Category: leadership

No better investment

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you know yourself, the rest will follow. The opposite, unfortunately, is not true.

Getting to know your strenghts and your limits, what triggers you and what motivates you, what really matters and what you can let go. Having the capacity to adapt to your own mood, understanding that today it is simply not the day, that right now is the moment to push, that your getting mad yesteday is because of the lack of sleep. Not beating yourself up while still holding yourself accountable.

There is no better investment than the time you spend getting to know yourself.

Data

FabrizioLeave a comment

Data is everywhere these days, that also means we got accustomed to looking at data to find meaning in situations that are difficult to interpret.

And so, if you present numbers or percentages, be aware of two things.

First, if that is all you have to say, people will get bored fast. If you do not have a story to accompany your data, if you cannot tell what the data means to you, to your organisation, to your purpose, if you cannot express how things could look different in case an alternative path had been chosen, then the time is pretty much wasted. Sure, you can look at history and see how those numbers and percentages have evolved, compare them with similar ones, but eventually none of that will inspire action.

Second, what numbers and percentages mean to you is not necessarily in line with what they mean to somebody else. Data might be universal, their interpretation is not. And so, be prepared at being challenged and having to inspire people to believe the story you read is more accurate than others. Follow up on that, repeat, look at it from different angles, and be consistent over time.

Data can change your world, but as a matter of fact it probably isn’t now. It’s up to you to fix that.

Things done right

FabrizioLeave a comment

The moment we think: “if you want things done right, do it yourself”. That is the moment things actually stop being done.

No matter the level we reach in our career, we are not responsible for everything and we are not capable of doing everything. The illusion that telling others what needs to be done would take simply too much time, or that what lands on our desk is something we need to take care of in person, is just an excuse to postpone that difficult conversation, that report that requires your full attention, that speaking engagement you always wanted to take.

It is resistance.

By being unwilling to delegate tasks that others could reasonably help with, we fail to make progress on the important or tricky things that only we can do.

How to have a good day, Caroline Webb

P.S.: This is as true as it gets even for managers who still cling to completing tasks instead of taking responsibility for the development of their team.

Gap

FabrizioLeave a comment

And of course, this is a direct consequence of the fact that concepts are susceptible to different interpretations.

As long as organizations will continue approaching culture as a list of evocative words, the gap between culture (what management wants) and climate (what employees experience) will remain wide. And values statement will be abstract, generic and aimless.

The distance

FabrizioLeave a comment

You have spent resources improving your product with features analysts said are necessary in your category.

You have hired hundreds of new employees and built an organization that can sustain higher revenue.

You have rolled out a new tool because the old one was clunky and not providing enough flexibility.

You have gone all-in on that campaign because your experience and guts told you that was the right thing to do.

You have increased your marketing spend to better feed sales pipeline, investing in ads that interrupt people and are clicked only by robots.

You have changed your management team because the targets were not met.

And in the meantime, out there a potential customer is still wondering how to fix the issue your product is supposed to solve.

The distance between what happens within companies and what happens in the market is often shocking. Organisations and the people they are supposed to serve play in different fields, sometimes in completely different sports. The only way to fill such gap is to religiously do two things over time: figuring out who your customer is and understanding their world better than they do.

It is a strategy, not a tactic. And for this reason the distance continues to grow. And grow. And grow.