Lessons from EO Part 2 of 5: Covey’s Quadrant Prioritizing
February 3, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
Most oftentimes we simply get lost with the tasks in front of us. We have an avalanche of things that need to be accomplished that we scatter over multiple post-it notes, scribble on the corner of a notebook page, and we feel overwhelmed by it all. By using a systematic prioritizing system created by the famous Stephen Covey, we can determine how we see our “to-do” list in a clarified and enlightened fashion.
Covey divided the things in front of us into four quadrants. Quadrant I items are both urgent and important. They are in short a crisis that must be addressed imminently to avert disaster. Hence, they are given priority #1. Quadrant II items are important but not urgent and represent what he terms “preparation”. Quadrant II’s represent our strategic vision for the future of what we should do but may not need to do today. Quadrant III items are urgent but are not so important in the larger scheme of things like checking your email and responding to various questions from your staff that need to be addressed. He calls this quadrant “interruptions”. Quadrant IV represents items that are not important and not urgent, which he terms “trivia”.
Obviously, priority #1 is to address and manage Quadrant I issues. However, we need to analyze our Quadrant I issues to determine how they went from Quadrant II to Quadrant I. What our goal should be is to make such an analysis so that we can more easily keep items in Quadrant II before they become Quadrant I issues. If we live our lives constantly in Quadrant I, something may be wrong. In short, Quadrant I items are “reactive” in nature and Quadrant II items are “proactive” in nature. Similary, if we have no Quadrant II items perhaps we are not sufficiently planning for the future and we should focus on defining Quadrant II items. If you are a business owner and can delegate effectively, you should try to move Quadrant III items over to a staff member to take care of it so that you can focus your priorities on Quadrant I and II items. Obviously, you must also recognize something as Quadrant IV so that you can properly ignore it and not give it Quadrant I and II priorities mistakenly.
When I am in Forum and we work on our presentations, we are trying to get the right balance of Quadrant I and II items discussed so that we are not always in a reactionary mode but can handle urgent and important problems when they arise. Using Covey’s 4 quadrants may help streamline your life if you find it currently chaotic and unplanned or reactionary in nature.
Lessons from EO Part 1 of 5: Accountability
February 2, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
I attended moderator training all day Friday at the Crescent Hotel in preparation for my being moderator of my Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) Forum group. I was mesmerized by how much I learned, thinking I knew it all before going into it. The famed Ellie Byrd led the all-day session and stimulated fruitful thinking on topics I needed to know despite my waning energies in the late afternoon. ”Forum”, for those who are not aware of it, describes a small discussion group of the same 8 to 10 business owners that meet each month to go over business and personal topics of concern to them. I meet every month for 4 to 5 hours with the same group of individuals to help each other grow personally and professionally and whatever happens behind closed doors is held to the strictest level of confidentiality so that there is an impregnable safe haven for discussion and sharing. Forum has been affectionately referred to as “AA” for business owners, which I agree wholeheartedly with that appellation.
I have learned a tremendous amount from Forum, but I cannot share any stories from within our group based on the aforementioned confidentiality agreement. Nevertheless, the training that I received on Friday helped me define certain universal truths that can help individuals whether they are interested in personal growth or as business owners. I asked Ellie permission to write these blogs, and she graciously consented…so onward with our first topic.
I would like to think of accountability as a much more forceful and meaningful version of a “New Year’s resolution”. A New Year’s resolution almost carries a pejorative connotation in that most people fail in their endeavors in a relatively short timeframe. I myself am hoping for this failure in my fellow spin-class attendees so that I can more easily secure a bike without having to be there an hour before class time! However, a New Year’s resolution only is made to yourself once a year and usually over 1 or 2 items that have no definable metrics or external accountability. I am now reading Leadership Gold by John Maxwell, which will be the topic of either next week or the week after’s blogs, in which he says accountability means not trusting yourself but trusting someone else to be there to keep you honest.
What is accountability more specifically? Basically, it means that there is another individual holding you to your defined goals using measurable parameters on a more frequent basis than once a year. I myself have set forth 3 goals for 2009: 1. to be a more present CEO of all my businesses, 2. to move toward personal growth and self-awareness, 3. to continue to improve my personal health and body. Although these goals are not as definable as say, “hit a sales goal of 5 million dollars” or something like that, they work for me. Hey, I am very right-brained and work with less number targeted goals than some of my left-brained colleagues. Each month I report back to my Forum group as to my current action step, past action step, and how I have completed the step.
This is one level of accountability. Monthly goals are fantastic but to be very serious about accountability, we have to have defined metrics every single week that can be measurable and punished if not completed. One thing I learned from Ellie is that accountability cannot be forced across the board. Individuals who resist this second tier of accountability will not submit to it and will resent those who compel them to follow this level of accountability. Also accountability groups have been studied for optimal effectiveness, and Byrd found that a group of 3 to 4 members can create an optimal environment for personal responsibility, whereas 2 members or 5 members simply did not function as well. By allowing those willingly to subscribe to a deeper level of accountability permits the motivated to achieve more rigorous goals without inflaming the rest of the group who might not be as interested. This is interesting to me because I will be presenting this option next month on my EO retreat to my forum group as an option for accountability for us in 2009.
Outside of my forum, I shall be starting a weekly accountability group with my spa leaders, Linda and Phillip, looking for growth targets as I see that the newest of my businesses needs the most of my presence, and we are meeting today for our first accountability meeting. So for those of my readership out there who are interested in being serious about their own level of accountability for personal or professional growth, consider finding an “accountability group” that can push one another on shorter time intervals toward defined goals with measurable fines for those who fall short of the target. Obviously, you can adjust the time interval of accountability, fines, group size, and goals based on one’s own desire for accountability. Preferably you don’t just declare an abstruse New Year’s Resolution in your mind that you soon forget by February 1.
Learning from Gestalt: “Walk the Talk”
October 3, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
I am very proud of being a member of an organization known in brief as EO, Entrepreneur’s Organization, here in Dallas, which is a part of about 16,000 worldwide members. Every month, I attend a lecture by an experienced professional in his/her field of business and have a lovely dinner along with it. Also, every month, I attend what is known as forum, which is a 4-hour dedicated time of 8 to 10 people (9 in my case), who share with each other parts of their lives and businesses so that they can become better business owners and human beings. Forum is known affectionately as “AA For Business Owners.”
It is a hardcore meeting because if you are a second late based on the displayed time on your cellphone, you will have to buy dinner. If you are 20 minutes late, you are not allowed to enter the room. If you do that twice, you are kicked out for life. If you miss two meetings in a year, you are kicked out for life. Despite our busy lives, we commit to each other that we will be there every fourth Wednesday at 3:30 pm come hell or high water.
During our time of helping each other, which we call “experience sharing” rather than advice giving, we employ a language that is derived from Gestalt psychology in which we never say, “You really should not have fired that employee. That was not right.” Instead, we use the “I’ word, “I fired this employee last year that really was not the best decision for me or my business for these reasons…” Basically, we are not here to give each other advice but to learn from each others’ experiences. In short we take the “You” out and replace it with “I”.
As a caveat, we also cannot say, “I would have done that” or “I would say the thing that I would do is…” because that also violates Gestalt. The “I” refers to what you yourself have actually experienced in the past not what you conceive of someone else should do, which is thinly veiled advice. It is working with people who “Walk the Talk”, i.e., those who don’t just spout words of meaningless wisdom but who actually have lived and experienced life lessons that you as a intelligent individual can draw from if you are attentive and open.
In a way, that is what this blog is about. It is about my giving tidbits of my life, passions, foibles, successes, and thoughts so that perhaps you as a reader can attain something valuable from it. I hope these blogs are not just inconsequential banter but help to guide one’s life in very small but substantive ways.
I think Gestalt is a great tactic to help a leader lead his/her troops. Many times, we approach an individual who has had a problem and we say, “Boy, you really should have done this better. Let me tell you how…” Instead if we open with, “Boy, I did the same thing you did last year and I have learned a valuable lesson why I would never do that again and here is what I learned.” Approaching a problem that way is entirely different and can lead to entirely different results. I hope you can use Gestalt somehow effectively in your own life whether personally or professionally.
OWNERSHIP
August 12, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
There are many ways that ideas come to me for this blog. At times, someone says something to me that I go, “Huh, that’s something I need to share with others.” At other times, it has been milling around in my head for a few weeks until I have the opportunity to write about what I wanted to write about. Tonight I attended my Entrepreneur Organization (EO) event by Richard and Linda Eyre, who talked about raising kids. I would recommend anyone who is in the process of raising kids to visit their site and learn more about their unique philosophy about raising children.
Now, as many of you know, I don’t have any kids. However, I always get something out of a lecture so what I thought was interesting about their approach to child-rearing is instilling in kids a sense of ownership, a sense of ownership in everything that they do. I like the idea that kids would get this imaginary checkbook which the parents would sign off on when they completed certain tasks and chores. It gave their children a sense of responsibility and the value of money. Someone then asked them, “Did you then pay your kids for grades?” Richard Eyre responded, “No, that is not what we do to teach children those values. We showed that the true value of education which was what it could do for you in the future.” He only had his kids monetize certain chores to teach them the value of money, how to have ownership in their work, and what was interesting was to teach them how to learn to give. He said one of his daughters (he has 9 kids) came to him at 9 years of age and wanted to give all of her money to the starving kids in Africa rather than keep it herself.
What I got out of the lecture besides some ideas of how I would like to raise my future children is also some fundamentals of what the Eyres were getting at, which is personal ownership. I think today in particular in our wonderful free society, we take too much for granted and start to lose our own sense of ownership. Lawsuits abound and people are quick to blame the next guy for some problem. ”Oh, it couldn’t be me who did that. I don’t make mistakes. I wouldn’t do something like that.” Please, give me a break. We are all human and fail. The person who gains my respect is the person who looks inward and says, “Yup, that’s my fault. Let me see how I can get better now.” Not some kind of rationalization about life.
Back to kids. I was at EO’s event about 3 months ago and Ross Perot Jr. was lecturing. Someone in the audience asked him, “So, Mr. Perot, how did your parents instill in you your work ethic?” His answer was fascinating to me. He first said that his parents showed their love for one another first then they always put the kids as a priority. His father said to him, “Son, all I want is for you to be a good citizen.” Think of that. Not to be happy. Not to be rich. But to be a good citizen. The point of this is that to be happy may mean to go take drugs and live a dissolute life, perhaps. To be rich may mean to accumulate wealth and relish only material things. To be a good citizen means to make a difference in this life and to make an impact for others out there. I love that.
I was instilled a great work ethic from my parents but it wasn’t driven in me but led by example. My most meaningful job was working in a cafeteria one summer before going off to college. I worked the cashier; I mopped the floors; I prepared food; I bused the tables. That taught me the sweat of making a buck. It showed me good people who work hard for their honest dollar. It taught me ownership in everything that I do.
I will stop this very long and rambling blog. I just want to communicate that whenever someone blames you of something or you are faced with questioning whose fault is it anyway remember when you point to someone with your finger, 3 fingers point back to you. Take ownership in all things in life. It is the first step to being a leader…more about that in another blog.