Tag: empowerment

Forcing

Fabrizio1 Comment

Nobody is forcing you to stay where you are.

Somebody perhaps asked, or maybe it is exactly where you wanted to be, or it might be that it is fear that’s sticking you to that seat. You might feel the responsibility. You are probably telling yourself there is no other option. You are asking others to validate your desperate attempts, and the faintest nod makes you double down on your fragile certainty.

But the truth is, nobody is forcing you.

So, if it starts feeling wrong. If people around you tell you that it is wrong. If you can’t find peace of mind, despite the desperate attempts and the faint nods. If anywhere you look is despair, rejection, sadness.

Move.

Nobody is forcing you to stay there.

A story for your career

Fabrizio2 Comments

Owning the narrative to your career (and life) has a double positive effect.

First, you get to control how people look at your profile, see you professionally, and eventually what they hire you for. There are many marketing experts, MBAs, sales reps, customer success managers. When you differentiate from the bulk and stress what makes you unique, you make a statement. People will listen if you are consistent enough.

Second, it is a great way to remember what is good and tune down what is bad. Every role, every task, every project has ups and downs, risks and opportunities. If you frame what you did within a narrative that is your own, the good will naturally emerge, and it will serve an higher purpose. Your own.

Connection

Fabrizio3 Comments

We underestimate the importance of talking with somebody when things are bad.

We tend to close, fantasize, make assumptions, build on our own emotions, point fingers, second guess, and in general spiral down in a hole we can’t get ourselves out of.

There is always somebody to talk to. Sometimes that is your partner, a friend, your boss, the quiet colleague who barely talks in meetings, a mentor, a person you think highly of.

When things are bad, we need connection much more than a solution. And connection is all around us, we just need to be brave enough to reach out and start building it.

Templates

Fabrizio1 Comment

I used to start working on presentations by opening PowerPoint (or Google Slide). Now I start on a piece of paper, perhaps with the aid of some post-its.

The reason is simple. When I started planning my presentation on a set of slides, or on a template, I always ended up twisting the message to make it fit. Of course, I could always change the slide or the template, but the reality is that by approaching presentations this way I would always always tend to have the visual dictate what I would say.

If you start on a piece of paper, instead, you have the freedom to choose the topics you want to cover, the points you want to make, the pace you want to sustain. You can jot down ideas, scratch them, link them, expand on them, and already come up with a pretty solid backbone for what your telling is going to feel like.

From there on, it is all details. And that is when templates, slides, pictures, styles, animations should come into the scene.

The outcome of your presentation will depend a lot on your audience, your message, and the change you seek to make. None of that is accounted for in any PowerPoint template.

Would you take it?

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Are you into leadership because of the power, the role, the status, or because of the challenges, the responsibility, the people that allow you to lead?

It seems like a trivial question, and the answer is probably, for most, somewhat in the middle.

But I can’t count the leaders who stop at the prestige and forgo the difficult part.

What if we would start presenting promotions into leadership roles in a different way? And so, instead of saying.

You did well so far, here is a promotion, a new title, and a salary raise.

We would say.

You did well so far. Here is a chance to take this team and make it awesome, to listen to their ideas and ensure the ones that make sense get developed and the others are put on hold (perhaps forever), to raise their engagement with the company and their role even in the face of bad news – especially in the face of bad news. Do you take it?

Managers do really need to start thinking at leadership in a different way, otherwise it will continue to be the professional graveyard of people with monetary and status ambitions.