Category: leadership

Time

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Time is limited and it is one of the most critical resources.

Contrary to money, that can be spent on multiple different things (when you have it), time is a trade-off matter. And for this reason, how it is invested is extremely important.

I do not have time to develop my team members. I am overworked and overwhelmed, there’s absolutely no chance I can dedicate time to that.

This is a perfectly possible and understable scenario. In the short-term, there might be more important things than a meaningful conversation, a career development discussion, a training to organise or a coaching session.

Or might they?

Consider the following:

  • Do you have time to answer all the questions?
  • Do you have time to take all the decisions?

If your people is not empowered and developed, most likely they will continue to come to you every time they have a doubt, a concern, a request. Every time there is a decision to make, important or not.

Of course, this is the best case scenario. The alternative would be that they’d simply ignore their questions and the needs for new decisions, and carry on with whatever it is that they are doing. Good or bad. Until they’ll leave, that will be rather sooner than later. And then:

  • Do you have time to keep hiring continuosly?

An apparently intelligible decision (I am now focusing on everything but developing my team) can lead to a counter-intuitive consequence (I only have time to answer to my team’s short-term needs).

What we spend time on, not only determines our priorities today, but will also determine our priorities tomorrow. To take control of both, it is worth spending some more time figuring out how our decisions are going to play out in the long-term. This is something worth making some space in your calendar for.

Trust can be given

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When we say that trust needs to be earned, what we are really saying is that we are afraid and we want to maintain control over the situation. We are afraid because we do not know the other person, we have no history with them, we are unsure they can deliver as good a job as we expect, we cannot pretend them to be as committed as we are.

The problem is, when we approach a new relationship with this mindset, it is highly unlikely the other is ever going to earn our trust. And even if they will, it will be so because they have complied, they have gone along with our requests, they have checked all the boxes and eventually become a sort of clone.

This is not how progress happens.

Trust can be given, upfront. It requires a leap of faith, opening up and believing that someone else can achieve things that are not part of our current immagination, and yet are good. It means we can lose control, accept they might be better, and perhaps even step aside and let them on at some point. Trust is forward motion, and if we are solid enought to gift it to others, we can establish meaningful relationships that add up to much more than their individual parts.

Add or subtract

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What if the next Democratic candidate at the White House would start their campaign speech by saying: “I do appreciate the work the Trump administration has done so far, particularly for what concerns the boost to the economy, the renovated focus on national security and the efforts put into establishing a negotiating table with North Korea. And to further bring America towards the future, here is how my administration is going to build up and expand on the these and other themes.”

There is really no effective benefit in going one against the other, a part from reinforcing each others’ views and widening the gap that separate us. In politics, as well as in business, interpersonal relationships and society in general, you can either add or subtract to the work of others who came before you.

Adding is the path towards unity, forward motion, long-term and prosperity. It is about building bridges and building them together, trying to go somewhere nobody has been before. Consider this the next time you are asked to take on a new assignment.

Developing

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Before you start implementing career development plans for your employees, or ask one of your team members to embark in a personal development plans, you have to sit with yourself (and your managers, and the board), and be honest about a very simple fact.

Are you ready to commit to helping your people to potentially change role, job and company?

This is a major scare for most leaders. They struggle to accept the fact that somebody might one day move onto biggest thing, a more interesting role, or even a more successful organisation.

But even if you are among those who fear people leaving, there are very good reasons why you should go ahead and be serious about helping them develop their careers.

First of all, whether you are or not involved, they are going to take care of it, and it might turn out to be a whole lot worst if your company is just a passive spectator. In a particularly unclear time for my development, I had asked my bosses to help me navigate the next steps. They were not responsive, hiding behind a “you can be whatever you want to be”, and eventually I took the lead. First by making a decision that should have been made more carefully, and then by leaving the company.

Then, the idea that people will stay in the job for more than a bunch of years is nowadays highly unrealistic. In the US, the median number of years a worker stays with a company is 4.3, and the pace at which people change job in certain sectors and companies (even the most successful ones) is quite amazing. How to motivate them to stay just a bit longer than your competitors’? Well, certainly not by feeding them shallow performance reviews and promises of promotions into jobs they’ll later find out they do not care about.

Finally, you might easily end up realising that by actually developing your people, you will give them a reason to stay with you longer. There are not so many companies out there that do that seriously, and yours could be a quite big competitive advantage in the search for talents, for a pretty long time.

Near-enemies

Fabrizio1 Comment

I love the concept of near-enemies.

In Buddhism, near-enemies are manifestations that are quite close to a desired state, yet are actually a whole lot different. So different, they are actually dangerous.

A desired state of Buddhists, for example, is equanimity. That is to say, a way of being calm and focused no matter what happens around you. It is “stability in the face of the fluctuations of worldly fortune“.

Equanimity has a clear enemy, a “far-enemy”. That is restlesness, anxiety, the desire to have things the way we want them to be. The near-enemy, though, is indifference.

From the outside, equanimity and indifference look perhaps the same. Yet they are substantially different: equanimity is not desiring things to be one way or the other; indifference is not caring whether things are one way or the other. With equanimity, we feel everything: the good, the bad, the ugly, the despair, the difficulties, the joy, the sorrow. We are simply not stuck there. With indifference, we feel nothing.

This makes me think of how much we are nowadays focused on near-enemies.

Activity, for example, that is an active force, a state in which things happen and are being done, is often mistaken for its near-enemy busyness, that rarely leads to any progress.

In the same way, our popularity (definitely not a Buddhist concept), that is the condition in which we are liked, admired, supported by others, is often mistaken for its modern near-enemies likes, fans, followers, visits, clicks or any other vanity metric of your choice.

If we expand the concept a little, we can also see how easily we are distracted by near-enemies in our pursue of something we deem important. We do not want our community to be racist or bigot or closed, we want to pursue an ideal of openness. And to do that, we aim at a target, we attack, we label and brand, we separate. Ending up in a community that is even more close than it was before.

Near-enemies are an incredibly powerful concept. If we manage to go behind their seduction, if we do not fall for their attractiveness and easiness of reach, if we force ourselves to open to the real objective of our journey. That is when the highest states that we want to achieve – for us, our families, companies, communities – become not only attainable, but also natural.