This year, 2018, when attending Nordic Business Forum (NBF) I knew, what to expect and had my Brella-app running well in advance and I was truly psyched about the event. Considering all I think I was better prepared to absorb knowledge about different (also less familiar) topics and I was ready to be reminded about the things I know or should know by now already.
One of my Brella-meetings was with a team-leader working with product engineering. The discussion we had included exchanging ideas about management, performance at work, team-work and recruitment process, when identifying the right people for the job position. One aspect is having the right people with the potential skill-set to manage the job they are being hired for. The other aspect is to have your organisation meet the person’s needs and values. A company should have a responsibility to be as upfront and honest with the people it is recruiting to have the best outcome for the both parties. The values of the person and the company do play a role in the long-run — values should meet each other or overlap on some areas, since the shared common values might be considered to engage an employee better to the organisation than a pay-check in a big picture. If something doesn’t feel right, then it is difficult to keep on going without either changing the environment, where you are at or then changing the way you handle different issues in your current environment.
We also discussed The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – a book written by Patrick Lencioni, who was also a keynote speaker in NBF 2017. Either if it is a relationship within an organisation or a relationship in a business network, i.e. supplier / contractors to a company, trust is common in all the different relationships – starting from friendship, marriage and carrying onward to business relationships on different levels.
Trust is crucial to be practised and building trust requires shared experiences. On some level it is a skill to be a credible party in a relationship. Trust can weaken, so it needs to be nurtured. Also, according to Lencioni ”building trust requires shared experiences over time, multiple instances of follow-through and credibility, and an in-depth understanding of the unique attributes of team members.”
When you have trust, it is easier to have productive conflicts and this is something I have learned to be true in my different relationships in life as well as in business. This doesn’t mean picking or having fights, whenever it feels so, but instead this means having a heated conversation or a debate over a matter. Having trust mainly is built upon shared experiences, shared history and dealing with matters in a same boat.
”All great relationships, the ones that last over time, require productive conflict in order to grow. This is true in marriage, parenthood, friendship, and certainly business.” -Lencioni (Five Dysfunctions of a Team)
When you have heated debates — it means you might have a disagreement with someone, but that doesn’t mean that it is anyhow personal to the other party. The most difficult conversations I have had is with the people I haven’t yet achieved the trust aspect of the relationship. Trust towards other people doesn’t always come naturally to an individual, but it is unfair to immediately doubt the other party in a relationship. People should have more courage, when trusting their ideas to be evaluated by another person, who is yet a bit of a stranger.
How can you get to know another person or his/her ideas, if you don’t give your ideas and opinions out there to be evaluated? The shared experience, no matter of its magnitude, shows you the colors of another person.
Personally for me the following topics: psychology, personal development and management have been interesting for some time. It is fascinating to observe and learn from different situations; how people react, adapt and develop themselves.
If you see a lion, will you run towards it or away from it, will you hide or stay still?
I would probably avoid the places I’d see lions, but when I have a challenge or a problem in my work environment I try to face it first with my skill-set. I think fast so I’d try to find a solution first on my own based on my previous successful experience in the same matter, then with my colleagues and then turning to my supervisor. The last thing I would do is to hide the issue or from the issue, since that is not the way a responsible human should react.
In NBF 2018 it was encouraged to play with your strengths. Marcus Buckingham was one of the speakers this year and he highlighted that excellence has its own pattern and excellence can’t be learned via bad experience. Also, he reminded that in all unhappy marriages, people fight and in happy marriages people fight. He pointed out and reminded that you do not learn happy marriages by learning unhappy ones. You learn about happy marriages when you study happy marriages and vice versa. What is the critical difference between the happy and unhappy marriages is, what happens between the fights. This can also be applied to different relationships. All relationships have conflicts of different types and sizes, but how you deal and manage the relationship, is what defines the nature and the vibe of the relationship. In unhappy relationships trust is probably non-existent and in happy relationships trust is being reformed between the conflicts. Based on Buckingham’s speaker session I am extremely keen to read his upcoming book: Nine Lies About Work (2019).
The writing I have on the last page of my NBF notebook is: What do you love about your job?
I have been thinking and listing my love – loathe -boxes towards my job. It has been a great exercise and also a reminder, why I do what I do with the people I do it with.
0 kommenttia