It’s a challenge common to many leaders and managers: Last-minute customer requests, emergencies, interruptions, and distractions make it hard to stay focused on your M.I.T.s (the Most Important Thing). If you’re not careful, reactivity can become a permanent way of life. In this episode, you’ll receive practical steps you can take to calm the chaos and help your team regain their focus.
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.
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