Tag: relationships

Adaptability

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Adaptability is one key skill for leaders.

Not only adaptability to situations and contexts, also and foremost capacity to adapt to the people you lead. Pretending to do the same things with a junior person at their first work experience and with a seasoned employee who’s seen their fair share is naive and lazy. This is true for items such as how frequently you talk to them, what type of vision you frame their work with, how and how intensely you approach development conversations, and what type of recognition you plan to reward them with.

Of course, and perhaps a bit counterintuitively, this does not mean forgetting about you, your goals, your company. It actually requires quite strong awareness. Of what you can do and what you can’t, of what is needed and required of you as a leader, of what the particular phase your organization is in needs, and of what your team member wants.

And at some point, you’ll realize you don’t have what it takes to lead somebody. Not because they are outstanding and better, nor because you have suddenly lost your touch. It’s simply that they require a set of skills that you do not have, or have only in part.

So, if they indeed are valuable to what you are trying to achieve, rather than falling back on proved patterns that most likely would not work and deflate their motivation, you could sit with them, understand more about their strengths and ambitions, and go as far as having them mentored by someone else in the organization they could resonate better with.

Most likely, at some point that person is going to leave. And that is true in any case, it’s not something you can do a lot about anyway. What you can do is determine the passion and excitement with which they deliver work while they are around. That is a lot.

Doing is not enough

Fabrizio2 Comments

Learning by doing is a great concept, yet certainly it is not by doing only that we learn.

The idea of experiential learning originates from David Kolb, and it dates back to 1984. Kolb suggests a learning cycle that starts with action (the by doing part) and ends with action (a new one, hopefully), but also includes other fundamental parts.

Without appropriate space for reflection (what has happened?), conceptualization (what does what happened mean?) and experiment (what are we going to do now?), we are simply stuck in a reality of actions without learning, and probably also without purpose and direction.

From that cycle, I believe it is possible to expand to clarify the role of leadership in learning.

On one side, the leader kicks off the experience with the formal or informal act of delegating. On the other one, it facilitates the interpretation of “what happened”, particularly for what concerns reflection and conceptualization.

Finding new stories

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We often misjudge the relationship between cause and effect.

I have been fine being lazy all my life, but since I started exercising, it’s one injury after the other.

I have always had a job, but since immigrants started pouring into our country, I cannot find anything that’s worth my time.

I have never felt remorse from trying to be better than others, but since I began listening to people, now I am stuck and cannot progress in my career.

That’s what I have always done, so why should I change now?

The reasons we find to justify our behaviour, or the lenses we use to look into the past, are never neutral. We want to feel what we are doing or did is ok, and we do our best to find reasons not to have to change.

The world around us, though, does not matter about cause and effect. Time passes, societies evolve, technology progresses, relationships degrade, people leave, and we might very easily find ourselves in a world that we struggle to comprehend.

And at this very moment, we have a choice. We can find fake comfort in the stories we have told ourselves so far or we can go out with an open heart to find new stories.

I’ll go back to being lazy to make sure I continue staying healthy or I’ll continue exercising, taking into account the fact my body is not used to it, and I might have to take it easier in the beginning.

I’ll fight against immigration to make sure there’s a job for me or I’ll check if I can update my skills to better match the needs of the modern world.

I’ll stop listening and caring about people so to make sure I can get an edge or I’ll make an attempt to help people be better at what they are doing, and who knows what opportunities might open up for me.

If you are brave enough to choose what’s new, that does not mean you have to repudiate the old at the same time. It is part of you, of the person you have become, and there’s no reason to reject of forget it.

Just don’t build around yourself a prison made of what’s been. Use it as a stepping stone to leap into what will be.

Concerted efforts

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Management has gotten a bad reputation, while leadership is on the mouth of every person inside modern organisations (often with a mistaken sense).

And yet, both management and leadership are needed. In different moments, though.

Leadership is what happens in between the moments we are managing. Managing is helping people what they did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. Management is staying the course. Leadership is taking the leap, doing something that might not work. Pointing to a problem, a challenge, an opportunity, and saying “I am going over here, who wants to come?”.

Seth Godin, Akimbo s4e14

A good question for a leader is “where do we go next?“.

A good question for a manager is “how do we serve more people?“.

Managers and leaders can work together. In fact, an organisation is better off when equipped with managers and leaders that interact, work together, respect each other. And appreciate when it’s time for the other to take the stage.

In both cases, though, it’s important to remember that one of the key resources a manager and a leader have to allocate, motivate, deploy is people. Indeed, the main problem today is that we have managers and leaders who barely understand their role, and certainly do not grasp people. Both “where do we go next?” and “how do we serve more people?” are concerted efforts not formulaic spreadsheets.

Informing change

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When a decision is made to leverage emotions, the stage is set for heated and emotional discussions.

A tragedy happens, and it is the duty of those who inform the public to report it. Yet there are at least two level of discretion.

The first one regards the elements that complete the information. Would a written report be enough? Should it include a picture? Should it include graphic imagery? As a thumbnail, perhaps? An audio file capturing the very tragic moments? A video? A dispairing interview?

The second one regards the context we provide for the information. Was that a tragic isolated event? Was that part of broader topic? Are there policies in place that led to this? Are the ties clear? Is there people to blame? Are there other events that are related? Did this ever happen before?

There’s a race to the bottom in news organisations, one that is driven by the fear of being left behind. And so, if my competitors are doing something that drives traffic, so should I. The problem with this is that it makes the (almost) totality of the public discourse trivial, instinctual, emotional. It does so news after news, in a continuous cycle of resentment, repulsion and frustration. For the most part, it leaves all of us at a superficial level.

That’s not how change is informed.