Change does not happen because you want to.
Change happens because enough people want to.
And so, the first step towards change is figuring out what others feel about it.
You might get stressed, impatient, irritated by the whole process. But if you cannot handle that, how could you handle what is coming after things have changed?
There is a very powerful idea behind the story of Sitka’s remote off-site, described in details in this worthy article (full of tactics that are also applicable to meetings, all-hands, 1-1s and any other way your company has chosen to kill employees motivation).
The idea is that when you gather a number of people in one room (physical or virtual) the easiest way to make them fall asleep or continuously check their phones is to short-list some gatekeepers of knowledge (managers, teachers, experts) and let them speak for hours on end. And then we wonder why the message did not get through, why not everybody is working towards the agreed goals, why our purpose is not shared across departments.
Even assuming that the one-to-many form of communication ever worked, it does not anymore. People do not care about targets they did not contribute to plan, or about achievements they do not understand, or about buzz words that contrast with their day-to-day experience.
Design your events for connection, engage people in conversations and ask what the expectations are. Be flexible enough to not have everything under control. And remember who your end-user is.
At Minerva, we ended up banning lectures. They’re a great way to teach — but a pretty lousy way to learn. Good for the product builder, but bad for the end-user. Same goes for events. Big retreats are an easy way to convene a large group, but a bad way to facilitate connection.
Mike Wang
When you reject, belittle, or forget to follow up to an initiative taken by a member of your team, what happens is next time they will think twice before taking initiative.
It is that simple. And the effect compounds for additional rejecting, belittling and forgetting.
This is not to say you have to accept and follow through with every idea. You just need to communicate clearly what is important and what is not, what is “right now” and what is “maybe tomorrow”, what makes the picture and what makes the frame. This transparency is needed for people to appreciate why some things happen and other do not.
Unfortunately most hide behind busyness, that is often just an expression of ignorance (having no idea) or arrogance (thinking everyone has a clear idea).
It is a killer for motivation.
The fact with difficult conversations is that you can delay them, but you cannot delay the negative effects of the situation that made them necessary in the first place.
If a colleague is under performing and you have to pick up their slack, silence will not improve things. If your boss is not giving you what you demand, silence will not make them change. If the team you are working in has a toxic culture, silence will not make that more digestible.
Also, more likely than not, eventually the outcome you fear and that justified the delay is going to materialize no matter what. That colleague is probably going to be fired anyway, your boss is going to get rid of you, or you are going to get rid of them, the team will have to make some drastic changes one way or the other.
So, at the end of the day it is mainly a matter of being an agent of change or a spectator. The former makes you waste a lot less time, and you have no time to waste.
As a general rule, writing less rather than more is a wise decision.
And when you are tired, writing less rather than more should be an imperative. When you are tired, ideas gets fuzzy, reasoning falters, words get mixed up. Adding another sentence, another paragraph, another page will not make your argument stronger.
Of course, it is also possible to not write at all. Go get some rest, and get back to what seems the most urgent matter of the moment when it does not seem as urgent anymore (a night of sleep has this power).
Businesses would benefit immensely from this practice.
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