Busy leaders know when pressed for time we need easy decision making tools to accelerate conversations, projects and results.
We have several mantras we use in our practice and questions we ask ourselves to stay focused, especially in times of year like this when everyone is going hard and feeling tired from a busy year.
In an executive mentoring session recently I shared with one of our pharmaceutical leaders a statement our team uses: “if it’s not yes, it’s no”. His company is experiencing massive shifts and achieving great things and they are all running really hard. This simple statement became a filtering system for him.
I first heard this from Matt Church and have used it ever since, he even blogged about his personal mantras here and it is worth a read.
This mantra doesn’t work for everyone… it works for our team and especially for me. Rather than delay a decision or wait to answer a social occasion request or allow an email to sit in our inbox, we use this filtering system. If our initial response is not yes, it’s no. Simple. Easy. Effective… and sometimes hard to practice. It might need to come with a warning, you might disappoint people because you can’t attend every social occasion, participate in every meeting, or fulfill every request.
Some people are reluctant to say no because they want to be seen as team players or be people pleases. Anyone who has read our book Folding Time or been regular readers of this blog, know I think that NO is one of the most productive words in our language palette. No is a complete sentence. No means no. Try it out this week, can you say No to something to allow you more room for the things you want to say ‘yes’ to?
Can you use this filtering system during your busiest time of year? Share your ideas with us here on our blog.
PS. If you want more ideas on how to increase your productivity – check out other blogs here and several eBooks you can share with your team.
