Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
Control CagĂłn
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Your team is not weak. Your leadership is. You can hire the best people in the market. The sharpest commercial director. The most experienced technical lead. The planner who can see delays before they are even born. The lawyer who reads contracts like other people read Netflix subtitles. All beautiful. Wonderful. Very LinkedIn. But if you don’t empower them… If they need permission to breathe… If every decision has to go through seven committees, four “alignment sessions”, two steering groups and one mysterious guy called Nigel who is “on leave this week”… You don’t have a high-performing team. You have a very expensive kindergarten. Con corbata. The modus operandi is always the same. A project starts with ambition. Big numbers. Big promises. Big speeches. “We have assembled a world-class team.” Of course. They always say that. Nobody says: “We have assembled a mediocre group of confused mammals and we’ll see what happens.” That’s not the cup of team of any boss willing big bonuses. And then… the team cannot decide. Cannot negotiate. Cannot approve. Cannot challenge the client. Cannot challenge the contractor. Cannot move. Everything goes up. Everything comes back down. Slowly. And then leadership gets surprised. “Why is the team disengaged?” “Why are people leaving?” “Why is the programme slipping?” “Why is nobody taking ownership?” “Why in the surveys people complain so much?... oh, the idea is stupid, let’s get rid of the surveys…” Sorry… you killed ownership. With process made for monkeys. With your obsession for being copied in every email, as if CC stood for “Control Cagón”. And then… the best ones leave. The average ones hide. And the bad ones survive forever because they are very good at “following the process”. C0jonudo. You are decorating an org chart… and nobody ever delivered a billion-dollar project with a decorated org chart. If you want to understand what really happens inside the room when authority, autonomy and leadership disappear… You should check the latest lesson of The Room. Link below. ​The Room​ PD 1: If you liked this email, don't keep it in secret and forward it to a friend. They will thank you enormously one day. PD 2: If somebody has sent you this email and you want to receive emails like this yourself, visit vicentevalencia.com PD 3: If you want unsubscribe, click the link below. |
Vicente Valencia
Weekly insights on how to perform when it matters | High-stakes decisions. Real situations. No BS. | 👇JOIN +2k readers 👇
In some meetings, what you really need is… A proper fart. Yes. Loud. Wet. Smelly. “Con dos cojon€s.” Or with two balls. I’m talking about those meetings with no life and no soul. Boring. No agenda. No direction. “Update meetings”, they call them. They could at least give you popcorn. Or coffee. Or a shot of caffeinated life. I don’t know. Look. There are, at least, 5 things you simply cannot do in meetings. The first one is having more than two people at the table… Although I understand this...
I’m closing a real estate deal in the range of millions. Still, people around the deal are discussing $150 fees. It doesn’t make sense to me. It shouldn’t make sense to you either. The discussion around that fee is not worth more than 2 or 3 words in a lost sentence. Not in a deal like this. Think about it. If you don’t have room in your model to accommodate $150, you probably shouldn’t be doing this business. If your lawyers don’t see the waste of time and money involved in discussing $150…...
We don’t like to admit this. Because it sounds weak. Because it sounds like we don’t fully control our destiny. Because we prefer to believe we are lone wolves, alpha beasts, independent thinkers, and all that LinkedIn testosterone poetry. Sorry… but I have to tell you. Your performance is heavily influenced by the expectations of the people around you. Psychologists call it the Pygmalion effect. Simple idea. If people expect little from you… You often deliver little. If people expect more...