Tag: communication

Adaptability

FabrizioLeave a comment

Adaptability is one key skill for leaders.

Not only adaptability to situations and contexts, also and foremost capacity to adapt to the people you lead. Pretending to do the same things with a junior person at their first work experience and with a seasoned employee who’s seen their fair share is naive and lazy. This is true for items such as how frequently you talk to them, what type of vision you frame their work with, how and how intensely you approach development conversations, and what type of recognition you plan to reward them with.

Of course, and perhaps a bit counterintuitively, this does not mean forgetting about you, your goals, your company. It actually requires quite strong awareness. Of what you can do and what you can’t, of what is needed and required of you as a leader, of what the particular phase your organization is in needs, and of what your team member wants.

And at some point, you’ll realize you don’t have what it takes to lead somebody. Not because they are outstanding and better, nor because you have suddenly lost your touch. It’s simply that they require a set of skills that you do not have, or have only in part.

So, if they indeed are valuable to what you are trying to achieve, rather than falling back on proved patterns that most likely would not work and deflate their motivation, you could sit with them, understand more about their strengths and ambitions, and go as far as having them mentored by someone else in the organization they could resonate better with.

Most likely, at some point that person is going to leave. And that is true in any case, it’s not something you can do a lot about anyway. What you can do is determine the passion and excitement with which they deliver work while they are around. That is a lot.

Informing change

FabrizioLeave a comment

When a decision is made to leverage emotions, the stage is set for heated and emotional discussions.

A tragedy happens, and it is the duty of those who inform the public to report it. Yet there are at least two level of discretion.

The first one regards the elements that complete the information. Would a written report be enough? Should it include a picture? Should it include graphic imagery? As a thumbnail, perhaps? An audio file capturing the very tragic moments? A video? A dispairing interview?

The second one regards the context we provide for the information. Was that a tragic isolated event? Was that part of broader topic? Are there policies in place that led to this? Are the ties clear? Is there people to blame? Are there other events that are related? Did this ever happen before?

There’s a race to the bottom in news organisations, one that is driven by the fear of being left behind. And so, if my competitors are doing something that drives traffic, so should I. The problem with this is that it makes the (almost) totality of the public discourse trivial, instinctual, emotional. It does so news after news, in a continuous cycle of resentment, repulsion and frustration. For the most part, it leaves all of us at a superficial level.

That’s not how change is informed.

Take marketing seriously

FabrizioLeave a comment

Your company is not going to win on features and product.

It is almost boring to say this out loud, and yet many still think that the fact their product is better than their competitors’ is going to give them sustainable competitive advantage.

Your product needs to be good, as infallible as it can get, and that is pretty much the basic expectation of any person who is buying anything. Even more so in B2B. And yet, that is not what is going to make your company successful in the long term.

Few numbers.

Slack went public last week, and they disclosed (among other things) that they invest 56% of their revenue in marketing and sales. Salesforce and Tableau spend respectively 46% and 51% of their revenue in marketing and sales. Out of 205 Saas companies surveyed here in 2017, the median marketing and sales spend as % of revenue was 37 (and by the way, the once who spend more than the median had a marked tendency to grow at a much faster pace).

I like the way David Cancel, CEO and co-founder of Drift (and former Chief Product Officer at Hubspot) explains the importance of marketing and brand in the Saas industry.

In this interview, he describes the current as the P&G wave of Saas. When Saas got started (the Edison wave), few companies were trying to figure out what Saas was and essentially come up with the basics. Then, the industry started to affirm (the Ford wave): a number of companies consolidating practices and growing their businesses. Now, in the P&G wave of Saas, a fast-increasing number of Saas companies (Cisco estimated there were 156,796 third-party apps serving businesses in 2016, a 30x increase in a matter of two years!) need to give buyers a reason to choose them against the competition. And the reason is never the product.

There’s no intention here to claim that merely spending money in marketing and sales is sufficient for success. It is not, as it is not having a good product. The companies that I have mentioned here (Slack, Salesforce, Drift) have excellent marketing people, that know well how to craft a strategy way before moving into tactics.

Nonetheless there’s a clear necessity for Saas companies to take marketing and sales more seriously. Marketing, in particular, is not the interns you are hiring for the summer to take care of your social media pages, nor is it the student you underpay to drive traffic and leads to your website. Make sure you have a solid marketing team that understands positioning, customer research, value proposition and all the elements of a marketing strategy.

Today, there’s no more excuses to overview this fundamental part of building a success story.

Listening and asking

Fabrizio4 Comments

Two strong recommendations if you are into podcasts and leadership.

The Look and Sound of Leadership, by Tom Henschel.

Coaching for Leaders, by Dave Stachowiak.

They ship respectively monthly and weekly, and they are full of interesting insights and suggestions on how to be a modern leader.

If you want to start from somewhere, this one is a beautiful conversation about how poor we are at listening and what we can achieve by improving such basic skill.

In average, a person would speak about 150 words a minute. Yet in their mind, they can think up to 900 words a minute. If we stop at hearing the first thing a person says, there’s a huge chance we do not really hear what they wanted to actually express.

Oscar Trimboli

We have all had that feeling of not being able to sufficiently elaborate on our thoughts. We can get better at capturing our ideas, and still the role of the listener, particularly when in a position of power, is enabling our ability to clarify what we want to express and make us say it out loud.

And as a complement on the topic, this other one episode goes into some details about what we can do to facilitate and stimulate conversations. The key is being able to formulate good, open questions that give the other space to reflect and open up.

I hope you enjoy.

Tools

Fabrizio1 Comment

When a company implements a new tool, that is no guarantee the tool is going to fix the issue it was hired to address.

Actually, in most cases, it is quite the opposite.

A tool is merely a helper, enabling you to do something. It has very little to do with the definition of what “something” is, and even less with the act of doing itself.

I have experienced companies changing tools over and over again in the attempt to address, for example, a lack of internal communication. This is quite a typical situation in fast-growing organisations. The new tool is usually a fancy and shiny object for the first five minutes, and then people suddenly realise that: 1. they do not know what to communicate; 2. they do not know who to communicate to. And so, the new tool is mainly left unused, or is misused, and the problem persists.

Tools should always be implemented in a solid cultural and practical framework.

Culture is what tell you what to do. In the internal communication example, it tells what to communicate, how to communicate, who to communicate to, how often, for what purposes, and so on. So if a company is undercommunicating, a new tool is not going to solve it, because most likely it is not in their DNA to communicate. Or at least, they still haven’t defined an idea of internal communication that is worth following.

Practice is the act of doing itself. This is usually not very formal, though it can be (for example, a company can have a schedule for internal newsletters, updates, memos, etc.). And still, people working in an organisation know that there are certain things that need to be done, as it is part of their culture. Needless to say, managers and leaders have a dominant role in translating what to do in doing. If a company wants to be better at communicating, and (for very legitimate reasons) its managers and leaders think of communication as a least important task on the list of to-dos, a new tool is not going to send out messages in their place.

We have the tendency to give too much importance to the tool we choose and its features, when actually most of what is needed is already available. Of course, setting the stage for what needs to be done and for doing it means making decisions, and that translates into having a serious look into what is front and center to the organisation. The scarcity of resources is not something that can be addressed with technology, I am afraid.