Making decisions as you and your Leadership Team work on your business is a thoughtful process. And during that process, doubts most likely creep into your thinking periodically.
Doubts are those nagging feelings of uncertainty, where you may question a belief or hesitate to take action. Doubts generally make us uncomfortable. They leave us feeling anxious. After all, we’re entrepreneurs, leaders, managers – we’re supposed to be decisive and have all the answers at our fingertips. Right?
Data is key to getting things done. But data is just an indicator, not an objective. It’s our use of data that truly drives results.
“Expert” may be a level of status for which we strive, but many “experts” have a gift for complicating things. Take a recent client conversation, for example.
One team member positioned himself as an expert in data. He created a list of the top 37 data points he felt the company needed to measure. When asked for the weekly goal of each metric, the data expert shared two reasons weekly goals were very difficult to define:
This client has struggled for months to understand what the health of their business was each week.
The video below offers brilliant words of wisdom attributed to Warren Buffett as career advice to his personal airline pilot, Mike Flint. I have read this story before. This gentleman, self-described creativity expert James Taylor, offers it as advice for creatives.
I offer it as advice for business owners and leaders. It syncs really well with the precepts of EOS®, which all support the idea that Less Is More. Focus on the most important goals for your business, your department, your personal life – this quarter, this year, always.
If you want to be a more effective communicator, have more productive meetings, and have people respect you more – skip the verbal hugs. “Sounds good Jim, but what the heck is a verbal hug?” Good question.
A verbal hug is used to soften the blow of a message you believe is going to be difficult to hear. By adding extraneous information that you may or may not believe, you offer a verbal hug, hoping it will make what you are really trying to say more palatable.
This can become problematic because the true message is no longer clear and can be disregarded or not even heard.
Are you a recovering Visionary? You know the type – lots of big ideas, always inventing something new, a little light on the focusing, heavy on the creating, worried about the company culture, and incredibly impatient. I’m a recovering Visionary, myself.
Visionaries can clearly see a future. Our problem is that we keep changing it, and that can get in the way of our success as leaders. It’s rooted in what I call the “Free to Be Me” syndrome of Visionary leaders.
