Tag Archives: business

The Magic Formula – A Cure for Today?

20 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by in Character and Competence, Uncategorized

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There is a magic formula that the successful use, specifically and particularly when faced with a challenge that comes at them sideways and out of the blue. Of course, we are faced with such a challenge at the moment, and a lot of people, including members of my family, are feeling the effects of the measures being taken by people to avoid the dreaded lurgy. Which, according to MSWord’s spellcheck, is  a word.

Businesses are laying off people left and right, and given that a lack of custom does tend to thwart a business’ efforts to stay solvent, I can understand this. Of course, said businesses – the less scrupulous – will take the money offered by the government to keep them afloat, while not using it to keep staff in a job. And, of course, if you’ve laid off your staff carefully and before said money becomes available, you can avoid paying them at all. I hope that HMG makes sure that the money they hand out is properly accounted for.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, major grocery retailers are looking at the problems created by ‘now’ and are adjusting their practices to suit.

The major movers, ladies and quintleflick (not a word), are applying the formula.

Unfortunately, as the majority of us are not educated in leadership and management, a lot of people aren’t applying it. If only they knew what it was. Of course, while all clever kids know that x= minus b times the square root of b squared minus 4ac all over 2a, they aren’t taught this formula in school. And it could save a lot of stress.

The formula is E+R=O.*

E is the Event. This is the thing that happens to us or, as one of my participants forced me to decide, the situation in which we find ourselves. (That covered people born with disabilities –  they didn’t ‘happen’, their situation just ‘was’.) The Event is something outside of your control. You didn’t plan it, plan for it, expect it and probably didn’t anticipate the possibility. Cue a pandemic caused by eating a bat, allegedly.

R is the Response. It’s what you do about what’s happened, and that includes how you decide to feel about what’s happened. Excitement, despair, challenge – all reactions that are up to you. Maybe not in the first instance, but at least after you’ve paused to think about them.

O is the Outcome. The Outcome is what you want to have happened at the end of it all.

E is unchangeable. That being the case, the only way to change the value of O is entirely within the Response provided to E. Your Outcome is wholly dependant on the quality and thinking behind your Response to E.

The question is – is your Response wholly based in fear, or is it considered, thoughtful and ecological? Is it self-serving or will it serve us all? Is it destructive and aimed solely at self-preservation, or is it a unique answer to a problem? An answer the like of which gets written about in leadership and management literature next year?

Yes, folks. You Response to what is happening to you today could be so imaginative that you find yourself being immortalised in print. It could make you proud, or ashamed. Or just content, which is just enough for your integrity to remain intact.

Or you could just be a selfish tw4t. Your choice.

Businesses – the people you’re sacking, you’ll want back in three or four months. Treat them well and they will come. Treat them badly, and see whether all your selfish efforts backfire.

Have a good weekend, folks.

 

*From an idea by Dr Robert Resnick, as publicised in The Success Principles’ by Jack Canfield, but also the result of Habit One – Be Proactive, by Stephen Covey.

Why you choose not to manage time better.

31 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by in Time Management, Uncategorized

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What is your attitude to ‘Time Management’?

When I ask that question, I am not referring to how you ‘see’ time management as a method, or technique, or as a great big pile of ‘new stuff to learn’. In my book I cover that in a chapter entitled ‘Why NOT Time Management’.

No, what I intend to address here is more about your attitude towards the things that have an effect on how they manage their time or, more specifically, whether you want to (learn to) manage your time.

Another question is “Why is it people don’t think they need to, or even can manage their time?” – rather than “Why they don’t want to?”

The truth is, everyone needs to manage their time better, but many just don’t want to be told that. The suggestion that they need instruction in time management openly implies that they possess an inability to do what in their minds ‘should come naturally’ and they don’t like that. They are happy to be trained in their job, how to cook, or how to drive a car, but to many people time management is seen as an innate skill, even an instinct, and “I won’t / don’t need to be told how to do that!”

Your ability – or inability – to manage your time is affected by a plethora of circumstances, but if we were to identify specific situations where people find time management challenging, we would discover that they all come under one or more of five headings.

  1. Some of them are outside your control and you accept that;
  2. Some are controllable, but you simply won’t try because you think they can’t be controlled;
  3. Some aren’t controllable, but you mistakenly try, anyway, and your failure teaches you to stop trying at all;
  4. Some are within your ability to control them, and you know it, but nevertheless you don’t even try;
  5. But most of all you love the ones you think you can control, and you are controlling them.

The objective of my book is to increase the number you can and do control (bring 2 and 4 under 5); to manage your attitude and response to the ones you can’t (improve your understanding of 1 and 3); and to stop wasting your time trying to control the impossible.

I encourage you to think about that, deeply. I firmly believe what you are about to read applies to everything in your life. There are two reasons for this.

First of all, we don’t live compartmental lives any more, thanks to the smartphone, but we nevertheless still insist on thinking that we do. But the main reason I think it applies across the work/personal divide is because of the choices we make.

We choose our work – we apply for a job, fill out the form, complete silly answers to odd questions, maybe do a presentation, certainly undergo the ordeal of an interview, and then we get it. And then the job changes, things happen we didn’t expect, systems change, people change, laws and practices change, the work gets harder and more prolific, we aren’t retrained and we get fed up with what we used to love.

Everything in our lives – what we do, how we get what we have, how we behave – can have time management principles applied to it if we are to be at our most effective. And as personal time management can be affected by many criteria, it means our whole lives are affected by the same criteria.

What are those criteria, then?

  • Expectation – we have duties but we also make personal commitments which give rise to expectations in others, just as we expect others to do what we require of them.
  • Communication and miscommunication – how and what we communicate affects our ability to perform, just as it affects others’ ability to perform for us.
  • Interruptions (phone people) – the immediacy of the mobile phone has inadvertently enabled people to think it’s okay to interrupt other peoples’ conversations.
  • Priorities – we have priorities, those around us have priorities, and no-one thinks that everything being a priority means that nothing is a priority.
  • New systems, protocols and procedures – when you change a system, the training and changes to the old system have a time impact that is rarely taken into account.
  • Expanding responsibilities – the more you take on, imposed or elective, requires improved ability to manage everything.
  • Lack of practical training – a lot of what people need to know is now just ‘expected’. For example, is your ability use a computer now just assumed?
  • Lack of meaningful support – other peoples’ busy-ness means that they aren’t available to help as much as they used to be.
  • Values misalignment – what you think is important and requires passion, may not be approached in the same way by someone whose interests and focus lie elsewhere.
  • Unexpected responsibilities – surprise, you have a new role (no training, support, extra time or money available, sorry).

The challenge is not that these things shouldn’t happen. It is that they are facts of life. A lot of what we think is an annoying obstacle to our lovely and peaceful existence is, in fact, perfectly normal, and it is our response to it rather than the event itself that causes our stress. We think we can’t manage things, but the truth is, as indicated in the first paragraphs of this section, we choose not to manage things when we could, or we fail to learn how to manage things because we don’t want to or don’t know how to.

Proactivity and Time Management Methods are the answer. Or an effective part of it, anyway.

Go learn.

Discipline leads to business greatness – ask Jim Collins.

24 Wednesday Jun 2015

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Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth…. That is why I recommend the Statue of Liberty be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)

At the moment I am considering the focused application of The Three Resolutions to business and young people, and part of the research includes reading of that classic on successful business, “Good to Great” by Jim Collins – that’s where I saw the Frankl quote and, like many I use, it struck a chord.

I’ve written before about how responsibility is an essential counter-weight to freedom, so won’t labour that point. The reason for this entry is the study of the chapter in Collins’ book which is headed by that quote.

It is about how important the application of discipline is within a successful company, but with the caveat that it is not system-, management- or hierarchy- imposed discipline that has made the difference in the ‘great’ companies. No, the success relates to self-discipline of the staff.

Very briefly, Collins discovered that great companies (defined as monumentally more successful than comparator companies, and over a sustained period) did a few things others didn’t, including getting the ‘right people on the bus’, deciding the vision AFTER doing that, then focussing on what the company could be best at (and ignoring what it could not).*

One point Collins made is that the discipline wasn’t something injected at the 4th point on his Greatness Process Diagram. It was something that already existed at each point.

The right people on the bus showed discipline. Finding the right vision required discipline. Deciding on, and focusing on the core business required discipline. And execution required discipline.

Discipline is an essential in all activity, indiscipline undermines your efforts. Freedom is a great thing to have, but it requires discipline if you are truly going to enjoy it. We expect discipline in those who serve us, so absolving ourselves of the duty to be disciplined (e.g. ‘because we have earned it’) is selfish, arrogant, irresponsible and disrespectful.

Referring back to Collins’ example, the great companies did not impose discipline, they employed disciplined people who had the freedom to work (in a disciplined way) within and around the business’s systems so that the objectives could be properly achieved. Those disciplined people designed the systems but weren’t then confined by them. They were guided, yes, but not tied down.

I often bemoaned the way that organisations I worked with placed the system over and above the purpose – I used the expression ‘process at the expense of purpose’ because of the times I perceived that a success was criticised because a procedure wasn’t followed to the letter – e.g. finding a missing child instead of filling out the forms first. Collins’ suggestion is that the objective is paramount (provided it is ethical, of course) and if a process prevents it, it is the process that is wrong, not the objective, and the authority of the disciplined manager was such that s/he could work outside the procedural box to get things done without having to spend time worrying about the administrative consequence.

But the emphatic point was always – discipline made it possible. Self-discipline, then systematic discipline, and then execution discipline. But in the final analysis, given the ability to work imaginatively – it was self-discipline that mattered most.

See. I told you so.

*I’m still reading it, that’s as far as I’ve got so far. But why wait?