Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab. And I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today we are exploring the idea that great leaders don't lead like Ricky Bobby from Talladega Nights. All right, first things first. All that I do, I approach through my E three framework, and that means we leverage, exploring, experimenting, and evolving as our means of navigating our leadership odyssey. Now I define leadership as having a positive impact on the lives of those we care about. And I believe with this definition, every single one of us has both the opportunity and responsibility to lead in whatever part of the world it makes sense for us to do so. And if we all individually take these opportunities, we can collectively make the world a better place. All right. So for today, today's topic again, we're going to we shouldn't lead like Ricky Bobby. Let's get started. Three thoughts to start off with, and I'm going to say Ricky, Bobby and Lao Zhou in the same sentence. So you have to deal with that. But Lao Tzu said nature does not hurry yet everything is accomplished. Aristotle said the action that follows deliberation should be quick, but deliberation should be slow. And then finally, Natalie Goldberg shared with us, If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down. For me, slowing down has been a tremendous source of creativity. It has allowed me to open up to know that there's life under the earth and that I have to let it come through to me in a new way. Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else. Now, in case you haven't figured out why I referenced Ricky Bobby in those quotes, it's because Ricky Bobby said, and I quote, I want to go fast. And that's a default for leaders today. We feel like our pace has to be very fast.
00:01:47
And although we do have to move quickly, we should not move fast all the time. We can't be like Ricky Bobby. So let's explore a few concepts. Now, first thing is. The reason. One of the reasons you can't move fast is because it's efficient. And leadership can never, must never. Don't ever make it efficient. Now it should be effective but not efficient. Now efficient is capable of producing desired results without wasting materials, time or energy. Effective is successful in producing a desired or intended result. Yes, it should always be effective. But leadership is all about people. And so there's no way it can be efficient if you're focused on efficiency during the day. You cannot lead because efficiency will dictate what you do. And when you do it and people don't respond to that very well. I believe that leadership is really about decisions. It's about opportunities, It's about choices. And I could argue that leadership is just a choice. It's a choice you make a bunch of times every day. When someone comes up to you and says, Hey, do you have a few minutes? That was a choice. That's a that's a leadership opportunity. And if you looked at your watch and said, as a matter of fact, right now, I can't, I've got to be in a meeting, how about I circle back around with you? Okay. That's a choice. Not in bad or good about it. But you had an opportunity at that point and maybe you led or maybe you didn't.
00:03:14
But that's why I say leadership can never be efficient. And we don't. The other part of this is, is we don't learn unless we reflect. And reflection requires time and silence. You need to be able to quiet your mind. And you can't do that if you're constantly running fast. You don't take time to reflect. And that's what we learned from. We don't learn from our experience. I think it was Thomas Dewey who said, we don't learn from our experience. We learn from reflecting on our experience. So it isn't our experiences we learn from. We have to think about them. And like it or not, you are in charge of your time. I don't care what level you work for or work at, where you work, what you do, you have control over some of your time. You do have time to reflect and reflect doesn't take a great deal of time. It really is sort of easy. Ask yourself three questions. What went well? What didn't go well? What would I do differently? You know, it doesn't have to be complicated. Just think about those three things when you're reflecting on what you did today. Now, another great tool, another thing you could explore is the Eisenhower Matrix. You know, it's the everybody's seen it. I think it was really kind of publicized with Stephen Covey, but we refer to it as the Eisenhower Matrix for Dwight Eisenhower, which is urgent and important. You know, it's essentially the four quadrants.
00:04:39
Now, urgent is a state or situation requiring immediate action or attention. Other words to describe it might be acute, dire, desperate or critical. Now, important is of great significance or value likely to have a profound effect on success, survival or well-being. Those are not the same thing. But I think we do get them conflated today. I think we actually think everything is urgent. Everything that's important is urgent, and that's not the case. And as leaders, the best thing you can do is have clarity for yourself about what fits into each of those categories. And we'll get to that in a little bit when we talk about experimenting. Now, we also have to think about the concept of proactive and responsive. The difference. People often mistake one for the other. So if you have somebody in your organization and you say they're very proactive. Because when I tell them to get something done, they get on it. Like I can tell them five things to do and bam, they address them all. Okay. That's not proactive. That's responsive. Those are different things. Proactivity requires thinking and reflecting, and it's acting in anticipation of future problems, needs or changes. Now, if you told me that person, you told that person a couple of times to do something and suddenly they figured out a way to fix it so it never has to be done again. That's proactive. But don't mistake one for the other, because what we do is we end up putting people in roles where we expect them to be proactive, and they've never exhibited a history of doing it.
00:06:11
They've been very responsive. By the way, responsiveness is awesome. We need it in a lot of different roles. But as a leader, you need to be proactive. And if you go back to the proactivity requires thinking and reflecting. Acting in anticipation of future problems, needs or changes. So we think about what happens in our world and then proactive people always think about how do I prevent this from happening in the future? How do I make this easier in the future? How do I not need to do this again? That's proactivity, not responsiveness. Responsive people will do the exact same thing over and over and over and over again and again. There's certain roles. Nothing wrong with that. But from a leadership perspective, you've got to think about am I proactive or am I responsive? And the reason I say that is because if you're not thinking about that, who is? If you're not the one thinking about how do I how do I impact this differently in the future, how do we act in anticipation of future problems, needs and changes? By the way, you could you could actually define that. That could be a definition for strategy, acting in anticipation of future needs, changes or problems. That's what strategy is. Now, the final concept is from that I want you to think about here is from social social psychologist Ari Kruglanski.
00:07:25
And it's called cognitive closure, and it's defined as an individual's desire for a firm answer to a question and an aversion toward ambiguity. Now. Ambiguity can wreak havoc on our ability to generate new ideas. And it's not surprising that in one recent study they found that most brainstorms never generate more than two ideas. Because folks are eager to get the uncertainty inherent in new idea generation over as quickly as possible. Now, if we convince ourselves that we've solved the problem, we don't have to wonder anymore. Now think about just. Just take a deep breath. Sit back and think about that If you get in a brainstorming session. Think about the next time you get into a brainstorming session at work and you're trying to generate ideas. How long does it last? And are we trying to come up with ideas or are we trying to solve a problem? Those are two very different things. Brainstorming is about divergent thinking. Problem solving is about convergent thinking. So divergent thinking is about creating possibilities. Convergent thinking is about coming to a solution. It could be argued that maybe your brainstorming meeting is actually a decision making meeting. It's how do we come up with an answer for this problem? And that's not really what you're trying to do in a brainstorming session. You want to be a divergent, you want divergent thought to happen. You want to come up with possibilities, not answers. But the reason for that is the need for cognitive closure.
00:08:56
We by, by and large, leaders operate in ambiguity. A high percentage of the time. And the reality is, is you have to you have to exhibit you have to live in that ambiguity, and then you have to create clarity for other people out of that ambiguity. But you don't get to relieve your own ambiguity. And so the reason I bring this up is you have to figure out for yourself how much cognitive closure do you need and how often does that drive your pace? Your desire to go fast. Is it because you have a solution and you and you think it's the right solution? Or is it because I just don't want to deal with this anymore? So do this. Is it the best solution or is it just good enough because it gets the decision off your list? Just something to think about. So now let's jump over to experimenting. Here are some things you might want to do. Set aside times on your calendar to reflect and see how that feels. Start with 15 minutes. At the end of the day, just sit and think about what you did, how it worked out, and what you might do differently that provides a better result. Now, first of all, you have to have clarity around what a better result is. And again, I'm talking about 15 minutes here. I'm not talking about hours. In fact, I would challenge you to sit for 15 minutes and not look at your computer, not get on the Internet, not look at your phone, not check your watch, any of those things.
00:10:22
Just sit and think about the day. Put a timer on and think about those three questions. What went well today? What didn't go well? What would I do differently? 15 minutes. Try it and see what you think. Actually, here's a second one. Use the Eisenhower Matrix. It's really simple and it's really powerful. So if you have 15 things on your list, put them on that chart. There's four quadrants, you know, urgent and important. Urgent. Not important. Important. Not urgent. And neither urgent or important. Obviously, those things should go away. Right. But if they're if they're important and not urgent and then you have a bunch of stuff that is urgent and important, you got to make some decisions and then you have to think about, well, what's what about the stuff that's just urgent and not important? Should you be doing it? Should somebody else be doing it? Why is it on your list? But thinking about the difference for yourself between urgent and important and important. Because they're there. To be honest, there aren't too many things that are urgent and important. And if you're proactive, the question you're going to have in your mind is why are they urgent? What happened that made them urgent? Do they have to be urgent in the future? But seriously, just draw the matrix. Or just print it off the internet if you want to, and in one morning sit down with all of your tasks and then put them in the right box.
00:11:51
And think about what you should do that day. Think about letting that drive your behavior and again, the impact, the significant impact on this. Isn't just you, it's how many people in your organization are doing what you do. Imagine if you could you could make this standard in your organization, like you could get other people on your leadership team to do the same thing, and you start comparing and contrasting all your lists saying, well, what do you have urgent? What do you have as important, what do you have as urgent and important? Imagine the the ability to impact their lives and the organizations as a whole. Imagine what you could get done when you all shared the same version of important, the same definition. And not everybody was operating as everything's urgent. Everybody can take a deep breath and make sure that we are addressing the things that are truly important in our lives today. And don't continue to work on work that isn't yours with the mindset that you'll just work harder or longer hours. Constraints are actually a great thing and act as clarifiers. You should not have enough time to get everything done because everything doesn't need to get done. Begin to say no in whatever capacity you can so you can actually do your best work. That's the other thing that the Eisenhower Matrix can help with.
00:13:11
It's going to show you what needs to get done today and some stuff you're not going to have time for. And here's the thing, nor should you have time for it. Unfortunately, and I don't know when this happened, but leaders started taking on more and more responsibility and figuring out I'll get to my work later. I'll do my work tonight when I'm at home over the weekend, whatever that is, that. And I want you to be clear on something that's not admirable. That is not good behavior. For a leader to just keep taking on more work. And it's not a badge of honor to work 70 to 80 hours a week. You are not being effective. Stop doing other people's work. Stop doing work that doesn't matter. Everybody should know in your organization and starting with you, what are the 2 or 3 most important things that my high value activities that only I can do? Because if you figure out what only you can do, you'll start saying no to other stuff. Because if only you can do those things, that means those should be top of your list. Yeah, there's always an exception. I get it. So quit squealing about it. We're talking about there's always going to be exceptions to the rule, but you can't make rules for every exception. But back to ambiguity, right? We're no absolutes here. We're not trying to give you hard and fast rules. We're trying to give you principles.
00:14:38
You should focus a greater percentage of your time on doing the things that only you can do that bring the greatest value to the organization and to you. That's what you should do. And then finally, consider how much your need for closure is impacting your decision making. How good are you with ambiguity? How comfortable are you to sit and think about something for hours, days, Weeks? There are some things. That merit that kind of thought. There are things that shouldn't get solved quickly. Are you discerning what those things are and are you also again, back to the it's not it isn't just you I'm talking about. It's the impact you have on other people. All of these things are things that you can pass on to other people. So as an organization, are you helping people understand these concepts so that organizationally you can do these things? How are you passing on? How are you making sure everybody does this? If, in fact you think it's a good thing. All right. We'll close out with three quotes. Bring us back around. So Lin Yutang said, Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials. There is a noble art of leaving things undone. How comfortable are you with that? Because some people are freaking the hell out right now. This The thought of leaving anything undone is like, Oh my God, I got to get everything checked off the list.
00:16:16
The next one is from Saint Ignatius. Be slow to speak. And only after having first listened quietly so that you may understand the meaning, leanings and wishes of those who do speak. Thus you will better know when to speak and when to be silent. Be slow to speak and only after having first listened quietly so that you may understand the meaning, leanings and wishes of those who do speak. Thus you will be better. You will better know when to speak and when to be silent. And finally, from Carlo Petrini. Being slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you go in any given context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast. If tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos. I would just hope you remember you do have another gear. Don't lead like Ricky. Bobby. All right. So remember, all can, most won't and few do. And will you be one of those relentless few who explore, experiment and evolve so you have a positive impact on those you care about? If your answer is yes, then you are leading. And I thank you because the world needs what you have to offer and we need it now. Take care of yourself and take care of each other. And I hope to see you back in the lab soon.
