Tag: relationships

Clinging is not the answer

FabrizioLeave a comment

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

FabrizioLeave a comment

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

The role of integrity

Fabrizio1 Comment

There is no such thing a minor lapse of integrity.

Tom Peters

At some point in life, you have to become extremely clear on what you stand for.

It’s not about knowing what you will become, it’s more getting serious about the how. Will you lie? Will you look for shortcuts? Would it be ok to blame a peer for someone you know they did not do, if that would mean getting a promotion? What if tomorrow you wake up with 10,000€ in your bank account due to a favourable mistake? And say you have 10,000€ in your account after saving for 10 years, what would you do with that? If you see somebody in pain, how do you react? If you see somebody in difficulty, how do you react?

We are all capable of giving top-of-mind answers to those and other similar questions, but there are two additional difficulties.

The first is aligning actions with words. Everybody would say they would help somebody in pain, and yet would they if that would be more than an hypothesis? How would they react to actually witnessing somebody in pain?

The second is making the answers absolute. Acting maliciously to get promoted to the role you have been worked for all your life is not more acceptable than acting maliciously to get promoted to a role you do not care about. If the mistake gives you an additional 10,000€, it’s the same as if it would give you 1,000,000€.

When achieving that kind of clarity around the journey, things get a lot easier. And when you maintain clarity even when it is darker, when cheating would be easy, when nobody is watching, then you’ll understand the role of integrity in defining who you are and what your part is in the lives of others.

There is no particular age at which this gets easier, so start today if you haven’t already.

When you have an idea

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you have an idea that would demand any type of effort from anybody to implement (most ideas do), the sooner you get out of the “this-is-the-best-idea-in-the-world-everybody-will-love-it” mindset the better.

Instead.

Clarify what others have to gain from the implementation. Most ideas do not exist in a vacuum, and so side effects are to be expected. Identify the positive ones and state them clearly to the people who could reap the benefit. Mitigate the negatives.

Bring people onboard before actually presenting the idea to a wider audience. You most likely have some allies (if you don’t, drop the idea). It’s all about finding them and involving them early in the process. Make sure they understand what’s in it for them and how they can contribute to be part of the success.

Praise positive results of ideas that go in different directions. Change is difficult, and it cannot be lead by a fanboy. All ideas have pros and cons. Be honest about the cons in what you want to do, and most of all be outspoken when it comes to good results achieved by what’s been done so far, or could be done with the same resources.

Offer unconditional help. Perhaps you cannot do much to bring the idea to life, surely you can facilitate the work, shield the team from politics and petty discussions, bring more people on board as needed, champion the idea with internal and external stakeholders, reiterate the vision and the reasons why the idea exist in the first place.

You are close to real change.

Dispersing energy

FabrizioLeave a comment

How much energy do we spend trying to come out on top?

Being the best in our class, in our team, in our company; walking faster than others to try to get a best spot in the queue; paying for something we don’t need with money we don’t have; winning that argument that is draining the energy of our peers; speeding up as the traffic light gets yellow to pass just in time; refreshing the page to buy the tickets first, or to comment on the video first. Is there satisfaction in this? And if so, how long does it last?

How much energy to we spend giving external factors the keys to us being on top?

Wishing our partner would be more loving, our boss more caring, our colleagues more helpful. If only that thing would work out this way. If we could only win one more customer. If only the weather could be good tomorrow. I wish I had 10,000€ more to afford that car. Or some more time to spend with my family. My team won, and I am happy!

I choose to be responsible for my experience. In other words, the weather does not upset me. I upset myself because I am attached to beliefs about the weather. I believe it should be sunny and not cloudy. I am the source of my beliefs, and I am attached to being right about my beliefs, and when the world does not cooperate, I upset myself.

Jim Dethmer, Leading Above the Line

Coming out on top and letting external factors determine what the top looks like are incredibly tiring activities. Most of us live in a constant fight, one in which we have no power (we don’t get to change the weather) and the prize for which is not really something we are looking forward to.

There’s value in coming out second, third, fourth or ninehundredninetyninth. It’s for us to decide.