If you want to increase productivity at work, maintain a relentless focus on what matters most in four areas. First, ensure your team understands their big strategic priorities – the outcomes that matter most for the organization. Next, get clear about the specific initiatives and projects that support the strategic priorities. Follow up with an ongoing review of the specific, observable activities that will make those initiatives happen. And finally, build a foundation for success by helping your team understand and master the daily habits that create results. 

When There’s Just Not Enough Time: Beyond Time Management

“I just don’t have time. There is so much to do that some days I just want to give up!” – Halisee, Software Engineer

Halisee called us looking for help with the overwhelm.  Between her own important tasks, the needs of her team members, and her supervisor’s expectations, she’d been working 60-hour weeks, and she felt sick and strung out.

“My calendar is wall-to-wall meetings, often with two or three appointments competing for the same window of time. And it’s only gotten worse now that I’m working from home. We have MORE meetings, not less!”

Have you been there? If you’re like many leaders we work with, you face an unending stream of information, problems to solve, decisions to make, fires to put out, interruptions from email, texts, phone calls, messaging apps — and that’s not to mention the strategic projects you want to work on to build a better future. It can seem like you’ll never get ahead. Productive leaders focus their time and energy on the activities that produce results and build relationships despite the crush of activity – or perhaps it’s not “despite” the demands for their attention, but because they embrace the challenge.

To Increase Productivity at Work, Embrace Your Limits

There will always be more you could do than you possibly can do. To stop feeling overwhelmed, start by accepting that frustrating fact. We call this approach to time “infinite need, finite me.” At any moment in time, there are literally thousands of things you could do, but you get to do only one. That’s it. One. Before you can focus your time and energy on results, reach an understanding with yourself that you can do only one thing at any given moment.

Don’t talk yourself into thinking you can really make a difference on that muted conference call while you also try to help the employee who needs real advice—all while responding to a text escalation on your phone. You won’t give any of those situations the attention they deserve.

Of course, you understand these limitations intellectually, but when you truly internalize and make peace with the fact that there’s always another thing, it frees you from the overwhelm. You can’t do it all and you never will. So, stop trying. This is the freedom to focus on what matters most.

To Lead Highly Productive Teams: Cultivate an M.I.T. Mindset

As you free yourself from the demands of doing everything, the natural next question is, where will you focus? One hallmark of productive leaders is that they focus on what matters most. We call this commitment to do what matters most “Mind the M.I.T.” – that is, Mind the Most Important Thing.

Infinite need, finite me. Mind the M.I.T.

There are four levels of M.I.T. to consider:

1. M.I.T.s (Strategic Outcomes)
2. Initiatives
3. Activities
4. Habits

1. M.I.T. Strategic Outcomes

When you look up and view the horizon, where are you going? What is the most important outcome your organization or team will achieve in the coming years? Typically, you’ll have no more than three answers to that question. These are the big objectives with time frames measured in years. If you’re leading a team within an organization, your strategic M.I.T.s often come straight from the organization’s strategic plan. Strategic M.I.T.s are the North Star that helps you navigate the complexities of day-to-day business.

2. M.I.T. Initiatives

Every strategic objective will have one more initiative or project that helps the organization achieve that strategic M.I.T. There may be several of these initiatives and projects for every strategic objective. These initiatives are usually shorter-term and there is a moment when it will be completed.

For example, if your company wants to improve customer retention, there may be several initiatives including implementing a new customer management software, improving customer support quality, and a “plus one” strategy to deliver an unexpected bonus service or product to existing customers. Each of these initiatives is time-bound – it has an end date. Once the new software is implemented, everyone is trained, and it becomes the default way of doing business, it no longer requires focus as an intiative.

Your strategic outcomes might take a year or two to achieve. The initiatives that support them will often have timeframes of a few weeks to several months.

Productive leaders maintain a relentless focus on the initiatives and projects that are their responsibility, ensuring that they make regular progress toward them. If you have a clear project plan, you may clearly know your short-term objectives. If not, to identify your short-term M.I.T., choose a unit of time and ask, “In this week/month/quarter, what is the most important thing we can do to move us closer to our Strategic M.I.T.?”

3. M.I.T. Activities

Activities are the one-time actions you or your team must take in order to move initiatives forward. These are often specific steps in a project plan.

Back to the customer retention example. One of the initiatives is to implement new software. So you may have several activities related to this initiative:

• Schedule training for your team
• Demonstrate and model the new software during three team meetings
• Schedule observations to support your team in working through questions, bugs, and how-tos.
• Acknowledge early adopters and celebrate their results

All these activities will help your team successfully implement the new software. And, they are one-time activities. You don’t need to schedule training repeatedly, but you do need to make sure you get that done sometime in the next month.

What are the M.I.T. activities that you are your team are responsible for in the next 4-6 weeks?

4. M.I.T. Habits

At the heart of productive leaders and their teams is a clear focus on the day-to-day observable habits that directly lead to results. These are three or four specific, visible actions that repeat weekly, daily, or even many times each day. When you establish a consistent cadence of these 3 to 4 critical habits, you build a foundation for success. Then you can incorporate the one-off M.I.T. Activities without losing focus on the core behaviors that allow your team to be great.

What are the three or four observable habits that get you where you need to go? They may repeat weekly, daily, or even many times each day, but a clear understanding of the day-to-day behaviors that drive success is critical.

M.I.T. Mindset Example

To get a sense of how the M.I.T. Mindset works in practice, let’s look at another example outside of work. Let’s say you want to improve your connection with your mother. Your strategic outcome is a “more connected relationship with Mom.”

Moving down to the foundational fourth level of M.I.T. Habits, you might determine that calling your mom is a weekly success habit. So you schedule that weekly call. When confronted with a busy weekend, you ensure that you find time for that call because it’s an M.I.T. habit.

Then you move to level two and choose some initiatives. For example, you might choose to: schedule a vacation trip with Mom, celebrate her birthday with the extended family, and work with her to create a family history book that will be a gift for the holidays.

Each of these initiatives will have specific activities that go with it (as well as a clear finish line by when you want to complete it). For example, “Call your brother and sister to schedule time for the birthday celebration.” Or, “Get everyone on a call to choose the dates and destination for the vacation.” And “talk with Mom about various eras of family history.” This final activity you might be able to combine with your weekly habit of a phone call. There would be several more activities for each of these initiatives, but these get you started.

The habits are your foundation. The activities make the initiatives happen. And the initiatives lead to your strategic MITs.

Your Turn To Increase Productivity at Work

Managers who’ve been through our leadership training tell us this shift in focus and prioritization of behaviors has changed the game for them and significantly upped their productivity at work. The M.I.T. becomes part of their daily vocabulary. Consistent reinforcement like “Our M.I.T. this quarter is …” or “What’s your M.I.T. today?” keeps everyone focused on what matters most.

We’re curious. When you think of improving productivity at work, what’s your M.I.T.? What are the most important behaviors that will help you get there? What daily behaviors will help your team be more productive?

See Also:

• Mind the M.I.T. is One of the 6 Leadership Competencies You Can’t Lead Without
• Get Your Team Back on Track: Leading Through Distractions
• 5 Ways Leaders Can Focus When Everything Is Important
• 4 Questions to Ask Yourself and Your Team to Stay Focused on the Most Important Thing
• Download a FREE first chapter of Winning Well here.

The post Productivity at Work: How to Lead Highly Productive Teams appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Rapidly changing priorities can demoralize and frustrate your team if you’re not prepared to help them navigate the shifting landscape. Effective leaders prepare their teams for changing priorities, create structures to help the team shift, and advocate for their team to ensure their work is meaningful. These eight strategies will help you maintain your team’s energy and morale when goals change frequently.

1. Set Expectations
2. Create a Consistent Reliable Communication Strategy
3. Advocate for Your Team
4. Connect Priorities to Purpose
5. Retire or Table Old Priorities
6. Celebrate Effort
7. Align New Goals with Critical Behaviors
8. Create Space for Letting Go and Moving Forward

It was one of my earliest moments of workplace disillusionment. I was six months into a new job and my boss’s boss asked me to take on a major project. I was excited for the opportunity to add value and prove what I could do. I worked hard and gave the project my evenings and weekends until it was done.

When I returned the completed project to my boss’s boss (ahead of schedule and with better quality than anything he’d seen), he frowned. “Oh, we’re not doing this anymore. Can you do this instead?” and outlined the new goals.

No acknowledgment of my work. No recognition that I’d busted my tail to get it done. Just a new priority. No explanation. Nothing.

Frustrated doesn’t begin to describe it. I fumed. And I never fully trusted this guy again. (Also, I committed myself to helping leaders avoid these soul-crushing mistakes. So good did come of it.)

Whether you work in a fast-growing startup or a more established company that’s adapting to a rapidly changing world, priorities will change. Healthy organizations always adapt, innovate, and shift their goals. That’s life. But how you handle those changes makes all the difference in whether or not your team adjusts and engages with energy or gives up with futile frustration.

Leading Through Changing Priorities–Before the Change Happens

These first three steps take place before you communicate changes with your team.

1. Set expectations.

One of the most important parts of your communication is to let your team know that goals will change – and how frequently they can expect it to happen. Ideally, this starts in the hiring process. Some people enjoy shifting priorities. It keeps things interesting. For others, it’s maddening if they can’t finish what they start.

2. Create a consistent, reliable communication strategy.

The faster the change in your business, the more important it is to have a consistent, reliable communication strategy. We’ve seen leaders who leave changing priorities to instant messaging threads or word-of-mouth. Chaos and frustration are predictable.

Instead, if you can’t give the team predictable goals, give them the confidence of knowing exactly how they’ll know – and when.

3. Advocate for your team.

As priorities shift and your leaders ask you to change course, engage with them about the decisions. Can you add context to help them understand the impact on the team and other priorities? Help them to examine the tradeoffs. Often, leaders don’t have all the information and you can help them improve their decisions.

If they decided and it’s final, you can also advocate for your team by ensuring that you understand the bigger picture. When people move quickly, they can forget to connect what they’re asking to why it’s important. Ask how the changed priority fits into the larger goals and how it will help achieve them. You’ll need that information when you speak with your team.

Leading Through Changing Priorities–After the Change

These next five steps happen once the decision is final and it’s time to work with your team on the new priority.

4. Connect priorities to purpose.

As you communicate the change, connect “what” to “why?” There is a reason that things will change. Help them connect to and understand the bigger picture.

5. Retire or table old priorities.

You can help your team transition between shifting priorities with an intentional stop-doing or pause-doing routine. If the previous goal is going away, be clear about that. For example: “This was our goal. It no longer is. We can let it go.”

This process of consciously retiring old priorities can help your team avoid the mental drag that comes from open loops and unfinished projects.

There are times, however, when you won’t set aside a goal–you just have to pause working on it while you focus elsewhere. In these cases, it can be helpful to have a system where you and your team document progress made, next steps, and lessons learned. Then, when it comes time to pick up the project again, it will be easier for the team to get moving.

And–every 4-6 months it is useful to review these paused projects and ensure they are still relevant and need to be done. If not, retire them so they aren’t dragging down your team.

6. Celebrate effort.

An important part of your “stop-doing” routine is to intentionally close a task or project by asking the team what they learned and what they can carry into future work. Celebrate their work, what they learned, and the progress they made.

This creates a formal ending for the unfinished goal. You can have fun with this and create team ceremonies that honor the work they’ve done and the process of moving on.

7. Align new goals with critical behaviors.

As you introduce new priorities, be sure they aren’t just abstract goals. Does everyone on the team know what success looks like–both in the big picture and in what they observably do day-to-day that will lead to success?

8. Create space for letting go and moving forward.

Change comes with emotion – and changing priorities are not exempt. Your team will be able to move forward with more energy and creativity when you pause and give them room to process the change.

It doesn’t have to be a tumultuous grieving session. You might say something like:

“I know everyone worked very hard on that last project and we would have liked to see it through to the end. I know I would have enjoyed seeing that too. So, I want to pause and acknowledge what we learned. All the wins we had …

“Now, let’s take a deep breath …

… and look at the future with this new goal. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s why it matters. This is what success looks like. Let’s talk about how each of us contributes …”

 

Your Turn – How Do You Address Changing Priorities?

Leading through changing priorities requires preparation and nimble leadership to maintain your team’s focus and morale. I would love to hear from you—have you seen, or do you have, a fun or cool way of acknowledging the past while changing focus?

You might also like:

• How To Change Your Mind and Not Lose Their Trust and Support
• Leading through Conflicting Priorities
• Leadership Skills: 6 Competencies You Can’t Lead Without

Does your organization need a Courageous Culture – with higher engagement and a results-oriented approach to innovation? Where your employees speak up, share their ideas and drive quality performance and productivity? Visit our Strategic Leadership Page to learn how you can partner with Let’s Grow Leaders to bring human-centered leadership development to your organization. 

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Calm the Chaos and Help Your Team Regain Their Focus

0:00 – Get your reduced price copy of Courageous Cultures through the end of June 2021

0:30 – Welcome to Season 8 of Leadership without Losing Your Soul

1:00 – The challenge with maintaining our focus and helping your team regain their focus: all kinds of crazy

2:16 – Recognize that these distractions, emergencies, and challenges won’t go away. Mastering the art of leading through them is essential.

3:19 – Start by ensuring everyone understands what actually matters most. What is the MIT? Where are the team and business going over the next 18 months? How do individual behaviors contribute to the team’s success?

4:18 – Next, expect the unexpected. Use a two-axis process graph to look at how disruptive and how common your disruptions are. Meet with your team to get all the distractions on the table.

5:10 – Then, focus on the items in quadrant four (most frequent, most disruptive).

6:18 – Step three is to plan your response for the most common and most disruptive interruptions, distractions, and emergencies. You know it’s coming, so create a game plan to get everyone through it, help your team regain their focus, and get back to the big picture as efficiently as possible.

7:08 – A specific example of how you might plan for a common and important disruption and help your team regain their focus

8:27 – Next, in step four, you look at margin. Maintaining margin to absorb and deal with the “expected unexpected” is critical to helping your team stay focused.

9:31 – Finally, step five (which is where many people try to start): eliminate the causes of your most common, most disruptive distractions, emergencies, and interruptions.

The post Calm the Chaos and Help Your Team Regain their Focus appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Last-minute fire drills, interruptions, and real emergencies can become a permanent way of life. Get your team back on track by planning ahead with these five steps.

It’s a common lament: “It’s so crazy around here. We never know what’s going to happen and there are so many priorities. We’ll be working on something then that gets blown up and we have to focus on the new emergency.”

Distractions and interruptions are a part of life and they can make you crazy if you let them.

5 Steps to Get Your Team Back on Track

If your day seems to be a series of distractions and your team can’t make progress on the strategic priorities that matter most, here are five steps that can help you get your team back on track.

1. Clarify what matters most.

Does your team know the Most Important Thing (M.I.T.)? What strategic priorities matter most? What are the daily and weekly behaviors that will lead to success?

Without the North Star of clearly defined M.I.T.s, your team will always be reactive and distracted by the unexpected and urgent. The first step to get your team back on track is to define clearly what “on track” looks like.

2. Expect the unexpected.

You probably know more about your emergencies, fire drills, and interruptions than you might think. We’ve worked with so many leaders who feel out of control, but when you sit down and talk through the distractions, there are usually just a few causing the majority of the problems.

Take 15 minutes with your team and you can quickly figure out how to expect the unexpected. Start by listing out your most common distractions. Once you have the list, you can map them onto this graph by asking two questions: How commonly does this happen? How disruptive is it?

The items in Quadrant I are the distractions you want to address first. You know they will happen. You know they cost you the most time, money, and energy. (And if you have more time and effort to devote, then move to Quadrant II, then III.  You can usually safely ignore IV.)

3. Plan your response.

Now that you know the interruptions and emergencies that cause you the most trouble, it’s time to plan your response.

You have ways of doing your core work, processes that you know work. Build the same processes to handle distractions and return to the MIT. This shortens the time it takes to get your team back on track.

Let’s start with an analogy: a fumbled football.

As soon as that football hits the ground, everyone nearby knows that it’s their job to either pick it up and run or else jump on it and wrap it up in their arms. That’s the plan. Once you have possession of the ball, you get back to your game plan.

Let’s say one of your common, yet important disruptive distractions is a customer who is escalating to your executive office. It’s important and needs to be handled with urgency and care. How can you and your team build a standard way of responding so you minimize the time spent addressing the situation?

Without a process, it’s easy for this urgent situation to involve more people than necessary frenetically working to address the issue, updating their bosses, and duplicating effort.

Maybe your planned response looks like this:

1. The executive receives the call and sends it to a designated “on-call” manager who will coordinate response efforts.
2. After understanding the situation, the on-call manager contacts the customer and informs them they are working on the situation, and collects any additional information needed.
3. The on-call manager also informs the social media team and any other customer communication channels in case the customer is escalating there as well, so all communication is coordinated.
4. The on-call manager coordinates the response, contacts the customer, and closes the loop with the executive office.

4. Maintain margin.

One of the most overlooked ways to prevent distractions from overwhelming your day is to plan for them.

If you scheduled your team every day with wall-to-wall meetings and deadlines that must happen today, you have a fragile system with no margin for error. Any interruption will knock over that house of cards and (predictably) ruin your results.

You’ve mapped out your interruptions and how frequently they happen. Besides planning your response, give yourself margin in your calendar to respond. You may not know what will come up, but you know it’s coming.

And if you have one of those magical days where there aren’t any emergencies, fire drills, or interruptions – fantastic! That’s more time to work on your M.I.T. or build relationships with your team.

5. Eliminate causes.

Finally, as you examine your most common and disruptive distractions, ask how you can eliminate them. Is there a problem in your user experience that you can fix? Will a new process prevent those errors? Is there a frequent communication breakdown you can address?

You don’t have to have all the answers. Bring the team together, show them what a successful idea will achieve, and then ask them for their thoughts on how to solve the issue.

How to Get Your Team Back on Track

1. Clarify what matters most.
2. Expect the unexpected.
3. Plan your response.
4. Maintain margin.
5. Eliminate causes.

It’s easy to let exceptions become the rule and turn your days into whirlwinds of frantic reactivity. Taking a few minutes to identify your most common distractions and building a routine response will save you time, energy, and help get your team back on track, focused on what matters most.

Your Turn

We’d love to hear from you – what would you add? Leave us a comment and share: How do you help your team stay focused despite the inevitable distractions?

You Might Also Like:

Download a FREE first chapter of Winning Well: A Manager’s Guide to Getting Results-Without Losing Your Soul.

5 Ways Leaders Can Focus When Everything Is Important

How to Focus Your Time and Energy for Maximum Results

How to Unlock Your Team’s Best Ideas

The post Get Your Team Back on Track – Leading Through Distractions appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

We were discussing how to keep your team focused on what matters most when Nicolle, a team leader in a global communications business, asked, “What can I do when there’s a clash in priorities between my team and another department we must work with?”

This is a common question we hear from leaders at every level. When you find a clash in priorities, it’s easy to back off, become a victim, and make excuses—and many managers do just that.

But effective leaders navigate these conflicts—and build their careers and influence in the process. Master these strategies and you’ll become known for bringing people together to get results.

Navigate Your Narrative

The first step when you confront conflicting priorities is to get your story straight. No one woke up that morning with the goal of driving you crazy. Often, they’re not even aware there is a conflict. So, start by getting rid of any victim thinking and then tap into your power.

You’ve identified a conflict—and an opportunity to help everyone be more productive.

Cultivate Curiosity

When you find a clash in priorities, it helps to understand the problem. What, exactly is going on?

Let’s say another team isn’t prioritizing the work you rely on in order to achieve your goals. Start by having a conversation with your peer. For example: “I’ve noticed that the last three requests we submitted each came back in three weeks. We’re under the impression that these would be turned around in one week. I’m curious how it looks on your end?”

When you have these conversations, you’ll find many different causes. Occasionally, you might be working with an underperforming team, but most of the time, there’s a conflicting priority. They’ve moved your needs down the list because there’s something else going on.

As you have these curiosity conversations, try to listen and check for understanding about what you heard without getting defensive. For example, “So it sounds like you’ve had some people out sick and you’re getting pressure to deliver that product revision? Do I have that right?”

Create Clarity

Your goal with the curiosity conversation is to create clarity about the nature of the conflict. When the other person confirms your understanding of their situation, you can share your perspective.

For example, “My understanding is the project we’re working on together is supposed to deliver at the same time as the product revision. Do you understand it the same way?”

If they agree, then you can move to the next step. If they don’t understand the priorities the same way you do – that’s a good thing. You’ve created clarity: you’re each working from a different definition of success. Now that you know that, you can do something about it.

This happens all the time and savvy leaders are good at diagnosing these conflicts.

To create additional clarity, a common next step is to invite your peer to a conversation with your supervisor to get more clear priorities. When the three of you meet, you can quickly recap the clarity you’ve established and then ask for help understanding what matters most. For example:

“My team’s been having trouble meeting our milestones on this project because our data requests are taking longer than expected. When we talked about it, it became clear that we’re working from different priorities. I’m under the impression that both projects should be delivered at the same time, but her understanding is that her team needs to get that one done faster. We’d like to get some clarity on the timelines and priorities.”

Don’t treat these conversations as a chance to blame or excuse poor performance. It’s an objective statement of facts, the nature of the conflicting or unclear priorities, and a request for their perspective and help with clarity.

When you approach it this way, your leaders will often realize that they unintentionally created conflicting priorities and consequent conflict between teams. A quick conversation can clear it up and get everyone working from the same definition of success.

And yes, when that other team was truly underperforming, these conversations have a way of resolving that quickly.

Ask: How Can We …?

In some situations, the conflict results from multiple conflicting priorities from many leaders. Other times, there is no leadership guidance and you, your peers, or even vendor partners, must navigate the conflict yourselves.

This is an opportunity to ask a good “How can we…?” question. Eg: “How do you think we might meet both of our timelines? Is there a way I can help you? How can we help each other?”

Asking “How can we…” focuses everyone on possible solutions rather than getting paralyzed by the problem.

Schedule the Finish

Whether you got more clarity from your boss or worked out a mutual agreement with your peer, don’t leave the results to chance. Schedule the finish: as the agreement is made, schedule a time in a week or two where you will meet for 5 or 10 minutes to review the commitments you made and explore any new problems that might arise.

Your Turn

Conflicting priorities are a fact of life. Growing businesses naturally have tensions and they only become problems when they’re not addressed. When there’s a clash in priorities, it’s a fantastic opportunity for you to lead and make a more strategic impact.

We’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment and share your best strategy for resolving conflicting priorities.

You might like:

5 Reasons Your Team Just Doesn’t Get It

How to Respond When You Can’t Use an Idea

5 Ways Leaders Can Focus When Everything Is Important

How to Make Real Change Happen When You’re Not CEO

The post What Leaders Do with a Clash in Priorities appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

You don’t have enough time and energy for everything on your list – and you never will. Your ability to focus your time and energy is key to your success.

Focusing time and energy isn’t about managing time or the latest productivity system. It starts with your beliefs and one simple daily practice you can start today.

The post How to Focus Your Time and Energy for Maximum Results appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

You know that the ability to lead different and diverse people to come together and blend their talents is key to achieving breakthrough results. But if you’re like most leaders we work with, we imagine you’re still a bit caught off guard and surprised from time to time about just how different (and frustrating) these differences can be.

Learning to understand our own differences and how they impact those we are seeking to lead has been a critical part of our leadership journey.

As a young introvert, it flabbergasted David when he first learned that many people talk to figure out what they think. In a leadership training class one time he asked the facilitator, “You mean extroverts say things they don’t mean?”

Early in her career, Karin, a high-energy extrovert had a leadership mentor explain that her enthusiasm for her own ideas sometimes made teammates reluctant to speak up and share their concerns. She had to learn to slow down and ask strategic questions to give people time to process and catch up with her thinking.

The struggle is real. In our work as business and life partners, it often amazes us at how differently we interpret the same situation—and we teach this stuff!

People are Different

You may know it intellectually, but do people’s differences play a core role in your leadership? Do you lead different and diverse people differently?

People have different motivations than you. They process information differently than you do. Some want to compete, some want to get along. Some want to talk, some want you to leave them alone to do their work.

They have more or less urgency than you…more or less attention to detail…more or less focus on people or tasks or process or outcomes…they have different backgrounds. Something you find easy, they may have struggled with all their life just to get by.

Some people need to explain, some people don’t want an explanation. Some people trust authority; some trust no one – especially authority. Some like public recognition; others prefer a quiet “thank you.”

And those are just a few of the many, many ways people are different.

Your success as a leader depends on your ability to lead different and diverse people – to bring all these differences together to achieve results.

The Leadership Challenge of Differences

Unfortunately, people’s differences trip up many leaders. Over the years, we’ve seen so many leaders (and we’ve done it too) become exasperated when a team member doesn’t do what they expect.

When you dig deeper, you find out that the leader expected the team member would act just like the leader would in the same situation.

This creates many conflicts and expectation violations. Here are a few examples:

• Mary gives the team the freedom she craves from her own manager, but it confuses her team full of people who prefer more daily attention, and they feel like Mary doesn’t care about them.
• Joe methodically adds the new project his manager gave him to the bottom of his to-do list. But he frustrates his manager who thought Joe would intuitively understand that this project trumps everything and needs to be done right away.
• Mike comes to a staff meeting prepared to take part, arrives early, sits in front, and his teammate, Jill, thinks he’s angry because he didn’t talk engage or talk with anyone while the meeting was getting ready to start.
• Laura, a database manager, works long hours to ensure the data is accurate and then quits when the Kathy, her team leader, ignores her data in favor of political relationships.

At their core, all these relationship breakdowns happened because the leader didn’t understand that people are different.

Effective leaders understand that people are different and lead to draw the best out of each person.

Five Ways to Lead Different and Diverse People

Here are a few solutions for the challenges presented by our diversity.

1. Familiarize yourself with the basics of human diversity. There are many tools to help you do this. The specific tool is not as important as the fundamental understanding that people are different and that these differences can all add value.

2. Value the differences. No one wants to be tolerated. Every person on your team needs to be valued for the meaningful contribution they make. Intentionally seek out different perspectives, backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking. Get all the feedback you need to make the best decisions.

3. Give people what they need to be effective. This doesn’t mean that you enable poor performance. Rather, learn how your people are wired, what energizes them, and meet them where they are to draw greatness from them.

4. Provide clarity. Mind the MIT (the Most Important Thing), clarify the decision, who owns the decision, and the specific behaviors that lead to success. Clarify the relationships and interactions different roles will play as everyone works together. Use the Expectations Matrix to align the team’s expectations of one another – and of you. The clearer you can be, the more you pull everyone’s diverse talents and strengths together to achieve results.

5. Understand the ways people are the same. For example, everyone wants a leader they can trust. Everyone benefits when you link activity to meaning and purpose. Everyone wants appreciation (though they may receive it in different ways). Also, most people enjoy a sense of control and self-determination. (Though again, the amount varies.)

Your Turn

Remember, leadership is a relationship. The more you recognize, appreciate, and bring different strengths together, the more you’ll achieve. Leave us a comment and share your best example of a leader who brilliantly showed how to lead different and diverse people.

See Also: Speak Up Culture: How to Encourage More and Better Ideas

The post How to Lead Different and Diverse People appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

You want to be a productive leader, but your to-do list has more tasks, projects, and goals than you can possibly achieve.

The never-ending list can feel overwhelming. Leadership means a continual stream of information, problems, decisions, interruptions from email, texts, phone calls, apps—and that doesn’t include the strategic investments in people and projects that will help you build a better future.

It can seem like you’ll never get ahead.

Two Mindsets to Be a More Productive Leader

There are two mental shifts that will help you end the overwhelm and achieve the results you want.

There’s So Much

It’s not your imagination. There really is more on that list than you can possibly get done.

What do you do with that reality? Does it stress you and paralyze you?

If so, the problem isn’t with your list. It’s with your perspective.

Here’s the reality productive leaders embrace: there is always more to do than you can do. It’s a fact of life.

Right now you could check in with your boss, answer your emails, build a spreadsheet, talk to an underperforming team member, make a to-do list, help your child with her homework, work on your most strategic project, listen carefully to a peer, call a customer, hold a developmental conversation with a mentee, take a luxurious bath, go to yoga, read this article, call a dear friend, check your social media, adopt a cat, clean out the stale food from your refrigerator, and a thousand other tasks.

The list is endless. It always is and it always will be.

When you’re stressed and overwhelmed, the difference is that you’re more aware of your choices. When you’re relaxed on a beach, there are still a thousand other things you could do with that moment – you’re just not thinking about them.

To turn the problem into power, embrace the fact that you can’t possibly do everything.

You never could and you never will. The list is always infinite.

When you surrender the unrealistic hope that the list will somehow go away and acknowledge that it is always there, always has been, and always will be, it frees you to focus.

You’ve Got Serious Limits

Our son loves to multitask. He’ll watch a YouTube documentary while trying to clean his room. Inevitably, one of these tasks wins (and it’s usually not the room.)

The problem is that multitasking is a myth. He’s shifting his attention back and forth between each activity (or not shifting it at all).

It’s another tough reality for most of us to accept: in addition to the fact that there will always be an infinite list, there’s a very limited amount of you to go around.

The second mindset shift that will help you be a more productive leader is that you can only do one thing at a time.

From that long list, you get to choose one task.

That’s it. One.

Finish that one. Or move it forward as much as you can, then move to the next.

This is the secret of every time management and productivity system: There’s always more than you can do and that you can only do one thing at a time.

So how do you choose what to do?

Mind the M.I.T.

There are many sophisticated systems to answer this question.

We prefer to keep it straightforward:  What’s your M.I.T. (Most Important Thing)?

• What is the most important strategic outcome your team will achieve this year?
• Today, what is the most important thing you will do?
• What are the two or three critical behaviors that will produce the best outcomes for you and your team?

As a productive leader, your M.I.T. often shifts from day to day. Today, it may be to clarify your strategy for the year. Tomorrow, it may be to address an underperforming team member. The next day, your M.I.T. may be a coaching conversation or working with a colleague and your boss to get alignment on their M.I.T. It may be to ensure you finish what you’ve started.

Mind the M.I.T. means that you know what’s most important and do it first, if at all possible. Do it before the inevitable rush of interruptions, problems, and fire drills.

Simple? Yes.

Easy? Not always.

It takes courage to say no. It also takes courage to uncover your M.I.T. when it’s not clear.

It takes humility to accept your limitations and choose excellence somewhere over presence everywhere.

It takes self-awareness and confidence to acknowledge that today’s M.I.T. might be a walk in the woods or time with loved ones.

It takes determination to ignore what’s easy and do what matters most.

When you focus on your daily M.I.T., help your team understand the strategic M.I.T., and know their daily M.I.T. behaviors, you will unleash your team’s energy and transform your results.

To help him be a more productive leader, one Winning Well reader told us that he posted these words from the book on his office wall so he can see them every day:

Infinite Need.

Finite Me.

Focus On the MIT.

Your Turn

To be a more productive leader, embrace the infinite need, remember that you can only do one thing at a time, and focus on the behaviors that will make the most difference for you, your team, and the results you want to achieve.

Leave us a comment and share: What is your best secret to maintaining your focus and productivity?

The post 3 Ways to Be a More Productive Leader appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

“I’m so frustrated.” Mark, the Senior Vice President of a rapidly-growing communication hardware company serving the United States, leaned back in his chair and blew a heavy sigh past his mustache. “I’m hoping you can help me. It’s like there’s some key leadership skill I never learned.”

He continued: “Three of my direct reports are behind on projects I delegated. I walked through our contact center and customer service was a mess even though we invested all that time in training. Our quality initiative is stuck in neutral…it just seems like we can’t seem to get anything done.”

Mark is well versed in leadership and management. He knows the M.I.T. (Most Important Thing), how to set clear shared expectations, how to make sure everyone knows how to succeed, he knows how to reinforce what success looks like, and he knows how to inspire, to celebrate when it goes well, and how to hold everyone accountable when it doesn’t.

He knows all of these fundamental leadership skills.

So what’s the problem? What’s the leadership skill that Mark feels like he’s missing?

The Missing Leadership Skill

As we work with thousands of leaders around the world and watch them start using Winning Well leadership and management strategies, we’ve seen a common theme when it comes to who succeeds over time:

When it comes to changing a culture or transforming results, they don’t just start – they finish.

Sadly, organizations are littered with leaders who start, but never finish:

• The leader who says the meeting starts at 9, but when someone is late, doesn’t say anything.
• The manager who declared that a customer call must begin with empathy, confidence, and connection, but he only said it for two weeks and never got back to it.
• The team leader who facilitates a great meeting, helps the team dig deep to make tough commitments, but doesn’t follow up to see that it happened.
• The manager who has a brilliant performance coaching conversation with an employee who needs to improve in one key area, but three months later has never reviewed the desired new behavior.
• The team leader who declares a new era of entrepreneurial teamwork, but then never asks for a single new idea.
• The manager who delegates a project, but never receives it back.

It doesn’t take many of these failed commitments before your team loses faith in your ability to make change happen, and worse, you lose faith in yourself.

Make Your Choice

When you set an intention and follow through your confidence increases. Your team knows they can believe you, trust you, and rely on you. You credibility builds.

Finishing is a choice. It doesn’t happen by chance. In fact, the chances are it won’t happen at all.

Here’s the deal: life is busy. You’ve got more to do than time to do it. Your plan is going to get interrupted and your interruptions are going to get interrupted. If you don’t have an intentional, focused way to finish what you start, it won’t happen.

Effective leaders consistently choose to finish – but they don’t leave it to chance or a heroic act of willpower.

Make It Automatic

If you have to spend energy trying to remember everything you need to finish you’ll never do it. There’s just too much going on and your brain has limited energy. Just thinking about every open loop can be exhausting.

There’s a better way: schedule the finish.

The moment you set an intention, make an appointment with yourself or with the other person where you will complete the intention or take the next step. The key is when. What moment in time will you follow up, follow through, and finish?

Here are some examples:

• When you have a performance conversation using the INSPIRE model, the final step (E) is the Enforce step. Schedule a brief meeting to review their desired behavior. Eg: “Sounds good. Let’s meet at 10 next Tuesday to see how this is going and if you have any questions.”
• When you delegate, schedule a time where the other person will meet with you in person or by video to return the project to you, answer questions, and discuss next steps.
• When you lead a meeting, conclude the meeting by asking who will do what, by when, and “How will we know?” The final “How will we know?” are scheduled commitments to the team. Eg: “We will all have our data to Linda by Friday at 4 pm. Linda will send us the new process by Wednesday at 3 pm.” Everyone puts the times on their calendar. If Friday 4 pm comes and Linda doesn’t have data from Bob, she calls him. If 3 pm Wednesday comes and they don’t have the process, they call Linda.

The key in all these examples is to make an appointment. There is a difference between a to-do item and scheduled time on your calendar, particularly when that time is scheduled with another person. The likelihood of you both keeping your commitment increases significantly.

For items that don’t naturally fit in a calendar appointment (eg: you’re rolling out a new process to improve on-time delivery and quality), you can still make appointments with yourself to reinforce the initiative (communicate at least five times through five different channels) and to review performance.

When you create an expectation – particularly a new one that is the result of training or a new process – follow through on behavior quickly. When people get the behavior right, celebrate it, acknowledge it, and reinforce that this is what people like us do.

When it doesn’t happen, have quick INSPIRE conversations to redirect people back to the new way of doing things. If there are problems that prevent people from doing what’s needed, solve them quickly and visibly.

(This is the strategy at the core of the Confidence Burst strategy.)

Your Turn

Finishing isn’t flashy, but it’s a leadership skill with a huge payoff.

Martin didn’t need to learn a new strategy or read another book. His only missing leadership skill was to finish what he started.

Finish. Schedule the follow-through. Don’t leave it to chance or your to-do list.

We’d love to hear from you: As a leader, how do you ensure you finish what you start?

The post The Leadership Skill No One Talks About appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Dear Karin & David,

What do you do with a boss who makes it impossible to focus? We agree on a direction and three days later he has seventeen new ideas, dumps them on us, and the managers are expected to somehow get their teams organized and performing. We can’t ever finish one project before starting three more. Of course, I’m asking for a friend.

                                                                                                Please help!

                                                                                                -Scattered

Dear Scattered,

We hear you.

It can be incredibly frustrating when it feels like you can’t focus. We have worked for, consulted with many, (and even been) leaders whose frequent new ideas leave their people gasping for breath and confused as to where to focus.

The good news is that these leaders can bring many strengths to their jobs and together you can be very effective.

Let’s start by appreciating what your boss is bringing to the relationship. It sounds like your boss is an innovator. These people see the world as a series of opportunities.

They’re energized by possibilities and can create new and exciting ways of doing things. They often think about the big picture, start initiatives noone’s ever thought of, and are the antidote to lethargic “business as usual.” All sorts of ideas excite them and their enthusiasm can be contagious and motivating.

Remember these assets as you consider the challenges: they get distracted, their excitement can be exhausting, and it’s easy for projects to get lost as they pile up.

Next, let’s look at how you can help yourself and your boss to maintain focus.

First, have a conversation to establish the MITs for the year and for the immediate quarter. What is the Most Important Thing you and your team will achieve? We recommend you initiate this conversation so it doesn’t seem like a reaction or negation of your boss’s latest idea.

Next, communicate weekly with your boss about how you are making progress toward the agreed-upon MITs. (We recommend using the MIT Huddle Planner to facilitate these conversations.) This serves two purposes: First, it lets your boss know what you’re doing. Second, it subtly reminds your boss what you both agreed were the Most Important Things you would do.

4 Ways to Help Your Boss Focus

Third, when your boss brings their latest new idea:

1. Take time to listen. Make the effort to understand why it excites them and why they think it’s a good idea.
2. Validate their reason for suggesting it by reflecting what you hear. e.g.: “That sounds like a great way to get in front of more customers.” Note that this isn’t a commitment to do it. You’re entering into the conversation by ensuring you’ve understood the reason for their suggestion.
3. Ask how it aligns with other priorities. e.g.: “I know you’ve asked us to prioritize the new product development and customer retention this quarter. Is this an alternative to those priorities? Would you like resources reassigned this quarter or is this for the future? Which of these initiatives is the Most Important Thing?”When you ask these clarifying questions, your boss will often think about just how much of a priority the new idea should be. Sometimes they’ll say something like “It’s a fun idea, but let’s maintain our current focus for now.” Other times, however, they’ll have a good reason that the new idea ought to be pursued. It may achieve more than an existing initiative or meet a more urgent issue your boss has to respond to.
4. Check for Understanding. e.g.: “Okay, let me make sure I’ve got it: we’re going to stick with new product development and customer retention as our MITs this quarter. We’ll reconvene in six weeks to look at this idea with an eye to scheduling it for next quarter. Do I have that right?”

After this conversation, continue your weekly communications about the progress you’ve made on your MITs. This cadence of communication and conversation will help everyone think through priorities and shift them with clarity and purpose.

We’ve coached many managers on both sides of these conversations. In our experience, the idea-generating managers may initially be a little frustrated, but they come to value the questions.

In the words of Matt, a CFO who was frustrating his team with weekly new ideas:

“I hated it when my direct reports would ask me ‘How does this idea fit in with our other priorities?’ but after a few times, it helped me to really think it through and keep us focused on what mattered most.”

Let us know how you and ‘your friend’ use these conversations.

Your Question?

We love to hear from you. Send us your real leadership challenges (or ask for a friend!) and we’ll give you real answers.

See Also Forbes: 17 Tips For Dealing With a Disorganized Boss

The post What to Do When Your Boss Can’t Focus? appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.