We confuse activity with progress. Motion is great; the only problem is that it takes you nowhere. How many of us avoid deadlines, keep shuffling paper stacks around, get involved in long conversations and lengthy unproductive meetings during the workday and wonder why, at the end of the day, week, month, quarter and year nothing of significance has changed?
We freeze and fail to act when we need to. Instead, because we are so focused on not making a bad decision, we make no decision. The only thing that happens is that the situation stays the same or gets worse, but it does not improve and it does not go away. In the end, a decision still has to be made, and sometimes the passing of time has reduced the options available for a positive outcome.
We think the process is more important than the result. More often than not, we get hung up on making sure that the process is so solid that we fail to understand that most of the time, the result is substantially more important.
We fail to try something a second, third or fourth time. While there is a point where we do need to give up and try something new, most of us never get there. What we do instead is try something once, with the mindset that if it didn’t work that one time, it will never work again, under any circumstances. What we need to do is understand that things change and we can try something again, changing a variable, which is usually the poor attitude we have at the start.
We fail to measure what is important. Every organization has leading and lagging indicators. Most people don’t know the difference and how one can impact the other. Because they don’t understand the importance of what to measure, and when to measure, they measure nothing at all.
We stay in our comfort zone. We fail to understand what it is that we need to learn to be more successful, and because we don’t know what we need to learn, we opt to learn nothing at all. Status quo is the default position of the learning activity, which really means we are moving backward, because so much knowledge is being generated each day.
We think meetings are for decisions. Meetings are for information exchange, not for decision making. Individuals make most decisions, not groups. Because meetings are all about information, everyone usually wants to talk, hopefully speaking sense, but it makes the meetings run longer than necessary, without purpose. Those who like to speak get a sense of authority and power. The corollary mistake is thinking that talking more than others in meetings matters; it doesn’t.
We hire people thinking they will change. People don’t change that much; they are who they are. To be sure, people may change if forced to by circumstances, but even then it is very, very difficult. Often they end up being the same person they always were. And, angry that you asked them to be someone they aren’t.
We expect others to solve our problems. Like the fairy tales of childhood, people wait for someone else to arrive on a white horse, wearing a white hat, just in the nick of time. The corollary to this is that we blame others (competition, incompetent vendors, employees, the world) for everything that has and is going wrong in the company.
We fail to face the brutal facts of our current reality. Ignoring reality is a dangerous habit that potentially could lead to disaster. Life is not fair, competition is fierce, and the customer doesn’t always pay their bills when they should, and employees you want to count on call in sick. Face reality and deal with it in a cold, factual manner.
Ken Keller, 661.295.6892
