Hurry is your biggest enemy

While working on your sustainability strategies or projects, life can surprise you with problems, challenges, and confrontations. How you deal with difficult circumstances, difficult people in your team says a lot of who you are. Of course, a lot depends on how you try to avoid challenges to come up in the first place. But unfortunately while rolling out your green projects, problems come to us most unexpectedly.

In problem-solving, your number one enemy is ‘hurry’ because it often leads to hasty and bad decisions. In a moment of tension, we have to take a step back, breathe deeply and let our emotions cool down so that they are not running our responses.

Listening will save you

When running your business or your division, we often see that the person who has the most conflicts is the one who is unable to truly listen. They tend to make unilateral decisions, are often disrespectful and undermine other people’s thoughts.

If you are in charge, it is crucial to get multiple perspectives, especially when it comes to broad topics such as sustainability. This means sitting down with all the major people that can give you valuable input to move the problem forward, even if you don’t like them personally.

As we all know there are so many narratives around a conflict (everyone has their own truth) so it is fair to listen to everyone involved (and understand their point of view). This will help get a well-rounded understanding of the problem from multiple angles, which is crucial in order to move forward.

Ask the 3 magic questions :

When a new problem or situation arises, people tend to express their views and opinions of it, which only makes the situation worse. That’s when it is important to have these 3 questions in mind:

  1. Adding to the situation
  2. Subtracting from the situation
  3. Multiplying the outcome for an even better result

What do we mean by that? There are always people in your team who add or take away an idea to solve issues. Listen and observe them because they are very valuable; they are the people who offer new input, they show you what to subtract from a situation and help you resolve. They also have the potential of bringing you a new level of thinking with new possibilities and sometimes new potential gain.

Follow these tips and your green projects will become really successful and transformative for everyone involved.  

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