Category: leadership

Stronger

Fabrizio1 Comment

When you are in a leadership position, it will happen that something your team has delivered will be questioned by those you report to.

What to do?

You can side with the managers. You can side with the team. Or you can communicate both ways to find a solution that serves the greater good.

The first two options are shortcuts. They do work, yet they make victims: your team in the first case, yourself in the second. On the other end, making an effort to explain, ask, compromise is an investment of time and resources when you might have little of both. And that’s how you establish relationships that will make your organization, as a whole, stronger.

The greatest enemy

Fabrizio1 Comment

We are the greatest enemy to our own purpose, satisfaction, betterment, fullfilment.

We tell ourselves stories about the world that merely reflect what we feel and fear. Others will think I am arrogant if I do that. I am not good enough. If only I could get someone who believes in me. They don’t want me here anymore. They don’t care.

We are in charge. And we have the power to change all that. Now.

I may be able to explore my past, recalling memories of incidents where I learned to hide from my life, feeling the churn in my gut that makes (and keeps) me exactly as I am. And I may be able to explore the future person I want to be, my preferred image of myself, my intended self-concept tuned to hope and maybe distracting fantasy. But between the past and the future there’s the Now, with its stubborn realities, with its unpredictability and hidden dangers. There, in the Now, that’s where the real journey is either embraced or rejected, a point at which I must make a choice about facing what I haven’t faced all along — and stick with it.

Dan Oestreich – The mutiny against our conditioning

In or out

FabrizioLeave a comment

You are free to set some rules, to decide where the boundaries are, and what game you are playing. Actually, it is your responsibility. You should do that.

And once that is done, the next step is for you to figure out who is in and who is out, and for others to figure whether they are in or out.

You can’t be everything to everybody.

Take ownership of the process.

Additive bias

FabrizioLeave a comment

The reason why your value prop is full of “and”, your product is full of features, and your strategy is full of verticals and use cases (and exceptions to both), is that we are biased towards additive solutions.

We think that adding is better than subtracting when we look for solutions.

Of course, it is not.

But convincing others will always need a lot of work.

Each and everyone

FabrizioLeave a comment

Change cannot be imposed.

You can force people to do certain things instead of others. You can persuade them to think in a certain way. You can threaten them with punishments or incentivize them with rewards. You can get compliance and meet standards. You can shout, cry, beat, chase, restrict, and silence.

None of that is change.

Change can only start from within.

And if you want to direct change towards what is good for the community, you need to involve each and everyone in the process.