If you’re like many leaders, you’re spending a lot of your time, energy, and money in three main areas that are holding you back from doing your best to lead people and achieve success:
FIREFIGHTING 🧯
Managing emergencies, reacting to unexpected problems, trying to quickly resolve symptoms with a patchwork of temporary and often ineffective solutions, and addressing the same issues repeatedly. Focusing on short-term wins and throwing a lot of time, money, and energy at the urgent issue in front of us, leading people to work in continuous distress, make poor choices, underperform, and eventually burn out. All the while, more fires blaze around us.
THINGS I SHOULD NOT BE DOING 🙅♂️
Things that add value to the organization but are not the best investment of our individual resources. Things we could delegate so we can invest our time and energy in ways that generate more significant outcomes for our given role. Leaders often have a long list of things they do that are not the best use of their leadership hours.
THINGS NO ONE SHOULD BE DOING 📵
Resource wasters. The things that add little to no value to our lives or the organization. Scrolling mindlessly through social media, printing and filing documents that no one ever looks at, and complaining are examples of areas we spend our resources with little to no return.
To maximize our effectiveness, to do and live our best, we need to break away from inefficient uses of our resources, which means making more:
WISE INVESTMENTS 🦉
Proactive things that help prevent problems, realize opportunities, and create an improved future. They may be “fire prevention activities,” which seek to address the root cause of a problem, or other activities that help develop new ideas, capacity, and opportunities for success.
WISE INVESTMENTS FOR LEADERS 😊
Finding the root cause of a problem
Developing strategy
Setting goals
Delegating
Building relationships, filling buckets
Coaching
Facilitating conversations
Creating and communicating expectations
Gathering data
Analyzing data
Creating agendas
Monitoring and discussing results
Investing in good and top performers
Giving feedback
Celebrating success
Thinking
Learning
Being coached
Communicating strategy
Understanding needs
Resting and recharging
Listening
Improving your relationship with yourself
Planning communication
Discussions with a purpose
Doing things that bring you joy
Looking to better understand how to make wise investments of your resources? Check out Why Are We Stuck? to gain insight into why we have a hard time breaking the cycle.