Are You Thinking Big and Aiming High?

April 28, 2013 by 1 Comment

Photo by h.koppdelaney

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” – Michelangelo, Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer

Big, bold and compelling vision is what separates great leaders from good leaders. Great leaders set great goals. Great goals are ambitious, challenging, they stretch you and your team, taking you outside of your comfort zone.

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?” — Steve Jobs

Sadly too many leaders think small and aim low when setting direction. This is understandable as leaders don’t want to set themselves up to fail, so they remain cautious. There is danger in setting a vision that aims low.

  • Aiming low produces mediocre results.
  • Aiming low fails to inspire the people around you.
  • Aiming low fails to build new capabilities.
  • Aiming low keeps you locked into the past and reenforces the status quo.

To be inspired to do great work requires that you know you’re making a difference, that you’re doing what matters.

“When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that s—- off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.” — Steve Jobs, 2009

Pause and reflect. “Are you aiming too low?”. “Are you thinking big enough?“. Thinking big and aiming high gets you out of the status quo. Thinking big and aiming high creates the scope to shift how you do business. It pushes you to step outside your comfort zone.

  • Aiming high creates focus and direction.
  • Aiming high inspires and motivates others.
  • Aiming high create a sense of urgency and excitement to drive change.
  • Aiming high stretches you out of your comfort zone.

Leaders think big and aim high, they don’t set small goals, rather they set big, bold and challenging goals. Thinking big and aiming high breaks you out of making incremental improvements and causes you to think and work differently. It forces you to break away from what worked in the past, to explore new ways of working.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry

The only way you can achieve something big is to think big. Big ideas and big vision demands a significant shift in your capabilities. It stimulates innovation, new approaches and ways of conducting your business. If forces you out of your comfort zone without which you will fail  to make progress.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” — Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address, 2005

Great leaders push themselves and their teams to do that which others won’t. Do you have a great, challenging goal that will stretch you and your team out of their comfort zone?

 

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Busy is Killing Leadership

April 20, 2013 by 5 Comments

Photo By Vincent_AF

“Never confuse movement with action.” – Ernest Hemingway

Busy is killing leadership! Considering the experience and competence of leaders, their position and influence, their authority, the resources that they command, too many spend their time making the routine happen, instead of investing their time and energy into those few significant things that will create the organisation’s future. They fail to take advantage of the opportunities they have to make a real difference. One of the key reasons is that leaders find themselves distracted by busyness.

What is busyness? Simply put, busyness is a when we have a lot of work. It’s the drug of the 21st century. Busyness happens when we react to what’s in front of us, without stopping to consider if it matters or not. We get caught up in the urgency of the moment, soon it becomes a habit and before we know it we end up busy. We become trapped in the urgent. Leaders fall into the busyness habit when they allow weeks and months drift by, attending numerous meetings and drifting from activity to activity without stopping to consider if what they’re doing is making any difference.

 

How Busyness Kills Leadership

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker, “Essential Drucker: Management, the Individual and Society”

You become busy when you mistake activity for productivity, when you mistake efficiency for effectiveness and when you mistake more for better. You become busy when you ask “What’s next?” rather then stopping to consider “Why this?”. Busyness kills leadership as:

  • Busyness is fake work, it has the appearance of work, but doesn’t deliver results.
  • Busyness gets you doing unnecessary work. When unnecessary work is done time is wasted.
  • Busyness is seductive as it makes you feel important.
  • Busyness traps you into using your time and energy for doing good work rather than investing it in your great work.
  • Busyness robs you of the capacity needed to reflect and to think deeply about important issues and decisions of the day.
  • Busyness keeps you reacting rather than responding and initiating.

The real danger with busyness is not the number of tasks we find ourselves doing. Rather it’s that we find ourselves doing a whole lot of work that is unnecessary, unimportant or should not be done by us at all.

 

Busyness Prevents Leaders from Accomplishing their Great Work

“Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.” ― Peter Drucker

Busyness kills leaders as it causes them to spend time and energy on good work rather than on accomplishing great work. Leaders need to focus relentlessly on what’s required to make a meaningful difference.

You cannot afford to spend your time on what’s urgent, easy and routine. As a leader you need to be effective, to work smarter not harder, to work strategically not frantically with lots of activity and limited results.

Busy leaders are quick to tell you how busy they are, they wear their busyness like a badge of honour. It’s like being busy means you’re important, that you matter. However as leaders we need to avoid frantic activity, activity that on the surface looks like productivity, but is really just busy work. Busyness has become such a large part of current corporate culture that we often loose sight of how our efforts contribute to what matters.

Effectiveness requires focus and you cannot spread yourself thin trying to do too much. You need to say no to the urgent and yes to your great work. Busyness is the opposite of effective leadership. If your day is filled with things to do then it’s too fill. Don’t confuse activity with effectiveness. Don’t confuse busy work or even good work with great works. It’s the job of the leader to focus on accomplishing great work.

 

Are you in the busyness trap?

“Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first – and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.” - Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

If you’re not careful busyness will quietly take over your life without you even being aware of it. Leaders are often not aware of the extent to which busyness has taken control of their life. So you may be asking how do I know if I am in a busyness trap? Well, the following warning signs are strong indicators that you’re in a busyness trap.

  • A lack of clarity as to what constitutes great work.
  • Doing what does not need to be done.
  • Allow the agenda and priorities of others to set your agenda and what’s considered important.
  • Allowing urgent events and interruptions to distract you from the important.
  • Attending meetings where your participation is not necessary.
  • Not enough time set aside to think and reflect.
  • Meetings that don’t achieve anything.
  • Too busy to set time aside necessary to make important decisions.
  • A lack of systems so you find yourself reacting and reinventing decision making processes.

One of the best ways to identify busyness is to look for instances where there is a lot of effort or activity and limited results. It’s in these areas that attention is required to manage more effectively.

  • Are you in a busyness trap?
  • What are the few major areas that define your great work?
  • What do you need to stop doing so you can give more attention to the your great work?
Filed Under: Effectiveness Tagged With: , ,

Leaders Are Readers

April 13, 2013 by 4 Comments

Reading Photo By Jayel Aheram

Reading has always been a habit of great leaders. It’s one of the most powerful sources of growth, inspiration and new ideas. Reading is a great investment in your personal development.

If you want to improve your leadership you need to read. Effective reading is a habit that goes beyond just skimming or scanning. Effective reading requires you read deeply, understand and apply the ideas and lesson to the challenges of the day. Here are some habits that will help you get the most out of your reading.

  • Leaders Read Quality. To get the most out of your reading time requires you read books of quality. Quality books nourish your mind and inspire your heart. Effective reading requires you read right and that you read quality. As they saying goes “garbage in, garbage out”, we need to as careful what we feel our mind as we are about what we put into our bodies.
  • Leaders Read Broadly. Don’t limit your reading to a single genre, such as business or fiction. Develop the habit of reading broadly include books from a broad range of genres such as, biographies, philosophy, history, science, literature and the social sciences. This helps leaders broaden their worldview and become multi-dimensional thinkers. If you have traditionally only read business books why not commit to read two or three books outside of your comfort zone this year?
  • Leaders Share Insights and Inspire Others. Take notes from the books you read to share with your team. This is a great way to share ideas, initiate innovative discussions and spark action. A benefit of sharing your insight is that it inspires a culture of learning, reading and personal growth. Another great way to share and help others is to start a book club. To do this pick a book, invite a number of people to read it with you over the next month, then hold a group discussion to share insights, reactions and views.
  • Leaders Re-read Great Books. There are many books that you will gain significant more insight and understanding on the second reading. This is especially true for quality books; they usually require a second reading. Then there are a number of books that you many want to consider reading every year, especially books with ideas that you need to keep top of mind.
  • Leaders Read and Leaders Write. Whilst reading is a critical leadership habit, in the same way writing should be considered as important. Writing is the best tool for sorting and organizing your thoughts and ideas. Combining reading and writing helps to improve the value you get from what you’ve read. So once you have completed a chapter take time to write down a summary, your thoughts and reactions.
  • Leaders Never Stop Learning and Reading. Reading great books stimulates a leader’s thinking and is a source of new ideas and insights. Leaders are always on the lookout for great new reads.

Reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body. It keeps the brain active, healthy and productive. Reading is one of the best ways for a leader to keep learning, growing and impacting the world around them.

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What are your reading habits?

 

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Email that Gets Results is Structured for Clarity

April 1, 2013 by 1 Comment

Photo By apdk

Clarity requires that you bring structure to your writing. Your message must be clear and messages are clear when they’re well structured. Structure is important as it provides the recipient with a framework that makes it easy for the reader to follow and understand your message.

  • Limit your email to one main topic per message. Limit your email to a single main topic per message. Do not included multiple actions in a single email as this overwhelms the reader and increases the likelihood of miss-understanding and that some actions will be missed.
  • Structure your message into digestible chunks. People are not interested in reading large sections of unbroken text especially email. To make your message clear break the message into digestible chunks by writing short paragraphs each focused on a specific topic. Keep sentences short. Use lists.
  • Always included a topic sentence for each paragraph. A topic sentence is the first sentence of a paragraph that tells the reader what the paragraph is about. Topic sentences are important for good structure. Don’t hide important details in the middle of the paragraph, bring it to the front.
  • Have a compelling call to action. When an email outcome is actionable it’s useful to put a summary of  the action and expected response from the recipient at the top of the email making it clear the  action expected along with how time sensitive nature of the matter. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want and be clear, take the guesswork out of the message.
  • Provide supporting information and documents. When you make it easy for the reader to make a decision or take action you increase the likelihood of getting a timely response. One way to do this is to provide the reader with all the information and documents they require to successfully respond to your request.

Structure helps to make your message easy to read, understand and action upon. Poorly structured email frustrates the reader and increases the chances of the reader not responding.

This post is part of the series “Email that Gets Results”

 

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Email that Gets Results is Focused on a Single Outcome

April 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Photo by Nina Matthews Photography

Focus helps you get to the point quickly. People don’t want to read through a long and rambling email consisting of a collection of unrelated ideas. Focus requires that you set a single goal for your message. Your goal should be guided by one of the 3 types of email outcomes. Once you have decided on your message outcome consider the following guidelines to help you strengthen the focus of your message.

  • Keep your message focused on a single outcome. This requires that you’re clear as to the purpose and objectives of your message. Focus strictly on a single outcome per email. Do not mix a number of different goals and in a single email. Mixing your outcomes results in confusion and misunderstanding. Stay focused on addressing only one goal per message. If you need to address a number of issues it’s recommended that you address each in a separate email or alternatively schedule a face-to-face meeting.
  • Get to the point quickly. Your message must focus on a single topic or subject to be effective. This requires you to keep the purpose of your message front of mind and framing it in a way the recipient can understand and easily digest. Get to the point in as few sentences as possible. People want to know what the email is about as soon as they open it.
  • Reduce the number of questions. Limit the number of questions you ask in a single email. Reduce questions down to the 2 – 3 that really matter. The more questions you ask the less likely that you will get a response or that all the questions will be answered.

Focus your email on the right recipients

Target your message to the relevant audience by sending the message only to appropriate recipients. It’s important to think through who needs the information or who needs to take action. As a rule you should only send an email to those who would understand why they have been included as a recipient. Use the following guidelines when sending email to recipients:

  • TO: The “TO” field should be used to indicate that the recipient of the message is expected to respond or to take action. As a general guideline is to include the recipients that you require to respond to your email or to take action in the “TO” field of the email.
  • CC: The “CC” field is used to include recipients in the the mail that are included “for information” purposes only. The recipients in the “CC” field are not expected to reply or to respond to the request for action.

This post is part of the series “Email that Gets Results”

 

Filed Under: Effectiveness Tagged With: , , , , ,
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