We go onto wikipedia to find the plot of a movie we didn’t want to watch the rest of or a book we didn’t want to finish. We have that innate urge to know what happened because as we sat there reading or watching, we couldn’t figure it out. The same goes for your team, if you can’t find the plot, if you can’t direct it, if you can’t call it out – all your…
You wouldn’t attend a bad movie (or you might start and then leave?) You wouldn’t go to a bad restaurant? You wouldn’t continue going to a bad store you’ve had a continually bad experience with? So why keep going to a bad meeting where you are getting nothing out of? Where nothing good happens? Where all you get is a another 5 minutes of your life back at the end?
A sponge absorbs everything around it. It doesn’t expel it all correctly, but absorbing is what it does perfectly. If you can be a sponge and absorb everything, focus on that one great thing, you’re far ahead of so many you aren’t even doing that. Be the sponge that absorbs it all, everything else will fall into place from there.
It’s not that you haven’t had time. It’s that you haven’t MADE the time. Put it this way – you don’t write things down for yourself, you know what you are doing, where to do it, and what happens when things go sideways. You’re writing it for the person who comes after you, who needs to figure all that goodness out. You’re writing it for the person on your team that isn’t here, that hasn’t…
The team that takes the time out, the team that takes a step back and ponders what is happening, the team that puts all pencils down because something is just plain and clearly wrong. Is the team that will always come through in the end. That moment to regroup, that hour, or the day it takes to do it, will serve the team better than continuing to plow through on the wrong thing. Give your…