Tag: relationships

Gentleness

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Understanding what is happening within has one sole purpose.

Gentleness.

When it becomes clear where your actions and reactions come from, what’s behind the patterns you keep falling in, why it is so difficult to be a certain way and do a certain thing. Then you can relax.

That is not the same as giving up, or finding excuses. Actually, the moment you accept the trigger for what it is (a thought, a situation, a feeling, a sensation) and refuse to label it as “me” and “reality”, is the moment you can open to proactivity. Good thing will come from it.

Opportunities

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Why would people rent a car and not drive it?

Even a service as straightforward as car rentals can have things to figure out. So chances are your product, your service, your software might not be used for the application it was originally designed for.

Two points to make here.

If that’s the case, and most likely it is, the best way to find out what is happening is asking your customers. No need to sit in a meeting room with product, marketing, sales, customer success to second guess the needs of your audience. Ask them. Actually, get them involved and listen to them even if everything is going as planned. That’s almost always a signal that you are missing something.

Then, how do you react to finding out? You might be instictively led to force the original use on the customers. Teach them, penalize them, leverage price and place to guide the wrong users away. Or you could make an opportunity out of it, understand that your plans are irrelevant, leverage product and promotion to adapt to what you have found.

What’s happening?

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You enter the last week before the delivery of an important project. Your part is mostly done, you are mainly coordinating the work of others to make sure the deadline is met. One of the colleagues involved, talking with some stakeholders from other departments, gathers some piece of feedback that makes them reconsider a sizable part of the work they are doing on the project. They discuss it with you, and you feel put off by such a thing so close to the deadline. If that wasn’t enough, another person who has leverage and influence over the project sides with the criticism, and elaborates thoughts and ideas on how to possibly fix it in the long term. The deadline looms.

What do you do?

  1. You go in the tank. You have delivered your part after all, you are marginally involved in the remaining job, and excuses can be made for the lack of it. At some point, somebody will realize that there’s a problem, and you will be able to clearly explain why that has happened, and that it is not your fault.
  2. You block everything and ask to postpone the deadline. There’s lack of agreement on how to proceed, no reason to force a solution, and it is perhaps possible to open a broader discussion. People will ask about what happened, and you’ll have an explanation.
  3. You go ahead, as it was originally planned. The delivery is more important, having something some people think could be improved is far better than having an incomplete job and having to go around to explain why. You take a note to follow up on the criticism, and see if for the future it is possible to make that part better.

This is not a test.

We all probably go through the same (or very similar) thoughts at the same time. Each one of them has good motivations backing it and some kind of personal, self-interested roots. Eventually we will choose a course of action based on feelings and attitude rather than on concrete elements and facts.

We are all human beings, and it’s important to understand what is going on within us, before attempting to make a decision. That’s what can give us edge in the long term.

Talk with your customers

FabrizioLeave a comment

Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes (or in anybody else’s, for that matter) is not a great advice.

It might be a good introduction to the context and the surroundings of the customers, but eventually you will most likely end up taking with you a lot of your thoughts, ideas, assumptions, models, preferences, plans. What you will see is what you want to see, not necessarily what the customers see.

A better alternative is to talk with your customers (or anybody else you want to understand). Talk as in sit down with them, with no distractions, listen deeply, ask open questions, listen more, pay special attention to their language, their thought process, their ideas, and what they don’t say. There you can find information worth processing and turning into actions.

Pick three people

Fabrizio1 Comment

Your work would go in a much straighter line without feedback.

You’d just have to agree with yourself, put in the effort, enjoy the ride and deliver when its due. Nobody pointing out how that was tried already and did not work, how the sentence in the second paragraph could be better phrased to reflect the company’s values, how the blue could just be a bit more blue, or how it is fundamental to also feature the last meeting minutes to makes sure everybody is on the same page.

And how would you get out of doing the same thing over and over and over again? How would you get better, be more effective, get closer to your customers, in a single word “develop”?

We certainly get too much feedback, and yet we need feedback. And sometimes, in the rush of the end of the quarter, we just cut feedback out because we don’t have time to filter it, to process it, to act on it.

Pick three people. One you respect, one that is professionally close to you and one that is where you picture yourself in five-ten years. Ideally, they should be exposed to your work, or happy to be exposed to it. As you know them, you know that when they deliver feedback they do it genuinely, honestly and with your best interest in mind. As they know you, they know what type of feedback you are seeking, what your stengths are, your ambitions, your passions, your motivators, and where you want to go (and who you want to bring along). They might grow out of their role (respect is not forever, your role might change, your plans might as well), and that is fine, because other people will enter the stage ready to take their place.

Pick three people. And listen carefully to what they have to say. Absorb and digest their feedback, see what make sense, argument your position without defensiveness, open up and take the time to cherish the learning experience. Test what they suggest, see if it works, make changes and reiterate.

Pick three people. The others will have to wait.