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