Tag: growth

The pledge

FabrizioLeave a comment

Engagement is a pledge.

The deal though is no longer safety, money, and certainty in exchange for work, compliance, and loyalty.

We understand well enough that workers nowadays need to put in something more than mere hours, textbook task completion, checkbox performance. We ask them to be creative, innovative, collaborative, personal, candid, proactive.

What we struggle to understand, instead, is that the way to incentivize that has changed as well.

So, the next time you lead a project, a change, an enterprise ask yourself what your side of the pledge is.

Is it keeping everyone in the dark until the big reveal? Is it making all of the key decisions? Is it allocating five minutes at the end of the next meeting for everyone to share what they think? Is it distributing information to create hierarchies and factions?

Probably not.

Excited by the process

FabrizioLeave a comment

The world is full with emails that lay out brilliant plans.

And it is full (though admittedly less so) with excited replies to those emails, expressing a convinced “I am in!”.

But the difference is in what comes after that.

Some people are excited by the process of getting things done, bringing the team together, convincing the skeptics, repeating the details over and over again, changing their minds, changing other people’s minds, navigating the ups and downs, waking up to failure, presenting in front of a crowd, putting in the work.

Some people are excited by the idea and see all of the above as an insurmountable obstacle.

You are probably part of one group or the other depending on circumstances. Just be aware that it is a choice you can make, an attitude you can change.

No longer enough

FabrizioLeave a comment

It is no longer enough to tell that you work in marketing, that you are a great communicator, that you are an expert in corporate finance, that you have decades of experience in consulting.

That is the same thing thousands of other professionals can say at any given time, in any geography, with any type of degree and certification backing that up.

If you want to really stand out tell about the time you have leveraged your knowledge of customers to deliver unexpected growth; about the time you have changed the culture of a company who was struggling to engage employees; about the time you found a nasty mistake in the accounts of a potential acquisition, saving the buyer money and time; about the time you have turned around a stagnating start-up by suggesting they exploit an unexplored market opportunity.

We are not looking for marketers, communicators, accountants, or consultants.

We are looking for stories.

Your story.

Zero-sum

FabrizioLeave a comment

If you want people in your team to truly work as a team, help each other, keep each other accountable, and achieve common goals, then stop leveraging your position of power to get things done.

When you do that, people will think that the only way for them to get ahead is to take from their peers.

Dominance does not set a good example.

Patagonia

FabrizioLeave a comment

Imagine approaching your team with the suggestion that this year, for Black Friday, you could dedicate your site’s home page to a message of social responsibility.

Imagine suggesting that the headline could stick to the version your team crafted after months of customer research, rather than make space for the latest look-at-me PR sensation.

Imagine recommending to continue with something that has been planned for months, rather than replacing it all with some shiny hack that will boost one of the vanity metrics.

They would look at you and think you are crazy.

Unless you work at Patagonia.