Lack of Empathic Atoms | Episode 023 Every manager who has passed some personality test knows that he is predisposed to achieve fast results or build relationships with others. No matter the natural preconditions, everyone chooses whether to make a daily effort to work with others during change. Or to stay and work on a lonely island, where there is no need to change and synchronize his work style with others. Here the usual resistance of managers is that they do not want to change. They want other people to adapt to their style of work. If others can't, then it's my way or the highway. The truth is that successful managers neither require anyone else to change nor put on masks to pretend they are someone different. These managers are very aware of who exactly they are. And they support their people to clarify the same for themselves. From this authentic place, they can work great together - united in their differences. Many managers do not have a single natural atom of empathy in their bodies. All the empathic particles they have in their body have been created synthetically in the laboratory conditions of parking the ego and biting their tongue. This requires daily disciplined efforts. But no one said it would be easy. The real problem with teamwork is not that something is difficult. The real problem is that people have expectations for their work to be easy. It is this discrepancy in expectations that creates impatience and irritation. If something is difficult and you expect it to be difficult, the work will go fine. But the dress-up of reality, both for yourself and the team, will always lead to a discrepancy in expectations. And from there to disappointment. These disappointments will cause accusations against others and further discord. Or the same blows can cause self-analysis and integration if there are more empathic atoms in people and the work atmosphere. Whether people will unite or separate in their difficulties and differences does not depend on the challenges and differences. It depends only on those working with these difficulties and on their level of empathy.       What causes natural instead of synthetic empathy in your work?---Book "Cold Shower for Managers: Empower and Inspire Your Team with Your Humility and Accountability by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/2Ka23CU---Book "Park Your Ego: Face Your Bullsh*t and Own It" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/38VW3He

Comfort Zone or Pseudo-Comfort Zone | Episode 022           The lobster shell does not grow. But the lobsters themselves grow relatively fast in their first year. The only way for lobsters to grow is by discarding their former shell when it is too small for them. Changing the body cover is called molting. Young lobsters shed several times a year, and then usually once a year.         The lobster is highly vulnerable without a hard shell, and the primary way to survive is by hiding under a rock until its new shell hardens. And so on until the next time it grows up enough to throw away the old shell.         The primary pressure for the lobster to change its shell is the significant discomfort of tightening. This discomfort encourages change and growth.         There is no growth without change.         This growth process in lobsters is very similar to the growth process in humans. At one point, the old shell gets tight. Getting out of it is dangerous. But overcoming fears and throwing away the old shell is the only way to grow for lobsters physically. For humans mentally and emotionally.          The immediate pain of the tight shell can become a springboard for change. As long as the pain of the old is less than the pain of the unknown, the change will not happen naturally. Here, paradoxically, the present's inconveniences have turned into a kind of pseudo-comfort zone.         People confuse the real comfort zone in which they feel excellent, and their daily work is a source of joy and energy with the pseudo-comfort zone, where they do not work but endure their work. People delude themselves that things are okay. And so 10, 20, 30 years fade away in the pseudo-comfort zone.         If you are in a real comfort zone where things can't get any better, why would you want to get out of it? Is it because of the poster in your conference room that shows that "magic happens outside the comfort zone"? The real magic happens on the edge of the comfort zone, not entirely out of it. Entirely outside of it, there are the most vocal voices of doubt and fear, which create trauma, not growth.         Stay in the comfort zone with healthy growth, flow, and impatience for the next day. But do not stay in the zone of pseudo-comfort, where there are self-delusion and self-created suffering. ---Book "Cold Shower for Managers: Empower and Inspire Your Team with Your Humility and Accountability  by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/2Ka23CU---Book "Park Your Ego: Face Your Bullsh*t and Own It" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/38VW3He

Guilty Until Proven Innocent | Episode 21“It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.”Voltaire The question that helps managers stop blaming others and focus on their own “contribution” to the existence of chronic problems in teams is, “How do I ‘help’ this problem to exist?”. However, in one training session, this question provoked a whole tsunami of anger and irritation in the managers I worked with. In principle, this issue has the effect of a healthy cold shower, but if a person does not want to run cold water on his own, this cold shower has the opposite effect - it can lead to painful results. So it was, in this case, with my cold shower. I flooded the managers with cold water without preparing them in advance for this experience. And, of course - the symptoms of a cold appeared instead of a cheerful refreshment. I then analyzed the situation and realized that people could not make sense of the word in quotation marks - how I was “helping” my problem to exist - because they saw it as a personal accusation that they were not doing their job. They took it that way because in reality, in their work, they receive daily accusations from their managers and clients that they are not doing their job properly. Nobody considers the things they do well. But they are regularly and daily bombarded with accusations they did something wrong. These managers work in an environment where they are guilty until proven otherwise. And they are trying their best to prove just the opposite. Even more so when an outsider “accuses” them of not doing something right. All their ammunition goes into explanations and accusations against some others who have not done their job and thanks to which they cannot do their job. Then, when people work in a “guilty until proven innocent” mode, all their energy will be focused on not making mistakes or defending themselves, instead of looking ahead and taking bold risks. The reasons for creating a culture in which everyone is guilty until proven innocent lie mainly in the tough childhood of the manager who manages the entire team.Book "Cold Shower for Managers: Empower and Inspire Your Team with Your Humility and Accountability " by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/2Ka23CU---Book "Park Your Ego: Face Your Bullsh*t and Own It" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/38VW3He

Change Support | Episode 025 The Sioux Indians say that even the best warrior cannot lift the smallest stone with one finger. Similarly, in teams, managers are the hinge and the supporting hand that must make sure that the team can lift every stone in the way. To successfully go through change, managers need to provide support to their team with at least three things:   1) Clarity of purpose 2) Flexibility in plans 3) Transparency in communication   The main concerns of people when starting a change are related to uncertainty. The above three things address these concerns precisely by continually reminding the goals, showing flexibility in the plans according to the actual situation, and full transparency about what is happening. These three actions reduce the feeling of insecurity and focus on things that can be controlled. Then, when people feel insecure about change, their instincts will trigger doing the familiar. But faster and with more dedication. This is a mistake. In these moments of change, there is a need for the people in the teams to be comfortable with the discomfort. To begin gradual changes in their actions. Even at the cost of inconvenience. Without being tempted to go back to the old ways of working. Going back to doing things the old way, but faster, harder, and more dedicated, will only sabotage change. It will increase frustration. The typical mistake when communicating during a change is that managers only share when they have good news. This can create a vacuum of uncertainty and confusion when there is a lack of communication for a long time, when "there is nothing to communicate." The truth is that psychological safety is created by creating predictability. Predictability is rendered through regularity in communication - every day. There are three essential things in real estate - location, location, location. There are three essential things in teamwork during a change - communication, communication, communication.   1) On a scale of 1 to 10, how clear are the company goals for you personally?   2) On a scale of 1 to 10, how clear are each team member's goals individually?---Book "Cold Shower for Managers: Empower and Inspire Your Team with Your Humility and Accountability by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/2Ka23CU---Book "Park Your Ego: Face Your Bullsh*t and Own It" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/38VW3He

Your Team Is Your Mirror“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”RumiIf you look in the mirror and see that you have spinach between your teeth, you have no chance to remove it if you try to clean the mirror. But that is exactly what many team managers do when they see that they dislike something about their team - they put all their energy into trying to get the spinach out of the mirror. Instead of removing it from their teeth.Instead of rubbing in the mirror or attempting to change others, the proper place where the sustainable change in any team begins is the change in the manager of that team. People rarely really listen to and understand “what we need to change” speeches, but they almost always conform to, or even copy, the behaviors of their leaders. Both positive and negative.Your team is your mirror. If you see something which you dislike in the team, instead of wasting time and energy to rub in the mirror, see what in you causes this reflection. For example, if people start more tasks than they can finish, the question is, “What manager’s behavior triggers this thing?”One reason your people start more tasks than they finish is that you often change your priorities. It is quite easy and quick to say that something else is more important. But it is not so easy and fast to finish the things that have been worked on so far. And so, these things pile up. And when they pile up, there will come a time when people will be overwhelmed. Once they are overwhelmed, they will start dropping the ball. Again, in this case, the question is not why people do not finish their work, but what in the team leader contributes that there are unfinished tasks at all. The specificity of this example does not matter much - the manager can contribute to unfinished tasks with frequent change of priorities, uneven distribution of work, lack of daily calibration, lack of timely feedback loops, etc.More importantly, when reflecting spinach in the mirror, attention to change should be focused on the source of the reflection, not on the reflection itself.---Buy the book "Cold Shower for Managers: Empower and Inspire Your Team with Your Humility and Accountability " by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/2Ka23CU---Buy the book "Park Your Ego: Face Your Bullsh*t and Own It" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/38VW3He

Inspiring or Blaming Others“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”Mahatma Gandhi The natural state of most people when starting a new job is motivation and inspiration. Over time, however, this state changes through the full sinusoidal wave of various other emotional states: confusion, frustration, anger, joy, and disappointment. Then the cycle repeats - motivation, confusion, disappointment, etc.             Although managers do not attend training such as “How to demotivate and how to disappoint my team”, many of them successfully achieve just that - demotivated, frustrated, and semi-engaged teams. The people in these teams, besides laptop backpacks, carry on their shoulders even larger backpacks with complaints and accusations to their managers. The rivers of blaming, sarcasm, and cynicism in the teams usually spring from the offices of their managers. It is in the managerial meetings that there is no sincere understanding of people’s challenges; the focus is entirely on numbers and on what they do not do well. They disguise outright slander about others as jokes. The people outside the room are being called with some strange animal names. Sounds familiar? Managers’ self-irony is convenient insurance against the consequences of their toxic behavior. Over time, the complaints and accusations of the people in the teams transform. The adrenaline of seeking change gives way to a more sluggish presence in the day-to-day operations. Some people go into “I am waiting for somebody to tell me what to do” working mode. Others get on the rails of ticking off only the usual tasks, with zero initiative for something new and something better. People shy away from taking any risks. Busyness is simulated. In idle teams, which simulate busyness daily, time flows differently. The afternoon hours before leaving work feel much longer than the hours in the morning. Although they comprise the same 60 minutes. If you have a team that is passive and does not take responsibility for closing the productivity gaps, of course, this is because of you - the manager of this team. Here are two primary reasons you have a passive team: 1) The first reason is that you notice the apathy of your team to achieve results, but you do not notice your own apathy about the people in your team. Read the previous sentence twice. By your apathy towards the people in your team, I mean: - you do not spend enough time individually with people to get to know what drives them; - you get annoyed and you even get emotional when others share their problems. You perceive their escalations as personal attacks against you for not doing your job well; - you share nothing personal about yourself and wear the mask of the perfectionist; - you do not address the underperformance and do not support the people who need help to get better in their work; - you do not trust your team. You double-check and supervise their daily tasks tightly; - you expect others to have a similar motivation as yours for achieving results or even greater, without being sensitive to the fact that different people have different motivation drivers;   Thus, your inaction towards the people in the team fuels their indifference towards the goals of the team. Your team is your reflection. It simply reflects your vibration. 2) The second reason you have a passive team is that you confuse blaming people with giving feedback. You give feedback only about the things you see that should be improved, without capturing and acknowledging the moments when people achieve or overachieve their targets. This creates a fear of mistakes. The fear of mistakes will lead to the fact that instead of solving their own problems, people will start bringing them to you to solve. And because you want to get the job done quickly, instead of working to increase people’s capacity to solve their problems, you will start working directly with their problems. You will start giving them ready-made solutions. You will give long instructions. Then people will start doing only what you told them to do. Or more precisely, only what they have understood of what you told them. What they understood and what you told them do not always coincide. They rarely coincide. This way you create the preconditions for new disappointments. They will generate new accusations for a job not done well. This will increase the fear of mistakes... and you see that the cycle repeats. Your accusations lead to the creation of a passive team that does not take responsibility. And in the beginning, when people started in the new job position, they were motivated and inspired to do their job well. What has turned the team from motivated to passive is up to you to find out. But this manager’s job is not for everyone. Maybe it is not even for you.---Buy the book "Cold Shower for Managers: Empower and Inspire Your Team with Your Humility and Accountability " by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/2Ka23CU---Buy the book "Park Your Ego: Face Your Bullsh*t and Own It" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/38VW3He

"When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, do not adjust the goals, adjust the action steps."ConfuciusJust for one day try to finish each team meeting with the following question: "Who is doing what by when?", instead of "Have a nice day". At first, this may increase the duration of your meetings by 5-10 minutes, but over time it will shorten them and will increase their effectiveness.One of the most common cold spots (time-consuming activities with low added value) in management practice are the ineffective meetings. The ones that are carried out with inertia. They involve too many people and they have too vague goals. Is the meeting about gathering ideas? Is it about making a final decision? Is it for presenting a new project? It is not clear.Since the goal of the meeting is not mentioned at the beginning, people act impulsively and offer solutions when the decision has already been made. Or participants are asked to decide based on snippets of information from the meeting without preparing in advance. Or one of the worst cases - the meetings turn into an arena for pointing fingers and blowing off steam for 2-3 hours, without a break.At one point, the workday was almost over, and someone trapped managers in ineffective meetings that only contributed to an increase in their current unfinished business and unanswered emails. If the average duration of an unproductive team meeting is about an hour and at the end of the meeting, you say that someone has wasted your time; it means only one thing. And that is - that you wasted your time. No one can waste your time. You may say that someone wasted 5 minutes at the beginning of an ineffective one-hour meeting. But you wasted the remaining 55 minutes. Not someone else. Not your manager. Not the unprepared organizer of the meeting. You have wasted 55 precious minutes of your life, simply because you have given priority to the unproductive meeting, instead of the actual work that awaits you.But sometimes you are ready for someone else to "waste your time" just because you use that time to "switch off" while you are in the meeting. If you want to use your time at work and not become part of the mass "calendar slavery" then you will take part in meetings over 5 minutes only if these meetings are meaningful and productive. Otherwise, you will never have enough time. It will not be physically possible for you to take part in back-to-back meetings all day long. What is the solution for productive meetings? Two things: 1) The highest possible simplification of the agenda, 2) Clarity at the end of the meeting about this: "Who is doing what by when?"If it is clear what needs to be done, but it is not clear who will do it, the action will most likely be swallowed up by the black hole of collective irresponsibility. If it is clear who and what needs to be done, but no deadline has been set, it will not happen.So, I invite you to close today's meetings not with "Have a nice day", but with "Who is doing what by when?". And only then with "Have a nice day".***Buy the book "Cold Shower for Managers" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/2Ka23CU

"What can a poet achieve if he is not in pain?" Pain is just as important as the typewriter."Charles BukowskiThe purpose of the following lines is to provoke you to say "NO" to those things or people for whom you have long been postponing saying this "NO" to. So far, you may have been stopped by your good manners and unwillingness to offend or hurt someone else. But in saying "NO" to something, there is a very deep positive force when you know why you say it. This is good not only for you but also for the person on the other side. It is probably good for some third parties as well.Here is a specific example. Let us say your office is an open space with many people working on the same floor. Your desk is near a central corridor or a door, which is passed by dozens or hundreds of people a day. From time-to-time people stop by you, strike up a brief conversation about yesterday's football match, or about Kubrat Pulev's kiss. For them, this is just part of their planned coffee break with a walk and taking coffee from the kitchen area. For you - this is another useless distraction.If you say a positive "NO" to the dozens of unwanted daily distractions, what will be the biggest benefit for you?First, your working hours will be enough. Late nights or early mornings will be the exception rather than the current practice to get the job done. Now, managing the current workload is only possible if you stay up late or come early. The second benefit will be that mistakes in your work will be reduced. You will not have to write and read the same sentence five times because of a lack of good concentration. The third benefit will be that you will probably have some free time left, which you will decide how to use. You, not the surrounding people. You will decide how to use the free minutes instead of the casual office pedestrians.Apart from these undeniable benefits, there are some disadvantages to saying "NO". Some colleagues may be offended that you do not have a normal human attitude to exchange a couple of words with them. Some will think your ego is too big. Others will say you are pretending to be busy. Others will say that you have no friends in the office because you do not talk to anyone outside of meetings.If you put the opinion and approval of others before your desire to do your job without distractions, you will never have enough time.This is not because there are so many tasks. It is simply because you cannot organize yourself well and you cannot concentrate on your current tasks. You cannot say a positive "NO".A positive "NO" is not an oxymoron. It simply suggests that saying "NO" also has many positive effects. Especially if you get the right dose at the right place and with the right people.Now, you may think that you are not using the positive "NO" because of others. So as not to hurt them, so as not to draw wrong conclusions, etc. But in fact, you are not saying a positive "NO" just because of you. Think about it. What if someone gets hurt because you do not have a small talk?If your colleagues are offended because you do not engage in chit chats, what will happen to them when they have a good reason to be offended?Managers are more likely to avoid negative experiences than to pursue positive ones. That is why so many team leaders prefer to avoid social rejection and negative perceptions than to focus on the positive experience of doing their work during working hours. Failure to use the positive "NO" is also the fast track to professional burnout.***The book "Cold Shower for Managers: Empower and Inspire Your Team with Your Humility and Accountability" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/2Ka23CUThe book "Park Your Ego: Face Your Bullsh*t and Own It" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/3r5cves

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."George ElliottThere are two main types of managers - thermometers and thermostats.1) The first type of managers - thermometers - simply show the temperature of the environment in which they work. When the temperature is too high or too low - they just show it on their screens. Nothing more. Temperature, of course, is a metaphor for the energy level at the workplace. If there is a good amount of energy, it means that there is enough of these factors:- Willingness and desire for change, improvement, and development;- Seeking and giving feedback;- Initiative and proactivity;- Motivation and inspiration;2) The second type of managers - thermostats - set what the temperature should be and make it so. The easiest thing in the world is to be in a good mood, to have enthusiasm for work, and to be productive when everyone around you is in a similar state. Then things happen almost by themselves, the entire team is in the so-called "flow" state. If everything worked fine all by itself, there will probably be no need for managers. Here, with or without a thermometer (manager), the team naturally reaches and maintains an internal company homeostasis. Homeostasis is a property of an open system to regulate its internal environment through some regulatory mechanisms. These regulatory mechanisms in an office environment are the managers. They do not create the balance in the system per se, but they help the system to self-regulate through their continuous feedback and steering. This happens when the manager is like a thermostat - he sets the temperature and he makes sure it is at a certain optimal level.Teams do not need thermometer managers - the ones that work only as sensors for the external environment and external problems.Teams need thermostat managers who have the vision of optimal temperature and help teams reach this state of dynamic homeostasis. The characteristic of this homeostasis is that it is dynamic, i.e., if analyzed at the micro-level, there will be a temporary imbalance and perhaps slight creative chaos.From a technical point of view, the thermostat is a device that, with the help of temperature sensors, measures the actual temperature, compares it with a previously set temperature, and adjusts it to the set value. If we continue the analogy for the thermostat manager - first, you need to be clear about what temperature you are aiming for. In the beginning, I listed the things for which this temperature can be a metaphor - energy, proactivity, inspiration, etc. If these are not at the level that is healthy for the team - your job is to do something. For example, to give feedback, to align expectations, and to adjust the workload. Do not just reflect the outside temperature like a thermometer.There are only two things in your work that are within your control: your time and your energy. Both time and energy are the main levers you can use to set the right temperature for the team and yourself.You have a limited amount of time and energy every day. It makes sense to use them carefully. One way some managers do this is by limiting the number of decisions they have to make each day. Thus, they limit the use of their energy and focus on the small number of decisions that have a potentially large positive impact on the business.This can happen by following this rule of thumb: Every decision in the company has to be made at the lowest possible level, for which there is competence and decision-making power. Adherence to this principle reduces duplication of work.Some other important questions to consider:- What is your internal thermostat?- How do you use it?- How do can make sure it works properly?Spend some quality time answering these questions. Then ask your team the same questions. Here you can directly use the Socrates method and turn all the thermometers on your team into thermostats. Starting with yourself.******"Cold Shower for Managers: Empower and Inspire Your Team with Your Humility and Accountability" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/2Ka23CU***"Park Your Ego: Face Your Bullsh*t and Own It" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/3iJCYv9

"Life, unlike a chessboard, is not always black or white."John UpdikeIf you find yourself in a stalemate situation in which you do not see any useful move, it is time to stop. It is time to take a breath and to look at things from a distance.Stalemate + Distance = ClarityThe second important thing that can help you get out of a stalemate situation is to simplify things. This means crossing out the many dead ends or impossible moves and staying with fewer of them. One of the major reasons for creating stalemate situations maybe that too many options are being considered and that you are trying to protect the interests of too many stakeholders.Chaos + Urgency = DisasterAnother way out of a stalemate situation is to realize which team you play for. You are probably a member of many teams apart from the one you lead. Subconsciously, you probably want to protect the interests of all teams as much as possible. But when they contradict each other, decide which team is the most important to you at the moment. This will almost automatically give you clarity. And hence the impulse to get out of the stalemate.Limit your options to increase your clarity.The way to increase clarity is by remembering the values ​​and priorities that are important to you and drive you right now. If it is more important for you to create a sustainable team now - you will act in one way. If it is more important for you to achieve results quickly, you will act differently. It is very tempting to say that it is important for you to have both a stable team and to achieve quick results. But this is only possible if you add time. If you do not have time, choose between different priorities. After this point, it will be much easier for you to take adequate action and move forward. If you still do not have clarity, i.e., there is chaos, then adding action will only result in a disaster. But if you have clarity and add urgency, you will get the ball rolling. Clarity + Urgency = Action***Buy the book "Cold Shower for Managers" by Plamen Petrov on Amazon - https://amzn.to/2Ka23CU