And Improve Performance and Profitability in Your Company and Restore Sanity in the World
As a leader, time is your most precious asset. How you choose to spend it, invest it our share it determines your effectiveness and your happiness. Time is forever finite – and when lost cannot be retrieved. Effective leaders guard their time and endeavor to waste as little as they can and maximize the value of the time they do have.
I have seen through my own work that there is one thing that stands out among the more valuable things you can choose to do with you time‑– when you consider the myriad things that compete for your attention. And that one of the most ubiquitous and seemingly indispensable technology tools in our hands is rapidly eroding the time you spend attending to what perhaps matters most.
There is no question as to the increasing volatility in business today. Things are not only changing more rapidly and more consequentially, they are shifting more and more unpredictably.
The consensus view that we live in an increasingly VUCA world – meaning defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – is shared by business, governmental and military leadership and speaks to an increasing importance around for agile, adaptive leadership. We cannot wait, watch and then react to problems and opportunities just based on what has worked in the past. Instead, we must be curious, learn from what we observe and initiate creative approaches and adapt quickly to the changes in our circumstances. It is no longer a matter of what you know, it is what you need to know and how effectively capable you are of learning in real time.
The time you invest in learning and in helping develop others is critical to being an effective leader. The problem is that leaders are increasingly finding themselves challenged to find time for this and other things that should be priorities.
It should not be surprising to note just how much of your time and attention you spend either glancing at our actively engaged with your hand-held screen devices – which is in addition to the computer on your desk and the television screens that seem to be everywhere today.
I am not suggesting you shouldn’t avail yourself of the obvious benefits these tools provide. Just that you should examine the idea that it is likely that they are consuming an alarming percentage of your time and mental bandwidth -and stealing away the time you have available for things like improving yourself and developing others.
Some studies have estimated that the typical adult spends as much as 50 hours each month engaged in screen-time and a large percentage of this on our hand-held devices. This represents roughly 20-25% of the 50-to-60 hours or more per week that most CEOs and business leaders spend working.
Even if some of this time consumed with our personal communication devices is eroding quality time outside of work – it is still relevant. Most successful CEOs are actually serving the needs of their organization, at least to some extent, nearly 24-hours a day. There is not much difference between traditional work-time and down time. Finding time for all things that matter most are in competition with the total sum of the demands placed on you.
While the evidence of this being a problem is anecdotal, it is clear from just observing the people around you in any public setting that our attention has wildly shifted towards devices that didn’t even exist 20 years ago. The growth of this screen-time addiction has grown at an explosive rate in just the last five or so years.
Between email, text messages and the full-frontal attack of social media to our smartphones, the human brain is being rewired through the assault of dopamine surges that fire every time we are summoned to peek at the barrage of alerts we constantly receive.
Look around any table in any room– from boardrooms to restaurants and kitchens and bedrooms and you will nearly always find a smartphone within easy reach of every person – if not in their hands.
The concern this raises from a leadership perspective is how all of this has taken the time we might spend learning what we need to know to adapt to our environment – and focuses you instead on what others suggest they think you should know – and this is a dangerous trend.
The danger is that you are likely already so preoccupied with the demands and distractions in your life – that time that might be devoted to relevant learning is draining from our lives. Our shortened attention spans render it more practical to learn trick and shortcuts – but not engage in the deep, thoughtful learning that changes us for the better. And in this VUCA world, this places you and your company at a disadvantage to anyone else who is dedicated to remaining agile and proactive.
It is often said that knowledge is power – but it is learning that makes us powerful.
As a society we place a premium on knowledge. It is the key that opens many doors in life. But it is not any knowledge, it is having the right knowledge. It is knowing what you need to know – and given the constraints of time and our capacity to retain and utilize the information we store in in our minds – this also means learning what not to know and what to unlearn.
Real power is in being an effective and efficient learner.
Part of the problem with modern society is the assumption that learning is a function of simply being exposed to the information we need – or think we need. It partly explains why we justify so much time spent connected to electronic devices that connect us to a boundless source of information. Information does know make us smarter – it is the wisdom that guides how we employ our knowledge that defines our ability to accomplish things. What we know is not what makes us competent – it is how we use what we know.
A larger problem resides in our inability to sort the information we find to discern what is valuable, what is dubious or even what might be dangerously distorted. You can waste an inordinate amount of time falling down rabbit-holes in pursuit of information that may prove to be unreliable or worthless.
The real art of learning is understanding both how to learn and what it is you need to know. It is the basic “can I, should I” dilemma. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. If you have no idea what you should or should not do – or need to learn and know, anything you do seems worthwhile. Some of the most tragic failures are the result of doing things you never bothered to figure out why you should not – and that you do simply because it seems that you can.
We have traditionally placed heavy weighting on accumulated knowledge and experience as a measure of a person’s competence. This is especially true in evaluating leadership. But the pace of change today makes much of what we know quickly irrelevant – or at least deficient compared to what we might – or need to know. This critical gap is what wins or loses wars – and gives you the edge in competition for market share. More important than what you know is how well you are prepared to learn what you need to know. And this is somewhat dependent on what kind of person you are.
You can classify people in two discrete categories: knowing-beings and learning-beings.
Knowing-beings are people who principally operate in the knowing-mode and meter their decisions on confidence in their already acquired knowledge. This level of certainty creates a rigidity in one’s thinking and stifles the uncertainties of curiosity and the presumed risks of not knowing. It is actually rigid thinking that creates the greater risk.
Learning-beings also accumulate knowledge, but operate with bias towards uncertainty and curiosity. They recognize that questions are not just the genesis of learning, they are also the product. The more we learn, the more and better questions we can pose. They demonstrate strength in the courage of not knowing the answers – and strive to ask better and better questions. Learning-beings are better able to adapt to the challenges of a VUCA world.
The greatest and most important edge you can gain as a leader is to continuously improve yourself and your organization through growth that comes from learning. Proclaiming that if you are not growing, you are dying might be a tired cliché, but as it applies to leadership in a VUCA world – it is a simple truth.
The failure to actively engage in a regular process that will challenge your thinking, expand your perspective and provide you with access to thought leadership that will offer you competing points of view poses a clearly observable threat to the welfare – and perhaps the survival of the organization you lead. To disable the limitations of any organization you must first expand the constraints on the thinking of its leadership. This is how you expand the boundaries of success.
One of the best ways to do this is to enlist the assistance of trusted advocates for your cause and your business. Advocates, more so than advisors go beyond the foundation of trust and even loyalty. They are the people who are willing to provide support and benefit without expecting anything in return. This is what you find in peers on boards like my Vistage groups. It is also enhanced by having a coach whose role is to help you expand your personal boundaries and horizons by challenging you to learn and grow.
In the nearly 15 years I have been leading such groups and coaching CEOs – I have noticed the sense of decreasing time and bandwidth for such activities. Ten years ago – I would successful point out that setting aside a meeting day amounted to dedicating less than 5% of your dedicated working time in order to become a more effective leader and increase the performance and profitability of your company.
Today – with as much as 25% of your time hijacked by the constant and unsettling distraction of virtual connectivity and electronic devices – the human sensory depravation only magnifies the sense of pressure on your time.
Taking away another 4-5% of the time you have available to attend to just your most perfunctory duties seems entirely untenable. You are more likely gasping for air and looking for ways to buy time back.
The interesting thing – and good news here is that this is exactly why you want to have a group like this at your disposal. is at your disposal.
There is a powerful drive towards the kind of personal accountability that enables the members of my groups –CEOs who struggle with the same time issues as you – to tackle the distractions, and understand and focus on the one thing that matters most – being fully competent and effective in your role as a leader. When you make this your priority – it becomes possible and then easier to take back control of your life by getting the remainder of your competing priorities in order.
The devices are not going away – nor is the increasing demands on your time. It is not a matter of eliminating the things that rob you of your performance and your sanity. It is a matter of taking charge and deliberately leading the life that serves the indelible purpose that guides you.
###
