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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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Everyone values their time, how time is used, how time is spent, and how time is invested. In his tremendous book, “The 360 Degree Leader“, John C. Maxwell presents his sixth Lead-up principle - Be Prepared Every Time You Take Your Leader’s Time. I have written about time management before, yet this chapter really struck me as being very pertinent to your GTD practice. Being prepared is not just important when meeting with your leader, it applies to almost all of your relationships and interactions.

Time is something, perhaps the only thing, that cannot be increased no matter how organized and productive you are. We all get our “three-score-and-ten”, split up into days of 24 hours, and that is all.

“One of the best ways to save time is to think and plan ahead; five minutes of thinking can often save an hour of work.” ~ Charles C. Gibbons

Maxwell’s first principle for being prepared is to invest ten minutes in front-end thinking and preparation for every minute that you expect to get from your audience. The audience that he has in mind is one’s manager or leader, but I submit that this applies to every interaction important enough to warrant being called a meeting. Whether your audience is your boss, your direct report, or a group that you are speaking to you need to complete some preliminary groundwork in order to not waste anyone’s time.

Don’t Make Them Think for You

When you meet with someone, it is likely that questions will come up, from both sides. Being prepared means knowing in advance which questions to ask, and which questions you should already have the answers to. Good questions will do one or more of the following:

• Clarify objectives
• Align resources
• Expand options
• Speed up the process of completion
• Stimulate thinking and collaboration

Bad questions, on the other hand, show that you may not be thinking enough, or that you are lazy, or not on board for the whole program. In any case, they hurt more than they help. Good questions show that you have something to contribute, that your head is in the game.

Be Prepared to Add Value

Not only does proper preparation allow you to voice your ideas, it gives you the ability to evaluate new ideas that may be presented back to you. As Maxwell writes, “Often the difference between a good idea and a great idea is the value added to it during the collaborative thinking process.” I really like that expression, and I look forward to the day when the word “meeting” is replaced with “collaborative thinking session”. Adding value due to prior diligence allows you to get to the heart of the matter in less time, while still being able to elaborate on the details if needed.

What’s in it for Me?

Have you ever been in one of those meetings that lasts three hours, everyone talks and expresses their “point of view”? The kind of meeting where you leave feeling like you’d have been better off taking a long lunch instead? Being prepared for your role gives the others in the audience a return on their investment of time in the meeting. This increases the value of Brand You, which is a return on your own investment of time in preparation.

Knowledge work is just that, work. It takes time and effort. In fact, David Allen thinks so highly of it that he included a quote about thinking from David Kekich on page 189:

An hour of effective, precise, hard, disciplined - and integrated thinking can be worth a month of hard work. Thinking is the very essence of, and the most difficult thing to do in business and in life. Empire builders spend hour-after-hour on mental work…while others party. If you’re not consciously aware of putting forth the effort to exert self-guided integrated thinking…if you don’t act beyond your feelings and take the path of least resistance, then you’re giving in to laziness and no longer control your life.

[Note: David Kekich has a complete credo, which you can read here, and I will have some more about him shortly.]

Being prepared is one of the most important things that you can invest your time in. When you talk, others will listen, as you can add value to the conversation. Maxwell also provides some guidelines for following up on these meetings, for the next encounter:

• This is what you said the last time we met.
• This is what I learned.
• Here is what I did.
• Did I do it right?
• Can I ask more questions?

Be prepared, and Get Things Done.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/585a77. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Relationships define our leadership style. How these relationships are maintained will determine your success in any group or organization that you are part of. In this series of posts we are looking at John C. Maxwell’s book, “The 360 Degree Leader“.

Invest in Relational Chemistry

“People won’t go along with you if they can’t get along with you”

You must take responsibility for connecting with the team members that you lead, as well as those that are leading you. This is a short list of actions to take in order to increase the level of connection between you and your leader:

1. Listen to your leader’s heartbeat - Take the time and effort required to discover just what your leader’s inner workings are. “What makes them tick?” Focus on these things, if you do not know where to begin.
   • What makes them laugh?
   • What makes them cry?
   • What makes them sing?
   • What do they worry about the most?
2. Know your leader’s priorities - Your leader has a short list of activities that must be acomplished in order to be successful. Know what these action items are, and make sure that your own work is done in support of these objectives.
3. Catch your leader’s enthusiasm - You know how sharing enthusiasm for the game creates a bond within a sports team, or group of fans. This same type of bond can be created between you and your leader, and passed on to the rest of your team.
4. Support your leader’s vision - Know where your leader is headed, and what compass they are using to get there.
5. Connect with your leader’s interests - Do you know what your leader does outside of work? Do they golf or run? You do not need to take up these activities yourself, but you should know about the basics and the players. Go to the bookstore and peruse the magazine section.
6. Understand your leader’s personality - You can study some of the materials on personality types available online to discover your own type, and that of your leader in order to gain insight into how to best interact.
7. Earn your leader’s trust - Trust is the currency of the new economy. Your investment in building your relationship with your leader will create a “bank account” of trust that you can use to improve you career.
8. Learn to work with your leader’s weaknesses - You cannot improve the relationship that you have with your leader if you are unable to see and accommodate your leader’s weaknesses. Learn to anticipate them, and be prepared to assist when needed.
9. Respect your leader’s family - Being polite and courteous to your leader’s family in all situations may seem like a no-brainer. Keep in mind that you have little control over how you are perceived by your leader’s spouse and family, so be sure to make a good first impression, and maintain a positive attitude toward them.

“The thesis of Winning with People is that people can usually trace their successes and failures to the relationships in their lives. The same is true when it comes to leadership. The quality of the relationship you have with your leader will impact your success or failure. It is certainly worth investing in.”

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/66e5oj. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

You can manage a process, you can’t manage people

A big mistake that many new managers (and some experienced ones!) make is to think that the group of people that they are now in charge of need to be managed. I’ve got news - a manager is in charge of the processes and actions that their people will be executing. A Leader is out in front, guiding their people in the right direction to accomplish the group’s goals.

In his book, The 360 Degree Leader, John Maxwell studies the importance of Leadership on the quality of management - no matter what level in the corporate hierarchy that you fill. “Lead Up Principle #4” describes just what leadership is:

• People more than Projects
• Movement more than Maintenance
• Art more than Science
• Intuition more than Formula
• Vision more than Procedure
• Risk more than Caution
• Action more than Reaction
• Relationships more than Rules
• Who you are more than what you do

As you can see from this list, leadership deals with concepts that are much more abstract than simple management. A manager uses rules, policies, and formulas to keep the “production line” moving, cranking out those widgets. These are the concrete aspects of a manager’s function, as opposed to the abstract types of thinking and behavior that create true leadership.

Leaders do what managers don’t

1. Leaders plan for the future - Also called Long-Term Thinking, a Leader needs to be able to see beyond today’s widgets. Making sure that the team is not only doing things right, but doing the right things for tomorrow and beyond is the responsibility of a Leader.
2. Leaders see the Big Picture - A team within an organization is just one part that contributes to overall success. Like a machine, every part is needed for efficient operation, and the Leader will think and act based on how their team fits within the larger context.
3. Leaders push the envelope - In the quest to find “a better way” a Leader will have the courage to color outside the lines. The rules are there for a reason, managers are told, Leaders will question the reason, “Is it still appropriate?“
4. Leaders accentuate the intangibles - Remember the list in the quote above? You can’t really plug a relationship with a team-mate into a graph to show the board of directors. Leaders will have confidence in expressing and describing the intangible factors that lead to success.
5. Leaders learn to trust their hunches - Intuition is a skill like anyother, that can be improved over time. The more you learn to focus your attention on the intangibles, such as principles rather than processes, the more perceptive your intuition will become.
6. Leaders give their power away - If you want something done right, I have always found that the best way is not to do it yourself; no, train someone how to do it - and put them in charge of it. Make them responsible and create trust. Truly empowered team members can create remarkable successes.
7. Leaders are agents of change - Managers are there to implement the changes that Leaders create. One of the basic qualities of a Leader is a desire for innovation, for making progress happen.

People can not be managed, they have hopes and dreams, they have problems at home. There is almost nothing a manager can do to make people work like machines. People prefer to be led, to have an example to work towards, an inspiration to perform. When a Leader has the skills and understanding mentioned above, they can take their team to a much higher level.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6rlesa. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

In the first two posts of this series (Manage Yourself First and Manage Your Boss Second) we began our discussion of The 360 Degree Leader: Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization, By John C. Maxwell.

Today we continue with the third principle of Leading Upwards, one of the most difficult parts of any job. Leading your leader does not mean sucking up, it means adding value to your leader by making yourself more valuable to them.

Are you working hard, or “hardly workin’? “

Not only is having a can-do attitude important in the new economy, it’s vital that you have a will-do attitude. The employee who is set up to get noticed and get ahead is the one who is not too proud or afraid to take on the difficult/dirty/low-status tasks that exist in every organization.

To become a true 360 degree leader, follow these 10 tips:

1. Take the tough jobs
2. Put in your time in the trenches
3. Be comfortable working in obscurity
4. Make an effort to get along with difficult people
5. Put your own reputation on the line
6. Admit your faults, never make excuses
7. Do more than is expected of you
8. Put out your hand and help someone else
9. Never, ever say, “That’s not my job”
10. Follow through on your promises

Not only will you be creating more value for your organization, you will be creating more value in yourself. With increased value, you will feel better about yourself and more motivated to continue stepping up.

Keep everything in perspective, as Maxwell says,”The goal is more important than the role.”

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5jhlvd. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen