Become a Successful Leader
Do you sometimes get the feeling that you are working 25 hours a day? Even your weekends are busy with the constant solution of work tasks, but the results obtained do not meet your expectations? In this article, we’ll talk about why this is happening and how you can achieve success without constant overload.
What do you think unites all successful people? According to our observations, they can achieve the desired results with the least expenditure of time, resources, and effort. In another way, this ability can be called efficiency.
Overwork, constant stress, and 24/7 work are not synonymous with high performance as a leader. Instead, the opposite is true. They show that the actions he performs are not sufficient enough.
How to make the work of a leader more effective?
All kinds of executive courses answer this question differently. Some directors focus on developing the right strategy, while others focus on motivation, and still, others teach the proper time management.
Performance has developed original training seminars for company leaders, which are dedicated to increasing efficiency.
Now we want to share our essential best practices in management with you and give some recommendations on how to make it more successful and efficient. To improve something, it is necessary to determine what factors generally decide what we want to change.
What does efficiency depend on?
In our opinion, efficiency depends, first of all, on what we are doing at the moment, at every single minute, that is, here and now. It is the actions that we take now that determine how successful we will be in the future, how quickly and easily we can achieve our goals and get the desired results.
Let’s look at this with a simple example. Imagine the journalists of a popular business magazine in your city asked you to write an article about your company and its services. You started writing the article with enthusiasm.
Soon, you needed to clarify the meaning of a word, you opened the electronic version of the explanatory dictionary to watch it, and at the same time saw on this page the announcement of a film that you have long wanted to go to.
You are interested, click on the link, found out when the show will take place, ordered tickets. We already wanted to return to writing the article, but then a friend with whom you have not seen for a very long time wrote on Skype and invited him to his birthday.
You cannot but answer him. Then you got a call on work issues that no one can solve without your approval.
So 5 hours passed. And instead of a finished article, you have one paragraph printed. It seems that you have been busy all this time. But can we say that you conducted it effectively? Have you been successful?
No. Because your goal – to write an article – was never achieved. You got distracted from the intended purpose and did something that did not contribute to its implementation. Thus, every day, many people literally “drown” in personal inefficiency.
Concentrate on your goals
Efficiency depends on how much we can concentrate on the goal we need and do those actions to lead us to its implementation. But to keep the focus on the desired destination, we need to direct our attention to it.
In our opinion, attention is an essential factor on which efficiency depends and the most valuable resource of a manager. Therefore, let’s talk about it in more detail.
Importance of attention
Unfortunately, many leaders underestimate the importance of attention and its impact on their performance. But in our life, only those areas to which we direct our attention develop. Imagine that you have a flower on your windowsill.
If you direct attention to it, you will understand precisely how you need to care for it: water, fertilize, tie up branches, or transplant. In this case, your flower will grow, bloom, and delight the eye. If you take away attention from him, you will certainly forget about the care he needs, and soon you will no longer have a flower.
The same applies to any area of life and business: as long as you direct your attention to it, it will develop and flourish. As soon as you stop doing this, more and more problems will begin to appear in it.
Set goals
Therefore, if you want to achieve good results in some areas, you need to set goals and focus on them. Most of the plans are not implemented precisely because our attention is diverted and switched to other things in the middle of the path to the destination.
There is an essential aspect of attention that needs to be clarified. It is essential to understand that the amount of our attention is limited! Someone has a little more of it, someone a little less, but each person has a specific limit of concentration.
Let’s imagine that it can be measured in arbitrary units of concentration. We can say that we direct our attention to everything that we do and what we think about.
If we are doing a familiar and straightforward business, it is enough to direct only a couple of attention units. For example, you can wash the dishes while talking to the children and thinking about where you will go with your family for the weekend.
At the same time, you will still get the desired result – clean dishes. The more critical and responsible business we have – for example, performing an acrobatic stunt at high altitude or negotiating with a foreign company about the possibility of cooperation – the more attention we need to direct to make it successful.
How this applies to doing business
Imagine you came to a business meeting to conclude a cooperation agreement with a new partner. This meeting is crucial for you, so you need to direct a lot of attention to talking with your partner. At this moment, you have, say, ten units of attention, and you direct all of them to communication.
Fifteen minutes after the start of the conversation, the chief accountant calls you and informs you that one of the clients has not yet transferred money for the goods purchased from you, and because of this, she cannot make the payments scheduled for today.
Naturally, while at a meeting, you cannot resolve this issue, so you promise to call the accountant back in 2 hours. But now you will remember that there is a problem at work that requires your participation. Consequently, whether you like it or not, this question already holds several units of your attention.
After another 10 minutes, your sister calls and wants to discuss with you a joint gift for your parents’ wedding anniversary. Of course, you explain that you are busy and call her later. But you still remember that your sister was upset because you could not devote time to her.
And the parents’ holiday is coming soon. You have about two units of attention left on this issue. And you can already give your interlocutor only half of the attention that this meeting requires. Consequently, you are already communicating with less efficiency than you could.
The office manager soon calls you, in a panic, he says that the wiring is damaged due to repairs in the next office, so now there is no light in the whole house and asks you what to do now. Naturally, being away from the office, you cannot change the situation.
But this force majeure will also take some of your attention. That’s all, after that the meeting can be ended and rescheduled for another time. You no longer have free attention units left to discuss the nuances of cooperation and effectively resolve emerging issues.
Reason for their weak efficiency
As a result, you spent almost an hour but did not achieve the original goal – to conclude a cooperation agreement. Your condition is far from ideal. Namely, you are irritated, hot-tempered, and ready to rip off someone’s head since many problems have fallen on you that need to be solved, and you have no idea what to tackle in the first place.
And your partner is not happy with this. That is, it will be problematic to schedule a new meeting with him. In this state, most managers spend every working day. And this is one of the main reasons for their weak efficiency.