The People Drain

Talk to successful leaders and ask them what motivates them and you'll hear things such as:

Helping customers achieve their goals
Creating strategies to overcome an issue
Tackling something no one else has solved

Then ask those same people what de-motivates them and you'll usually hear one thing:

People issues

Nothing grounds a high-flying company, department or leader more than people issues. An entrepreneur buddy of mine once told me, "I love everything about my business except the people stuff."

If I could give one suggestion on how an employee can make sure they aren't a drain or a people issue for their company it's this:

Come up with a sincere solution or recommendation

In my experience, it's really not people that drain you, it's the hopelessness of trying to solve a problem for a person who sits there expecting you to read their mind, deal with their co-workers and make everyone happy. It just can't be done. In fact, I've learned that the more I try to solve the problem, the worse it gets because I can never do as well as the very people closest to the issue. Quite simply, I will never please them.

If you bring a recommendation to your company, it may not be perfect, it may not be the final answer, but it will dramatically increase the odds of that problem being solved with as little drama or drain as possible.

Barry LaBov
LaBov and Beyond
Seth Godin's book, Linchpin, is a real great book. I highly recommend it. It's Seth's most personal, from-the-heart message yet.

One thing he said that was simple and powerful is:

In order for us to succeed on a project or a challenge, we need to have the smallest, most-engaged team possible.

Too often we have ten people with various levels of commitment tackling a project, when a smaller team of four, if totally dedicated to the success, would be far better.

Why do we run into this issue in businesses so much? He are my thoughts:

1) We think throwing people at a problem will ensure results
2) We don't want to burden a person with responsibilities, so we semi-burden two or three
3) Some of us like building our empire or a big team because it feels powerful
4) We allow ourselves to be too busy to think about the right people on the team, so we throw more people in because we think it can't hurt

If you bring a recommendation to your company, it may not be perfect, it may not be the final answer, but it will dramatically increase the odds of that problem being solved with as little drama or drain as possible.

Barry LaBov
LaBov & Beyond
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