Do you ever get frustrated with people on your leadership team while solving problems or brainstorming ideas? They may ask too many questions, jump to conclusions too fast, are too quiet, or are always a pessimist. Do you sometimes wish they all had your “MO” when discussing these things? Wouldn’t that be great? Or would it?

You might think it’s best to have all optimists on your leadership team or that it might be best to have all innovators or all realists, when in reality, my experience, after having observed almost 100 leadership teams identify, discuss, and solve issues, is that you’ll actually benefit by having a balance of all types.

When something good or bad happens, or when we have an idea, we want to share it. When we have a question, we want to ask it. When we are frustrated, we want to vent.

Sharing our news, ideas, questions and frustrations whenever the urge strikes, consumes an incalculable amount of time and human energy, and that matters because many of us say we don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we want to accomplish.

The overall safety record in commercial aviation remains strong, despite occasional high-profile incidents. In fact, the chances of fatality in an aviation accident are 1 in 9,821, while in an automobile they're 1 in 114! There is a simple formula for the high success rate in aviation: great processes plus solid training/certification plus an obsession with clear responsibilities.

“The unique talent that I bring to my business is my ability to manage my calendar and email,” said no leader ever.

Often, leaders get trapped into doing things like scheduling and email while the hours in our day vanish with little or no benefit to the company. I’m not sure why we get trapped doing things like this, but it’s common. This work could easily be done by someone else, but many leaders resist delegating these tasks – to the detriment of themselves and their companies.

EOS Implementers™ teach clients to use The Assistance Track™to refocus how they use their time. A large part of this involves handing off tasks to someone else who is better suited to do those tasks.

In my last post, I shared five of the ten “commandments” followed by teams that are great at solving issues from Chapter 6 of Gino Wickman’s book Traction. Because solving an issue often requires one or more decisions to be made, Gino refers to them in his eBook, Decide! as the 10 Commandments of Good Decision Making. If you or your team are stuck and making little or no progress when solving issues, it’s time to assess whether you’re following these commandments.