Category: leadership

Commit, don’t promise

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Committing is a personal matter. It is about dedicating one’s resources to an idea, a plan, a project. It involves going through the different possibilities and scenarios, the different allocations of time, energy, money, and picking one we feel we can give ourselves to. This is also the reason why committing publicly is so important. The moment we share our commitment with others, the commitment is still our (personal), and yet our very own personality is in jeopardy until we deliver. This is a powerful force to get things done.

Promising is different. A promise is always influenced by someone else, and that is the opposite of personal. You promise to change a status of the world because others are affected (negatively or positively) by that status, and yet not necessarily there are resources invested in the moment you are promising. Promising publicly is a pleonasm, as a promise is always done to someone else. Promising is easy, and that makes it also a powerful force to not get things done.

Commitment is about understanding what’s important and devote to it.

Promise is about grasping what’s urgent and put a temporary patch to it.

What’s happening?

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You enter the last week before the delivery of an important project. Your part is mostly done, you are mainly coordinating the work of others to make sure the deadline is met. One of the colleagues involved, talking with some stakeholders from other departments, gathers some piece of feedback that makes them reconsider a sizable part of the work they are doing on the project. They discuss it with you, and you feel put off by such a thing so close to the deadline. If that wasn’t enough, another person who has leverage and influence over the project sides with the criticism, and elaborates thoughts and ideas on how to possibly fix it in the long term. The deadline looms.

What do you do?

  1. You go in the tank. You have delivered your part after all, you are marginally involved in the remaining job, and excuses can be made for the lack of it. At some point, somebody will realize that there’s a problem, and you will be able to clearly explain why that has happened, and that it is not your fault.
  2. You block everything and ask to postpone the deadline. There’s lack of agreement on how to proceed, no reason to force a solution, and it is perhaps possible to open a broader discussion. People will ask about what happened, and you’ll have an explanation.
  3. You go ahead, as it was originally planned. The delivery is more important, having something some people think could be improved is far better than having an incomplete job and having to go around to explain why. You take a note to follow up on the criticism, and see if for the future it is possible to make that part better.

This is not a test.

We all probably go through the same (or very similar) thoughts at the same time. Each one of them has good motivations backing it and some kind of personal, self-interested roots. Eventually we will choose a course of action based on feelings and attitude rather than on concrete elements and facts.

We are all human beings, and it’s important to understand what is going on within us, before attempting to make a decision. That’s what can give us edge in the long term.

Adaptability

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Adaptability is one key skill for leaders.

Not only adaptability to situations and contexts, also and foremost capacity to adapt to the people you lead. Pretending to do the same things with a junior person at their first work experience and with a seasoned employee who’s seen their fair share is naive and lazy. This is true for items such as how frequently you talk to them, what type of vision you frame their work with, how and how intensely you approach development conversations, and what type of recognition you plan to reward them with.

Of course, and perhaps a bit counterintuitively, this does not mean forgetting about you, your goals, your company. It actually requires quite strong awareness. Of what you can do and what you can’t, of what is needed and required of you as a leader, of what the particular phase your organization is in needs, and of what your team member wants.

And at some point, you’ll realize you don’t have what it takes to lead somebody. Not because they are outstanding and better, nor because you have suddenly lost your touch. It’s simply that they require a set of skills that you do not have, or have only in part.

So, if they indeed are valuable to what you are trying to achieve, rather than falling back on proved patterns that most likely would not work and deflate their motivation, you could sit with them, understand more about their strengths and ambitions, and go as far as having them mentored by someone else in the organization they could resonate better with.

Most likely, at some point that person is going to leave. And that is true in any case, it’s not something you can do a lot about anyway. What you can do is determine the passion and excitement with which they deliver work while they are around. That is a lot.

Doing is not enough

Fabrizio2 Comments

Learning by doing is a great concept, yet certainly it is not by doing only that we learn.

The idea of experiential learning originates from David Kolb, and it dates back to 1984. Kolb suggests a learning cycle that starts with action (the by doing part) and ends with action (a new one, hopefully), but also includes other fundamental parts.

Without appropriate space for reflection (what has happened?), conceptualization (what does what happened mean?) and experiment (what are we going to do now?), we are simply stuck in a reality of actions without learning, and probably also without purpose and direction.

From that cycle, I believe it is possible to expand to clarify the role of leadership in learning.

On one side, the leader kicks off the experience with the formal or informal act of delegating. On the other one, it facilitates the interpretation of “what happened”, particularly for what concerns reflection and conceptualization.

Breadcrumbs

FabrizioLeave a comment

Last week, Facebook announced its cryptocurrency Libra. The next day, The Verge’s Casey Newton released the second part of his report on Facebook moderators, those who are supposed to solve Facebook’s problem with toxic content.

This is a company that for a long time has been misaligned. While preaching connection and innovation, the platform is generating far more problems for society and communities than it is solving. The leadership is failing to address such disasters, dodging bullets and any sort of responsibilities, while focusing on metrics that very little have to do with “bringing the world closer together”.

There’s an important lesson here.

You can be successful, rich, important even by creating a product that gives a sounding board to 3,000,000 pieces of toxic content every day. That manipulates democracy and facilitates genocide. That steps on basic human rights and gives away users’ data for illegal purposes.

But at the end of the day, what do you want to leave behind?