What It Takes to Say “No”

Most people do too much. Their lives are cluttered with unnecessary stuff and a confusing, burdensome array of choices. They waste themselves responding to the urgent while ignoring the important. They’re busy, but not all that effective. They’re burning calories they don’t need to.

In contrast, highly effective people think differently and are focused and calm. They concentrate on only the most important, and on the one thing that really matters.

So, instead of throwing more effort at whatever situation or problem you face, consider first, what you can discontinue.

The key to getting more with less is more about stopping than starting, it’s about knowing what to quit doing, what to say no to.

Create white space in your schedule, in your mind and in your life as a whole. It’s about emptying your days of those things that don’t justify your time and effort because the return on investment is so poor.

Imagine taking some of this new white space you’ve created by uncluttering your life and investing it in those things that really matter and count the most, work best, and bring the greatest rewards getting you 5,10, 15, 20 or even 100 times improvements.

The first thing you need to do is create white space in your life. Eliminate the deadwood.

The only place to get the time to create this white space, in the beginning, is from your Quadrant III and Quadrant IV activities.

To work in Quadrant II requires you to be proactive because Quadrants I and III work on you. To say “yes” to the important Quadrant II priorities, you have to learn to say “no” to other things.

Most people would say that the reason they are not as effective as they should or could be is a lack of discipline. On the surface, this sounds reasonable but if you give it deeper thought, the real problem is that their priorities have not become deeply ingrained in their hearts and minds. They haven’t internalized Habit 2 – Begin With The End In Mind.

A lot of people recognize the value of Quadrant II activities, whether they identify them as such or not. And they attempt to give priority to those activities and integrate them into their daily lives through self-discipline but without a principle center and personal mission statement and guiding principles, they don’t have the necessary foundation to sustain their efforts.

A Quadrant II focus is a worldview that grows out of being principle-centered.

It’s almost impossible to say “No” to the unnecessary urgency of the whirlwind, the popularity of the Quadrant III or the pleasure of escape of the Quadrant IV if you don’t have a bigger “yes” burning inside.

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7 Habits of Highly Effective People

7 Habits of Highly Effective People are broken down into two categories and are sequential.

Private Victories which always precedes Public Victories.

Private Victory Habits:

  1. Be Proactive – the Principle of Self-Awareness, Personal Vision, and Responsibility.    Being proactive is more than just taking initiative. It is recognizing that you are responsible for your own choices and have the freedom to choose based on principles and values rather than moods and conditions.

2. Begin with the End in Mind – the Principle of Leadership, Vision, Purpose, and Mission. We first create a mental VISION for the finished project. We always have a clear PURPOSE in mind. Identify and commit to the principles, relationships, and purposes that matter most.

3. Put 1st Things 1st – the Principle of Managing Time and Priorities Around Roles and Goals. This habit is about organizing and executing around our most important priorities not by the urgent agendas and forces surrounding us.  This teaches you how and what to FOCUS on and Fix Next. You will KNOW what to say ‘Yes’ to and what to say ‘No’ to with confidence.

Public Victory Habits:

4. Think Win-Win (or No Deal) – the Principle of Seeking Mutual Benefit. Thinking win-win is a frame of mind and heart that seeks mutual benefit and mutual respect in all interactions. It’s thinking in terms of abundance and opportunity rather than scarcity and adversarial competition.  SERVITUDE HEART

5. Seek First to Understand then to Be Understood – the Principle of Empathetic Communication. When we listen with the intent to understand, rather than simply to reply, we begin true communication and relationship building.   Opportunities to speak openly and be understood come much more naturally and easily. Seeking to understand takes consideration; seeking to be understood takes courage. Effectiveness lies in the balancing or blending of the two.

6. Synergize – the Principle of Creative Cooperation. This is the 3rd Alternative – not my way, not your way, but a third way that is better than either of us would come up with on our own. It’s the fruit of respecting, valuing and even celebrating the differences. It’s the creative cooperation of 1 + 1 = 3, 11, 111…

7. Sharpen the Saw – the Principle of Continuous Improvement. Sharpening the saw is about constantly renewing ourselves in the four basic areas of life: physical, social/emotional, mental and spiritual.

The first three Habits can be summarized in a very simple four-word expression: Make and keep promises. (Note: it isn’t just about honoring a commitment, it’s also about having the courage of character to make a commitment because you know you’ll honor it). 

The next three habits can be summarized: Involve people in the problem and work out the solution together. 

You will never master these habits, but by simply working on them on a daily basis, you will set yourself up for the success highly effective people enjoy.

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Strategy and Execution

There are two things a leader can influence when it comes to producing results: your strategy [plan] and your ability to execute [implement] that strategy.

Which of these do you struggle with the most? Is it creating a strategy, or executing that strategy?

Every MBA program I know of teaches strategy but few that I’ve heard of spend much time, if any, teaching how to execute that strategy.

Figuring out what you want to do is relatively easy; the challenge comes in getting people to implement or execute on that strategy at a level of excellence you want and need.

Executing a strategy that requires a lasting change in the behavior of people is one of the biggest challenges any leader faces.

In the book “The 4 Disciplines of Execution”, the authors talk about two kinds of strategy:

One is a “stroke-of-pen” strategy, things like capital investment, expansion of staff, process change, strategic acquisition, media mix or change in product mix. It’s called a stroke-of-pen strategy because you execute it simply by ordering or authorizing it to be done.

The other type of strategy is a behavioral-change strategy. This is something you can’t just order to get done because executing it requires the buy-in and cooperation of people. Examples are: improved customer service, higher quality, faster responsiveness, consistency in the delivery of your offering, or one I am very familiar with is implementing a one-best-price strategy for an auto dealership. To execute this strategy requires a change in the behavior of every employee.

Leaders tend to not recognize a behavioral-change strategy for its significance and difficulty until they attempt to execute. Typical is for leaders to assume the people are the problem. But they would be wrong. W. Edwards Deming taught that any time the majority of the people have a behavioral problem, the people are not the problem, the system is.

The very first thing to address is the clarity of the strategic desired end result through messaging. Research indicates that less than 1 of 5 employees could articulate, much less understand, the organizations wildly important goal or goals.

And of those that did know and understand the strategic objective, only about half could say they were passionate about it. Lack of commitment then is the second thing to address.

Thirdly, accountability is another major issue. A staggering 80% said they were not held accountable for achieving the strategic desired end result and finally, about 90 percent had no idea of their specific role in achieving it.

In summary, people don’t know what your goals are, why they are important so they’re not committed to achieving it, they don’t know what they are specifically supposed to do about it and they aren’t held accountable to its success.

The real enemy of getting the right things done is the whirlwind of the urgent, more commonly referred to as your day job! The distractions of the fires that assault every manager and leader on a day to day basis.

I used to call this the bucking bronco.

I used to feel like the moment I walked in the door to my dealership I jumped atop a bucking bronco and prayed I could stay on for the duration of the day without getting bucked off.

The “urgent” things act on you, whereas the wildly important strategic goals are things that are important and you have to act on them.

Problem: If you ignore the urgent, they will kill you today but when you ignore the wildly important, they will kill you tomorrow. You have to do both.

The Covey group created a plan called 4 Disciplines of Execution that is based on the principle found in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Here are the 4 Disciplines followed by a fifth that is insinuated in their book but I’m going to establish it as a MUST 5th step.

One: FOCUS on the Wildly Important – the 80/20 Principle: This is about getting more with less. As humans, we are hardwired to be able to focus on 1 or 2 goals at one time. When you narrow your focus, it is easier to distinguish between what is truly important and what is simply the whirlwind.

Two: Act on Lead Measures – whatever strategy you are attempting to implement, your success will be dependent on two types of measures: lag and lead.

Lag measures tell you if you’ve accomplished your goal. [typical lag measures are revenue, profit, market share and customer satisfaction].

Lead measures are quite different. They measure the most high-impact behaviors your team will execute that will drive the success of the lag measures.  A good lead measure has two basic characteristics: It is predictable and influenceable.

Three: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard – people play differently when they’re keeping score. This is the principle of engagement. The highest level of performance comes from those who are emotionally engaged and the best way to foster employee engagement is to keep score.

Four: Create a Cadence of Accountability – unless we hold each other accountable, the goal will slowly disintegrate into the whirlwind of the urgent. This accountability happens through regular weekly meetings of any and all teams or individuals that have a wildly important goal. The best cadence is weekly, 20-minute meetings where each person answers a simple question: “What are the one or two most important things I can do this week that will have the highest and biggest impact on the scoreboard?

This 5th step will take EXECUTION over the top: Effective Communication that is clear, simple and easy to understand. The messaging needs to help your employees understand the WHAT, WHY and HOW we can help them survive and thrive through the execution of the strategy and goals.

A strategy is relatively easy to come up with, executing on that strategy takes hard work, focus and effective communication skills and principle-centered leaders.

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Right Thinking Leads to Right Results

Right thinking leads to right actions, which leads to right results.

Wrong thinking leads to wrong actions, which leads to wrong results.

No matter how successful he might appear, the wrong thinker is a slave to his wrongness.

He makes many plans that don’t ever seem to work out. He is constantly torn between duty and desire.

His life is constantly oscillating between tension and internal friction.

Rarely can he do as he pleases and ends up often doing things he would rather avoid.

The problem is that unbeknownst to him, he is being deprived of opportunities because he has proven his untrustworthiness in a myriad of small things.

When honest people get his number, they simply ignore him or frustrate him.

Honest people of integrity, no longer associate with him on free and easy terms and seldom does he even know it.

There are numerous people who go thru life never knowing what they don’t know simply because they have destroyed others confidence in them, and just never know it.

A man, woman or entity of integrity has nothing to fear and nothing to hide. They are transparent and authentic.

Conversely, the man, woman or entity that does not have integrity has everything to fear and is rarely authentic and transparent.

Make a point of being honestly authentic.

The habitually dishonest person bases much of his thinking on false assumptions by not viewing current reality honestly, thus he is constantly coming to wrong conclusions.

Honesty and integrity make you invulnerable to other people’s troubles and doesn’t cause trouble for yourself or your business.

Dishonest (wrong) thinkers are constantly seeking something for nothing and blame others for their troubles because they fail to recognize the truth of the Principle of Inside-out.

“What causes trouble for a person is less a lack of intelligence than a lack of honest thought.” – Richard Wetherill, Right is Might

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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