How Leaders Cause Their Teams/Organizations To Sink Or Soar

Are you and your team on the bleeding or leading edge?

The leading edge of an airplane wing is critical to slicing through the air and directing airflow around the wing to create lift.

Leaders form the leading edge of their teams or organizations. He or she shapes everyone’s energy and behaviors. Highly effective leaders and outstanding leadership teams create powerful lift. Their teams and organizations soar.
 

Less effective leaders and weaker leadership teams form misshaped or dull leading edges creating a drag that reduces lift. Their teams/organizations may get off the ground, but they sputter and sometimes stall.

The most dangerous — often deadly — leaders and leadership teams slice and slash their teams and organizations. Mostly with good intentions and little desire to hurt anyone, these leaders and leadership teams are usually ignorant of the bleeding edges they’ve created and the damage they’re doing.
 

Are you and your team on the bleeding or leading edge? How do you know? According to whom?

Many teams/organizations are overloaded with too many priorities and conflicting activities. Does your team/organization load new projects and goals on top of existing workloads without rigorous “stop doing” pruning to make room for them?

These are the two biggest problems emerging with our free Strategic Use of Time Assessment tool. The survey asks 14 questions covering 7 deadly time traps. Hundreds of leaders have taken the survey online (click here to access it) or in CEO Forums where I’ve facilitated discussions on Leveraging Leadership Time.

After tallying scores for all questions, on average, participants score in the category of “Time is Slipping Away – you’re getting sucked into daily busyness and not investing your time strategically.”

In today’s highly reactive and crazy busy world it’s way too easy to allow the daily deluge coming at us — e-mails, meetings, problems, or phone calls — to control our time. This sucks us into playing trivial pursuit. That sets up a stress spiral; we’re not using our time strategically so we have more fires to fight which means we have less focus on leveraging our time which means we have even more fires to fight and we’re even less strategic...so our days spin ever more wildly as we chase our tail in faster and faster circles.

Does your team regularly take time away from daily operations to reflect and refocus? Does your team periodically ask what we should keep doing, stop doing, and start doing/do more to increase our effectiveness?

These two questions are from the second biggest problem identified in our time assessment. They describe the time trap of working “in” versus “on” the team. As our organizations spin ever more quickly, many teams allow their priorities to be badly distorted. Things that matter most — team dynamics, touchy moose-on-the-table issues, key priorities — are often crowded out by things that matter least — crisis du jour or technical problems better solved by those closest to the action — and the team spins round and round.

Is it time for you and your team to take back your time?

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. Connect Jim Clemmer Follow @JimClemmer