Slow Down to Speed Up

Liz Bywater

• Editore: Business Expert Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781947441569
• Argomento: Betriebswirtschaft
• Categoria: Leadership

Slow Down to Speed Up: Lead, Succeed, and Thrive in a 24/7 World is a powerful new resource for leaders from the C-Suite to the front line. Filled with innovative new approaches, pragmatic tools, and real-life success stories, this book tackles the universal challenge of getting better, faster, more sustainable results in a world of nonstop demands and constant connectivity. This book provides the concepts and tools to help leaders successfully strategize, prioritize, lead with purpose, find balance, and gain a competitive edge in today's fast-paced business environment. Based on Dr. Liz Bywater's 20 years of professional experience helping individuals, teams, and organizations thrive, the book contains real-world illustrations of the challenges faced by today's business leaders. Beyond that, it pro­vides actionable guidance to help readers make the best decisions, create a proactive, future-focused work culture, catapult individual and team performance, and lead extraordinarily successful organizations.

PART ONE

Slow Down

CHAPTER 1

Racing to Results

What’s Wrong with Going Too Fast?

In today’s high velocity, always-on business environment, leaders like you are expected to make incredibly rapid decisions, work at a breakneck pace, and achieve exceptional results—all without losing a moment’s time. Fast, faster, and faster yet. That’s the mandate from customers, colleagues, managers, business partners, boards, investors, and any number of other important stakeholders. Yet no individual, team, or organization can consistently and sustainably do its best when working at a frenetic pace or under constant, intense pressure.

Decisiveness is an essential leadership trait. Hasty decision-making? Not so much. Getting results quickly is important. Yet the pursuit of short-term wins can undermine a focus on longer-term growth. And an excessive attention to the daily tasks can get in the way of creating long-term strategic impact.

My client, Randy, who leads a team of scientific writers and researchers, put it this way:

As a leader, my responsibility is basically to look at the business in two to three year increments. I know already where we are this year. It’s more about looking at the next three. But because the teams are focused so much on the day-to-day, I sometimes have the feeling I can’t look ahead, even speaking in months—one month, two months, three months out—because we can’t get out of our own way day to day. I frequently hear, “I have to get this done, I have to get it out the door.” And that’s all true, but let’s at least look at the next quarter. What will be complete by then, and what can we build on?

You don’t want to minimize what is happening day to day. The daily work has to get done and our teams are very focused on that. But my job is to look at the business and say, “Here’s where we are with our initiatives. Let’s take a look now a couple of months down the line. What can be developed and what shall we be thinking about now, so that we can talk to our clients about the additional challenges and opportunities on their horizon?”

That’s the focus of the work we did when you came in to help us. And it created a definite mindset shift. Rather than just focusing so much on the day or week ahead, we’re moving now to months and that’s been incredibly helpful to us. It’s not just about survival of the day, but much more about the vision for a particular client, and making sure we never take our eye off it.

There’s no doubt, it is important to be responsive to clients. And certainly, you need to get the immediate work done. Even beyond that, it’s good to be agile in today’s business climate, and that can require moving pretty fast. Just remember, if you move too quickly, too often—if you chronically rush to results, react rather than anticipate, focus on short-term activities but neglect the long-term view—you will miss important opportunities for growth.

You are also going to make mistakes—many of them repetitive, most of them avoidable. Sometimes these will be modest-enough mistakes. Ideally, you will learn from them and move on. But if you are in the habit of continually going too fast, you will make the kind of major mistakes that put you, your company, customers, and investors at risk. These mistakes may require millions of dollars to remedy. They may also cost you valued clients, talent, revenue, and reputation.

There is a solution, rest assured, and it’s right at your fingertips. It’s a matter of shifting your balance. Adjust your focus from near-term actions to the longer-term, strategic view. Be more proactive than reactive. Slow down to learn from past successes and failures. Refuse to become embroiled in daily fire-fighting. Shift the balance and you will find it so much easier to advance while preventing mistakes large and small.

What’s Wrong with Moving Too Fast?

When leaders move too quickly, they often pay a steep price.

My client, Dianne, knows this all too well. Not long ago, Dianne nearly undermined an opportunity to win the largest and most rewarding piece of work she’d proposed in 30 years. Although a recognized expert in her field, with a vast portfolio of successful projects, Dianne was at a critical moment when she came to ask for my help. She needed my strategic guidance to help her salvage this landmark project. Winning this work would have immediate rewards and also create a model for new work with clients across the country.

Dianne’s project was in jeopardy because she was moving too fast. Amid an extremely busy schedule and facing a rapidly approaching deadline, Dianne had made some serious mistakes: She’d invited the wrong partner to collaborate on her project, and then inadvertently handed him the reins. She’d arranged a call with her buyer to discuss objectives and options rather than scheduling time with him, in person, to address his questions and concerns. She’d accepted unrealistic client deadlines on an array of projects and now was under pressure to get too much done in too little time. She felt overwhelmed and out of control. And it was beginning to take a toll. Her oversights and missteps nearly caused her to lose control of this project. She sought my help in a state of alarm, sensing that she was about to blow up the biggest deal of her life.

As Dianne and I began our work, it quickly became apparent to me just how much she had in common with the Fortune 500 executives I advise every day. Like them, and perhaps like you, she consistently had more to do than time in which to do it. She had a penchant for taking on too much. She rarely set limits and she almost never said no. She was overworked, over-scheduled, and often overwhelmed.

Dianne had long attempted to wrestle the intense demands of a growing business by running just a little faster, sleeping just a little less, juggling just a bit more, and always at her own expense. She rarely felt fully in charge of her time or her business. And yet, all the while, she had a palpable desire to be more effective as she grew her company, helped her customers in new and transformational ways, and pursued her legacy of leaving a deep and lasting impact on the world.

This was a real dilemma. If she kept going as she had been, incredibly busy, overcommitted, often stretched to the limits, her business would stagnate and ultimately decline. She would remain mired in mid-level projects that paid far too little for the value she brought. Her clients would lose faith in her and her formerly stellar reputation would spiral downward. In fact, some clients had begun to express concern about Dianne’s lateness to appointments and inconsistency in meeting deadlines. If things didn’t improve quickly, Dianne’s project would slip through her fingers. Her vision would remain elusive, her legacy unfulfilled.

In my work with Dianne and hundreds of other leaders, I’ve seen the same dynamic time and time again. In a well-intended effort to get rapid results in a fast-paced world, leaders rush to decisions, say yes too often, and favor the short-term. They move too quickly and make preventable mistakes. Results suffer, stress mounts, and success remains out of reach.

So Many Decisions...

Today’s leaders make an astonishing number of decisions every day—decisions that require time for thoughtful reflection. Yet, if you are like many business leaders, you find yourself making important decisions on the fly, often without enough time for thorough consideration or requisite input from others. It’s an unfortunate dynamic, and it can lead directly to failure.

My client, Tina, a seasoned executive at a multinational health care company, has seen this firsthand. She’s lived through a multiple examples of the mistakes that resulted from rushed decisions and inadequate stakeholder.

Several years ago, Tina was asked to salvage a major initiative on the verge of collapse. It was an important project, involving the development of a new IT system to help the company process critical safety data for the FDA. By the time Tina was brought in to help, this key initiative was already a year behind schedule.

The problem was this: To be properly implemented, developers of the new system required input from stakeholders across multiple functions. It was an essential step in getting the system to function properly. But in an effort to hit an overly aggressive deadline, the project had been hurried along. And while things moved along well enough at first, significant problems arose over time. With the lack of communication and coordination, mistakes were made and relationships became strained. Major problems were overlooked. Eventually, the entire system had to be rebuilt from the bottom up. It required an additional year and $2 million to finally arrive at a solution that worked. Time had been wasted, money squandered, and collaborations strained. Yet it had all been quite preventable. A little upfront time for key conversations would have made all the difference.

...So Little Time

It has been estimated that, on average, each of us makes 3,500 decisions a day. Every one of these decisions, large and small, takes up mental energy, leading to cognitive fatigue and impacting effectiveness. The more decisions we make, the more depleted we become, and the less adept at making outstanding choices.

Even something that seems straightforward—responding to e-mail—requires an array of decisions, such as:

• Should I reply by e-mail, or pick up the phone, or walk down the hall for a face-to-face conversation?

• Should I send my reply now or later?

• How many people should be copied?

• How much background must I provide?

• Do I add a warm greeting to soften the tone?

• Should I include a comprehensive view or just provide the highlights ...