Category: leadership

Ask this instead

FabrizioLeave a comment

When companies grow and get to a certain size – say, 3-400 employees – the tendency is to add layers of management and middle-management to set the stage for the future growth.

That’s when something typically happens that ends up actually hindering the growth they are seeking.

It is the time when the company stops solving interesting problems and starts serving individual agendas.

It is the time of more and more meetings to find alignment, the time of blaming it on others, the time of politics and gossiping. It is a time dominated by opinions and personal anecdotes. Facts lose importance. Indeed, they barely get measured because everyone is busy pleasing those up the ranks while trying to come out first among peers.

It is where motivation dies and talent retention becomes a serious problem.

So when you hire or promote managers for your growing company, ask them not about their previous experience and their track record. Ask them instead how they plan to manage their team, how they will be handling conflict and contrasting ideas, how they will be making decisions and manage the change that comes from those decisions.

These hires will determine your possibility to get to the next phase. Be intentional about them.

Not really a dilemma

Fabrizio1 Comment

Going back to the office. Continuing to work from home.

It would be nice if for once we would not make out of this an ideological dilemma. There are good arguments for both sides, and when you think about it, it is not really a dilemma. Managers just need to find the courage to ask their employees where they prefer to work, and then follow up to make sure that their choice is respected.

There are different ways to contribute to the success of an organization.

Stalling and advancing

FabrizioLeave a comment

Things that stall a (professional) relationship: sarcasm, passive-aggressive messages, dominating the conversation, lack of communication, inappropriate comments, delays with no explanation, losing your temper, unilateral decisions, power moves, keeping score.

Things that advance a (professional) relationship: helping, saying I am sorry, asking for a chat when there’s a misunderstanding, listening, asking open questions, sharing mistakes, starting with how are you? and tell me more about that, telling about how you feel.

Thinking about that relationship that’s making your workdays miserable, are you stalling or advancing it?

Appropriate

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you are taking decisions that will impact (negatively) others, it’s not a bad thing to ask yourself: Do I really have to?

Often things make a lot of sense on paper: cutting costs, increasing profits, getting some surplus to invest in expansion. But is it appropriate in the here and now? Can it be avoided? Can the policy be changed?

Of course, decisions like these are rarely taken lightly. Just make sure you are considering all perspectives, not just the one that is more common, easier, more anticipated.

Footsteps

FabrizioLeave a comment

We know, from our own experience as employees, that people perform better when they are engaged. And that engagement means different things to different people.

Yet, despite us knowing that, we keep running companies in a standardized way that kills engagement.

We ask people to do shallow work. We keep them busy with emails, internal chats, and meetings. We manage from the top down. We regard productivity and (physical) presence as the same. We do performance reviews with a checklist. We assign titles and roles, so that we can look at nice pretty boxes and feel in control. And every now and then we throw a party to cheer everybody up (better if under the influence of alcohol).

The thing that I find most perplexing, though, is how much small and medium companies (the vast majority of companies out there) adhere to the same trite script.

They are the ones that are actually better positioned to change these practices. They are the ones who could make of their differences a decisive factor when seeking and retaining talent. They are the ones who could truly have a personal approach to engagement, and be flexible enough to make it feel as if each single employee would belong.

Just because your target is to grow, it does not mean you have to follow in some other company’s footsteps.

Doing that is actually killing your chances of growth.