Tag: team work

Audacity and deduction

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When you research your audience’s needs and wants, asking is only the first step.

It is good to have a set of questions prepared to conduct either a survey or a live interview, yet the answers you will get will probably not be as insightful as you would have hoped. Often people struggle to elaborate on what they are looking for before they actually see it, and so if you do not want your research to just be a collection of unhelpful anecdotes, or your offer a complete mess, be prepared to move on with these two steps.

First, map the information collected with the questions and find common themes. Most likely, different people will have different ways to express similar needs, wants, desires, gaps, and those similarity are what you are looking for. It is not an easy exercise, and it requires different iterations and some experience (and possibly more than one brain). You can generate a set of assumption based on such information, and move on to prepare a mock-up or a draft of what you want to offer.

Then, go back to your audience and simply ask: “what about this?“. Let them talk, observe how they react, give them space to elaborate and expand with coaching questions such as “what else?”, “how would you move this forward?”, “what can be done to improve it?”. Eventually, you’ll have a good idea if the direction is right and what to follow up with.

If you stop at asking questions, the situation might look more complicated than it really is. What is needed is also some degree of audacity and deduction. And by the way, this is valid even when your audience is not your customer, but for example other internal teams or your partners.

Out of fear

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I was enjoying some of the early Spring (“early” for Finnish standards) with my daugther yesterday, as she was playing on the trampoline. She was jumping amazingly, doing flips I had never seen her doing before. She was gaining confidence, until she miscalculated and slightly hit her head on the rubber surface of the trampoline. Nothing too painful, yet it suddenly made me realize how dangerous what she was doing felt.

She tried to repeat the flips a couple of times, and I was way too scared to let that continue. I only had terrible images of terrible things happening to her in my mind. Eventually, I told her to stop, as it was too dangerous and she could get hurt. After that, she continued jumping more safely and certainly less enjoyably on the trampoline, and I could perceive she had lost part of the confidence that she had so bravely conquered.

The point is, when we are in a position of power, our words and behaviours have an immense impact on the people that look up to us. We can pretend that is not true, that it does not matter, that after all we are just sharing our opinion, and that we are no different from the people we lead. This is a trap I see many flat-organization hands-off managers and leaders do. And still words and behaviours are the major determinant of what we will get from our people.

I am not sharing this to give the impression that overanalyzing or beating ourselves up for our faults is a good option. If we do keep awareness on this power, there are plenty of ways we can correct our mistakes.

“I am sorry I asked you to stop, I was acting out of fear.”
“There is really no reason why you should not apply for that internal position, I am just panicking at the idea to lose such a valid team member.“
“Please, go ahead and do as you were suggesting yesterday. My initial reaction has not been one of the best, and it is because we have never tried that before and honestly I have no idea if that could work or not.“

If we do not maintain awareness, on the other hands, all we get is compliance and bottlenecks that have blossomed out of our own fears and self-doubts.

Messages that spread and stick

Fabrizio1 Comment

Few days back, I was skimming through a book I found at work (Lencioni’s The Advantage), and I found a very appropriate metaphor for how communication works in the workplace. According to the author, it’s like in the old sketch where the wife is mad at her husband since he never says that he loves her.

“I told you once when we got married”, he retorts. “I’ll let you know if things change!”.

Very often, this is how people communicate in a professional setting. There is a meeting in which something is announced and it is expected for everyone to be on the same page and working toward the same goal. An email is sent to inform of a major change, and employees are supposed to know of the change, of what it implies for their work, of what repercussions it will have on their department, and so on. In more informal settings, it is not unusual to hear of a manager informing a team member in the office kitchen that the project the team was working on has been postponed, and then imagine that they would know exactly how to react to that and what to focus their attention on next.

Interpersonal communication is complex and fragile. Even more so when multiple people are involved. If we have a message that touches many and needs to spread and stick, we should follow few generic rules.

First of all, be ready to repeat. Nobody likes to be repetitive, and yet that is the best way to have a message stick. Neither does anybody like to be boring, and that is why we should avoid a “copy-pasting” effect and find different ways to deliver the core message we want to share. The core message – it could be summarised with “what” and “why” – needs to be very clear to the messenger. It might sound trivial, yet think about the difficulties many experienced people have in elaborating on the reasoning behind their decisions.

Then, be ready to experiment, with different channels and different formats. People have variegated ways to absorb information. Some like to read, some prefer a face-to-face interaction, some like meetings, some informal conversations, some need a visual representation of what is being discussed. Be bold, do not stick to what is usually done in the organisation. It’s worth it if you believe your message is really important. And try to put some video in the mix, particularly if you want to reach wide.

Finally, be ready to ask. Any type of communication is usually accompanied by the assumption that we have been understood and action will follow. That is almost never true. Ask if people have got it, if they are clear on the different implications of your message, touch base with them after one, three, six months and see if they still remember the “what” and the “why”. And if you have a doubt, go back to repeat and experiment until you are more than sure.

I know it sounds like a lot of job, yet we all need to embrace our role as Chief Reminding Officer when we have something we deeply care about to share within our organisation. If we do not do that, we risk to be rowing the boat by ourselves, and that is much tougher in the long term.

Time

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Time is limited and it is one of the most critical resources.

Contrary to money, that can be spent on multiple different things (when you have it), time is a trade-off matter. And for this reason, how it is invested is extremely important.

I do not have time to develop my team members. I am overworked and overwhelmed, there’s absolutely no chance I can dedicate time to that.

This is a perfectly possible and understable scenario. In the short-term, there might be more important things than a meaningful conversation, a career development discussion, a training to organise or a coaching session.

Or might they?

Consider the following:

  • Do you have time to answer all the questions?
  • Do you have time to take all the decisions?

If your people is not empowered and developed, most likely they will continue to come to you every time they have a doubt, a concern, a request. Every time there is a decision to make, important or not.

Of course, this is the best case scenario. The alternative would be that they’d simply ignore their questions and the needs for new decisions, and carry on with whatever it is that they are doing. Good or bad. Until they’ll leave, that will be rather sooner than later. And then:

  • Do you have time to keep hiring continuosly?

An apparently intelligible decision (I am now focusing on everything but developing my team) can lead to a counter-intuitive consequence (I only have time to answer to my team’s short-term needs).

What we spend time on, not only determines our priorities today, but will also determine our priorities tomorrow. To take control of both, it is worth spending some more time figuring out how our decisions are going to play out in the long-term. This is something worth making some space in your calendar for.

Developing

FabrizioLeave a comment

Before you start implementing career development plans for your employees, or ask one of your team members to embark in a personal development plans, you have to sit with yourself (and your managers, and the board), and be honest about a very simple fact.

Are you ready to commit to helping your people to potentially change role, job and company?

This is a major scare for most leaders. They struggle to accept the fact that somebody might one day move onto biggest thing, a more interesting role, or even a more successful organisation.

But even if you are among those who fear people leaving, there are very good reasons why you should go ahead and be serious about helping them develop their careers.

First of all, whether you are or not involved, they are going to take care of it, and it might turn out to be a whole lot worst if your company is just a passive spectator. In a particularly unclear time for my development, I had asked my bosses to help me navigate the next steps. They were not responsive, hiding behind a “you can be whatever you want to be”, and eventually I took the lead. First by making a decision that should have been made more carefully, and then by leaving the company.

Then, the idea that people will stay in the job for more than a bunch of years is nowadays highly unrealistic. In the US, the median number of years a worker stays with a company is 4.3, and the pace at which people change job in certain sectors and companies (even the most successful ones) is quite amazing. How to motivate them to stay just a bit longer than your competitors’? Well, certainly not by feeding them shallow performance reviews and promises of promotions into jobs they’ll later find out they do not care about.

Finally, you might easily end up realising that by actually developing your people, you will give them a reason to stay with you longer. There are not so many companies out there that do that seriously, and yours could be a quite big competitive advantage in the search for talents, for a pretty long time.