Category: management

creativity, management, work

Leap: Business and Life Lessons from Ship Builders

Christa Avampato
From Pinterest

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Most people have no business managing others because they have no idea how to positively motivate others. In this void of motivation, managers think the best idea is to have update meetings with their team members so the team can offer up detailed lists of what they’re working on to account for their time.

How many of these meetings have you been in? And how many of those meetings left you inspired? I find meetings like this useless. If you’re an adult and you have a job that you care about, you just do whatever it takes to get the job done in the time that you have to do it. You go to your manager when you need help or want to talk through an idea. Why waste time accounting for the hours you worked by preparing a detailed list of tasks for your boss? That sounds unbelievably inefficient to me and it communicates a true lack of trust and respect between managers and their team members.

Here’s a better idea for managers: build a team that actually cares deeply and passionately about the work. Motivate them by caring about who they are as people and being vested in their success. My former boss, Bob G., had one simple belief about teams. When he hired me he said, “Christa, I hope you are really successful at this company. But more importantly, I support you personally. I want to see you as a person be happy and successful and I’ll do anything I need to do to make that happen.”

I was more motivated to work for Bob than any other boss I’ve ever had. This belief in how to manage also presented another unintended consequence: because I was so self-directed working for Bob, I became entirely self-directed in all of the work that followed. That sense of self-direction in a job made entrepreneurship much less scary for me down the line.

Unfortunately, Bob spoiled me with this attitude. He set the bar too high. I have expected every boss after him to be this wise and supportive. The fact that I now work as a freelancer should tell you that every boss I’ve had after him failed to rise to his level. Once you get used to working for someone like Bob who has an enlightened view of management, you can’t go back to the dark days of micromanagement.

Bob’s outlook is all too rare these days. But it doesn’t have to be rare. Anyone could take this point-of-view. Anyone could decide at any moment to give their team members freedom to grow, experiment, and shape their work. What have you got to lose? Try it in small steps with small projects and see how it goes. You’ll be surprised by how high your team can soar when you give them the opportunity fly.

communication, management, relationships

My Year of Hopefulness – Get a Leg Up by Backing Down

Christa Avampato

I get frustrated with high-strung, territorial people. They’re a little too much for me. I don’t understand them. During a recent lunch, I was talking to one of my mentors about a few people I’ve interacted with that have these unfortunate character traits. I have been struggling to find a way to get along with them. It seems that what ever I say or do, I always come out on the losing end of the deal. 


“You have to disarm them,” my mentor said. “They are fearful people. And if you meet them with any kind of resistance, they become more fearful. And more territorial. And more high-strung.” 

“So how can I win?” I asked. “Just back down,” she said. 

I was skeptical. I’m a “throw it all out on the table and sort through it” kind of person. That doesn’t work with high-string people. The truth is scary to them, especially when presented with extreme honesty. Though I don’t like doing this, I understood today that with high-strung people you have to take away the argument. Completely. I would prefer to just have a healthy debate, make a decision, and move on knowing we all said our piece, held hands, and jumped together. Won’t work with high-string territorials. So I have to find a new way. 

Today one of these people phoned me up after sending a particularly rude email telling it was my responsibility to do something. She kindly cc’d me while responding to the person asking her for a favor. I was mildly irritated but I wanted to follow my mentor’s advice and take away the argument. So I replied that even though I wasn’t quite sure it was my responsibility to do this particular task, I’d be glad to help. No problem.

Rather than just washing her hands of the event and moving on knowing I’d do the task, she felt the need to call me and say that if I didn’t really think it was my responsibility, she’d take the task because if it was really her responsibility then she wanted to do this. (You can imagine my patience wearing thin with this kind of conversation.) So I let her talk herself round and round in circles and once she came up for air, I told her I’d be glad to help with the task or glad to turn it back over to her, whatever she preferred. In a huff, she hung up. 5 minutes later I got an email saying that she’d take care of it. My mentor’s advice worked. 

This was a good lesson to learn. While we all have a normal method of operation, it’s important to remember that our method doesn’t work with every kind of personality. We have to adjust our approach and craft our communications carefully and creatively depending upon the audience. If we are our own brand, then we must remember that our messaging needs tweaking depending upon what we want to accomplish with whom. It’s not easy and it takes patience and practice. Once we get the hang of it, this method saves us a lot of frustration, time, and once in a while it might even clear some items off our to-do list.  
books, career, economy, job, management, work

Trust and learning in a time of change

Christa Avampato

“But never forget … our mission is to recognize contraries for what they are: first of all as contraries, but then as opposite poles of a unity.” ~ Herman Hesse


There’s a lot of tension flying around companies at the moment. This holiday shopping season, and the financial results it generates for companies, will lead to some potentially scary decisions in January. If you feel everyone holding their breathe until the new year, you’re not alone. The pressure and fear is immense and wide-spread.


This morning, I read my Daily Good email that highlight a Harvard Business Review article about trust in a time of extreme mistrust, and leading change in a time of change – both incredibly difficult things to do and quite frankly two things that many managers are not good (although they don’t always know that but their team does.) For example, some managers think they’re change agents simply because they question everything. The fine line that separates change agents from managers who only ear what they want to hear is how they ask the question and what their end-goal is. A change agent wants to examine possibilities, dig in to the issue, and examine detail in an effort to fully understand the issue at hand so a collaborative solution can be found. They take a balanced approach. 

Managers who hear only what they want to hear, also ask a lot of questions but ignore any of the details of what they’re asking for. These are the “I don’t care what it takes, just make it happen” managers. They will steamroll over their people, squeeze change out them, and then sit back quite proud of themselves of how they’ve transformed the group. Unfortunately that transformation came at the group’s expense, not to their benefit. And if you have one of these managers, I am very sorry. Truly. I know where you’re coming from and so do most of my friends. You are in a no-win situation because there is no reasoning with that kind of manager. Your leader doesn’t have balance, and without balance that person cannot lead effectively, much less mentor you.  

So what can you do? Reach out, way out, in your organization. Extend the olive branch at every turn, whether the person is in your group or not. Take this time to expand your network – you’ll feel better meeting new people in your organization that may have nothing to do with your job now, but could in the future. You can find solace in partnership, strength in unity. And that solace and unity is what’s going to get you through this economic bust. 

The other thing you can do is focus on the learning, not the bad behavior your fearful manager is exhibiting. Bob, one of my former bosses, gave me this counsel and I think of it all the time. He would say that no matter what happened to him in his career, good or bad, he knew it was all good learning and it made him a better person and a better manager in the end. Take this time to think about how important it is to build trust with the people you work with and for, and go out and exhibit that trust while also relying on your skills and ingenuity that will help you persevere. It’s a tough road, I know, but at this point it may be the only way forward.