Tag: failure

Everything you say you’ll do

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There are not many things you are asked to do when you lead other people.

Certainly, making sure your team has the needed support. Financial, political, and technical support. Also, truly listening to and caring for your team members, including helping them find a career trajectory they are comfortable with. Finally, taking difficult decisions when things stall or risk to stall, possibly with the aid of a transparent and candid process everyone in the team understands and trusts.

And then, of course, there’s everything you say you’ll do. This is as important as the three points above, as it sets the tone for the type of relationship you are going to build with your people. If you start not delivering on things you yourself have taken ownership for, even worst if you are not open and don’t explain when that happens, why that happened, then the relationship is going to be weak and feeble. And it will be very difficult to turn that around.

Good thing is, you choose what you promise. Choose mindfully.

Walk the walk

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It’s tough demanding somebody to do something you are not doing yourself in the first place.

Try ask your kids to spend less time in front of the screen when that’s all you do as soon as you have a moment of free time. You can play the “I’m-the-adult” card for a while, and yet in the long run your request loses significance.

The same thing is valid in organizations. You might ask your team to be innovative and come up with new ideas, and you can still hide behind the urgency and contingency of the moment to always opt for the safe path. Yet eventually you’ll lose the commitment and they’ll bring their creativity elsewhere.

It’s as easy as that.

Clinging is not the answer

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Beliefs are constructs, and so two things can happen.

They can fail you. When you least expect it, when you start thinking at beliefs as reality, when you put a lot of pressure on them, the world will shift and they might not be relevant anymore.

They can change. It takes probably more time than you’d like, a lot of learning, some pain, and yet there is no reason why your beliefs should be the same for all your lifetime. When was the last time you thought Santa would deliver gifts on Christmas Eve?

As this happens, you can either cling to your failing and changing beliefs pretending they are fact (they are not), or you can challenge yourself over and over again to find uncomfortable situations, meet that person you’d never want to meet, learn something out of your field, invite somebody you don’t know very well over for dinner. Make it so this choice is deliberate.

Offer problems

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When leading people, it’s better to be careful about pushing urgencies down the line.

An urgency is always something personal. Something that is urgent for you is rarely urgent for another person, and when you leverage your position of power to get that done, two things happen.

First, the machine gets stuck. The member of your team who is working on your urgency is not being employed for what they were (hopefully) hired for. Instead, they are acting on orders. Value is not added and the organisation has just seen a bottleneck blooming.

Second, energies are drained. The effort put into doing a task one does not understand is more than the one put into a task one owns. Additional mental energy is needed to make sense of the situation, reverse-engineer the decision and figure out if this is the right time to search for a new job.

Rather than urgencies to act upon, offer people problems to solve, and let them come up with their list of actions, people to meet and documents to draft. Give them the tools and let them come up with their story. After all, nobody wants to be a secondary character in a story someone else has drafted.

Be the person who gives energy, not the one who takes it away.

From The Trillion Dollar Coach

Strategy and tactics

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While I was writing Secret Recipes the other day, I noticed I wrote another post a while back on a similar topic and yet with an apparently contrasting message. I now want to try to make better sense of my thoughts around doing.

Secret Recipes is about approaching information in a critical way. I say that 99.9% of the people seeking information online (how-to and step-by-step guides, mainly) will not do anything about it, and that the remaining 0.1%, those who plan to actually implement the recommendations, should factor in the role of context and luck. That is to say, they should not take what they read as immediately applicable to their case.

We know what to do is about the inability to act on what we know. Our hubris often makes us not follow common knowledge because we think we are different, our situation demands it, our idea is better than the millions that have come before it. And this makes us fail even when there’s a pretty consistent agreement out there about how we should have acted.

Secret Recipes suggests to be critical with information, We know what to do seems to suggest the opposite, that is to say to follow the knowledge we gather.

Both are true, and it very much depends if we are talking about strategy or tactics.

We know what to do is about strategy. It’s about the knowledge that multiple generations have gathered around how certain things are done. It’s about rules, frameworks that people have been following before and that have worked. And so other people also followed them, and again they worked.

Of course, sometimes the rules need to be broken. Yet, rather than believing this is the time, with us, here and now, we usually end up much better off if we stick to them. For example, if we start doing marketing by investigating the market and the customer, no matter if our product is so unique everybody will go nuts about it. Or if we are pitching to Guy Kawasaki with a presentation that follows his 10/20/30 rule, no matter how important it is everything we were planning to say.

Secret Recipes, on the other hand, is about tactics. That’s what most of the content nowadays is about, because tactics are usually more nuanced and dependent on the situation. For this reason I believe that being critical is necessary, and the more we act on such tactics anchoring them to the general framework (the strategy), the better.