Tag: communication

Walk the walk

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It’s tough demanding somebody to do something you are not doing yourself in the first place.

Try ask your kids to spend less time in front of the screen when that’s all you do as soon as you have a moment of free time. You can play the “I’m-the-adult” card for a while, and yet in the long run your request loses significance.

The same thing is valid in organizations. You might ask your team to be innovative and come up with new ideas, and you can still hide behind the urgency and contingency of the moment to always opt for the safe path. Yet eventually you’ll lose the commitment and they’ll bring their creativity elsewhere.

It’s as easy as that.

Leading juniors

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When you hire somebody junior in your team, there are few things you need to make sure of in order to have this person develop, perform and be more than a cheap source of labor.

Allocate time to support them. In small teams, this can be complicated, and yet a junior member is most likely not going to learn and develop independently, and surely that is not going to happen in a way that can be beneficial to the company. Give them the appropriate attention, guide them, if necessary match them with a mentor, or an advisor, somebody you trust and is committed to what you are trying to achieve. Invest in their learning (online courses are great, peer group even better), and be absolutely sure they are not feeling on their own on a difficult journey.

Set some boundaries to their responsibilities. And make sure what’s in the job description is achievable with the support mentioned above. It’s funny to see how many students or new graduates are made “managers”, or “specialists”, setting them up for failure already in the way they are presented. It’s ok to be a “junior”, or a “coordinator”, or a “responsible” for a while, and then grow the list of responsibilities as more confidence is acquired.

Understand the way you behave will shape theirs. Contrary to more experienced people, who might have their own style, their own work routines, their own rhythm, junior employees usually don’t have any of that. You have the chance to help form such things, and you better do it consciously and with a clear plan. Think about the type of person you’d like to have in your team five years down the road, the type of colleague you’d be glad to work with, and then be mindful about how you measure their performace, how you talk to them, deliver feedback, give them guidance.

Time for a change

Fabrizio1 Comment

You are at a party.

You have been nervous lately at the idea of coming to this party, so while you drive there you rehearse some situations in your mind. You prepare interesting stories, a couple of funny anecdotes, think about how to invite people to your own party next week, and mentally remind faces and names of the people you’ve heard are looking forward to meeting you.

As this happens in your mind, confidence builds and you enter the main room with your chin up high. You walk to the bar, and a guy standing there politely asks: “How are you?”. “Well, thanks. Actually, the most funny thing happened to me this afternoon..”, and you continue for about ten minutes telling your little story.

The nice guy disengages from you to rejoin his friends, and you notice the host a few steps away from you. You approach her and the group she is talking to, and you overhear her sharing that she’d had a problem with her car, and she’d had to walk back home for 10 kilometres, leaving the car on the side of the road. Fortunately, you know everything about cars, so what better chance? “As you describe it, it sounds like a problem with the carburator. I have a list of three things I do weekly to avoid problems with the carburator. First, …”, and you continue with your advises for a perfect carburator maintenance routine for the next five minutes. As the group slowly disperses.

Just after you’ve put something in your stomach (the food is not great, but at least you got to share with some bystanders the story of how you have overcome the challenges of combining work and study, and managed to graduate with distinction), you spot one of the people that you’ve heard wants to meet you. You rush to her with steady steps, and after a quick intro, you invite her to join the party you are giving at your place a week from now. “It’s to celebrate my recent promotion”, you explain, “I am inviting as many people as possible, so that together we can celebrate this unbelievable achievement of mine. Just think I have only been with the company for five months!”.

The party continues, and after the initial confidence, anxiety surfaces once more, as you have the feeling people are trying to avoid you. Why would that be? Did you perhaps choose the wrong stories to tell? Or the wrong words? Is your place too far away from the city center, and people will not join your party for that reason?

You are beaten, and you can’t make sense of what is going on.

Here is how most marketing feels today. Self-centered, obnoxious, bogus and irrelevant. Time for a change?

Clinging is not the answer

FabrizioLeave a comment

Beliefs are constructs, and so two things can happen.

They can fail you. When you least expect it, when you start thinking at beliefs as reality, when you put a lot of pressure on them, the world will shift and they might not be relevant anymore.

They can change. It takes probably more time than you’d like, a lot of learning, some pain, and yet there is no reason why your beliefs should be the same for all your lifetime. When was the last time you thought Santa would deliver gifts on Christmas Eve?

As this happens, you can either cling to your failing and changing beliefs pretending they are fact (they are not), or you can challenge yourself over and over again to find uncomfortable situations, meet that person you’d never want to meet, learn something out of your field, invite somebody you don’t know very well over for dinner. Make it so this choice is deliberate.

When you have an idea

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When you have an idea that would demand any type of effort from anybody to implement (most ideas do), the sooner you get out of the “this-is-the-best-idea-in-the-world-everybody-will-love-it” mindset the better.

Instead.

Clarify what others have to gain from the implementation. Most ideas do not exist in a vacuum, and so side effects are to be expected. Identify the positive ones and state them clearly to the people who could reap the benefit. Mitigate the negatives.

Bring people onboard before actually presenting the idea to a wider audience. You most likely have some allies (if you don’t, drop the idea). It’s all about finding them and involving them early in the process. Make sure they understand what’s in it for them and how they can contribute to be part of the success.

Praise positive results of ideas that go in different directions. Change is difficult, and it cannot be lead by a fanboy. All ideas have pros and cons. Be honest about the cons in what you want to do, and most of all be outspoken when it comes to good results achieved by what’s been done so far, or could be done with the same resources.

Offer unconditional help. Perhaps you cannot do much to bring the idea to life, surely you can facilitate the work, shield the team from politics and petty discussions, bring more people on board as needed, champion the idea with internal and external stakeholders, reiterate the vision and the reasons why the idea exist in the first place.

You are close to real change.