Category: leadership

Care enough

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Your colleague does not know how to proceed with their project, there is not much you can do about it.

The executive team has made a decision about a new direction for the company, there is not much you can do about it.

That member of your team is demotivated and you are pretty sure they have started looking for a job, there is not much you can do about it.

The agency is not delivering the quality of work you were expecting for the price you are paying, there is not much you can do about it.

Customers do not understand what you have to offer or why they should care, there is not much you can do about it.

Except, of course, there is.

There is always something you can do about it, provided you care enough. A pep talk, a note, an alternative, a plan, some learning, real positivity, an email, a smile, some words of encouragement, a lot of influencing, long term commitment, a sincere interest.

So, when you go for inertia, at least own the decision: “I am sorry, this is just not important enough for me right now to try to do something to change things”.

Hard work

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Hard work, they say, will lead you to success.

But hard work is not working 14 hours a day, weekends included, allowing yourself little sleep, few acquaintances, overworking your team members, writing three paragraphs when one would be enough, replying to all incoming emails within minutes, taking more tasks than you can handle because a promotion is in the air, eating crap because you have no time, a constant status of busyness.

We should stretch the idea of hard work along time and understand that hard work is consistency, determination, showing up with no regard for the reward. Hard work is long term.

Hard work is practice.

Newsletters

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As I have cleaned up the mess that was (still is) my personal inbox, I have grouped together few resources that are worth checking out if you are interested in any of the topics below.

Leadership

Seth Godin’s blog – Delivers daily, and rarely fails. It might be considered “marketing” by most, but I personally consume Seth’s content mainly to keep my practice and work on track.

David Cancel’s The One Thing – Delivers weekly, fairly short messages, loads of wisdom from a guy who has built three multi-million dollars companies and witnessed a good deal of B2B and Saas development in the past decade. Without losing sight on what is important.

Dave Stachowiak’s Coaching for Leaders – This is a weekly podcast, but by subscribing (for free) you are getting weekly episode notes full of great content. Always one of my first recommendations when it comes to a more modern approach to leadership.

Marketing Strategy

Forget the Funnel – Gia and Claire’s customer-led program is all you need to come up with a complete and growth-oriented marketing plan. For free, you still get weekly workshops and a resource library that is basically endless.

Sharebird – For different reasons, I consider Product Marketing has being the strategic foundation of modern marketing, and Sharebird puts together AMAs from Product Marketers of companies such as Salesforce, Adobe, Zuora, Hubspot, and more.

Content Marketing

Animalz – Their weekly newsletters are pretty much a lesson in how to do content marketing themselves. I crave for their “What we’re reading” section, and I recommend joining the Slack community to get feedback and insights on best practices, or just have a chat.

Velocity Partners – I wrote about how much I love Velocity’s messaging, and that is in itself a great reason to get their semi-regular newsletter. And if you want a second one, here is what they did when everyone in marketing was panicking about the covid situation back in April. Brilliant.

This is definitely more content than I can consume in a lifetime, and it is pretty much my final newsletter reading list.

What do you read?

Hours

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Should employees work 30, 34, 36, 37.5, 40 or more hours a week?

It is a good thing that governments discuss this (and it is not a new discussion they are having). But companies honestly should not care. Sure, there are still some jobs for which output is correlated to the amount of hours people put in. For the vast majority of the workforce though, this kind of reasoning is outdated and demotivating.

Mainly for two reasons.

First, personal and professional are nowadays as blurry as they can be. Do you get great ideas as you take your kids to daycare? Or have you ever read an email and fell into a train of work-related thoughts just before your free evening started? How do you account for that time?

Second, most jobs are about challenges and problems (or at least, they should be). Thinking that by investing on them – on paper – 2 or 3 hours more per week actually does have an impact is silly.

It probably is the case that your organisation being involved in preserving a longer working week is just an easier way to hide inefficiency and fear of change.

The people you lead

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It is the most difficult thing to understand, and perhaps the single biggest differentiator between a good leader and a mere manager.

The moment you start leading a team of people, your main responsibility shifts to them.

It is not to your boss, it is not to the management team, it is not to the executives, to other departments, to the board or to the company. Of course you also have responsibilities to these individuals and groups. But the main one, the one that defines your role, the one for which you will be measured in your leadership skills is to the people you lead.

Do you know them? Do you know their fears, motivators, ambitions, strengths? Do you know how they feel? Are you ready to have difficult conversations with them? Do you have an idea of where they have been professionally and have a plan for their future development? Do they come to you with ideas? Do you challenge them with problems? How do you discuss with them about their mistakes?

It is an extremely important relationship to build. And you have to allocate time for that before anything else.