Category: culture

Not a choice

Fabrizio1 Comment

Somebody once told me: “If you don’t tell me you don’t like it, you are the one losing, as I will go on doing it.”

A key takeaway from this article about radical candor, is that it’s not really a choice.

You might refrain from delivering criticism because of kindness, or because you don’t like being criticized in the first place, or perhaps the timing is not right, as everybody is in a hurry, and you’ll get back to it later, when the situation is calmer.

In the meantime people develop habits, that gets consolidated and more difficult to notice and adjust. You get frustrated, nurture a negative narrative about the other person, figure out ways to live with it and postpone the confrontation.

Until it all breaks down. If only..

Time and potential are wasted by not being candid in the first place.

Influence

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Influence has a bad reputation.

We think of influence as something that is done to people, to us. We do not like the idea of having our thoughts magically changed, and so we do not like those who try to change them nor the act itself. To be fair, influence has been used by people to impose their view on others for quite some time, so no wonder we get defensive any time someone even just mentions the word.

What if, instead, influence would be an act of empathy?

If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way – deeply and intuitively – you might even find your own mind opening in response.

Jonathan Haidt, The Rigtheous Mind

We have lost

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It’s not for us to judge what others do.

There are systems in place for that, and as individuals and human beings, we should not feel entitled to decide if other people’s behaviour is right or wrong.

Today we are given the illusion that we have this right, that it is necessary for us to let everybody know what we think about this or that event.

We have lost the capability to use others’ actions for self-reflection (and betterment), and we just cherry pick facts and happenings that confirm to ourselves and the world we are already better, smarter, braver, fairer.

We have lost the empathy to understand others behave like they do not because they are mean, devious, malicious, but just because they are facing our very same challenges, trying to make sense of a life that does not help them in the effort.

We have lost the courage necessary to look within ourselves first, to sit in front of a mirror and think about who we are and who we are not, the things we like and we want more of, the things we dislike and we want less of, and we drown in a continuous flow of superficial interactions that end up being shouts in the dark.

We have lost, and we are losing every day the sense of perspective, of what is important, of why should I care, or what is my role in all this.

We have lost, but we can take all of this back. It’s a choice we make every day.

The people you want to change

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Some problems would greatly benefit from a more customer centric approach.

One of them is cybersecurity. We all laugh at how silly it is to use “1234” or “p4ssw0rd” as credentials to access any type of service, and we all know we should not use the same password on different websites, or stick the password on our computers. And yet, most people do just that. Because keeping in mind more than a bunch of easy-to-remember passwords is taxing, because not all are aware of password managers softwares (they don’t come preinstalled in your devices), and because even when you install one you realize that the experience is not exactly easy – between syncing across devices, two-factors authentication, master password recovery, and whatnot.

If change in the world is what we seek to achieve, we need to be brutally focused on how the people we want to change go about their routines, what they care about, why they should even bother, and what we can do to actually enhance their lives while change makes it course. Resistance and indifference is the other side of the coin, and in some cases it might mean a whole lot worse consequences than the failure of a business.

People is our most important asset

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For founders and start-ups managers, here is a list of things that’s beyond what you should expect of your employees.

Being loyal to your cause.

Being as excited about your cause as you are.

Doing extra work without being paid.

Doing basic work without being paid (fairly).

Being self-motivated.

Doing work without recognition.

Doing work that is beyond the job description you’ve hired them for, or the title you have given them.

Putting up with your lack of vision, planning, communication, transparency.

Participating in every after-work activity for team building.

Interpreting uncertainty and change as a free pass for mean managerial behaviour.

Agreeing to the fact that your busyness is more important than their busyness.

Finding answers to questions you don’t even ask.

Carving their way into career development.

Learning by themselves.

Accept that somebody with more experience will come in at some point and start telling them what to do.

If people is really your most important asset, you could start by having a honest look at this list. Leave your excuses on the side for a moment, and mark the items on which you are failing your employees. Ask how you can do better. And then do it.