I see in my daily reading of Flipboard articles and blog posts, how to increase productivity and or how to improve professional performance. Many of these self-help tactics reflect habits of some of the most popular and successful entrepreneurs of our time. #influencermarketing. What do they do daily and how do they get it done? Some articles tell you to get up early, some tell you to sleep in. Some tell you to make a list, some tell you to ditch the list. Eat right, eat less, exercise……the list goes on. I think if we captured all the actions and implemented them into our routine, let’s just say we might not have time to be productive.
I wanted to offer Simple Thinking from my perspective and experiences of leading and coaching teams on what I determined to be a major difference in productive team members and not so productive team members. I think first we should define the context of productive as an individual who is getting it done and getting a lot of it done. Productive team members are sought out by every organizational as leaders will gravitate to those who are able to perform at a higher level.
So, today's Simple Thinking moment offers a single thought approach- Write A Will & Kick The Can. What does that mean? I would like to encourage you to change your approach to commitments of action and approach to strategy. Rather than saying ‘We can do this….’, change it to say ‘We will do this…’ instead. As an example, it changes the level of the team commitment if we state ‘We will achieve $10m in new sales’ as opposed to saying ‘We can achieve $10m in new sales’ this year.
You may be thinking this is silly and/or straw advice. When you are in meetings this week professionally or having a personal conversation with friends and family that involves commitment, make a mental note of how often people avoid being committed to accountability with the use of ‘I Can’ instead of ‘I will.’ Oh, and for those of us that are always looking for a loophole, make sure ‘try’ is absent from the commitment statement. The first cousin to the non-committal ‘I can’ is ‘I will try’ which avoids accountability too!