Tag: team work

Who are they serving?

FabrizioLeave a comment

Is your team serving a bigger purpose – the organisation and its values, the customer and their ambitions, the broader community and its needs?

Or is your team serving you?

Some questions to find out.

How often do you get pushback on your ideas?

What happens in meetings when you start talking?

How different do the solutions that get to you look like?

When is the last time you heard about a dissatisfaction?

If you don’t have time to review, are things delivered nonetheless?

Honest answers to these questions have the potential to make a huge difference.

Bans and productivity

FabrizioLeave a comment

Is the workplace the best place to discuss societal and political issues? No.

Should societal and political discussions be banned from the workplace? Also, no.

The problem with a ban is that it rarely hits where it aims. You might want to curb animated discussions on your internal tools and you end up making your people feel less comfortable expressing themselves.

We do live in challenging times. Most issues are polarized. Most fail to see the greys. Most feel the only possibility is to be fully in or fully out. And if your people want to talk about a delicate issue, your role as a leader is not to direct the conversation towards the appropriate forums, but rather to sit down with them and provide a safe forum for the discussion to happen.

Even if that means a loss in productivity.

Contagious

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you decide to help someone, it might not go exactly as you anticipated.

They might not get what you wanted to help them achieve.

They might end up worse off.

They might not even use your help and go their own way.

They might take your help and use it with other people.

They might realize your help is not applicable.

They might feel as if they owe you and get stuck.

They might not be grateful.

They might not want help at all.

Yet, just by making the decision to help someone, you have put kindness out there. Kindness is contagious, and it is always worth it.

Farther away

FabrizioLeave a comment

When a system is broken, there is no patch, no tool, no framework, no novelty that can fix it. All of that can make it work for a while longer, and a little more, but in the end the system will still be broken.

So, if you are serious about making it work, the only way is to take a step back and have a look at the system itself.

It is painful, because it means that what you have done so far might have taken you somewhere you were not supposed to be. Yet, the alternative is to end up even farther away.

Your choice.

Concerted

FabrizioLeave a comment

Imagine you meet with some peers. The purpose of the meeting is to decide on changes that will impact many. You keep the meeting secret, and secret are also the follow up conversations that aim at defining the details. You go about it for a while, and then you and your peers go public with a big reveal. Now that the change is public, you go back minding your own business, expecting that everyone else will adapt and adjust accordingly.

I wonder how it would end.

I also wonder how common this situation is in organisations all over the world.

Your effort to promote change is failing because you want change imposed rather than concerted.