Engagement – Crisbie Coach

How And Why Determination And Commitment May Change Your Life

Paris, 2004. A young man comes out from a building with a smile on his face. He applied for a traineeship and had just finished his interview that did not go as expected.

The young man, named Héritier, is 22 years old and came from Angola at the age of 8, running away from a civil war. He did not speak French but did everything to learn all well in school, also helped by his family and friends. After his degree, he started to look for small jobs, to contribute to the family budget.

He applied for a internship with a cleaning company. The employer, although they found that Héritier had an atypical profile, was very interested in the boy’s dynamism and the interview lasted about 5 hours!

At the end of the interview, Héritier did not get the internship but his first job contract. The company was just established and was looking for young talents like Héritier, who in short time reached the top of his career within the company.

He decided then to go further to make his dream come true. He wanted to create his own company and started up a cleaning company that would use only organic products.

In those years, his career looked interesting to the media because it reflected a reality that was still unknown: the economical contribution produced by migrants in the country that welcomed them.

With his company, Héritier has generated a turnover of 100.000 euros during the first year, a figure that tripled over the following three years.

Héritier managed to find his way thanks to his commitment and determination to succeed.

What have you learned from Héritier’s story?

What I Have Learned From Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was the most creative genius in history. Of course, saying that I learned things from Leonardo is perhaps a bit risky, because in fact Leonardo is the very embodiment of genius.

As we know, Leonardo lived in a particular era for humanity, the Renaissance, when literature, philosophy, science and the fine arts experienced an unprecedented splendour. Italy was in full economic momentum and Florence became the capital of fine arts.

Leonardo was born not far from Florence, in Vinci in 1452. In Florence, he learned painting, sculpture, architecture, music, nature, science, geography, poetry and who knows what else. After all, we know he was a genius, right?

Let’s see some of his main masterpieces:

1. The Last Supper, a mythical painting, difficult to preserve because Leonardo used a technique of his own invention that, however, proved to be inappropriate.

2. The Vitruvian Man, a drawing that illustrates the proportions of the human body.

3. The Gioconda, also known as the Mona Lisa, one of the most famous and seen artworks in the world.

Other works are less famous but not less important:

The Codex Atlanticus, which brings together the largest collection of Leonardo’s writings and drawings.
His futurist inventions such as the helicopter, the plane and the submarine.
The huge statue depicting a horse: 70 tons of bronze and 7 metres high.

Why Leonardo wanted to make these works, so different from each other?

I think he was mainly driven by the curiosity to experiment and discover new horizons. He loved creating and doing things with his hands. He loved dreaming, designing, building and putting wings to his ideas.

Taking care of all his projects, one after the other and sometimes even in parallel, represented for Leonardo his life’s purpose.

The lesson that Leonardo taught me is that in life you have to try, make mistakes, do not give up and start over again to move forward. It does not matter how many difficulties you may face. Surely, Leonardo had to go through a series of failures to achieve his project. I am sure that determination and perseverance were also some of his skills. Look at what he left us, all the works that gave him the title of genius of all time.

You may not forget your failures, but to progress you can learn from them.

What are the lessons learned from your life?

Best Friends at Work: 3 Ideas

Do you have a best friend at work? And if you’re the boss, do you think most of your employees would be able to name a co-worker they consider a close friend?
Surveys carried out in the US show the following findings:

84% of respondents said a job can’t truly be great unless they have great co-workers.
67% said they have at least one co-worker who they consider a close
friend.
Those who said they have close friends at work are more than twice
as likely to also say they look forward to going to work than colleagues who don’t.
41 % said they’d left a job because they didn’t like the culture.
36 % said they’d take a pay cut for a more ideal workplace culture.

Gallup.com wrote in January 2018 that their research had repeatedly shown a concrete link between having a best friend at work and the amount of effort employees expend in their job.
When employees possess a deep sense of affiliation with their team members, they are driven to take positive actions that benefit the business — actions they may not otherwise even consider if they did not have strong relationships with their co-workers.

Yale University professors Emma Seppälä and Marissa King wrote in Harvard Business Review in August 2017: “People who have a best friend at work are not only more likely to be happier and healthier, they are also seven times as likely to be engaged in their job. What’s more, employees who report having friends at work have higher levels of productivity, retention, and job satisfaction than those who do not.”

It is interesting to look at that last item above (no. 5) about what would prompt employees to take a pay cut: a workplace that better approaches their ideal, which seems to include more friendships.

It suggests that fostering a culture where employees truly feel like they are working in a culture among friends, might get the kind of loyalty money cannot buy.

Organizations can and should be focusing on how they can build a culture of friendship and inclusion. It is not about forcing employees to be friends. Rather, it’s to create a culture where friendships can naturally develop.

Here are three ideas for fostering and supporting friendships within organisations:

Promote open communication;
Encourage people to get to know one another;
Support social activities.

Would you give it a try?

Empower Your Staff: Let Them Take Decisions

In the mid-2000's the business man Brian Robertson wanted his business to increase by making the decision making processe more efficient. In was then that the concept of holacracy emerged for the first time in the United States.

According to Robertson, the only solution to work more efficiently would be promoting autonomy and reducing the number of parties involved in decision making. In a holacracy system, every business task / mission establishes a team that is free to make the decisions relating to their goals. On condition, of course, to remain consistent with the general objectives of the company.

What does it really mean working in a holacratic environment? First, giving back the sense of ownership and responsibility to the collaborators. To do this, you can organize groups of a few people; let’s say a maximum of ten people that work in a completely autonomous way. Each group would make concrete decisions for the group itself, without any control or hierarchical validation.

For topics of strategic importance, the debates will take place at the management level and all employees will participate. The votes counts the same. Young graduates in their first work experience count in the same way as senior employees. All groups may receive a budget to finance their various proposals and initiatives. This allows decisions to be taken quickly and by collective intelligence.

This type of horizontal organization tries to adapt to the needs and expectations of the new generations. In recent years, young jobseekers require companies to offer flexibility, autonomy, responsibility and above all a sense of utility. The concepts of nonsense job (bullshit job) and brown-out are more and more increasing.

Holacracy, by putting the person at the first place, seems to respond to these problems because it makes them aware of their importance within a team. Empowering people gives motivation, engagement, and therefore more effectiveness.

Obviously, you will not always agree within a team. However, this also represents a benefit, because the purpose of holacracy is not to eliminate the differences, but it is rather to encourage everyone to take the floor and to express their doubts. The group can analyse all the options and possible contradictions immediately. The group itself, after having overcome all possible misunderstandings, will find the solution. Of course, you need to be able to put aside your ego, as the common project will have the priority.