Tag: empowerment

Finding new stories

FabrizioLeave a comment

We often misjudge the relationship between cause and effect.

I have been fine being lazy all my life, but since I started exercising, it’s one injury after the other.

I have always had a job, but since immigrants started pouring into our country, I cannot find anything that’s worth my time.

I have never felt remorse from trying to be better than others, but since I began listening to people, now I am stuck and cannot progress in my career.

That’s what I have always done, so why should I change now?

The reasons we find to justify our behaviour, or the lenses we use to look into the past, are never neutral. We want to feel what we are doing or did is ok, and we do our best to find reasons not to have to change.

The world around us, though, does not matter about cause and effect. Time passes, societies evolve, technology progresses, relationships degrade, people leave, and we might very easily find ourselves in a world that we struggle to comprehend.

And at this very moment, we have a choice. We can find fake comfort in the stories we have told ourselves so far or we can go out with an open heart to find new stories.

I’ll go back to being lazy to make sure I continue staying healthy or I’ll continue exercising, taking into account the fact my body is not used to it, and I might have to take it easier in the beginning.

I’ll fight against immigration to make sure there’s a job for me or I’ll check if I can update my skills to better match the needs of the modern world.

I’ll stop listening and caring about people so to make sure I can get an edge or I’ll make an attempt to help people be better at what they are doing, and who knows what opportunities might open up for me.

If you are brave enough to choose what’s new, that does not mean you have to repudiate the old at the same time. It is part of you, of the person you have become, and there’s no reason to reject of forget it.

Just don’t build around yourself a prison made of what’s been. Use it as a stepping stone to leap into what will be.

Breadcrumbs

FabrizioLeave a comment

Last week, Facebook announced its cryptocurrency Libra. The next day, The Verge’s Casey Newton released the second part of his report on Facebook moderators, those who are supposed to solve Facebook’s problem with toxic content.

This is a company that for a long time has been misaligned. While preaching connection and innovation, the platform is generating far more problems for society and communities than it is solving. The leadership is failing to address such disasters, dodging bullets and any sort of responsibilities, while focusing on metrics that very little have to do with “bringing the world closer together”.

There’s an important lesson here.

You can be successful, rich, important even by creating a product that gives a sounding board to 3,000,000 pieces of toxic content every day. That manipulates democracy and facilitates genocide. That steps on basic human rights and gives away users’ data for illegal purposes.

But at the end of the day, what do you want to leave behind?

Concerted efforts

FabrizioLeave a comment

Management has gotten a bad reputation, while leadership is on the mouth of every person inside modern organisations (often with a mistaken sense).

And yet, both management and leadership are needed. In different moments, though.

Leadership is what happens in between the moments we are managing. Managing is helping people what they did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. Management is staying the course. Leadership is taking the leap, doing something that might not work. Pointing to a problem, a challenge, an opportunity, and saying “I am going over here, who wants to come?”.

Seth Godin, Akimbo s4e14

A good question for a leader is “where do we go next?“.

A good question for a manager is “how do we serve more people?“.

Managers and leaders can work together. In fact, an organisation is better off when equipped with managers and leaders that interact, work together, respect each other. And appreciate when it’s time for the other to take the stage.

In both cases, though, it’s important to remember that one of the key resources a manager and a leader have to allocate, motivate, deploy is people. Indeed, the main problem today is that we have managers and leaders who barely understand their role, and certainly do not grasp people. Both “where do we go next?” and “how do we serve more people?” are concerted efforts not formulaic spreadsheets.

Your story

FabrizioLeave a comment

Make sure who you are defines the job you do, and not the other way around.

You might be stuck in a job you do not like, and yet this does not alter the person and the professional you aim to be. If you are treated fairly, you can still do a good work, deliver value in details, lend an helping hand, translate experiences into learnings.

And when it is time to move on, continue on a path of self-definition and self-affirmation.

Never lose track of who you are and what you are here for. That’s what makes your story coherent and worth telling.

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.