When your breath is short, your legs heavy, your mind numb, your motivation low, there is really no reason why you should muscle through the situation.
The best thing you can do is slow down, stop even, take a few deep breaths, and find your own pace.
There is nothing more important than you living your life at a pace you can sustain. Not even an olympic medal.
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.
How many tools are you going to try before accepting that there is something deeper that needs to be addressed?
How many platforms will you sign up for before accepting that you can write also on a piece of paper?
How many videos will you consume still before accepting that it is not only by watching others performing that you will improve your skills?
How many people will you have to hire before accepting that it is the lack of a system that’s hindering your growth?
How many courses are you going to enroll for before accepting that you can learn by doing, for free, every day?
How many applications will you have to send it before accepting that it is your story you have to work on?
First get the basics in place, then worry about the embellishments.
We too often get stuck pretending that it works the other way around.
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.
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.
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