Take Linda, and exec who oversees 26,000 employees. While we were trapped together on a long car ride, she explained that an upcoming strategic meeting with 200 members of her management team was based on the premise that “Communication is the most important part of business.”
Uh, what? When Linda’s ship sinks, I hope all that communication comes in handy.
Where Linda and too many decision makers fail is in misunderstanding their key role—they’re not paid to communicate or to empower or to work at 110% (that one kills me)—they’re paid to THINK!
I couldn’t resist asking some probing questions. Linda revealed that she’d be working with the team on a single project for about 3 hours, and she’d known about the project for approximately 2 months. Then I began to lead her thinking in a different direction.
I asked, “When did you start thinking about what you were going to do and say at this meeting? Not writing and creating your presentation…just thinking.”
“Immediately. This project could impact our entire year and probably two [years].”
My response: “What’s more important; the two months you THOUGHT about this at work (including collecting information, doing research, and preparing the presentation), or the 3 hours you’ll be COMMUNICATING?”
Ah ha. Linda’s expression showed me in that moment she realized that the time she spent thinking was more important than the communication. Not that communicating is unimportant, but it’s trumped by thinking.
Linda, like anyone in leadership, is paid to think.
Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers’ CEO, Peter Blake, understands and plays his role as a thinker better than most. The billion-dollar CEO hosts “Eat with Pete” on a regular basis with his employees. Blake believes that his employees have much to offer and when given the opportunity, they will share ideas and insight that he can use to make sharp, intelligent decisions.
There are employees who are hired to fulfill a number of functions like answering phones, creating designs, managing shipments, and servicing customers. Their tools are often tangible: computers, eyes, hands, robots, ships, etc.
The people who manage those employees may share some of the tools, but their most important and valuable tool is their minds. People who seek thinkers for hire aren’t called “head hunters” for nothing, you know.
Great leaders and managers do two things better than everyone else:
1. They accelerate their organization’s growth and success.
2. They achieve targeted results with less waste and greater ROI.
Imagine creating a plan for a new initiative today and letting it sit over night. Upon return, you find that the “rest period” helped you to gain more insight into the project. It’s akin to writing a letter and then reviewing it the next day to see previously missed errors.
The management styles of two heavy hitters in the 1980’s auto industry exemplify the benefits of thinking versus doing: Japan versus Detroit. When Toyota’s management team first developed its modern assembly line, management made it possible for any assembly-line worker to pull a cord to stop production should a problem or defect occur. Immediately a team of people reviewed the challenge, fixed it, and restarted the line. This added “thinker” to the role of worker: a conscious thought within Toyota’s strategy. For two years, the line crept along. Then one day, the line started to accelerate, and autos emerged from the lines with high enough quality that they passed directly from the line to freighters for delivery.
Detroit’s management strategy put doing ahead of thinking, being busy instead of thinking, when they decided that the only people who could stop production were managers, not assembly-line workers. Although cars moved through the line quickly, they didn’t meet the targeted standards of quality; sometimes as many as 130 defects per 100 cars were reported. ROI was diminished and production was slowed when quality control had to disassemble and then reassemble the products.
Think about the fire fighting skills management needed to work in this environment.
Once you see how valuable your role as a thinker is, what do you do to improve? Here are 4 places to start:
1. Learn to Slow Down: Accelerate past competitors by doing one thing most of them don’t. Invest the extra time, which could be as short as a few weeks, days or hours, into the planning/thinking/strategizing stage of everything you do. We’ve seen people spend one week planning a project that yielded $10,000 when they could have spent two weeks planning and walked away with $80,000. When you think better, you jump traditional management charts, edging and leaping ahead of others.
2. Use Your Organization As Your Eyes and Ears. Take another lesson from “Eat with Pete.” Recognize that you have a virtual gold mine within your management team, so gather, select, and implement the most powerful ideas.
3. Add Tools to Your Toolbox. Given your job is to think, make sure you take the time to learn new skills that enhance and/or leverage your ability to make smart decisions.
4. Marinate: Become aware of how you think to develop patterns that work for you. Mulling around ideas gives you a bank of options, so that when you’re called upon to make quick decisions, you’re on the ball and on target for better results.
Your greatest management tool is your mind. In order for any tool to do its job, you have to care for it and use it optimally. Although this tool doesn’t come with an instruction manual, (can you imagine!) there are techniques, like the four here, that you can use to continually improve your ability to think masterfully. After all, that’s what you’re paid to do.
