Are You Taking Care of Busyness?

Are You Taking Care of BusynessHow many times has this happened to you? You FINALLY take the time (often not that much) to learn a skill or connect with an expert and wind up with time savings that pay back again and again:

  • You’re struggling to find a shortcut in MS Word that you think will save time. After endless searching through menus, you finally just Google it and a two minute YouTube video shows you exactly what you need to do. You realize you’ve wasted hours over the past few months.
  • Meetings often get off track, run late, and waste time. You see a skilled meeting leader focus the meeting agenda, keep participants on topic, and close discussions with action steps. You tighten up your meetings and save time.
  • You take the time to show one of your team members how to deal with a recurring problem. He now handles it the next time it comes up.

When we’re too busy to learn, we waste even more time. As busyness booms, the accelerating treadmill means we work harder just to keep up.

Are you taking care of busyness and working overtime? Get off the speeding treadmill for 10 minutes and take our Mind Your Own Busyness quiz to find out.

I am sticking my nose in your busyness. How’d you do on the ‘going out of busyness’ scales of our quiz? Have you fallen into the busy-manager trap? Based on five years of research studying 500 managers, Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, published their conclusions in a Harvard Business Review article, “Beware the Busy Manager:”

“Fully 90% of managers squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities… the smallest proportion of managers we studied — around 10% — were both highly energetic and highly focused. Not only do such managers put in more effort than their counterparts, but they also achieve critical, long-term goals more often… spend their time in a committed, purposeful, and reflective manner.”

Decades of leadership research has settled the debate and put to rest the myth of the born leader. I poked fun at the born leader myth perception with fictitious birth announcements of born leaders and losers. What deceives so many people when looking at strong leaders is they make it look natural. That’s the final level of skill development mastery. We see the end results and don’t see all the work the leader put into getting there.

Clearly, there’s no busyness like slow busyness. We need to slow down to speed up. Take time to get unfiltered feedback on your leadership effectiveness, and build a personal development plan that leverages your strengths. Sharpening your coaching skills can significantly boost your leadership effectiveness while reducing stressful, time sucks.

To help you in taking care of busyness, we had fun putting together a quick video on escaping the speed trap. Click here and slow down for two minutes to see how you can escape the speed trap and leader smarter, not faster.

Now’s the time to start your ‘going out of busyness’ tale.

The post Are You Taking Care of Busyness? appeared first on The Clemmer Group.

For over three decades, Jim Clemmer’s keynote presentations, workshops, management team retreats, seven bestselling books, articles, and blog have helped hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The Clemmer Group is the Canadian strategic partner of Zenger Folkman, an award-winning firm best known for its unique evidence-driven, strengths-based system for developing extraordinary leaders and demonstrating the performance impact they have on organizations. Check out www.clemmergroup.com for upcoming webinars and workshops.

Website: http://www.clemmergroup.com

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