Posts Tagged ‘productivity’
The Week in Tweets April 20 2012 no responses
Every week, I share a recap of some of the best things I’ve seen on Twitter. This week, I’m highlighting tweets and links on our stressful relationship with our smartphones, whether CEOs deserve privacy, the importance of listening, developing your leadership skills and a story of a great comeback.
3 Tips for Pacing Your Work for Lasting Success February 14 2012 2 responses
There was a vastly underrated road trip movie last year starring Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr. called “Due Date.” Downey plays an uptight businessman and Galifianakis plays a goofy but lovable stoner. They take a cross-country trip together. Hilarity ensues.
Whenever Downey’s character would explode in rage, Galifianakis’ character would say, “Hey, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.” It’s one of my favorite catchphrases ever. Not sure why I love it so much. Part of it was Galifianakis’ delivery, I guess. Part of it is the rhyme. The biggest reason it sticks with me is because I think it’s a great mantra for most leaders today.
Here’s my evidence for that. For the last seven years, I’ve run 360-degree surveys and self-assessments based on the leadership model in “The Next Level” with thousands of executives and managers. The lowest-rated item across that group for the past seven years has been: “Pace(s) myself/himself/herself by building in regular breaks from work.”
In the 360 surveys, the colleagues usually rate the leaders low on that behavior, and the leaders’ self-assessments are even lower than those of their colleagues. By the way, the scores have gotten lower every year.
What’s going on? Here’s what I see.
“I Wouldn’t Want to Be You” October 24 2011 no responses
Several months ago, I was in a coaching conversation with a “go to person” leader about the results of her 360 degree feedback from colleagues. Her highest rated behaviors were a strong mix of items that focus on getting results and items that focus on building relationships. In my experience, leaders who have high scores in both of those broad areas – results and relationships – are the ones who are very effective over the long run. They get stuff done without leaving a lot of damaged people in their wake.
So far, so good. Then we turned our attention to her lowest rated behaviors. As is the case with most “go to people”, her lowest rated behaviors were a combination of items related to pacing herself, balancing her priorities, giving her team space to execute and achieving results through others rather than by herself. When I asked her what her take was on the mix of results, she said something I hadn’t heard before.
She said, “I’m afraid that the people on my team are looking at me and saying, ‘I wouldn’t want to be you.’”
The Fine Art of GSD: How to Get Stuff Done in a Large Organization May 16 2011 2 responses
One of the highest compliments that can be paid in our house is that someone “GSDs.” While we have a somewhat colorful definition of what GSD means, the polite way to explain it is that it stands for Gets Stuff Done.
When you think about it, getting stuff done is a big part of life. One of the reasons that a lot of leaders and would be leaders are frustrated with their organizations is that it’s hard to get stuff done. Go up against the immovable object too many times and you eventually quit trying. It’s what Martin Seligman, the founding father of the positive psychology movement, calls learned helplessness.
I see this a lot in my coaching work. Even very senior leaders end up talking about “they” – as in “They will never let us do that.” I recently worked with the senior leadership team and some high potential leaders of a client company to identify ways they could streamline their operations to scale their growing business. Prior to the meeting, three areas of opportunities were identified. We brainstormed potential solutions for each opportunity and sorted those out using the criteria of degree of difficulty and likelihood of making a difference. There were a number of ideas that were deemed very likely to make a difference but relatively difficult to do. Almost all of those ideas required influencing or convincing “them” (in this case, staff at the corporate headquarters) to do something different. Just a few months later, I’m happy to see my client leaders using their influencing skills to encourage their corporate counterparts to make changes. They’re getting stuff done.
Someone else who has figured out how to get stuff done is a manager at Pfizer named Jordan Cohen. As recently reported in the Financial Times, Cohen successfully convinced the senior leaders at his company to adopt an initiative he dreamed up called PfizerWorks. Like a lot of people at his level, Cohen noticed that he was spending a good part of his time on low-value-added work like compiling spreadsheets or tweaking PowerPoint decks. His big idea was to build a network of low-cost suppliers to do that work instead so the managers and leaders at Pfizer could spend more time doing the things that only they could do. In the first year of his program, 60,000 hours of employee time were freed up for higher value work.
How did he do it? The FT article provides some answers. Here’s my quick hit list for Getting Stuff Done based on what Cohen did and my own experience in working with clients who know how to do it:
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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