I was stumped. I was at a talk on resilience at Alan Weiss’ Million Dollar Consulting Convention and the speaker, Richard Citrin, asked us to map our careers. He demonstrated using himself, much like the diagram at right, describing each achievement and setback through his long career. Then he gave us some time to do the same.
I know the earth is round and the sun rises and sets with our rotation. I picture the difference between my high sun and a sinking sun farther east every time my daughter calls from London on her way home from work and I’ve barely finished lunch. I picture the pre-dawn glow in Oregon every time I refrain from calling my sister before noon on the weekend. Time zones are an intriguing, but familiar, concept. But that did not prevent me from being blown away last week.
The human experience is paved with failed promises, mistakes, omissions, bad luck, and scary new situations. The consequences range from immediate regret to crippling anxiety. The situations run the gamut from saying something stupid to your supervisor to being asked to speak to a large audience to discovering your new house is threatened by rising seas after signing the papers at closing.
I hate to admit it, but that guy yelling at his phone could have been me a couple of times recently! And I promise you, you don’t want to be the company that does that to people! Most of my clients’ companies, whether large or small, want to treat their customers well. They know that they don’t always succeed. They make mistakes. And they aren’t always aware of how they are perceived by customers and prospective customers. However, they try. At least they say they try. They all say they care.
To get a handle on an overflowing To-Do list, divide a sheet of paper into two columns and label them “Urgent” on the left and “Important” on the right. If you like, also draw a horizontal line and label the top half “Business” and the bottom half “Personal.”
My executive coaching clients tell me it’s tough to avoid distractions that pull them and their teams away from strategic priorities. Readers worldwide write to complain about too many priorities and not being allowed to focus on strategic priorities. Across every organization, there is too much to do and yet it’s common to see many hours devoted to less important tasks while strategic priorities languish. What’s to do?
If you are blind to improvement opportunities, you will never improve. How blind are you? Let’s look at the evidence. Here are 10 signs that you can’t see the enormous opportunity before you to improve productivity, profits, and engagement:
Agreement, as well as progress, starts with objectives. We will never agree on alternatives if we can’t agree on objectives. In other words, we will never agree on a route if we can’t agree on a destination! Thus, objectives are what we should be debating, not alternatives. Case in point: Gun control. The gun control debate is impossible largely because everyone is arguing about alternatives before agreeing on objectives. Here are just some of those alternatives:
Last weekend, I joined the students in Boston to March For Our Lives and protest the complete inaction of Congress to do anything about school shootings and assault rifles. Let’s leave the obvious debate aside for a minute