Category: leadership

Offer problems

FabrizioLeave a comment

When leading people, it’s better to be careful about pushing urgencies down the line.

An urgency is always something personal. Something that is urgent for you is rarely urgent for another person, and when you leverage your position of power to get that done, two things happen.

First, the machine gets stuck. The member of your team who is working on your urgency is not being employed for what they were (hopefully) hired for. Instead, they are acting on orders. Value is not added and the organisation has just seen a bottleneck blooming.

Second, energies are drained. The effort put into doing a task one does not understand is more than the one put into a task one owns. Additional mental energy is needed to make sense of the situation, reverse-engineer the decision and figure out if this is the right time to search for a new job.

Rather than urgencies to act upon, offer people problems to solve, and let them come up with their list of actions, people to meet and documents to draft. Give them the tools and let them come up with their story. After all, nobody wants to be a secondary character in a story someone else has drafted.

Be the person who gives energy, not the one who takes it away.

From The Trillion Dollar Coach

When you have an idea

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When you have an idea that would demand any type of effort from anybody to implement (most ideas do), the sooner you get out of the “this-is-the-best-idea-in-the-world-everybody-will-love-it” mindset the better.

Instead.

Clarify what others have to gain from the implementation. Most ideas do not exist in a vacuum, and so side effects are to be expected. Identify the positive ones and state them clearly to the people who could reap the benefit. Mitigate the negatives.

Bring people onboard before actually presenting the idea to a wider audience. You most likely have some allies (if you don’t, drop the idea). It’s all about finding them and involving them early in the process. Make sure they understand what’s in it for them and how they can contribute to be part of the success.

Praise positive results of ideas that go in different directions. Change is difficult, and it cannot be lead by a fanboy. All ideas have pros and cons. Be honest about the cons in what you want to do, and most of all be outspoken when it comes to good results achieved by what’s been done so far, or could be done with the same resources.

Offer unconditional help. Perhaps you cannot do much to bring the idea to life, surely you can facilitate the work, shield the team from politics and petty discussions, bring more people on board as needed, champion the idea with internal and external stakeholders, reiterate the vision and the reasons why the idea exist in the first place.

You are close to real change.

When things stall

Fabrizio2 Comments

Sometimes you hit a winner.

It might be you have changed something in your routine, or you have worked more smartly and efficiently, or you have hired somebody for your team, or the situation around you changed. And things start to work. You achieve goals, you get praises, you march expedite towards the success you have defined for yourself and your organisation.

And then, it stops.

Just as suddenly as they have started, things stop working. The growth line is flat, goals are far off, the team starts raising questions and demanding change, you feel like you are a fraud and everything you have achieved so far is just a coincidence.

A common thread I found when this happens is the tendency to intensify work. You do more, you ask people around you to do more, you hire more, you grow your operations. And while doing that, you get the chance to do more of what brought you to the initial success: more marketing, more sales, more product development, more everything. Very soon, you (and your organisation) are in a frenzy state, you do not have time to think about what is happening because there’s a new urgency, you become like an unintelligent robot repeating things you did in the past expecting a different outcome. Needless to say, this rarely works.

What tends to work, instead, is taking a break. That does not mean going out of business and start anew. It means sitting with your team, looking at the fundamentals of what you are doing and see what changed. Is it the size? Is it the why? Is it the who? Where in the process did a critical shift happen that was not noticed? Is there anything that is still working? Of course, this is a process that requires awareness and openness, and hopefully you have established such an environment when things were going well (rarely those will spark in dire times). When you are done, you’ll have a new plan, that possibly will require you and your team not to do more, but to do better. Not to find more customers, but to find better customers. Not to hire more people, but to hire better people. Not to do more marketing, but to do better marketing. Not to add more processes and levels, but to act on better practices and experiences.

Be ready, because if you are lucky, you’ll have to go through the process very soon.

Someone wants it this way

FabrizioLeave a comment

When looking at organisations, I am often baffled by the amount of damage that gets done in the name of (supposed) harmony.

Considering the number of companies that list innovation among their core values, that should almost never be the case. You cannot be creative and innovate if all you care about is pleasing someone, making sure they feel important, executing on poor plans just for the sake of not making a fuss. Diversity and conflict should be at the core of every enterprise. And while it is important to maintain the conversation civil, by the time we enter the work environment we should all be on the same page: if somebody has a different idea they are not implying they are better than us, neither they are jeopardazing our professional worth.

“We are doing this because someone wants it this way” is a very poor way to serve your organisation.

Arguing

FabrizioLeave a comment

Before investing time, energy, relationships in an argument, it is advisable to spend some time understanding three things.

What is the impact of the outcome? It seems many times discussions and arguments arise for matters that do not move the needle: having the brochure with a blue or a red background, using this or that word, wanting an opportunity back that is already gone, and so on. You might have a strong preference for one or the other, and yet you know deep down the outcome is not going to move numbers and cultures, so consider dropping the argument altogether.

What are the facts I base my opinion on? When a discussion starts, it’s most likely about opinions and sentiments: I like this better than that, I think that banner would be more effective than the other, I have a feeling our customers would not understand us. Of course, this is valuable, and yet if you cannot anchor it to real life experiences, examples, and facts, consider dropping the argument altogether.

Are the people I am talking to ready to hear this? If you claim something progressive in a conservative environment, that might not be the right audience to put forward your brilliant new idea to. Wanting to go South when everybody (or at least, who’s driving) is going North, is a pretty ambitious target, so consider dropping the argument altogether.

If the impact your idea will have is relevant, you have facts supporting it and people willing to hear, than go ahead and invest. Be wary though that these three are often missing, and when that’s the case you are only going to waste time, energy and eventually deteriorate relationships.