Tag: team work

Questions and answers

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Leadership means asking questions.

What is the problem?

What can we do that is new and better?

How do we tackle this issue?

What if we do something else?

How can I help you?

If your days, your meetings, your interactions are filled with answers, you are doing something else entirely.

Take Gary Kaplan, who changed the culture of a hospital in Seattle. He took his top people to Japan and said, “Look what they’re doing over here. Do you see anything that might apply to our hospital?” He was very humble. He knew they had to fix the hospital, but he didn’t know how to do that. He was also very autocratic about, “We’re all going to go to Japan”; he managed the process. But the content and what they actually ended up doing, he built from the ground up.

Edgar Schein, In Conversation with Edgar Schein

Bridge

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When one gets squeezed between two opposing forces, it is quite usual to start depicting both forces as enemies.

Lousy middle management is a great representation of this.

Middle managers are at the crossroads of contrasting needs and ambitions, and the result can easily get to “management has unreasonable expectations” and “my team is lazy and ineffective“.

Of course, this is a divisive approach. Soon enough everybody hates everybody, nobody is happy, and things never get done.

Being in the middle, though, also means having the opportunity to build a bridge. To stop and sit down and listen to what those needs and ambitions are about, help each part to formulate them in a way that makes sense to the other, and finding ways to be helpful and support action in a common direction.

It takes time, energy, and a lot of confidence in ourselves and others. And it always pays off.

A small step

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When you talk about change, you might get a lot of resistance or a lot of cheering. Most likely, a mix of the two.

In both cases though, you are not one step closer to the change you are seeking.

And that is because telling about change is only one small step on a highway that also features telling about change again, finding supporters and aids, telling once more, showing what change is, buying in those who are against it, preparing everyone for change, reshaping the change story and spread it a bit farther, measuring change, following up to change, and initiating what comes after change.

A meeting or an email might be a good start, they are never the end of it. Even when everyone agrees. Particularly when everybody agrees.

Building relationships

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The way you communicate reality is often more important than reality itself in building bonds. Or breaking them.

Say you have to share a decision with your team, one that is not fully fair, one you were not involved in making, one that will not make them happy.

You can state the fact, and say there is little that can be done to change reality. You can say that “little” is something your team will have to pull off, and that the deadline for it is in one week.

Or you can still state the fact, and say you are sorry for the situation. There is still something that can be done, and you will drive the effort, coordinating the work of the different team members.

Reality has not changed between option 1 and option 2.

Relationships have though.

Attached

FabrizioLeave a comment

We get attached to things, and that hurts the most.

We get attached to things that bear no real weight in our lives. Winning or losing an argument will not make us a better human being. Getting promoted or not will not make us a better worker. A higher or a lower salary will often not change our lifestyle that much. The new idea we have failed to promote and develop will not make of us a failure.

We get attached to things, and we should just let go.

That is when a wealth of possibilities will unfold.