Tag: change

What matters

FabrizioLeave a comment

It’s normal to want to please others. It’s naive to try to please everybody.

Eventually, you’ll have to say some nos, whether you’ll do that explicitly or implicitly. The different commitments you have taken are going to clash with one another, and at least a bunch of them are going to be left behind. Your work is going to put off some people, and in the attempt to smooth the corners, you’ll end up losing those who used to like it as well.

When you try to please everybody, it’s highly likely you’ll please nobody.

Instead, start by asking some uncomfortable yet important questions. Who am I trying to serve? Who/what does matter to me? Who do I think highly of? What should I do today to achieve what I set out to do tomorrow?

It sounds counter intuitive that by looking for answers within ourselves we’ll end up serving others better. You should give it a try.

Will you take us to Mount Splashmore?

FabrizioLeave a comment

How much do you have to insist before your customers say “yes”?

My bank sends me a text every day to tell me there’s a message for me in eServices, regarding changes to Terms and Conditions. I should go there, read it and approve it.

I still haven’t done that.

Facebook sends me daily updates of what my friends are sharing on the platform. I should re-install the mobile app and do not miss any of it.

I still haven’t done that.

LinkedIn has a new offer every other day to make me go back to Premium. I should take it, as it is unprecedented, and enjoy all the benefits (?) of their premium offer.

I still haven’t done that.

While navigating the net and Facebook (desktop), I get targeted with ads of cars that are nowhere close to the league of cars I am interested in. I should really check it out, and perhaps consider a lifestyle change.

I still haven’t done that.

Dumb repetition can get annoying pretty quickly. It breaks trust and it lowers the expectation of you actually having something interesting to say. And perhaps, like Bart and Lisa, eventually you get a “yes!”. Does that sound like a victory?

If you have to repeat yourself too much before inspiring action, you have either the wrong message or the wrong audience. Making it louder won’t help your case.

In corpore sano

Fabrizio1 Comment

I am a lazy person, and I have so far failed at taking care of my body.

Despite being very active in my teens and early twenties, I have basically refrained from doing any type of regular physical activity in the past fifteen years.

This year, I have decided that I am also going to change that. Because I am getting old, and a healthy body is important and shapes the impact you want to have in the world. And so, after taking on light exercise in the form of Tai Chi training from January, today I have started (lightly) a more intense training that will hopefully take me to run a half-marathon in two years.

Wish me luck.

Just a small part

Fabrizio1 Comment

When faced with bad news, there’s a natural reaction that almost automatically kicks in.

It’s about making the bad news the totality of our reality. We feel discomfort, pain, despair, because we have just been told that something does not conform to the idea(s) we had about our life. And we often take this to the extreme. We amplify the discomfort, the pain, the despair. It becomes all we see around us and perceive within us. We go to a dark place.

And that is fine.

As long as we know that is not true. The discomfort, the pain, the despair, they are just a part of our reality. A small part indeed. So the following step, that is all but automatic and instictive, is to look at things around us for what they really are.

Ok, we did not get the job, and still we have that hobby we always wanted to dedicate time to.

Ok, our relationship is shattered, and still we have a dear friend that deeply cares about us.

Ok, our body is not working as it should, and still our mind is present, vibrant, open.

The second step is not about being optimistic. It’s about realizing that things happen to us all the time, a neverending flow. And that focusing all our attention, energy, commitment to a single one of them, no matter how bad, is a limit to expressing the potential of each life.

The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.

Chögyam Trungpa

Dismissals

FabrizioLeave a comment

There is one important thing to keep in mind when someone in the team has to be dismissed: the impact on those remaining.

For what I have seen so far, there are two reasons why a team member is let go.

The first one is behavioural. The person does not get along well with the rest of the team, is not in line with the company’s culture, generally speaking does not fit well with the work environment. Sometimes, the person is openly toxic and is poisoning the atmosphere for everybody.

The second one is operational. The person is not performing up to the standards, they are not doing their job, they are taking other people’s time in the attempt to catch up. Sometimes, the person is openly slacking, not delivering on their promise and failing to meet even the most basic expectations.

Behavioural dismissal is usually more accepted from those remaining in the team, mostly because the team has felt on their own skin that the relationship was not going well. Operational dismissal is usually more prone to objections, and in most cases it leaves a bitter taste and a sense of fear (“who will be next?”) in those remaining.

On way or the other, there are few things you have to do as a leader to try to mitigate the impact of a dismissal.

First, you have to be crystal clear in setting goals. What is expected of the person, how you are going to measure that, and what are the check points that you’ll go through together. This is valid both for behaviour and performance, and yet I argue that particularly for employees in new situations, the way they relate to others in the team and in the company should be on top of the list of goals.

Second, ask a lot how you can help and make sure to follow up on that. You are the leader, you own the failure and the missteps of your team members. There’s no one in the world that can simply start a new job or a new role and be ready to walk on their own. And this can be extended to all changes that happen in a company or a group.

Third, give ample warnings. If numbers and facts show that the person is not meeting the goals you have set together, despite your continuous and genuine help, be open and tell that. Be direct when you do that, deliver the seriousness of the situation, elaborate a plan together to get past it (you can start from point one and point two), and eventually make sure the person is aware of where they stand.

If you do that confidently, at the very least the dismissal will not come as a surprise. Of course, you cannot be open to the ones remaining regarding the reasons for the dismissal, and yet they will trust that there’s a reason (because you are following a process) and that they are not in danger (because you are going through the same process with them too).