Copy
Hold the Line
Hi there,

How has your week started? Under the pump or under control? I feel we hit the pedal in the metal yesterday and it won't slow down for a while. Under the pump: yes. Under control: we've stepped up as a team and working together to make it all happen.

Over the weekend I caught up with an old colleague I used to work, back in the days when I was in advertising. We reminiscenced, as you do, and were reminded by the terrible experience my friend had the first year after university. She landed a job within days of searching, at a rapidly growing ad agency which then had won numerous recent awards. It looked great on paper but in reality was a churn factory. The real bad kind.

I've seen both, the good ones where you you churn together as a team – get the work done and achieve amazing things – and the bad ones were everyone's unhappy and only look after themselves. This place was the bad kind. The kind of place that makes you hide as soon a senior steps out from their private office into the open office. The place where the Creative Director will shout their disappointment at everyone high up from a balcony. The kind of place where, when my friend finally had had enough and decided to quit (even though no other job was waiting), a founder forced into an HR role actually would say "You won't tell anyone how bad you think it is here, right?".
 

10 years ago these kind of companies and this kind of leadership still existed. I'm sure they do still, but over the last 10 years something shifted as the world and a new work force had had enough. We've seen companies emerge in Silicon Valley and changing the way we work to achieve more in better ways. According to the book Trillion Dollar Coach,behind some of the companies there stood a man named Bill Campbell – a football coach turned leadership coach for some of the world's most successful leaders.
 

In Trillion Dollar Coach, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle of Google, explores and reveals Bill's leadership techniques. One thing stands clear, Bill was tremendously good at doing the right thing, always. Reading the book, the tips come across as basic business etiquette, simple ideas that in reality are hard to live up to. It's easy to slip; to not be prepared, to not respond properly, not have time, not listen, not be clear, not be honest or open to learning. The list goes on and amounts to this mountain of pressures that makes us not do the right thing such as showing respect or treating people with dignity or working for the company rather than yourself.
 

Whenever we find ourselves in these pickles, where our shadow powers take over, this sentence from the book can help us hold the line: "Leadership is not about you, it's about service to something bigger: the company, the team." I find that this is the difference between the bad places and the good places.
 

By the way, three days after leaving that agency my friend was offered a job with another agency by another person who also had fled the bad churn factory.
 

Read more:

 

Upcoming

  • Meditation, every Tuesday at 9am > Details.
    If you're back in the office and feel awkward meditating in an open office, why not book a meeting room with some of your colleagues and join the session from there. 
CJ Malmsten

www.integral.org.au
Copyright © 2019 Integral.
All rights reserved.


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.