Category: culture

More than a higher salary

FabrizioLeave a comment

If your team complains about something, it’s not because they are spoiled, naive, or junior. If they complain often, that’s even more true.

There’s probably some deeper issues behind their behaviour. They might not feel motivated, or they might have the impression they are not free to make their own decisions, or they might just be disoriented by the continuously moving targets.

It’s your responsibility as a team lead to figure that out, because you can’t really start talking about performance, goals, development, until you clear the air and tackle the complaints.

And “tackle” is not about blindly accepting all request, but rather managing them.

“Here is how we are going to do this”.

“Here is why we can’t do that.”

“Here is who is going to be responsible for the other thing.”

And so on.

Being a manager is more than a higher salary.

Action first

FabrizioLeave a comment

This tweet explains clearly why doing is more important than achieving, why action comes before motivation, why you ought to choose journey over destination.

We often get stuck trying to figure out what is the best scenario, what we want to be tomorrow, what else we can get. And the only antidote to that is doing.

Losing

FabrizioLeave a comment

How quickly can you get out of an argument?

How quickly can you say, “it does not matter”, and forget about it.

How quickly can you say, “you might be right”, and shift your perspective.

How quickly can you say, “we don’t agree”, and proceed together.

How quickly can you say, “that’s alright”, and put the difference out of your mind.

Just a reminder that no matter how hard you try, you can’t win an argument.

No matter what you do

FabrizioLeave a comment

The moment you can accept that others think differently, that things happen no matter what you want or what you do, that nobody out there sees you as someone intrinsically deserving praise or criticism, that’s the moment when you can find peace of mind and set to achieve your goals.

The longer you can sustain that acceptance, the better of you will be.

What’s keeping your team?

FabrizioLeave a comment

What’s keeping you from achieving more, being more motivated, completing that task or project?

Each one of us will have their own answer, but in an organisation, the most common answer must be meetings.

Meetings without an agenda and a list of actions to follow up with.

Meetings that are updates.

Meetings that should have been an email or a Slack message.

Meetings to give feedback on a piece of work you have never seen before.

Meetings that are workshops that aim at fixing a problem with participants who have no idea what the problem is, let alone the skill set to fix it.

If you are a manager of people, your first responsibility should be to rid their calendars of meetings.