Last week I discussed internal battles, double personalities and some of the misunderstandings between managing and leading. This week, I will offer some tips to help you transition from being the technician and/or manager to allow the leader inside you to come out and flourish.
Some, if not most, of the concepts are pretty straight forward, but discipline plays a vital role whether you will make the transition or not. A leader has to be disciplined for various reasons, but to me, the most important reason to be disciplined is due to:
- Vision. To begin any entrepreneurship adventure, all the leader has to go on… is a vision. Nobody else sees that vision like the leader does. It can be very difficult to keep the staff motivated or at times, even yourself to be motivated, but having the discipline to trust your instincts and your vision, will play a key role to help you see your vision through.
When you begin developing your discipline skills, you are indeed transitioning into a leader.
Another concept is the mission statement. And this concept I will break it into two components, because I think that many people, including some instructors in the subject, miss one very important component of the mission statement and that is, your personal mission statement. Your business should have a mission statement, what does your business stand for.? But equally important, arguably more so, what do you stand for? This question is paramount! The answer to this very question, “what do you stand for?” could trigger a paradigm shift that will change your life for the better! After you answer that question, you are thinking and acting, well… like a leader.
The concept that I am about to write about is also one of keys to efficiency and that is: Time Management. Interestingly enough, last night, after completing my International Designation, a group of students along with some of our teachers, had a little gathering afterwards at a local restaurant, where I posed the following question to one of our teachers. How do we capitalize on this 5 days worth of concepts that we just went through? And his answer was short and sweet. . . Time Management. We all know that this is not a new concept, yet it is very important. He went on to say, when you go to the office, the first thing you do is open your email and before you know it, it is 1PM. Where did your day go? He also said, if you designate/allocate time intervals for certain activities, you will accomplish so much more. In fact, time management can only work if you actually do not let interruptions disturb you, from the activity at hand. Otherwise, your time management skills need improvement. Time management leads me to the next concept… prioritization.
What are your priorities? The preceding question may be ambiguous, perhaps even too broad, what I’m trying to get at for the article’s purpose is, what are your priorities for today? For Tomorrow? For this week? Some people will tell you that the night before is the best time to set up your priorities for the next day; some believe that the best time is at the end of your working day and some others believe that it is in the morning prior to your starting your working day. I will give you my personal insight and opinion. The best time to set up your priorities to work on, is the time that you consider best for you and that also yield results for you! Let me expand a little on this. If you try to set up your priorities for the next day, right before you quit for the day, and the results are good, then by all means, stick with it. But if it doesn’t work, meaning, you are so overwhelm from the day’s work that you can’t think straight about what it is that you need to complete tomorrow, perhaps setting up your priorities at that time, may not be the best way to go about it. By the way, this specific concept applies to your business as well as your current job, if you have one. In my personal experience, I have tried all three approaches and found that the night before, between 10 and 11 in the evening, is when I am the most relaxed and can think objectively about what it is important for me to work on the next day. But again, try any possible combinations of time, until you find that perfect time, where you can think objectively about what it is important for you to tackle that day or the next.
The before mentioned concepts are just the tip of the iceberg. We are scratching the surface of becoming a leader. Trust me when I say this and I am not discouraging anyone, in fact quite the opposite, but the study and development of leadership is a lifetime endeavor. Join me in future articles where I will actually go in more depth into each and every one of the concepts here discussed and provide you with examples. Thank you for reading!
