Tag: change

Winning machine

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you have a new idea, it is quite difficult to avoid having all your following thoughts gravitate around it.

If a new slogan comes to you in the middle of the night, all the successive iterations will just be slight variations.

If you think at a solution for a problem you have had for a while, you will expand and stretch the solution until it gets good enough to actually cover at least a small part of the problem.

If the process you have just implemented has proven successful, you will use it until it is too late to understand it is no longer up-to-date.

A possible way around this could be to ask different people to come up with a new idea. Or to foster an environment in which it is normal that different people come up with a variety of new ideas. If you match with a process that clearly defines what gets picked, what gets postponed and what gets rejected, you have a winning machine.

Agent of change

FabrizioLeave a comment

It is not so difficult to agree that change needs to happen. It is much more complex to agree on what change adds up to and act on it.

So, if you are an agent of change, there are two things to keep in mind.

First, small wins are wins nonetheless. You do not have to achieve everything at once, and even small changes in the right direction are something to be proud of. Building blocks that can support larger wins in the future.

Second, not giving up is part of the package. You might be tempted – you WILL be tempted – to give up once things do not look exactly how you had planned. That is precisely when you have to take a deep breath, buckle down, and reinforce the message around the need for change.

Keep going.

Difficult times

FabrizioLeave a comment

Sometimes it feels like banging your head against a wall. And sometimes it feels like that for most of the things that make up our days.

In these times, the importance of a practice cannot be overestimated. Getting back to doing, sitting down to deliver, adding a “+1” to whatever streak matters to you, can help immensely in keeping sane.

Practices can be developed in good times, and it is in difficult times that they save you.

The temptation

FabrizioLeave a comment

Having an idea, an opinion, some knowledge, a preference comes with a strong temptation. The temptation to overwhelm, to impose, to change, to replace.

We cannot be wrong, and therefore all that is around us must accomodate our view.

This temptation grows stronger as two things happen.

First, the more we accumulate experience the more we think what has worked so far will also work here and now. Second, the more we are high up in a hierarchy the more we expect it is our right to have better ideas, opinions, knowledge, preferences.

Executive, managers, leaders regularly give in to this temptation. And it is not a matter of being right or wrong. It is more a problem of breaking morale, of mining trust, of diminishing the value you can get from people who work with you.

Temptations can be resisted though. It takes practice and discipline, but it is not impossible. And in this case it will translate in an act of kindness that people will reward you for.

Hide and run

FabrizioLeave a comment

What do you do when you forget to get back to a colleague, when the day ends without you returning that call, when the follow up you promised on that matter does not happen, when you postpone that conversation you were supposed to have?

The truth is, most of the time, we just go down a path that takes us further away from the right thing.

And so we avoid the colleague, we silence the phone, we build excuses around the promise, we postpone the conversation until it gets forgotten. We hide. We run from a mere oversight until it spirals into a complete failure. This is how much we hate admitting we did something wrong.

Of course, all of the process of hiding and running takes a lot of resources. Energy and time that will be better employed once we find the courage to say “my bad, let’s move on”.

How much more could you achieve if only you would learn to say “I am sorry”?