To be a strategic business person, there are certain characteristics you should strive to minimize or, if at all possible, eliminate from your daily activities. Those characteristics you should avoid are:
• Micromanager
• Perfectionist
• Control freak
• Jack-of-all trades
• Workaholic
• Dictator/screamer
• I’ll do-it-myself martyr
• Hands-on technician
All of those should be self-explanatory, so, to save time and space, I will not define them.
Take a few moments and reflect on each of the characteristics above and then ask yourself which ones best describe you. Now rank on a scale of one to 10, with one being least and 10 being highest, where you are with each of these.
Next, make a commitment, starting with the highest ranked characteristics, to start working on improving them. Most business people start with the one they feel they can be most effective at improving and then work their way down their list. Once you have significantly improved on the one you can quickly improve the most, then concentrate on the next one and continue down the list until you have improved on all of them.
If you feel like you can work on multiple characteristics at the same time, then go ahead and try. However, you should monitor your progress, and if you’re not progressing on each one as much as you’d like, then change your strategy to focus on the ones you can improve the quickest and then work on the remaining ones in the order you feel will yield the greatest results.
If you have identified yourself as not being as strategic as you need to be, and then you set a goal to becoming strategic, you are already ahead of most business people. You have taken that first step to identifying where you can make significant improvements.
Most business people feel they need to focus only on the task needed to be done at the present time. As a result, they are always busy being busy and never take time to look at the big picture. They need to take the time to ask themselves:
• Are there any symptomatic, recurring activities that happen often enough that they should be handled in a systematic manner and can be delegated to someone else?
• Is there anyone in my organization whose responsibilities already include the same or similar methods to accomplish?
• If there is, why have I not delegated the responsibility to them?
• If not, is there anyone in my organization that has the ability to learn how to develop and/or utilize a systematic method to handling the task?
• If I have no one person in my organization I can delegate to, can the system be broken to subsets that multiple people can be trained to perform, and can a coordinator direct the tasks when they occur to the properly trained person needed?
• Why am I reluctant to delegate to others?
• Is (are)the reason(s) one or more of the above characteristics?
• What can I do today to start making any needed changes?
These are just a few of the questions you should ask yourself. All of the answers you need to become are inside yourself if you take the time to think of the right questions to discover them.
The real key to addressing your tendencies to engage in activities that are the opposite of being strategic, as noted earlier in this column, is developing a proactive approach where you take the necessary time to think strategically and spend less time being tactical. It is the foundation of S.T.O.P. – Strategic Time Out Process.
If you are not already engaging in a S.T.O.P. system, why not? If you are and you are not seeing the results you anticipated, you need to ask yourself what adjustments need to be made in your systems that will result in additional improvement.
More food for thought - “All achievements require time.” David Joseph Schwartz, American motivation writer and coach, 1927 – 1987.
Rick Brines is owner of The Growth Coach of Chattanooga. He can be reached at 423-886-6095 or R.Brines@TheGrowthCoach.com.