All in Careers
When it comes to communication, authenticity and simplicity are the two most important ingredients.
Whatever you’re trying to do - convince someone to buy something, change how they behave or join your team - it always pays to get straight to the point and be real about why your message is so important.
The biggest challenge that any organization - small or large - faces is finding and keeping good people. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a start-up team of 3 or if you’re Google, the core challenge remains the same: employ the best people possible.
And getting the best people is a complex goal with multiple aspects to it, each as important as the other.
How do I find the best people to do what is needed? How do I incent them to do their best work? How do I make sure they stay?
I was on Twitter recently and came across the following tweet:
One of the things that I love about the Montessori education system is its focus on developing independence and confidence and instilling self-esteem in children.
In fact, one of the central tenets of that system is Valorization. I was reminded of this in a recent video from the RPMS school (which is where my kids went). Valorization is about:
It’s hard not to focus on the Finish line, on completing the task and getting things done.
We seem to be hardwired to be that way, or at the very least, programmed to focus on it.
Our emphasis, then, is on the end point, how we’ll feel when it’s all over. And all of our efforts goes towards that end and getting “the result”.
The problem with that mindset is that we lose sight of what’s probably the most important part: the journey.
If you spend any time online looking for advice (of any sort - personal or business), you’re bound to come across articles that espouse the “1 question you need to ask” or the “3 signs that you’ll be successful”. The intention behind these articles is clear - if you’re on the path to X, and if you pay attention to these one or two or three things, then you’ll get there.
I get the simplicity of the approach and I appreciate it’s allure, especially if the advice is coming from someone we consider to be successful (or from someone who works for a company we consider to be conventionally successful).
I’ve talked about situations where leaders and managers struggle to say “I don’t know” because of their fear of seeming incompetent or not being “in the know”. It’s an approach that rarely works and, more often than not, breeds frustration and angst, because it goes against the reality that real leaders are human, open and willing to be vulnerable.
On the flip side, we also see situations where perfectly competent individuals - individuals who know their stuff and know the situation at hand - are unwilling to say what they think. They remain quiet even when they know better, even when their expertise, experience and gut are telling them otherwise.
Why does this happen?
“I don’t know.”
Three words that so many people, including both emerging and current leaders, find incredibly hard to say.
We’re bred on this perception that we need to have all of the answers, that we’ve mapped and thought through the entire journey - peaks, pitfalls, perils and all. And that all of these answers are at our fingertips.
“To me, happiness is about an expectation of positive change. Every year before 2016, there was an improvement in my expectations — in the team, the product, or the company. This was the first time in my life when the present year felt worse than the last.“
The above quote come from Sahil Lavingia’s Medium article titled “Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company”, which recounts how he built what by any normal standard would be considered a successful business but a failure by traditional Venture Capital standards (and as he says, his own).
If you’re going to do anything different, you’re going to get criticized.
There’s no shortage of folks willing to offer you advice if you’re thinking about a new venture, a new project or a new position. They’ll range from friends, family as well as business colleagues - well intentioned or otherwise. Some of it you might actively ask for, but a lot of it will be offered to you, at no extra cost.
Donald Miller is an author and businessman who helps organizations tell better stories. His message is that, in a business world that’s full of noise and clutter, the only way to cut through is to tell stories and engage your audience - in any type of setting.
One of his key themes is that there are really 4 key roles you can play in any story - hero, villain, guide or victim.
We all like the idea of getting along.
In business relationships specifically, harmony is an essential ingredient in successful, long term relationships. If we have harmony, we have alignment, we have consensus (at least in terms of direction), we have the grounds for collective momentum.
The trick is in making sure that the basis for that harmony is real. Harmony isn’t about happiness, hugs and kisses. It’s often hard to get to, many times requiring debate, disagreement and (periodic) discontent. Achieving real harmony is almost always hard work.
“There's a concept in Hinduism called "dharma," which means "duty." Your dharma is to always do *the next right thing*, without attachment to the consequences (karma). When you follow your dharma, good karma naturally flows from it. When you don't, it doesn't.“
I’m not a religious person, nor would I call myself overly spiritual, but I do believe in the old saying, “what comes around, goes around”. Which is probably why the above tweet from Asha Rangappa resonated so strongly with me the other day.
In any pitch - whether it’s to make a sale, get a job, get a promotion, or fund an initiative - the story you tell is all-important. It has to inform, educate and (many times) entertain and inspire the audience, so that they ultimately say yes, and agree to whatever your “ask” is.
So how you craft that story is absolutely critical. From the key themes, to the overall flow/structure, to the specific messages/story points, to the facts and anecdotes that illustrate those messages, it’s essential to flesh out all of those elements.
I’m reading a book called “Coal Black Mornings” by Brett Anderson, the lead singer and founder of the British band, Suede, which had their heyday in the BritPop era of the 1990s through early 2000s.
(Suede is in my Top Five bands of all time, but while popular in Britain, they’ve been largely ignored in the US. If you haven’t heard of them, they’re absolutely worth checking out - start with the first two albums.)
There’s a passage in the book where he talks about his song writing process, and writes:
Strategy is an interesting topic.
You and I can be working in similar areas of management. We can have gone through the same set of experiences in our time at our organization. We can even have a similar view of what defines success in our chosen markets. Yet we can have markedly different perspectives as to what approach it will take to get there. And that’s perfectly normal - in fact, it’s almost always a good thing.
In my last post, I talked about the thought process we (should) go through when deciding if it’s time to quit what we’re doing.
While there were multiple idea threads that inspired that post, one of them was an article by Mariam Naficy, the Founder and CEO of Minted, an online design marketplace. In that article, Mariam talked about how she raised a small seed round from friends and family and then launched the business, originally intending it to be a lifestyle business. And then:
If we’ve labored over a job or an initiative or a project (of any scale) for a concerted period of time, and it hasn’t delivered what it was supposed to, we’ll find ourselves asking that very question, in one form or another.
Am I done? Is it time? When is enough, enough?
Of course, it’s a difficult question to answer.
In my last post, I said that the great thing about technology today is that everyone has a platform.
At the same time, the terrible thing about technology today is that everyone has a platform. The thing is just because we have access to a platform doesn’t mean we can use it. That access has got to come with some level of responsibility.
The best thing about technology today is that everyone has a platform.
It doesn’t matter whether our preferred medium is in written, audio or visual form, we have access to all the technology we need to create, publish, broadcast and market our message to anyone, whether they’re in our hometown or all the way across the other side of the globe.
