Category: culture

Personal development

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If you want your people to develop, participate in trainings, attend events related to their field, network with peers and exchange ideas, just give them a clear budget (time and money) and some broad rules. Then let them choose how to go about it, approve by default and sponsor sessions to share their learnings with the rest of the team.

If you don’t want that instead, give them a process to follow, some paperwork to do and managerial discretion.

Or even better, tell them their development is not at the top of your agenda.

The two options

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Are you building thought leadership or are you looking for leads?

It might seem like it’s just a marketing question, but it is actually much more than that.

Are you establishing deep connections or are you greeting everybody and move on?

Are you here to make a change or to share your numbers?

Are you interested in telling a story or in surfacing shortcuts?

Are you creating or copy-pasting?

And the one that I personally prefer.

Are you for quality or quantity?

Certainly, the two can be simultaneously present. And yet, you can’t go all in on both. Eventually one will prevail, projecting your work in very different directions.

Also, the more you stick with one the more difficult it will be to move onto the other. But this is more true when the movement is from leads to thought leadership. So, the idea that “we are going to do quality work when X and Y will happen” is a mirage.

I bet you already knew that.

Frameworks

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Frameworks, matrices, canvas are great tools to organize thinking and guide action.

And they should be approached with two things in mind.

First, you need to understand how they work. To do that you often have to read articles and papers from the people who have proposed the tool you want to use, and possibly also from people who have challenged their usefulness.

This is particularly problematic with models that are very well known and frequently quoted in organizations, such as the 5 forces by Porter, or the S.W.O.T. matrix, or the Competing Value Framework by Cameron and Quinn. People use these without actually knowing what the authors had in mind, or without having any reference to get them started, and as a result they are often misused. Even when a colleague suggests they have all the information you might need to get started, challenge them and dig into the original material.

Second, they are simplification of reality. And so they might not fit 100% to the specific case you are trying to apply them to. They might need some adjustments. And that is one more reason why it is important to study them, so that when rules need to be bent, it’s not going to betray the purpose or the essence of the tool.

Slavishly applying a framework, a matrix, a canva to your business, and doing that by only looking at the superficial level, it’s most likely not going to bring about the change you are seeking.

What we’d like

Fabrizio1 Comment

How would you like others to treat you?

If you are having a bad day, and still need to go out to buy some groceries. You just grab the first clothes you can find and don’t worry about your hair. What would you like others to say?

If you are having a tough period, and at work you can only do the bare minimum. You avoid coffee breaks as you do not want to talk to anybody, you delay your lunch break to grab a quick bite by yourself. How would you like others to talk about you?

If you are not answering that message because it would mean you finally need to have that difficult conversation you have postponed for so long. What would you like others to call you?

The next time we reach for an easy judgement, let’s keep in mind what we’d like others to do when it’s our turn.

Nice and rude

FabrizioLeave a comment

Both nice and rude are roadblocks to change.

One because it hides a truth, the other because it distracts from it.

Being in the middle is worth the effort.