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Asking the Right Questions to Lead Your Team to Success

Nov 20, 2022 | Business Growth, Business Owners, Goal Setting, Leadership, Strategic Planning, Success, Uncategorized

Are you asking the right question to lead your team to success?

What Really Matters Most in life, leadership, and organizational development?

As we prepare to move into the coming year, let’s take a deep dive into this question. Essentially is it a question? Or is it a matter of focus? I believe it’s both.

In order to focus on your life, leadership, and organization, you must first address “What Really Matters Most?” as a question. To transform it from a question to a focus, you must assess where you are now compared with where you want to be.

Rather than reacting to past results and current circumstances, focus on “what really matters most” requires an awareness of and commitment to your vision and purpose. As the saying from Proverbs goes “without a vision, people perish.” There is no pragmatic way to determine how to spend our time, effort, energy and resources without answering this question.

Without focus, you become a victim of current achievements, constantly reworking to compensate for unintended outcomes. We must do some deep work to design our vision.

Today’s leaders face unprecedented positive and negative forces on organizational management. These forces of change present special challenges to leadership and to the workforce. To become a results-driven team, you need extreme clarity on your vision, purpose, and strategy communicated to all involved in supporting its execution. Organizational performance measurably improves as everyone develops an absolute focus on results. This companywide focus on ‘what really matters most’ allows all members to consistently create, develop, and track the results in tandem.

You also need to develop your leadership team, creating programs that give them tools to change their thinking and behavior to achieve sustainable results, growth, and profitability. By developing your people into self-leaders, they will grow and move forward to answer “What Really Matters Most” for your business.

Future looking leaders will use the competitive edge found in developing self-leadership in employees at all levels of the company. Your people are the ones to make it happen. Hence the need for clarity, focus, and a real understanding of “What Really Matters Most” at all levels. Do you have a winning strategy to get you to What Really Matters Most?  

What is the Relationship Between Activity and Results?

May 11, 2021 | Business Owners, CEOs, Leadership Development, Productivity

Many people are running around crazy busy but are not really effective or productive. Being productive and producing amazing results requires a relentless focus on what really matters most in the organization. Productivity is really all about doing the right things, for the right reasons, and doing them in order of priority.

You will achieve positive results by doing the things that really matter most in your business and getting the right people, the A players, in the right positions to achieve your goals.  Achievement is simply the result of doing the “right things” consistently over a sustained period of time. Doing the “right things” is a direct result of your personal choice. Your future is built on the choices you make, day by day, moment by moment. Every one of those choices should be about moving you closer to your overarching goals.

When you spend your time doing the right things and doing them in order of priority, you can dramatically increase your productivity! How do most people today improve their productivity? They put in more and more hours! Working longer and harder is never the right answer because it only depletes our energy and produces little, real, or impactful results.

Time is the limiting factor – it is the scarcest resource- totally irreplaceable.

This challenging new normal is going to quickly weed out the weak and ineffective organizations and doing the right things matters more now than ever before.

As a leader or manager in your organization being productive is more about:

Planning and Goal Setting – Think Time

Communicating your goals and plans.

Gaining commitment from your team to execute your goals

Relationship Building

Delegation and Follow-up

Coaching and Training

Personal Development

Preparation and Prevention

Reporting, tracking & special projects.

My favorite quote from Peter Drucker is “There’s nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” I love this quote because I have seen people on a daily basis, in organizations I work with, being efficient doing things they should not be doing at all.  You do not have to handle every crisis, interruption, or inbox item. Be very, very selective about what you are giving your time and attention to.  Say yes to the right things and no to everything else.

The shift begins when you start focusing on “what really matters most” which is effective operations and clear strategy. 

Peter Drucker said over and over again “Don’t confuse motion with progress.” Just because you are doing things all day long does not mean that you are moving the needle any further. When in doubt, ask your self Peter Drucker’s question, “What can I and only I do, that if done well, will make a real difference?”  It is one of the best of all questions for achieving personal effectiveness. What can you, and only you do, that if done well, can make a real difference?

For more information, download this Getting Results Through Others Brochure – Click Here.

The Secret to Getting More Done

Mar 22, 2021 | Business Owners, CEOs, Productivity, Success

A principle that operates in every area of our life and business and one that can help you become more effective is the 80/20 Pareto Principle. The 80/20 Rule is one of the most important and helpful concepts of all time. It is also called the Pareto Principle after its founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who first discovered it in the early 1800’s.

What it means is that approximately 20% of the ACTIVITIES you spend your time, effort, energy and resources on will produce 80% of your RESULTS. We call those top 20% of activities your High Payoff Activities or Wealth Creating Activities. Twenty percent of your efforts will produce eighty percent of your results.

On the other hand, 80% of the activities that you spend your time, effort, energy and resources on are producing only 20% of the results! We call them Low Payoff Activities. These low payoff activities will make little if any impact on your goals and your results. This means that only a small portion of your activities are vital and those contribute the most towards you goals and accomplishments.  This implies there may be just a handful of activities, perhaps only 2, 3 or 4 activities that are producing 80% of the results you currently experience! Focus on the 20% activities that drive your results. Focus on those 20% of activities that make the greatest impact to unlock higher productivity, greater profits and rewards in your business and personal life. You should spend 80 percent of your time doing the things that you do best. Typically, this means that if you have a list of 10 items to do, two of those items will turn out to be worth as much or more than the other eight items put together.       

The bottom line is we all have the same 24 hours in a day to accomplish our goals.  As business owners you must constantly ask: what is the highest and best use of my time right now.  Am I working on the highest payoff activity I can?

Critical to your success is learning to say no to any activities, to anything that is not really a good use of your time.  Constantly ask what really matters most in my organization. Time is going to pass anyway so you may as well make the best use of it.

We all have the same 168 hours in the week to work with. What happens is we get enslaved in the 80% of the activities that are only producing 20% of the results. We spend 80 percent of our time doing unproductive and meaningless things, and by the end of the day we feel exhausted, frustrated, and angry.

Wasted time! Wasted effort! Wasted energy! Wasted resources!
Stop wasting your precious time right now and start applying the 80/20 rule to your business by spending your time, effort, energy and vital resources on those HPA’s that are going to return tremendous investment back to you.

It’s not the hours you put in that count; it’s what you put in the hours.

 

 

Clarity, Focus and Results are Three Keys to Success

Jan 12, 2021 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Strategic Planning

As I mentioned last week, I always talk about 3 words being the key to success in any endeavor in life. The 3 words are clarity, focus and results.  

Clarity – Do you have extreme clarity on your goals for 2021?  I find far too many people have clarity around what they don’t want in business and in their personal life rather than what they really want or would like their future to look like. Do you really know exactly what you want to achieve? What really matters most in your life and business?  Hazy goals produce hazy results at best. SMART goals produce the results you want.  

Focus– Goals are meant to provide focus and direction.  This also means you should only have a few really important and significant goals.  How many things can you actually focus on at one time?  The more goals you have, the less focus you have.  My favorite quote from Paul J. Meyer, founder of Success Motivation Institute, is, “If you aren’t making the progress you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals aren’t clearly defined.” Over the years this has proven so true in my life and the lives of my clients. Focus is so important because you will only achieve those goals on which you are committed to take action.

Paul J. Meyer also said, “Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon must inevitably come to pass.” Everything in that statement will exponentially take your power to focus to a new level.

What this means is you will have a crystal-clear strategy, a system and action steps to execute your goals. You will have a daily routine and daily habits to drive you toward your goals.  

Results – Results are all about your system.  The goal is the end-result you want to achieve personally and professionally.  Goal setting is easy – ask anybody! To really achieve an important goal; however, it is critical to have a system.  This is why you need software and  systems to drive your strategy and your goals program into the future.

You can’t keep doing what you’ve always done and expect different results.  You must identify the changes you will make in the future to achieve your goals.  John Dryden said, “We first make our habits and then our habits make us.”  Your daily routine and rituals, your daily huddles with team members and extreme focus on high payoff activities are the keystone building blocks of your personal and professional life. Putting these systems in place will give you the results you want.

I hope these ideas and concepts will spark some interest in you having your best year yet in 2021. We have the tools, systems and software to make your 2021 goals a reality. Let us know how we can help you by emailing me at michael@achievable.com.

 

 

How to Make Next Year Your Best Year Ever

Nov 18, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Strategic Planning

First, you need to define what “Best Year Ever” means to you; you have to know what you want in order to achieve it. Your ability to get crystal clear about what a successful year looks like will help you make the leap towards that ideal year.

What is your personal strategic plan for your life next year? You can follow these three simple steps to make sure you have the best year ever in 2021.

Step 1 – Be Extremely Clear On What You What. Know what you really want in life and in your business. Know what goals and outcomes you would like to achieve by the end of next year and know exactly what you don’t want. Create a list of personal goals and business goals for the next 12 months. The fact of life is none of us is going to live forever and we don’t know when our number is up so it is so important to get clarity around what is most important for us to achieve. We need to remember to create goals for personal health and well-being and spend more time on our most important relationships. You should also pursue that special hobby or interest you have been putting off. Take time out of your busy schedule before January rolls in to recharge, relax, and reenergize with powerful and meaningful goals for next year. Get the pen to the paper right now and start mapping out your future.

Step 2. Review & Execute. After you create your goals schedule an appointment with yourself every week to work on the action steps to move your goals forward. Our lives are built on the foundation of these six major areas of our wheel of life: Family & Home, Financial & Career, Mental & Educational, Physical & Health, Social & Cultural, and Spiritual & Ethical. These areas are the pillars that you will build a totally integrated life on. Make sure you are spending at least one hour a week in your plan of action. Your personal plan of action is the master plan for the rest of your life. Your planner should contain a master list of priority business and personal goals. The world is infested with distractions and noise designed to take us off our goals program and put us on someone else’s goals program which is why we have to continue to be intentional about setting aside time to work in our plan of action on a weekly basis.

Step 3. Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing. Develop a relentless focus on what really matters most, what is most important and significant in your personal and professional life by setting up ironclad boundaries so you are not interrupted with the tyranny of the urgent which usually isn’t really important. Focus on what you want and not on what you don’t want. For everything that is not a high payoff activity for you – figure out a way to simplify, eliminate, delegate or outsource the activity. Take massive action on your goals – make this a daily habit.

Remember, “It’s hard by the yard, but it’s a cinch by the inch.” Concentrate daily upon doing the little things that eventually will help you accomplish the big things. You create and maintain an environment that is conducive to ongoing motivation. Create a work environment that energizes you and always surround yourself with positive, goal-directed, self-motivated people. It is true what they say – you are the company you keep.

The Right Questions Lead You to the Right Vision

Nov 10, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Strategic Planning, Success

How has your vision changed for your business and personal life over the past few months? Have you taken the time to think about how the current pandemic and economic turmoil has impacted this vision? Is it the same as it was before or completely different? Hellen Keller once said “The only thing worse than being blind is having no vision.” Even though we cannot completely know what will happen tomorrow or even five minutes from now, it is important to have a detailed image in our minds of what we want to achieve in the long-term. This may change and this is ok, too. But we must always be able to imagine how achieving our goals will look to us and the world around us. We might also imagine how it might feel to achieve those goals and how we might benefit the people in our communities.

A business vision is a crystal-clear image of the future we wish to create. It describes what our company aspires to be and how the world could be impacted, hopefully positively, by our company’s actions. If we want to consistently move toward our vision, we must know what it is, inside and out. We can ask ourselves questions to better understand this vision and in doing so, we can gain clarity on how to achieve it.

There are two main types of questions we can ask, inward questions and outward questions. Inward questions allow us to discover information about ourselves and our business. Some examples of inward questions include:

What do we do best?

 What are our strengths?

What is an ideal organization and how can we be that organization?

How do we want to influence the world around us?

Outward questions lead us to uncover information about our industry and customers. Some examples include:

How is our industry changing?

What is our competition doing in response to market changes?

What are we hearing from customers about their needs?

If you answer these questions you will have a solid jumpstart on developing a vision for your business that takes into account today’s reality and consumer needs. If you want to continue building this vision and begin designing a strategy to achieve it, join the FAST TRACK Challenge beginning November 16th. Click Here for more information.