Tag: failure

The perfect excuse

Fabrizio5 Comments

They don’t care.

It’s the perfect excuse, an impenetrable shield when we have something to ship.

It’s perfect and impenetrable because of course they do not care.

Why should they? Why should somebody that is not you care about the job you have to do, the impact you are trying to have in the world, the change you are out to make?

Perhaps, all of that is going to impact more people than anything else before. And yet until the impact has happened, until everything is done and complete, until you’ve moved on to something else (and perhaps even for a little while after that), no one will care.

If we are doing things with the expectation that others will confirm their validity, that they will see how great they are and give us some sort of reward, we are already set up for failure.

Important job is for ourselves in the first place.

It’s the type of job you would do when nobody is watching, when you are left alone, when you have no team and no company. It matters to you, and that’s why you should go ahead and ship it. All the others will give it a look, at best, and then move on with their big thing.

The duality of change

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Change is natural, and yet we repeatedly fail to accept its nature.

We fail when we are the passive recipient of change, as we cling to what was before and find increasingly intricate ways to justify a position we often did not support before realising change was upon us. And we fail when we are the active agent of change, as we seem not capable to appreciate the difficulties change brings in others lives and allocate enough space for discussion and venting.

Change brings resistance and opportunities, dialogue and self-absorption, evolution and involution. It is a continuum of statuses, and where the people affected will eventually land highly depends on how deeply we appreciate the duality of it.

This is something to consider if we are interested in deep change. The alternative is to continue approaching change as a one-sided decision, hoping others will quietly resign to it.

Delivery

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If all you give your employees are tasks, you can certainly expect them to execute them, perhaps even a bit before the deadline and with a little less resources than originally planned, sometimes with some more effort than it would normally require.

Expectations, though, should not be extended to the quality of their work (it will meet specs, and that’s pretty much it) and on their commitment to finding new ways, establishing new relationships, solving new problems, identifying new interesting questions.

If all you give your employees are tasks, delivery is pretty much all you can ask in return. And that’s not something you can change with a clap of hands.

Counterintuitive

Fabrizio1 Comment

We won’t open an e-mail we have not asked for.

We avoid banners on websites as if they were bearing plague.

Whenever possible, we avoid giving permission to be tracked for commercial and retargeting purposes.

We are fed up with listicles and click baits.

We are very sceptical of sources we are not familiar with.

We do not answer cold calls, and when we do we shut the conversation off as soon as possible.

We get mad when an ad appears for a product we have only visited the information page once. Three months ago.

We would never buy from a place that treat us badly, disrespectfully and dishonestly.

We could spend half of our very precious day to engage in an angry conversation with a customer support rep that cannot tell us why we are not getting what we have paid for.

And yet, as marketers we often assume others will be happy when exposed to all of that.

Why?

Going about growth

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If you are lucky enough to see your company growing, or if you are an early stage employee at a growing company, here are four things for you to consider.

Four things I have consistently seen working when taken into account, or snowballing into disasters when disregarded.

As you promote people into managerial positions, make it crystal clear that their new priority is managing people. This requires a very different set of skills, and most likely some external training is needed. Do not assume that just because somebody is good at their job, or is an expert in a certain area, they will also be good bosses. If they are too busy, make space for them. They should not.

When somebody makes something that is very good for the company, make sure to take some time to acknowledge that and craft a story out of it. This is valid at many levels, and it is one of the responsibilities of leaders and managers to elaborate on why what was done matters, here and now, as well as to spread it. This is the behaviour you want more of.

At this point, you probably have some type of culture deck or presentation or brief. Put it to test, and change it as the company grows. Finding examples and stories (see also above) that resonate with the type of culture you want to establish is fundamental. Your culture lives, whether you want it or not, and it’s up to you to approach it strategically.

Finally, remove “good job” (and its variants “great work”, “amazing content”, “superb teamwork”, …) from the accepted phraseology. If something is truly good, make a commitment to say why it is so, and how it does serve the purpose of the organization at this stage. If it’s not, establish an environment in which candid criticism is accepted and not taken as a personal judgement of someone’s abilities.