Mike Tyson has a great quote
‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face’ ..
How often do you as a leader get punched in the face? All it takes is one phone call to change the course of your day…
Through my experience I’ve discovered many people spend their day in ‘Fire Fighting’ mode where they wait for something to happen and then put the fire out.. While there is a place for that, I prefer my clients, specifically leaders, to spend most of their time in ‘Fire Prevention’ mode, working on their business, not in their business.
When you have a small business, more often than not it’s so easy to get stuck in your business just to keep things moving, and with that if i was to ask you do you feel satisfied when you get home after a long day thinking you achieved something, what would you say?
To help my clients get out of ‘Fire Fighting’ mode, I start of by assessing their day to day activities so we can build up a current state view. This will give great insights on where they spend their time and quite often they are shocked that they spend so much time on things that don’t add real value to their business or their customers.
Once we have this picture, we then discuss what they should be doing and create a plan for actually achieving that. This is always the fun bit as leaders often find it hard to let go, they have to go through a change process and this takes time. Once they stick with it they will eventually adapt to it. However this is not a once off assessment, things change so fast in business, this needs constant review to ensure you are protecting your business and customers from whatever the market throws at you…
Committing to something is key.. and please be patient with it.. You may not get things 100% right in the beginning and that’s ok, in fact its not the goal. The goal is to get it started and through consistent iteration, then get it right..
Leadership Commitment Assessment Video Transcript
Hi, Shay Lynch here, Director of Future State. And in today’s video, I wanna talk about the role of a leader. Now we’ve talked about this in previous videos, like in terms of what the role of a leader should be, how it should be specific to your business, your industry, and more importantly, your personality, right? So the next question, once you know what you should be doing, the question is, are you committing to it? Because it’s sometimes very easy to know what to do, but the hard part is actually doing it, and living it, and walking the walk. So that question is, are you committed, right? So a little exercise I like to do with my clients is just a little time exercise. Now, I like to do this over a period of two to four weeks, if you have the time. And it’s a very simple activity. Just be honest, when you’re doing it, and letting anytime you do an activity, record it. It should actually only add about five minutes, maybe a little bit more to your time every day. So in terms of time requirement to complete, it’s very user friendly, right? So just very quickly, right, I wanna go through this little table out here. So we’re just talking about the leader role for now, the leader view, right? So I want you to create a little Excel worksheet that has a number of columns going across, right? So, we start off with the date and the activity. And here, I just want you to write a small bullet point description of what that activity is. As simple as you can possibly put it, on as less words as possible, no chance of ambiguity then. Then I want you to put down the duration of it. How long did you spend? Now, you can choose hours, minutes, whatever. Whatever’s most appropriate, okay? And then we’re gonna talk about work type. Now, we’ve talked about the value of doing certain activities in previous videos. So again, just to recap, value necessary waste. And this is more of something that we can review at the end of it. So don’t be too caught up here because, maybe as you’re only doing it, you start to realize which is value which is not, right? That’s part of the whole exercise is to learn, and understand, and question why you’re doing things. And then finally, once you’ve done all this, once you’ve inputted everything, the review part is the action. Like the three Ds, I call it. Are you gonna keep doing? Are you gonna delegate? Are you gonna delete? Are you gonna stop doing your thing with me, right? So what I like to do is, as I said, I like people to do this over a two to four week period, right? And the importance of this then is because, once you start building up this view, you will see very quickly. Are you committing to the role, your time? Once you sum up all the days, and by the way, there should be a sum total at the end for the duration. Once you see where you’re spending your time, then you will know, are you committing to your role? It’s a very simple activity because we’re human beings. Sometimes we like to hold on to things that we like to do that may not necessarily be the right things to do. But it’s just because we like to do them, we’re good at them, so we like to do them. And that can be many different things. For once you’ve defined your role, you will see very quickly are you committing to it, right? So, this is phase one. So I would like you to do this for over the four week period, because then you’ll have enough information that it will be qualitative, you will get good information. And don’t do it over a few days or a week, ’cause it’s still, it’s too short. I always find that at least two weeks, if you can do it in four, brilliant, but at least two weeks work, right? Because then once you’ve done this, the first and important part of the exercise is one, fill that out. Then when you’ve done that after the exercise, then we started looking at putting in the work times. And you can always question these. These are always subjective. You may wanna get your team support here in defining these, and then define what you do next. What is the action? What is the thing that’s gonna help you get committed to your role? Another thing that you can do after the exercise is, once you’ve done your activity, you’ve done your descriptions. Once you start to see patterns, you can add another column in here and go activity group. And then this can be really important as well, because then it gives you a macro view of what exactly you are doing in conjunction with what your defined role should be. The other important thing of this is what I wanna talk in another video, is all about, like I know we mentioned the word time here, managing our time. This is not really about any specific techniques on time management, but I also wanna help you manage your energy. So in another video, we’re gonna talk about once you know all these activities, in a group, when you see the patterns and you group them all together, what are you going to do with them? When are you gonna do them? So we’re gonna talk about your energy management. So you’re always on top of your game, every single day of your working life. I hope this makes sense. If you have any questions about this, please get in touch. And in the meantime, this is Shay Lynch saying, thanks for listening.
