One of the biggest and most painful mistakes you can make is to believe it is about you.
Things happen all the time, people have thoughts and feelings that make them behave one way or the other, words are said and opinions expressed more than we can appreciate. And it is not about you.
Making it personal is the opposite of committing. It is a way to hide, to postpone, to not do.
It is also a strong instict, as each one of us is the main character to their own story.
Just keep it under control.
Changing the way you see the world is not a sign of weakness.
Share and celebrate your successes. And share and celebrate your failures too.
This is even more important when you are a leader. People learn from failures, more than they learn from successes. Failures make you more relatable, they help alleviating the pressure, and they allow others to prevent missteps, traps, biases. Indeed, sharing the stories of your failures is one of the greatest gifts you can give your team.
If you aim at owning your story, you ought to own your failures as well.
People pay more attention to, engage in more thinking about, and retain a more elaborate memory of negative as compared to positive events.
Bleadow et al., Learning From Others’ Failures
What if tomorrow, as leaders, we would make the decision to stop getting into employees’ way and let them free to self-organize and solve the problems they are hired to solve.
What if we would remove all rules and trust that people would actually do their job to the best of their ability.
What if we would decide to raise everyone’s salary, not because we have had a particularly brilliant year, not because we have reached all our targets, not because we have outperformed the competition, just because it is the right thing to do.
What if we would choose not to fire people when things don’t work, but actually challenge ourselves to find a way to make them work.
What if we would genuinely commit to work on our culture, and make that a reason why people come and stay.
What if we would agree that the measure of our success is the state in which we leave our teams when we move on, and more importantly how many leaders we helped developing.
What if we would make an intentional effort to build relationships, not with our peers, upper management, and executives, but with the people we aim to inspire and guide.
Just because you don’t know any other way, it does not mean there is no other way.
Culture is not a statement.
It’s not a nice quote on the wall, a deck, or the list of principles on your website. It is not something you can decide in a meeting. It is not something you can survey. It is not something you can benchmark.
Culture lives in what you do. In the habits of the day to day, in what your leadership says, in the things that get rewarded. It’s in all the meetings, in the 1-1s, in the informal chats by the coffee machine. It’s in what you communicate, what you focus your attention on every time you stand in front of the camera and broadcast to the whole company. It’s in the details. It is there when nobody is watching.
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