An excerpt from Felicity’s speech at the 10th anniversary dinner of Zadro…
1. Valuing the work that you do is hard. Your impact is not the same for everyone and adjusting that to suit people’s needs is something that takes time to get right.
2. Focusing on the work and not the bank balance reaps more return.
3. More people should say exactly what they are thinking; and more people should be ok with hearing it. It would save time and we’d get a lot more done.
4. Know your weaknesses and outsource them to others. Anything else is a false economy. You can’t do everything, nor do everything well.
5. Being present with someone for 10 mins and looking them in the eye accomplishes more than multitasking for 30 people.
6. The leader’s job is to think 5 years ahead, next year, tomorrow and what each of the team are doing today and next week – at the same time. Sometimes that gives me a headache.
7. Building our work culture, one that I want to work in and be surrounded by quality people, has been the greatest achievement of my professional career. The recipe for that is multi-pronged, multi-layered and thought of multiple times during the day (and night!)
8. Never, ever, think you know more than someone else. They have a richness of experience, ideas and a perspective you’ve never dreamt about. Miss listening to it, could mean missing a nugget of gold that will save you down the track.
9. Any workplace that treats people as anything less than a 360 degree being with many tentacles, each representing the other roles that employees play in life, such as being a daughter, son, mother, father, partner, friend, mentor, neighbour or world citizen – is a factory.
10. The people you work with, colleagues and clients, can either help to make you or break you. It is how you choose to react to them that makes all the difference. That is why I’ve chosen to surround myself with people who are makers. Every one of my team has something in them that I admire. You may not see it in yourself, and you may not even notice it in each other yet, but I can see it.
