610-793-6609 michael@achievable.com

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.

Getting Results Through Others By Communicating More Effectively

May 4, 2021 | Leadership, Leadership Development, Productivity, Success

Probably the number one challenge for companies that I have found through working with my is  communicating effectively on a consistent basis. We have more ways to communicate than ever before in our history and yet in most cases do a terrible job at it. Many people in business communicate but few truly connect or are understood which leads to a lot of mutual mystification. For this reason, I want to review some way that we can communicate more effectively.  

Let’s look at a couple of areas:

The first area is communication factors.  Our communication consists of 3 factors: the words we use, the tone and inflection of those words and body language which includes facial expressions. Profesor Albert Mehrabian of the University of California in Los Angeles studied communicated and found that of our total communication message the words represent only 7%, the tonality is 38% and our body language is 55%. Right here we can see lots of ways for our communication may be misunderstood.

You can also use other models, such as the DISC model to understand communication styles. DISC is the universal language of observable human behavior. It creates a report that tells the assessment taker HOW they do what they do. One of the great values behind the DISC model is you can take an assessment and in 10 minutes identify your style and you can also learn the style of everyone on your team. Knowing each others’ communication style and adapting your style to communicate better is an excellent way to improve the communication of your team.

There are also barriers to Effective Communication that we must be aware of and seek to overcome. The first is attitude. The truth is people do things for their reasons, not ours, so we have to be in tune to their attitudes and values. Another is lack of trust – trust is earned and not bestowed, so it is important to develop a trusting relationship with the people we are communicating with in the workplace and every area of our lives.  The third is distractions – internal and external. External distractions surround us daily such as people, notifications on social media or e-mail, background noise. Internal distractions are our head trash, internal dialogue and/or lack of interest. We must seek to eliminate distractions whenever possible. Our preconceived thoughts and ideas can also negatively impact communication. These can include personal prejudices, perceptions, and personality traits. As we increase our own self-awareness, we can more easily identify which personal factors may be inhibiting our communication with others.  Lack of communication skill is another issue. Most people don’t really know how to connect and listen, it is important to study communication styles and practice effective communication.  Lack of concentration can cause us to miss important information and talking too much means we are not listening. Having an “I” focus is another major barrier to communication. When you are all about you and not the other person, you are not REALLY hearing what they are saying.

A Few Commandments of Good Communication

  1. Develop trust and credibility. It’s not automatically given; it must be earned. Authentic sincerity helps to create an atmosphere of trust.
  2. Effective communicators use the 5 C’s in their message: Clear, Complete, Concise, Concrete, and Correct.
  3. Every perspective is a perspective.
  4. What we hear and what we see depends largely on what we are listening and looking for.
  5. Openly communicate more than you have to or need to. Make it your top priority. Say what you mean. Say exactly what you mean.

The real question is: How do you know if you are successful at communicating? 

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.

 

 

Communicating Effectively with Your Remote Teams

May 28, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Leadership, Leadership Development, Productivity

The way we live and do business has changed dramatically as a result of the Covid-19 crisis. To prevent the spread of the virus, we have been practicing social-isolation. As business leaders we have been forced to lay-off some of our people or decrease their hours and I encourage all of us to stay in contact with those employees and provide assistance whenever we can. Those who are able to still work from home are challenged to navigate through the inundation of e-mails and video-calls. Parents working from home are struggling to find some sense of balance as they juggle their roles as homeschool teacher, parent, and employee. We are all trying to figure this out and social isolation is not making it any easier because human welfare relies on interdependence. We need to find a way to truly stay connected to each other despite the upheaval. The way we do this is by communicating with people in the language they understand.

For the purpose of this post, I want to focus on communicating with your teams working from home. Working from home is a huge transition for teams used to office life, and your communication might be suffering. More than ever before, it is critical that you are aware of your own communication style and the communication style of your team members. The Working From Home Report is a new assessment tool developed by TTI SI that will give you and your team the gift of self-understanding. Inside the report, you’ll find: personalized work from home tips and direction on how to communicate with your team when everyone is working from home. I’m offering this assessment tool to you and your team for FREE!

Productivity increases by 20-25% in organizations with connected employees, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. Give your team the boost they need right now with the Working From Home Report by improving communication between everyone. Click HERE to complete the assessment now and then share the link with your team!

5 Ways to Eliminate Time Wasting

May 28, 2020 | Business Owners, CEOs, Motivation, Productivity, Strategic Planning

5 Ways to Eliminate Time Wasting           

How often do we excuse unaccomplished goals with the statement “I don’t have time?” I believe that we all have the time to achieve everything we want in life and business if we focus more on what really matters most – high payoff activities. You want to spend time doing the right thing in the right way at the right time and for the right reasons. As business leaders some high payoff activities include personal development, building a high performing leadership team, providing strategic direction, goal setting and planning with your team, tracking results, and managing capital. The reality is that we get so caught up in daily operations and navigating through crises that we put off these high payoff activities for when we have time – and the time never comes.

You can apply the S.E.D.O test to all organizational tasks, activities and processes and refocus your attention on the high payoff activities. S.E.D.O. stands for Simplify – Eliminate – Delegate – Outsource. And 5th test, Automate, has been recently added to remind us that technology can help us handle repetitive tasks without wasting our time and energy.

Simplify  – What task, activity, or process can be simplified, streamlined, consolidated or rearranged?

Eliminate – What task, activity, or process that no longer has value to the organization can be eliminated?

Delegate – What task can be delegated to other team members?

Outsource – What task, process, or project are you currently doing that is not part of the core of your business? How can you outsource it?

Automate- Create systems and processes to handle repetitive tasks.

When you spend your time on high payoff activities, you will be more productive. You will have more energy. Your people will be more engaged, and you will increase your opportunities to achieve your overall vision and mission with less stress. Not only will you have time to do what you want in life and in business but you will be happier too!

Click here to download the S.E.D.O tool for free.

 

 

How Do We Cultivate the Necessary Knowledge to Inspire Change?

Feb 25, 2020 | Business Owners, CEOs, Ethical Leadership, Happiness, Leadership, Leadership Development, Productivity, Success

“Knowledge is power” is a phrase credited to Francis Bacon in his Meditationes Sacrae, published in 1597.

Since then, it has been quoted by many, including Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Jefferson, and debated by others who argue that knowledge is not enough to drive action or create change. I would have to say that I agree with both sides.

Lifelong learning is one of the core values of my company, Achievement Unlimited, Inc., and also one of my own personal values. So, yes, I believe that knowledge is power because it is the primary catalyst for action and change. The question we must ask, though, is how do we cultivate the necessary knowledge to inspire change, and once attained, how do we turn that knowledge into action?

I have coached many business owners, C-level executives, and organizational leaders, departments, and teams in goal-setting and strategic planning. Goals and plans are crucial to establish direction and define achievement and success. My experience and most research on the topic show, however, that most of even the best plans fail to be executed.

Why?

Depending on who you ask, there may be different reasons why business leaders, teams, and individuals fail to meet their goals, but I have come to believe it boils down to one reason – thinking. People struggle to meet their goals because they are repeating patterns of thought that stop them from achieving, succeeding, or even just being happy.

The workshop I facilitated last week with my mentor, Peter Demarest of Axiogenics, LLC, created awareness for its participants of how their own personal and individual ways of thinking are stopping them from achieving what really matters most to them in life and in business. We learned that human beings function at their “best” only 5-15 percent of the time. This is because people are stuck in ways of thinking that are counterproductive to achieving what they truly want.

Peter wrote posts for “Tuesdays with Michael” over the past three weeks that highlighted some of the core concepts we discussed in the workshop, including The Central Question, Valuegenic Self-Leadership, and Neuro-axiology, and he dove into greater detail during the workshop about what these mean and how they apply to each individual member of the group.

Each participant took the VQ Profile assessment before coming to the workshop and received their First Steps VQ Assessment Report, which provided them with an explanation of their greatest cognitive asset and two of their most dominant cognitive biases that have limited them in their journeys in business and in life.

Eyes lit up at the revelations made, and the participants discussed how accurate the reports were. A few members shared that they read their reports to their significant others, who responded in agreement to the report. Knowledge of this information is critical in defining the actions needed to break through our limiting beliefs, and we are often very unaware of why we do the things we do that bring us great distress and stop us from realizing our full potential.

This goes back to my beginning point that “knowledge is power” but it cannot stop there. Awareness is the first step, and then the real work begins. Peter gave each participant questions they can ask themselves to help them utilize their cognitive asset to overcome their cognitive biases and create a breakthrough. One participant wrote that the workshop provided “fantastic insight and valuable steps to become a better leader.”

Are you a business owner or C-Level executive who is tired of hitting a wall while striving to achieve your business and personal goals? Are you ready to make the changes necessary to finally achieve what you want with less stress and greater personal fulfillment? The next Self-Leadership Breakthrough is scheduled for Wednesday, March 18 and begins at 8:30 AM. Click here to register.