Tag: self-improvement

Balancing act

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There are two key challenges to the work of leaders. Two extremes you’ll constantly have to struggle balancing.

On one side, you have the difficult task of letting go, delegating, leaving space to others. On the other, you have the need to maintain a level of involvement and commitment, showing you care and you are actively thinking on how to empower others to drive things forward.

It is a common misunderstanding of those promoting hands-off leadership that leaders should be quiet and almost invisible. If that’s the case, the next question they’d have to answer would be: “do you even care?”.

Clinging is not the answer

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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.

Strategy and tactics

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While I was writing Secret Recipes the other day, I noticed I wrote another post a while back on a similar topic and yet with an apparently contrasting message. I now want to try to make better sense of my thoughts around doing.

Secret Recipes is about approaching information in a critical way. I say that 99.9% of the people seeking information online (how-to and step-by-step guides, mainly) will not do anything about it, and that the remaining 0.1%, those who plan to actually implement the recommendations, should factor in the role of context and luck. That is to say, they should not take what they read as immediately applicable to their case.

We know what to do is about the inability to act on what we know. Our hubris often makes us not follow common knowledge because we think we are different, our situation demands it, our idea is better than the millions that have come before it. And this makes us fail even when there’s a pretty consistent agreement out there about how we should have acted.

Secret Recipes suggests to be critical with information, We know what to do seems to suggest the opposite, that is to say to follow the knowledge we gather.

Both are true, and it very much depends if we are talking about strategy or tactics.

We know what to do is about strategy. It’s about the knowledge that multiple generations have gathered around how certain things are done. It’s about rules, frameworks that people have been following before and that have worked. And so other people also followed them, and again they worked.

Of course, sometimes the rules need to be broken. Yet, rather than believing this is the time, with us, here and now, we usually end up much better off if we stick to them. For example, if we start doing marketing by investigating the market and the customer, no matter if our product is so unique everybody will go nuts about it. Or if we are pitching to Guy Kawasaki with a presentation that follows his 10/20/30 rule, no matter how important it is everything we were planning to say.

Secret Recipes, on the other hand, is about tactics. That’s what most of the content nowadays is about, because tactics are usually more nuanced and dependent on the situation. For this reason I believe that being critical is necessary, and the more we act on such tactics anchoring them to the general framework (the strategy), the better.

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

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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.