Some time ago, I attended a course that turned out to be much more interesting than I expected. The theories and examples shared there helped me reflect on some past and current situations and understand what really happened — and what is happening now. Here are some of the lessons re-wrapped and/or learned, which might be helpful to everyone in a way of self improvement.
I fall into this trap almost every day, when I'm giving some orders or tasks to the team. Sometimes the results from the team work are so strange that I wonder who is the stupid one - I or the team. I'm trying to be precise and simple in my wording, but this doesn't help much. And suddenly I found the answer - I need to speak each team member’s “native language” - to translate what I mean into words they understand. I tried and it works!
People's driven forces are so many, that I couldn't count them all. It's true, that Money is the most common motivator - not because it’s the most powerful, but because it’s the easiest to use. Second is the Fear - fear of punishment, fear of the uncertainty of the future, fear of the change. But if you team is assembled from people driven by those two forces, is this a successful team? Probably and definitely not. If you build a team driven by Knowledge and Freedom, you can conquer the world.
Looking through the history, the most powerful empires were led by dictators. It's the same when you look at the business world. But also the biggest catastrophes and failures are also brought by dictators. Having the power and freedom to do whatever you want doesn’t guarantee success - on the contrary, it often leads to disaster. The successful dictatorship is one of a thousand, like a lottery win, and needs a big matching of many personal qualities and abilities with the external environmental factors. Also, the major mistake of the dictators is that they quickly forget that sometimes listening the others is the only source of information for their one-man decisions.
Nothing will happen if you only change the company’s facade without rebuilding its foundations. Also, changing some parts of her or add of new features without a related changes in the whole structure and company culture are doomed to failure soon or later. Internal resistance and destructive forces are more powerful than the outside ones; they work slowly but constantly in direction of returning to the old status quo. The popularization and awareness of the changes, together with changing the people's minds (or people itself) should be the first steps in this long journey.
I brought this Simon Sinek's sentence home and spread it to my sales team. And as expected, we found out that our marketing focus was only on what we sell, not on why we sell it. In fact, even the CSO's answered me on this question with the simple answer - "we do it for money". So, I realized that there was something wrong and we need to change the direction of our sales strategy. Moreover, we are working on a tough market and our financial results are not good. I hope that the change will be the key to success.
I already got this before, but it was good refreshment. One person can't be a Leader of himself, he needs a team. Creating a working team and involving more and more people for the cause is a long process. And it starts with the first follower — a person who believes in what the leader believes, supports them at any cost, yet often remains in the leader’s shadow. However, this sacrifice is needed for the sake of the common cause.
During meetings, sometimes it's impossible both parties to get what they want from their starting positions. When we talk about a win-win situation, it often means that both parties end up equally unsatisfied - or that one side gets something different as compensation. The ability to listen and then to talk is mandatory for a success; this gives an opportunity to understand what really the other side wants, even if this is not officially shown. Usually, this is different from the meeting topic – i.e. we can discussing the money in the yearly budget, but the other parties can want only a future job retention.
As I mentioned above, to create a perfect team is a hard job. Up to now we always do this using a so called empirical or experimental way, based on our past experience and relations with the team members. I was intrigued by the Belbin test because it explained some of the problems we currently face in our teams. It's true that wrong person at some team place brings more problems than solutions. So, I suggest everyone to done it and to find his inner self. Then you can arrange the teams more precisely. However, because the Belbin test determine the team roles, which are not equivalent to personality types, together with Belbin's it good to make the Colors Code as personality test.
I liked this approach, which is focused on the positive things. When we use it, we focus on what we are doing right, instead of only fixing specific problems. I've tried this immediately when I came back at work – we took the latest successful contracts we've made and started to analyze them. Honestly, at the beginning no one knew why we really won those customers. The major answers were that it was due to the lower prices given, but we found out that this is not true. The real reason we discovered was that we promised and delivered the service in a very short term, impossible for our competitors. And it was just because we are small and flexible company, compared to the others. So, we decided to focus on this as our advantage and to point it in our offers.
Focusing on what others do well is far more effective than analyzing their weaknesses. This eliminates the possibility of conflicts between the people, and from the other - charged with positive emotions.
In our company each year we make a survey with questions like "What you think we can do better", "What you want to change" and "What you dislike in the company". As a result, there are always comments about who is to blame for the bad things, without this to bring to some improvement. This year, I’m thinking of changing the survey questions to: “What do you think we do well?”, “What should stay as it is?”, and “What do you like most about the company?” I’m curious to see what kind of answers we’ll get.
© 2015/2025 Nikola Vasilev