Transcript
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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.
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Welcome to Moments with Marty. Your short, sharp shot of leadership insight to help me to stay on track between our weekly episodes of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. French philosopher Blaise Pascal once said, all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. That was 400 years ago, and it's never been truer than it is today. With so many demands on your time and so many things competing for your attention, it's easy to stay busy. And even though you might complain about being run down or overworked, there is an upside for you. It provides a convenient smokescreen to help you avoid self examination. You're too busy to stop and think, so you keep going. And even when you have the chance to slow down, you don't. You just fill your plate with more. Think about this in a leadership context. The only thing I know for sure about every organization on the planet is is that you will never have enough time, money or people to do all of the things you'd ideally like to do. So you have to make choices. But somehow it feels easier to be constantly redlining than it is to make those choices, because those choices can be hard. If you actually take the time to stop and think, you might find that a lot of what your team does delivers no discernible value. It's just noise. Which is why every so often you need to push the chair back from the desk, take 10 deep breaths, and ask yourself, what is my team really producing? Are they working on the highest value things? And can I trace every investment of resources to a tangible outcome? I know the thought of looking critically at what your team does every day can be quite daunting. What if you found out that a large percentage of the work they do creates no value whatsoever? It's just stuff. You might feel compelled to stop that work. And once the work stopped, you'd have to face some cold, hard facts, like the fact that some of your people may not be capable of producing the value they should? It's way easier not to ask the question in the first place. Just keep going in blissful ignorance and hope that no one else notices. What I can promise you is that if you're strong enough to face those facts, you'll never look back. It'll open the door to levels of performance that were previously unimaginable. If you could stop rewarding people for just being busy and instead focused only on the value being produced, your team would be completely different night and day. Different what if everything your team did produce demonstrably better outcomes? Outcomes that clearly connected to the organization's biggest value drivers Slowing down Clearing the busy work off the team's agenda and putting a laser like focus on producing high value deliverables is the key to improved performance. If you don't get this right, your team's just going to be spinning their wheels. Busy is the enemy of productive. As long as you give your team a free pass for being busy, performance is going to elude you. Most leaders don't even know where to start with this problem, so if you can work out how to do it, I promise you you will stand out. If you want to go deeper on how to kill your team's busy work instead of killing their performance, have a listen to episode 366 of the no Bullshit Leadership podcast, replacing busy work with real results. We'll leave a link in the show notes. I really hope you enjoyed this moment and it gives you that extra little spark to be a no Bullshit.
