When you engage in a new connection, expect friction.
You are trying to tie-in two (or more) parts that were separated before, and therefore it is granted there’s going to be misunderstanding, resistance, overreaching and suspicion.
Your role is to not misinterpret all of that as a signal a connection is not needed or wanted. Building bridges is the only way to progress, and you have to keep motivation high and fear low to gather people around a vision, a concept, an idea.
Hang in there.
Diversity is a tough sell because in the short term it only adds complexity.
In a context in which all that matters is what you achieved yesterday and what you are going to be doing tomorrow, adding someone to the team that might have different habits, different thoughts, different ideas, a different language, different ways of doing things is only problematic.
What is everybody else going to say? How are they going to adjust? How can we deliver against the targets if most of our time is spent aligning our views? Wouldn’t it be easier to just hire somebody like us, someone we don’t have to explain everything to?
Of course, if your mind is set on the long term, instead, the benefits of diversity are very easy to understand.
What team do you want when everything you have done so far is not going to work anymore (I promise you, it will happen)? How many points of view are you going to consider when that difficult problem nobody can crack is going to be presenting itself once again? What background should your organisation have the next time an interesting new market is going to open up in front of you?
Diversity is always enriching, you just have to give it time. As with most good things, truly.
.. is much more important that what gets done.
That is to say, if culture eats strategy for breakfast, tactics are not even on the menu.
If still somebody has doubts about this, after all that has happened with Uber and WeWork these past 12 months, here is a statistic that further supports the importance of culture (and of executives and management promoting culture with their own behaviour) on organisations’ and personal success.
In 2018, 39% of the CEOs losing their job were ousted because of unethical behaviour (vs 35% because of poor financial performance).
It was the first year in which unethical behaviour led the list of reasons why CEOs get fired. And it is an additional sign that more and more people, even at board level, start taking culture seriously.
The way things are done is much more important that what gets done.
Luck is a major factor in all types of success, and the failure to recognize this simple fact is a major factor in all later collapses.
Some people, at some point, start thinking that success is owed and inevitable.
They are perhaps very talented people, or people who put a lot of work and long hours into shaping something, or even incredibly creative people who have managed to change the rules in their industry, or again natural and charismatic leaders that suck others into their visions.
But should all this be a determining factor, there would be millions of billionaires and thousands of unicors and decacorns. And the best thing would be that once gotten there, there they would stay forever. They would own the recipe, after all.
Success is all of the things above, and yet it is mainly a series of unprecedented and unrepeatable circumstances that lined up to provide somebody or a group of people with an opportunity. If you are there, you most likely do not know how you got there, and you better not get too comfortable.
Appreciate the luck you have had, make it worth it (not only for yourself, ESPECIALLY not for yourself), and build resilience for when the moment will come for you to step out of the spotlight.
Change is difficult, of course. But there are two separate challenges that one faces when asking for change.
The first one is psychological. It’s the most common and evident one. It’s the resistance of the mind. We like comfort, we like things the way they’ve always been, we don’t know what we might get into by changing. Perhaps we also recognize that circumstances are not great, and yet we cling to them, as the unknown is scarier than an imperfect known.
The second one is behavioural. This is more subtle. It’s the resistance of the body. We have embraced change on a theoretical level, and yet we keep falling back to old habits, to old frameworks, to old practices. We know we need change, and we are struggling either because nobody has shown us how to change or because nobody is holding us accountable for the little daily things that are needed to fully shift.
Both challenges need to be considered, and one might only be halfway through when everybody nods to their ideas and says: “this is great, exactly what we need!”.
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