Category: culture

How to start trusting others

FabrizioLeave a comment

Three ways to start the good habit of trusting others, particularly if you are in a leadership role.

  1. Praise others’ strengths. This is not about saying “good job” or “keep up the great work”, but actually about taking time to identify things people do well and break those down with them. Why are they good? Why do they matter (to the organisation, to the purpose)? What is it that makes them special? How can we make sure you can re-do this next time?
  2. Listen without distraction. I wrote about listening yesterday. Making sure you are 100% present during a conversation (that is to say, at least listening to understand) means you are trusting others with your time. No, you don’t need to check your phone every five minutes. No, you do not have to quickly answer an e-mail as somebody is talking to you. And probably no, the phone call you are getting is not important and you do not have to take it.
  3. Delegate responsibilities. Delegating, in general, is difficult. In part, we don’t want to bother others; in part, we do not believe others can do as good a job as we can. Furthermore, when we delegate we usually delegate tasks: “can you work on this report?”; “can you take next week’s presentation?”; “can you update this process?”. I believe we can do a better job by delegating responsibilities, that generally feature more freedom and exposure: “We have been tasked with achieving this type of growth, can you take ownership?”; “I have been in charge of updating the management, how about you do it from now on?”; “So far, managers from the headquarters have done most of the touch bases with remote offices, how do you feel about taking that?”.

Honest and open stories

FabrizioLeave a comment

We are surrounded by stories.

We tell stories all the times. About ourselves, our family, our work, the situation we are in, what happened yesterday, the last weekend, the last time we went on vacation, our childhood, our adulthood. Others do as well, and so all we hear all day long, every day of the week, are stories.

Companies tell stories as well. The story of a company is sometimes more complicated, as it is a mixture of its values, products, customers, stakeholders, shareholders, and so on. There are, in general, more interests involved in the story of a company, yet that does not mean it is not a story.

As your exposure increases, and this is valid both for individuals and for companies, you progressively lose the grip on your story. Sometimes you might hear that somebody does not believe it, that they have a different version, that they have seen you do something that is not line with what you are narrating.

Facebook has for long time been the platform bringing people together. Its story was one of communality, of moments and likes, on sharing interests (and stories) with your friends and family. Nowadays, Facebook is the platform that has rigged elections in many countries, where hatred and fraud spread, and people with mean intentions can organise to easily find an audience.

Amazon has for long time been the best shop in the world. Its story was one of outstanding customer service, attention to details, low price and convenience. Nowadays, even though it is not remotely in as bad waters as Facebook (and other social media), we hear more and more about how it basically pays no taxes, how it devours every competitor in every market it chooses to enter, and how its CEO is the richest person in the world while its employees are sometimes overworked and strictly surveilled.

The more a story is told, the more its audience grows, the more the power of the person or the people telling it, the more it is difficult to believe it. It’s just how it is, and the only thing that you can do to attempt to mitigate this risk is being honest and open.

Honest, because the closer the story you are telling is to how things actually are, the easier it is to stay on its track. How do you behave when nobody’s watching? If your interest is in getting people together, why is your main source of revenue advertising?

Open, because in telling the story you need to be sensible of the people you are affecting. Is my story beneficial to my community? Am I willing to lose profit to address something that unexpectedly happened while I was living my story? Am I ready to quit, should the damage be too much?

Telling stories is complicated, and we don’t spend quite as much time as we should trying to define them.

Sit down and watch it grow

FabrizioLeave a comment

One of the most difficult thing when you are in charge is to understand when it’s time to let go.

With the best of conscious intentions, a leader in a growing company may inadvertently generate an endless number of “problems” in order to stay busy, feel needed, and defer the difficult work of figuring out what leadership looks like now that the organization has evolved.

Ed Batista

I have experienced this first hand in different companies. The idea that being busy means being important is something that we all buy into at one point or the other. It is often very dangerous when a company is growing, as the focus of managers and leaders should mainly be on letting go of their duties and their responsibilities, on making sure that the people they manage and lead get the necessary attention, and that the high level strategy and vision gets appropriately translated into day to day actions from their team.

You can get used to this little by little: take something you have built, sit down, delegate and watch it grow without you. It will be liberating and incredibly rewarding.

Discrimination is never a business choice

FabrizioLeave a comment

If you own a business, I still believe you should be free to decide who you serve. It is unpleasant, inappropriate and unsavvy if you base this decision on traits such as race, religion, sexual orientation, political support, and similar. Yet it is a decision you should be able to make.

On the other hand, you should also be aware of something.

If your decision is discriminatory, you are also contributing to a more closed community. If you only serve people of a certain race, religion, sexual orientation, you should expect a selection in your clientele. And possibly in your staff, in your entourage, in people hanging around your business, in people making decisions about your business, in who’s giving you feedback, in who’s recommending how to improve. And on and on and on.

It might be exactly what you are seeking to achieve, and yet there is no way the type of environment you are building around your business will make you thrive, succeed and, eventually, grow as a human being and as a business leader. You’ll be poorer, in quite many ways, and so will your community.

If you don’t want certain customers for silly reasons, you’ll end up worst off. What you are doing is not conscious, it’s the mere result of the hype on an issue set by some politicians or unthoughtful leaders who care zero about you.

How to win friends and influence people

Fabrizio2 Comments

The very same title kept me from reading How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnagie for a long time. The idea that friends can be won and people influenced was something I just could not digest. People (and friends alike) would love me not because of some weird subterfuge, but certainly because of who I was and how I behaved.

The fact is, this book is a must read for everybody who wants to know how to make a relationship work. Any type of relationship, though Carnagie focuses mainly on business relationships.

The message is as simple and commonsensical as it is difficult to put into practice: if you want to have meaningful and satisfying relationships in your life, just forget about yourself.

This does not mean you have to obliterate yourself in the presence of others, or that others can do anything to you and you should just accept it and be greatful for their consideration.

It means that the next time you are talking to somebody, you should stop thinking about what’s the next smart thing you are going to say as soon as they make a pause; you should stop wondering about the fallacies of their argument to counter them with your infallible logic; you should stop telling about how wonderful you are and how they should change to match your worldview.

Instead, you could open to the other person in the conversation, do that genuinely and from the heart, focus on what they are telling you and make sure they walk out of the dialogue with a higher self-esteem they had before joining it.

Few points from the book that really resonated with me. And to some extent changed my approach to relationships.

People are not “creatures of logic”, they are “creatures of emotions”. If we really think that by proving the validity of our argument we will win their hearts, their minds and their actions, we are delusional. In this sense, Carnagie says, “any fool can criticize, condemn and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving”. That’s where true power lies.

Avoid interrupting others, even if it is to share an incredible idea you just had while they were talking. Leave them space to talk about themselves, and be sure you are interested and listening. At some point in my career, I realised how I had stopped asking people how they were when meeting them, probably because at some unconscious level I was not interested in knowing that. I have changed course, also thanks to this recommendation. Now, when I get asked “how are you?”, I try to keep my answer as short and to the point as possible, and then ask back “and what about you instead?”. And I listen to the answer, carefully.

I have mentioned this next point already once in my blog, and I consider it my personal key take away from reading How to win friends and influence people.

You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.

Have you ever been so passionately and unconditionally convinced by somebody else who just proved you wrong, to go as far as changing your mind, and actually liking the person? Of course not, and others as well do not appreciate being told they are wrong. Again, this does not mean you should abandon all your opinions and ideas. It just means that it’s not by arguing that you will have other people’s goodwill. Finding common ground and moving forward together is a much better and more sensitive approach.

And finally, give praise to others. Not generic “good job”. Tell them that for sure, and also why they did a good job, what you were impressed with, why, why it is important and what would that mean to you if they would do it again. We love to be praised, and yet we find it so difficult to praise others. Make it a daily habit, if needed, and get used to it so much so that it becomes natural and genuine.