Category: leadership

Busy

Fabrizio1 Comment

If you tell others often that you are busy – and genuinely would prefer not to – understand two things.

First, delegating is not about telling others what to do, it is about trusting them with important problems to solve. It’s not about “I need this report by tomorrow” and all about “how and when do you plan to report on the findings?”.

Second, there is no one single thing that will dramatically impact the outcome if it is done today rather than tomorrow. Urgency is fake. Success is achieved by doing something consistently and over a long period of time. Big projects or tasks that pop up at the last minute in your calendar are not going to drive results.

Now go out and practice this.

Defensive

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When you get defensive during a conversation, you lose the opportunity to listen, to learn, to understand, and most importantly to move the relationship forward.

It is a strong impulse, instinctual almost.

Put some effort towards resisting it.

Fraud

FabrizioLeave a comment

Perhaps thinking that 88% of digital ad clicks are fraudulent is an exaggeration. And perhaps it is true that digital ads are so cheap that at the end of the day ad fraud is not a big issue.

But at some point, as marketers, we will have to acknowledge the big hallucination we are living through.

Influencers can buy fake followers by the truckload — roughly 20% of them are fake. Approximately 40% of Donald Trump’s followers are likely bots. Social media platforms are rife with cats and bots: Facebook admits to shutting down billions of fake accounts on its platform every year. Even app store installs are fake. Bots/click-farmers download 1 in 5 iOS apps. On the Android platform it’s 1 in 4.

Scott Galloway, here

Might this be one of the reasons why CMO tenure is at the lowest in more than a decade?

And when is the last time you have had a digital ad ignite your buying process?

Exploring feedback

FabrizioLeave a comment

Feedback is such a popular topic nowadays that managers are pretty much forced to give some.

And so, they resort to “good job!” – or the equivalent “great job!”, “terrific!”, “fantastic work!”.

If you are getting that, take the time to make your manager’s life a bit more challenging. No need to worry, you are just asking them to do their job.

Ask them.

What did you find good in what I did?

What do you think could have been better?

How would you have managed that situation?

How does this relate to our high level goal?

Where do I grow from here?

Crisis #2

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are moments of crisis in every group, in every team, in every company.

And if you lead, you ought to try and turn the crisis into an opportunity to strengthen the bonds.

Confirm with your people what the purpose is. The vision, the long-term game, the utopia you are heading towards despite the temporary setback.

And then agree on what the tactics are, what you are going to do today that’s going to take you all closer to the purpose.

The two parts go hand in hand, and that’s where most leaders fail. They either move from one tactic to the next, in the hope to find a purpose. Or they use tactics that are taking them away from the purpose, with the excuse of trying to address the crisis (“we will do what is right once the crisis is over” is not a very effective narrative).

When purpose and tactics are aligned, here are three important questions to answer to keep everyone informed and cared for as you get to it.