Good morning everyone, I’m Fabio, from Italy.
A few months ago we had a meeting; we discussed about the past, the present and the future of our organization.
Looking at the past, we asked ourselves what we consider a success or a failure.
It was interesting to observe that one thing that was a success for someone, was a failure for someone else; or the opposite.
In effect reality and perception are two separate things (or maybe not).
This is why in this talk I wanted to focus on my personal TOP&FLOP, or more specifically on how I did my best leading our organisation.
I fulfilled the role of president from 2006 till 2014.
This graph represents our demographics in the last 13 years.
The lowest pick is 2 people, the highest one is 98.
In the beginning we decided to build a real group. So we started pulling people inside. Something like “Please, help us!”.
At the size of 16 people, we decided to build an association.
The keyword here was “build”.
Once we build the organisation we started attracting people who wanted to become a clown doctor.
But some of those people also wanted to contribute to the growth of our organisation.
The keyword here was CONTRIBUTE.
Then we started attracting a third kind of people; the ones who wanted to become clown doctors but who were not interested in building. And that was perfectly fine.
What I observed is that with the more diversity we have the we increased the costs of alignment and the divergences among people.On the contrary, the visibility of our decisions, our actions, was decreasing.
It means that it took more time to see the effects of something.
At that time to me leadership meant finding the balance between the goals of our community and the goals of each single person.It’s what someone calls “find the proper place for everyone”.
But no one teaches you how to be a leader. It’s a path, like the one of being a clown doctor. I needed to learn a lot about delegation, styles of leadership, inner motivations, and so on …
So, here is my first personal FLOP.
Vision (and also leadership) is embodied in human behaviours.
I let our vision be just a sentence in a document. Even when our disalignment started to grow.
I thought that it was clear, but it wasn’t.
Now I know that pursuing a vision is a continuous consensus process inside a group; it’s a journey, not an arriving point.
Practically it means - to me - that a group must pass through different things. Like having fun, suffering, talking and pursuing small and large goals.
Now let’s move to what I consider one of my TOP.
When we decided to build something in 2004 I told myself: “Fabio, listen. You have 10 years, in order to build an organisation that will not depend on you, or anyone else.”
In order to reach this higher goal I did all I can.I trained myself, I created a structure of groups, I tried to create internal guidelines, I asked for help.
This looks like a cool plan, right?
But in reality I had no idea of what I was doing.
Anyway I can say that I had trust in different things. Or maybe we can call it faith.
Faith in myself, people around me, what I was learning and the future itself …
In 2014 I left the role of president, after 10 years from my promise.
That was one of the strongest things I had to face. Not only for me, but for my organisation too.
What makes me proud is that there wasn’t a handoff, but a new group was born.
And here it is my personal TOP.
I’ve always tried to encourage people to develop ownership and to take care of the people around us.
And on top of that I had the opportunity to train my faith and my skill to lose control.
So here are the two takeaways I want to leave you:
As a group, keep practicing the building of your vision. “Where are we going?”. Then transform your ideas into human behaviours.
Have faith in something, listen to other people, build something that drains your energy; it is worth it, trust me ;)
I want to thank this amazing organisation for bearing me and bearing with me
And thank you all.