How do you spend your time? | Issue #201
How should you spend your valuable time to be a successful CEO?
Are you bogged down in the relentless grind of running your business? Feeling there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done? Wondering how any CEO gets time to look at the bigger picture? Let alone plan for the future? You’re not alone.
We see this in the vast majority of CEOs that we coach. Only the other day, I was speaking to a CEO who told me he didn’t have time to look after his health. That’s bad! It should never get that far. We analysed his diary, looking at where he spent his time. It didn’t take long to see that he was spending a mere 20% of his time on things that only he could do. The rest of it could be managed by someone else.
Time management is an art. Like many things, it takes focus and discipline. But it’s vital to stop you from becoming the bottleneck in your business. You owe it to your company to get a grip. If you worked fewer hours in the business, it would likely grow faster.
How to Design a Conducive Culture for the Modern Workplace with Gustavo Razzetti
How can you help your team to do their best work? By building a conducive culture that allows them to thrive. Gustavo discusses his new book, Remote Not Distant, which takes the concept of deliberately designing a culture and applying it to a new normal hybrid workplace.
Recommended Podcasts
Drawing on 2 decades of experience as a personal trainer, wellbeing, performance and mindset coach, George offers new perspectives and practical tips, and introduces an exciting lineup of guests who share their own personal go-to methods of boosting their wellbeing.
Recommended Articles
3 Ways Companies Make Work Purposeful
Companies are trying to retain employees through better pay, flexible working conditions, and emphasis on the corporate mission. These are not proving successful because the real problem is people’s engagement with the work they actually do. This piece identifies what companies should focus on in their attempt to retain key talent: make the work itself more interesting, link the individual’s work to the mission, and build learning into that work.
How to Make Better Business Decisions in Your Next Strategic Planning Session
Don’t fall into the trap of using your strategic planning session with your team as an exercise to “bless” what you’ve already decided (“Bring me the data that confirms my idea is the way to go!”) or to debate endlessly over whether or not to do one thing in particular. Widen your pool of possibilities by engaging your team in a Think Rhythm prior to your planning session, where you’ll actually make the decisions.
Employer Branding Is the New Marketing Imperative
Building a brand that attracts and retains talent — employer branding — is at the top of the C-suite agenda and is the most critical priority among CMOs, according to a 2022 Forrester CMO Pulse Survey. “Now is the time,” the CMO at a $28 billion commercial real estate company told us, when “talent is the No. 1 priority among our leaders.”
Recommended Reads
How To Begin by Michael Bungay Stanier
How to Begin is for you if…
You’re ambitious, but feel you’ve never been given full permission to find and strive for what’s possible for you. You’ve achieved things in your career, and it’s now time to “climb the second mountain” and think about legacy.
You’re unhappy with how the world is working right now, and you want to change your part of it for the better.
You’re a coach, and you want to support your clients to be great and do great things.
You’re at the start of your adult life, and you’re fired up to live a life of meaning and impact. You’re ready to begin, and to start doing something that matters. We unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. With The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier wrote the bestselling coaching book of the century. With The Advice Trap, he showed you how to tame your Advice Monster. Now, he’s here to help you reclaim your ambition, figure out what you should do that matters… and begin.
Creative Construction by Gary P. Pisano
Every company wants to grow, and the most proven way is through innovation. The conventional wisdom is that only disruptive, nimble startups can innovate; once a business gets bigger and more complex corporate arteriosclerosis sets in. Gary Pisano’s remarkable research conducted over three decades, and his extraordinary on-the ground experience with big companies and fast-growing ones that have moved beyond the start-up stage, provides new thinking about how the scale of bigger companies can be leveraged for advantage in innovation.
MEANINGFUL ACTION FOR MONDAY
Innovation or efficiency: where is your business?
Your firm is on a continuum between innovation and efficiency. You need to work out where it is now, and where you’d like it to be. Some of our clients, who are value-added re-sellers, are far from the efficiency end: low margin, high volume of products. And that’s about efficiency, otherwise, they don’t make money. But some other clients, who are in the digital transformation space, they’re about selling ideas. They don’t need to focus on efficiency, but in innovation. So, from an organisational perspective you can only be in one place. So, if you’re an efficiency business and you try to launch innovation initiatives, you will fail. If you’re an innovative business and you try to become more efficient, you will fail.
Quote of the week
“There’s nothing efficient about innovation.”
Simon Sinek
Dominic Monkhouse
Dominic offers business coaching and management development, strategy planning and organisational change, using tried and tested methods to launch your organisation onto an unparalleled growth trajectory. His programme is a function of his broad experience, his deep expertise and a proven process used by over 2,700 firms worldwide.