Tag: fear

Trust can be given

Fabrizio1 Comment

When we say that trust needs to be earned, what we are really saying is that we are afraid and we want to maintain control over the situation. We are afraid because we do not know the other person, we have no history with them, we are unsure they can deliver as good a job as we expect, we cannot pretend them to be as committed as we are.

The problem is, when we approach a new relationship with this mindset, it is highly unlikely the other is ever going to earn our trust. And even if they will, it will be so because they have complied, they have gone along with our requests, they have checked all the boxes and eventually become a sort of clone.

This is not how progress happens.

Trust can be given, upfront. It requires a leap of faith, opening up and believing that someone else can achieve things that are not part of our current immagination, and yet are good. It means we can lose control, accept they might be better, and perhaps even step aside and let them on at some point. Trust is forward motion, and if we are solid enought to gift it to others, we can establish meaningful relationships that add up to much more than their individual parts.

The narrative killer

Fabrizio2 Comments

A good way to stop being busy is to avoid saying that you are.

“How are you?”
“Busy.”

I did this many times myself, and it’s not really a nice way to move the conversation forward. Even more, busy is the narrative killer: if you repeat it long enough, that’s the the only story you and others will hear about yourself. It is a sticky one, very difficult to get rid of, even after some time has passed and, to be honest, you are no longer as busy as you were the first time you said it.

“How are you?”
“I am excited as I have just received confirmation that we will go ahead with the project.”
“I am disappointed as I have been told we are not moving forward with the hiring process.”
“I am exhausted as yesterday had to work all evening on the presentation for next week.”
“I am really looking forward to join your team meeting next month and present what we are working on.”

Busy is a common safeplace, and it shades us for taking responsibility for how we actually feel and what we are actually doing that is important. Stop saying you are busy and you will find yourself taking some time to discover how you actually are.

“How are you?”
“I am a little overworked at the moment, but it is fine, as I am working on things I love. What about you?”

 

Developing

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Before you start implementing career development plans for your employees, or ask one of your team members to embark in a personal development plans, you have to sit with yourself (and your managers, and the board), and be honest about a very simple fact.

Are you ready to commit to helping your people to potentially change role, job and company?

This is a major scare for most leaders. They struggle to accept the fact that somebody might one day move onto biggest thing, a more interesting role, or even a more successful organisation.

But even if you are among those who fear people leaving, there are very good reasons why you should go ahead and be serious about helping them develop their careers.

First of all, whether you are or not involved, they are going to take care of it, and it might turn out to be a whole lot worst if your company is just a passive spectator. In a particularly unclear time for my development, I had asked my bosses to help me navigate the next steps. They were not responsive, hiding behind a “you can be whatever you want to be”, and eventually I took the lead. First by making a decision that should have been made more carefully, and then by leaving the company.

Then, the idea that people will stay in the job for more than a bunch of years is nowadays highly unrealistic. In the US, the median number of years a worker stays with a company is 4.3, and the pace at which people change job in certain sectors and companies (even the most successful ones) is quite amazing. How to motivate them to stay just a bit longer than your competitors’? Well, certainly not by feeding them shallow performance reviews and promises of promotions into jobs they’ll later find out they do not care about.

Finally, you might easily end up realising that by actually developing your people, you will give them a reason to stay with you longer. There are not so many companies out there that do that seriously, and yours could be a quite big competitive advantage in the search for talents, for a pretty long time.

You lead the way

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If you set goals early on in life, you are more likely to be successful. A famous study at Yale University showed that out of the class of 1953, the 3% of students that had their ideas clear at graduation collected 97% of the wealth of the whole class two decades later. Actually, they did not.

Bias is almost impossible to avoid, but there are ways around it. For examples, few decades ago, orchestras started doing “blind auditions”. That is to say musicians who are under scrutiny are asked to perform behind a screen, so that examiners would not be influenced by their gender. The chance for women to pass the first stages of the audition has increased by 50% thanks to this simple trick to keep bias in check. In fact, it did not.

To become an expert at anything, you need to practice for 10,000 hours. Not really, to be fully honest.

What do we do when something we strongly believe in, something that is motivating us, that is driving our work, a practice that is making us feel better, a recommendation that has given us the strength to leap, is proven wrong?

We keep on going, doing our work day after day, because in the end there is only one way that is going to help you achieve what you want to achieve. Yours.

Sit down and watch it grow

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One of the most difficult thing when you are in charge is to understand when it’s time to let go.

With the best of conscious intentions, a leader in a growing company may inadvertently generate an endless number of “problems” in order to stay busy, feel needed, and defer the difficult work of figuring out what leadership looks like now that the organization has evolved.

Ed Batista

I have experienced this first hand in different companies. The idea that being busy means being important is something that we all buy into at one point or the other. It is often very dangerous when a company is growing, as the focus of managers and leaders should mainly be on letting go of their duties and their responsibilities, on making sure that the people they manage and lead get the necessary attention, and that the high level strategy and vision gets appropriately translated into day to day actions from their team.

You can get used to this little by little: take something you have built, sit down, delegate and watch it grow without you. It will be liberating and incredibly rewarding.