Tag: team work

Adaptability

FabrizioLeave a comment

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.

Concerted efforts

FabrizioLeave a comment

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.

Your story

FabrizioLeave a comment

Make sure who you are defines the job you do, and not the other way around.

You might be stuck in a job you do not like, and yet this does not alter the person and the professional you aim to be. If you are treated fairly, you can still do a good work, deliver value in details, lend an helping hand, translate experiences into learnings.

And when it is time to move on, continue on a path of self-definition and self-affirmation.

Never lose track of who you are and what you are here for. That’s what makes your story coherent and worth telling.

Listening and asking

Fabrizio4 Comments

Two strong recommendations if you are into podcasts and leadership.

The Look and Sound of Leadership, by Tom Henschel.

Coaching for Leaders, by Dave Stachowiak.

They ship respectively monthly and weekly, and they are full of interesting insights and suggestions on how to be a modern leader.

If you want to start from somewhere, this one is a beautiful conversation about how poor we are at listening and what we can achieve by improving such basic skill.

In average, a person would speak about 150 words a minute. Yet in their mind, they can think up to 900 words a minute. If we stop at hearing the first thing a person says, there’s a huge chance we do not really hear what they wanted to actually express.

Oscar Trimboli

We have all had that feeling of not being able to sufficiently elaborate on our thoughts. We can get better at capturing our ideas, and still the role of the listener, particularly when in a position of power, is enabling our ability to clarify what we want to express and make us say it out loud.

And as a complement on the topic, this other one episode goes into some details about what we can do to facilitate and stimulate conversations. The key is being able to formulate good, open questions that give the other space to reflect and open up.

I hope you enjoy.