Tag: values

Breadcrumbs

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Last week, Facebook announced its cryptocurrency Libra. The next day, The Verge’s Casey Newton released the second part of his report on Facebook moderators, those who are supposed to solve Facebook’s problem with toxic content.

This is a company that for a long time has been misaligned. While preaching connection and innovation, the platform is generating far more problems for society and communities than it is solving. The leadership is failing to address such disasters, dodging bullets and any sort of responsibilities, while focusing on metrics that very little have to do with “bringing the world closer together”.

There’s an important lesson here.

You can be successful, rich, important even by creating a product that gives a sounding board to 3,000,000 pieces of toxic content every day. That manipulates democracy and facilitates genocide. That steps on basic human rights and gives away users’ data for illegal purposes.

But at the end of the day, what do you want to leave behind?

Concerted efforts

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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.

Informing change

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When a decision is made to leverage emotions, the stage is set for heated and emotional discussions.

A tragedy happens, and it is the duty of those who inform the public to report it. Yet there are at least two level of discretion.

The first one regards the elements that complete the information. Would a written report be enough? Should it include a picture? Should it include graphic imagery? As a thumbnail, perhaps? An audio file capturing the very tragic moments? A video? A dispairing interview?

The second one regards the context we provide for the information. Was that a tragic isolated event? Was that part of broader topic? Are there policies in place that led to this? Are the ties clear? Is there people to blame? Are there other events that are related? Did this ever happen before?

There’s a race to the bottom in news organisations, one that is driven by the fear of being left behind. And so, if my competitors are doing something that drives traffic, so should I. The problem with this is that it makes the (almost) totality of the public discourse trivial, instinctual, emotional. It does so news after news, in a continuous cycle of resentment, repulsion and frustration. For the most part, it leaves all of us at a superficial level.

That’s not how change is informed.

Your story

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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.

Patience

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Despite common belief, patience is not a passive quality.

Patience means being committed. Devotion and dedication are necessary to stay in a situation long enough, to make the uncomfortable feel comfortable, to push away the instict of moving on to something else that might look more appealing in the moment. A patient person might look like somebody who has given up, and yet deep down they are decisively in.

Patience also means being aware. Knowing what is going on, proactively seeking for signals, interpreting the situation and learning from it. It is more than merely waiting, as it involves a conscious cognitive work aimed at collecting information about one’s sorroundings in order to effectively understand.

If you look at patience through this lens, then it should be easy to understand how crucial it can be in business and, more generally, in life.