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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Stay Strategic – But Execute!

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Jesse Gee
Jesse Gee is an entrepreneur who has successfully built over a dozen businesses in the construction, finance, & insurance industries.

One of the biggest challenges business professionals face day in and day out is the temptation to allow all of the tactical issues of the day eclipse their ability and/or willingness to work on their wildly important strategic goals. I would go as far as to say that this problem doesn’t just plague businesses; it plagues people in general. Having a daily strategy is extremely important.

We have all had days at “work”, where at the end of the day we couldn’t really point to anything of great significance that was accomplished, or for that matter, that we were any closer to our goals. However, we know we worked our tail off!

One thing is for sure, that if we don’t plan our days, they will plan themselves. We’ll willingly give up, although not intentionally, many of our days to the plans and demands of others without giving it much thought. Its easy to become reactive, and as a consequence we lose focus and become diluted.

So how do you change this pattern? Here are 2 simple steps that you can implement today.

1. Define your wildly important goals then write down the 1- 3 lead activities that you must accomplish every day to achieve them.

In the book, The Four Disciplines of Execution by Sean Covey, he states that you need to define your “Wildly Important Goals” or WIG’s. A good question to ask yourself when coming up with your WIG is, “if every other aspect of my, or my organization’s performance, remained the same, what is the one area where change could have the greatest impact.”

Once you have defined your WIG now you must define the 1-3 activities (sometimes less is more here) that are lead activity(s) which move you toward your WIG. As an example, if you’re in sales and your wildly important goal is to make 30 sales in the next 90 days then your lead activities might be to knock on 20 doors every day. Because you know for every 20 doors you knock on you will generate one appointment and for every three appointments you get a sale. If your in customer service and your goal is to improve the customer experience, it you could be visiting a new customer ea. day. If you lead a team of others then your greatest impact could be connecting with and inspecting each person’s progress on their lead activities each day.

Make a fresh commitment every morning to focus on accomplishing these lead activities.

2. Be accountable to someone.

My favorite attorney and a great friend of mine once said that “people don’t perform to their potential, they perform to the level that they are managed and held accountable”. That statement really hit home with me. A plan or strategy or even a list of 3 things to accomplish each day is only meaningful when there is execution. It’s been proven that we are more likely to execute consistently if we are held accountable. If you have a manager that isn’t holding you accountable to those lead activities ask them to. Or grab someone close to you like a mentor, spouse, or co-worker. Make a point to talk daily and get face to face once a week to measure progress and really focus on the accomplishment of the daily, lead activities that get you to the goal.

Make a commitment to do these two things today. If your feeling like you don’t have the resources remember that its probably not a lack of resources but rather a lack of resourcefulness thats holding you back. Finally, don’t worry, the tactical stuff will still get done each day but now so will the real important stuff because you will have focus.

 

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