Clear The Static

I am a firm believer in the use of the urgent important grid by Stephen R.Covey, https://www.stephencovey.com/ It helps me to make sure I am prioritising my things to do.

Unfortunately there are things that never seem to get done. They are personal admin tasks and usually not urgent. When I’ve got my business head on they are like static distortion buzzing away in the back ground. Sometimes it is good to get rid of this static by setting aside some time to blitz this non urgent and personal stuff.

I took a couple of days out of running the business last week to do exactly this. I focused on stuff like getting my car a service, using my ISA allowance and fixing up odd jobs around the home as well as going to see the dentist and doctors for checkups. These were things I had been meaning to do for ages. I still did some urgent / important work tasks but mentally work was a secondary priority on those days.

It is important to do this every now and again as not only does it clear the static but allows you space to think about what you are doing and check you are in balance. Make sure you pay attention to health, home and relationships and if you feel they haven’t had attention recently blitz them. It doesn’t need to be whole days, just an hour or two could do it.

It is all too easy to be sucked into being busy all the time and forget about what else is really important.

Fend off a winter of discontent.

This is the time of year when people make and take decisions about their future.

Often this leads to people deciding they need to change their jobs or get more out of their current one.

At the same time management teams are looking to set company performance goals and individual targets for the new year.

This makes it more important than ever to make time to evaluate how you and your staff are doing, decide what your goals and aims really are and how they fit with your key values. It is also important to set some time dated milestones, to give the feeling of early momentum in the coming year.

Unfortunately conventional appraisals often do not fulfil this desire to develop or how to make the job rewarding if people are thinking of leaving.

Solutions to this are:

1) Train the management team on how to effectively coach people and ask truly open questions in a way which moves people to a positive action which matches their beliefs and values.

Coaching helps do this, however often people believe they are coaching others when they are actually simply selling them the ideas and goals they want met.

Also it is sometimes difficult for someone to be completely honest and feel free to explore what they want with their immediate manager. Key tips for coaching therefore are:

a) Create rapport. Match the person’s level of energy and only when they are comfortable begin to lead it up if necessary. For example if someone has complaints they need to feel they are listened to and acknowledged in some way, before moving on to asking them for what a solution might be.

b) It is also important to always explain what is involved in the process and that the onus is on the person being coached to come up with the answers. This is especially important if the one doing the coaching is a direct line manager.


c) The person doing the coaching must have the mindset that the person being coached has all the resources they need to come to good decisions. Otherwise they will often give away the fact they want a particular answer to a question through body language and voice tone.

2) Get outside help.

This can be a matter of letting key staff have mentors from outside their team or unit, using professional coaches, or making the coaching and developing of staff a key part of someone’s job in the same way that training often is.

Giving people a hand to help resolve issues, focus on the positive and make good resolutions that are actually kept goes a long way to having staff that are confident they are in the right job and therefore have a strong desire to do well.

The coach also often gets a wider perspective on company issues which prove to be valuable.