Control, No Control, and What Matters

Every person, team and business has a finite amount of resources.

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
Share
Leadership Tools: Control vs No Control vs Focusing on What Matters.

It is how we choose to use those resources that determines the level of our success, the speed we get there and our joy while on the journey.  

  • Spend time developing your strategy and determining what really matters in helping you get there. 
  • Assume your mental model of what really matters is incomplete.  
  • Assume that you have more control than you think.  Stephen Covey gives a great example of expanding your Circle of Influence in this 3 minute video which is expanded upon more in the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  
  • Assume this will take a while but everything worth achieving takes time.  Success is about taking a series of smooth and deliberate steps in the right direction every day.  Remain focused on the objective. Don’t get sidetracked by momentary obstacles or setbacks. Learn from the Marshmallow Experiment.

Assess yourself over the last week:

  • How much time did you spend on things you can control but don’t really matter?  
  • How much time did you spend thinking or complaining about things you can’t control?  
  • How much time did you spend developing a more accurate model - learning what you didn’t even know you needed to learn?
  • How much time did you spend prioritizing around what really matters?
  • How much time did you spend working to build more influence over those areas where you currently have no control that truly matter?



Stop Doing Things - Peter F. Drucker
The tendency as a leader’s role evolves is to keep adding things to their list of responsibilities and to their team. What’s important is to regularly pause and reflect about what you can STOP doing to allow for new ideas if they are really better.
Missing Person Protocol
One of the biggest challenges of growth is keeping an ever-increasing number of people aligned. With nearly everyone being over-scheduled and focusing on competing priorities, a missing person protocol is critical for successful meetings and decisions.
Production Tracking - Doing the Math as a Habit
Today contractors have amazing tools for tracking field production such as Rhumbix. We spend a lot of time developing very tightly integrated systems with our clients focused on production feedback.