you are paying, there is not much you can do about it.

Customers do not understand what you have to offer or why they should care, there is not much you can do about it.

Except, of course, there is.

There is always something you can do about it, provided you care enough. A pep talk, a note, an alternative, a plan, some learning, real positivity, an email, a smile, some words of encouragement, a lot of influencing, long term commitment, a sincere interest.

So, when you go for inertia, at least own the decision: “I am sorry, this is just not important enough for me right now to try to do something to change things”.

Easy

FabrizioLeave a comment

Just because something is easy, it does not mean it should not matter.

Easy has a tendency to go unnoticed, to not be motivating enough, to be left out of curricula, cover letters and history, to be frowned upon, to be looked at with skepticism, to be considered as something anyone can do, to be the last task on the list, to be left behind.

The truth is, regardless of how easy something is, it still needs to get done.

And doing does matter. Always.

Hours

FabrizioLeave a comment

Should employees work 30, 34, 36, 37.5, 40 or more hours a week?

It is a good thing that governments discuss this (and it is not a new discussion they are having). But companies honestly should not care. Sure, there are still some jobs for which output is correlated to the amount of hours people put in. For the vast majority of the workforce though, this kind of reasoning is outdated and demotivating.

Mainly for two reasons.

First, personal and professional are nowadays as blurry as they can be. Do you get great ideas as you take your kids to daycare? Or have you ever read an email and fell into a train of work-related thoughts just before your free evening started? How do you account for that time?

Second, most jobs are about challenges and problems (or at least, they should be). Thinking that by investing on them – on paper – 2 or 3 hours more per week actually does have an impact is silly.

It probably is the case that your organisation being involved in preserving a longer working week is just an easier way to hide inefficiency and fear of change.

Winning machine

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you have a new idea, it is quite difficult to avoid having all your following thoughts gravitate around it.

If a new slogan comes to you in the middle of the night, all the successive iterations will just be slight variations.

If you think at a solution for a problem you have had for a while, you will expand and stretch the solution until it gets good enough to actually cover at least a small part of the problem.

If the process you have just implemented has proven successful, you will use it until it is too late to understand it is no longer up-to-date.

A possible way around this could be to ask different people to come up with a new idea. Or to foster an environment in which it is normal that different people come up with a variety of new ideas. If you match with a process that clearly defines what gets picked, what gets postponed and what gets rejected, you have a winning machine.

Agent of change

FabrizioLeave a comment

It is not so difficult to agree that change needs to happen. It is much more complex to agree on what change adds up to and act on it.

So, if you are an agent of change, there are two things to keep in mind.

First, small wins are wins nonetheless. You do not have to achieve everything at once, and even small changes in the right direction are something to be proud of. Building blocks that can support larger wins in the future.

Second, not giving up is part of the package. You might be tempted – you WILL be tempted – to give up once things do not look exactly how you had planned. That is precisely when you have to take a deep breath, buckle down, and reinforce the message around the need for change.

Keep going.