Category: leadership

Concerted efforts

FabrizioLeave a comment

Management has gotten a bad reputation, while leadership is on the mouth of every person inside modern organisations (often with a mistaken sense).

And yet, both management and leadership are needed. In different moments, though.

Leadership is what happens in between the moments we are managing. Managing is helping people what they did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. Management is staying the course. Leadership is taking the leap, doing something that might not work. Pointing to a problem, a challenge, an opportunity, and saying “I am going over here, who wants to come?”.

Seth Godin, Akimbo s4e14

A good question for a leader is “where do we go next?“.

A good question for a manager is “how do we serve more people?“.

Managers and leaders can work together. In fact, an organisation is better off when equipped with managers and leaders that interact, work together, respect each other. And appreciate when it’s time for the other to take the stage.

In both cases, though, it’s important to remember that one of the key resources a manager and a leader have to allocate, motivate, deploy is people. Indeed, the main problem today is that we have managers and leaders who barely understand their role, and certainly do not grasp people. Both “where do we go next?” and “how do we serve more people?” are concerted efforts not formulaic spreadsheets.

Listening and asking

Fabrizio4 Comments

Two strong recommendations if you are into podcasts and leadership.

The Look and Sound of Leadership, by Tom Henschel.

Coaching for Leaders, by Dave Stachowiak.

They ship respectively monthly and weekly, and they are full of interesting insights and suggestions on how to be a modern leader.

If you want to start from somewhere, this one is a beautiful conversation about how poor we are at listening and what we can achieve by improving such basic skill.

In average, a person would speak about 150 words a minute. Yet in their mind, they can think up to 900 words a minute. If we stop at hearing the first thing a person says, there’s a huge chance we do not really hear what they wanted to actually express.

Oscar Trimboli

We have all had that feeling of not being able to sufficiently elaborate on our thoughts. We can get better at capturing our ideas, and still the role of the listener, particularly when in a position of power, is enabling our ability to clarify what we want to express and make us say it out loud.

And as a complement on the topic, this other one episode goes into some details about what we can do to facilitate and stimulate conversations. The key is being able to formulate good, open questions that give the other space to reflect and open up.

I hope you enjoy.

Beyond up and more

FabrizioLeave a comment

Is up the only way? Is more the only mean to advance?

Certainly, that is the popular view. When you are with a company, you figure what your next step would be in terms of career advancement and salary increase. Companies tend to reward with promotions and bigger paychecks their best performers or people with long tenure. They apply a one-size-fits-all measure that gets along well with the broadest culture, and yet might end up disappointing everyone involved.

Unfortunately, many organizations still offer only one way “up”. Become a manager, even if your strengths aren’t in management. Some people who aren’t really cut out to be managers may do an OK job, but they may never feel quite right managing.

It’s the Manager, by Jim Clifton and Jim Harter

There are terrific opportunities to improve this view of the work environment (and of society at large). Just imagine.

You have done a terrific job lately, I am proud of you as you have achieved this and that, and it’s important to the organisation because of that and this. As I know you had to work some extra hours to achieve that, I suggest you take two weeks off and take your family somewhere for a relaxing holiday. We are happy to pay you normal salary while you’re away, and cover the cost of the flight.

The way you have contributed to taking this team to the next level is really outstanding. In particular, I noticed you have done this with that project, and that with this person. You have mentioned during one of our conversation you’d wanted to complete your Master’s Degree you had to abandon to support your family. We’d be happy to cover the cost of your enrollment at University X for the completion of your studies.

You have been essential in closing this customer. Without you, we would have missed the opportunity to discuss the importance of Y, that eventually turned out to be crucial in convicing them. Thanks for the additional research you put into the case. I know that your true passion is in people’s development, though. I have discussed with the head of HR, and they are happy to take you in their team and mentor you on this new path. What do you think?

This does require extra effort, the effort put into knowing team members‘ strengths, wants, needs, ambitions, passions. You should really start today.

Tools

Fabrizio1 Comment

When a company implements a new tool, that is no guarantee the tool is going to fix the issue it was hired to address.

Actually, in most cases, it is quite the opposite.

A tool is merely a helper, enabling you to do something. It has very little to do with the definition of what “something” is, and even less with the act of doing itself.

I have experienced companies changing tools over and over again in the attempt to address, for example, a lack of internal communication. This is quite a typical situation in fast-growing organisations. The new tool is usually a fancy and shiny object for the first five minutes, and then people suddenly realise that: 1. they do not know what to communicate; 2. they do not know who to communicate to. And so, the new tool is mainly left unused, or is misused, and the problem persists.

Tools should always be implemented in a solid cultural and practical framework.

Culture is what tell you what to do. In the internal communication example, it tells what to communicate, how to communicate, who to communicate to, how often, for what purposes, and so on. So if a company is undercommunicating, a new tool is not going to solve it, because most likely it is not in their DNA to communicate. Or at least, they still haven’t defined an idea of internal communication that is worth following.

Practice is the act of doing itself. This is usually not very formal, though it can be (for example, a company can have a schedule for internal newsletters, updates, memos, etc.). And still, people working in an organisation know that there are certain things that need to be done, as it is part of their culture. Needless to say, managers and leaders have a dominant role in translating what to do in doing. If a company wants to be better at communicating, and (for very legitimate reasons) its managers and leaders think of communication as a least important task on the list of to-dos, a new tool is not going to send out messages in their place.

We have the tendency to give too much importance to the tool we choose and its features, when actually most of what is needed is already available. Of course, setting the stage for what needs to be done and for doing it means making decisions, and that translates into having a serious look into what is front and center to the organisation. The scarcity of resources is not something that can be addressed with technology, I am afraid.

It depends

Fabrizio1 Comment

At some point, we started seeing every situation as a binary option.

Win or loose.

Good or bad.

Give or take.

Growth or irrelevancy.

With or against me.

And so on. That’s only a narrow interpretation of how things are. One, perhaps, that makes it easier for us to interpret the complexity of situations right here right now. And at the same time, sets us for a neverending battle.

Probably the biggest lesson I have learned in business school is that there is no single, mystical key. Most of the questions about what to do in this or that scenario were met by professors with a very convincing “it depends”. It’s not a way to be conservative and not accountable, rather a powerful sentence that unlocks deep understanding, analysis, and decision-making based on the current situation rather than on mere knowledge and experience.

Eventually, I am certain this is an approach that better fits learning, change, impact.