Tag: values

Leaking

FabrizioLeave a comment

Work leaks into your personal life, news and preoccupations leak into your personal life, continuous demands of attention leak into your personal life.

And to some extent, that is fine.

At some point though, that becomes untenable, and that is precisely what you need to be aware of. When does that happen? How does that manifest? What can you do about it*?

Lacking a system that keeps this in check means gradually losing track of yourself, your thoughts, your strengths, your limits.

No work, preoccupation, demand can be tackled if that happens.

* I have recently started keeping two distinct apps for emails, one for personal emails (that I have heavily cleaned and optimized) and one for work emails. If you tend to drift to work stuff in your free time, you might give this a try.

Stand out

FabrizioLeave a comment

The faster way for you to build a story is to record what you do.

Do it daily and consistently, and after a while, as you look back, you will find threads that already are the seed of a narrative. Put them together, water them, double down on recording, and you have everything you need to stand out from the masses.

Again.

The best time to start doing this was yesterday. The second best time is today.

Enough people

FabrizioLeave a comment

Change does not happen because you want to.

Change happens because enough people want to.

And so, the first step towards change is figuring out what others feel about it.

You might get stressed, impatient, irritated by the whole process. But if you cannot handle that, how could you handle what is coming after things have changed?

Connection

FabrizioLeave a comment

There is a very powerful idea behind the story of Sitka’s remote off-site, described in details in this worthy article (full of tactics that are also applicable to meetings, all-hands, 1-1s and any other way your company has chosen to kill employees motivation).

The idea is that when you gather a number of people in one room (physical or virtual) the easiest way to make them fall asleep or continuously check their phones is to short-list some gatekeepers of knowledge (managers, teachers, experts) and let them speak for hours on end. And then we wonder why the message did not get through, why not everybody is working towards the agreed goals, why our purpose is not shared across departments.

Even assuming that the one-to-many form of communication ever worked, it does not anymore. People do not care about targets they did not contribute to plan, or about achievements they do not understand, or about buzz words that contrast with their day-to-day experience.

Design your events for connection, engage people in conversations and ask what the expectations are. Be flexible enough to not have everything under control. And remember who your end-user is.

At Minerva, we ended up banning lectures. They’re a great way to teach — but a pretty lousy way to learn. Good for the product builder, but bad for the end-user. Same goes for events. Big retreats are an easy way to convene a large group, but a bad way to facilitate connection.

Mike Wang

Killer

FabrizioLeave a comment

When you reject, belittle, or forget to follow up to an initiative taken by a member of your team, what happens is next time they will think twice before taking initiative.

It is that simple. And the effect compounds for additional rejecting, belittling and forgetting.

This is not to say you have to accept and follow through with every idea. You just need to communicate clearly what is important and what is not, what is “right now” and what is “maybe tomorrow”, what makes the picture and what makes the frame. This transparency is needed for people to appreciate why some things happen and other do not.

Unfortunately most hide behind busyness, that is often just an expression of ignorance (having no idea) or arrogance (thinking everyone has a clear idea).

It is a killer for motivation.