the-7-habits-ofhighly-effective-people

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart

taken this approach before, you may need to spend more time to train them in what this approach involves, what "completed staff work" means, how to synergize around differences and what identifying alternative options and consequences involves.

The "In" basket and correspondence. Instead of diving into the "IN" basket, you would spend some time, perhaps 30 to 60 minutes, beginning a training process with your secretary so that he or she could gradually become empowered to handle the "IN" basket as well as the correspondence under item number five. This training program might go on for several weeks, even months, until your secretary or assistant is really capable of being results-minded rather than methods-minded.

Your secretary could be trained to go through all correspondence items and all "IN" basket items, to analyze them and to handle as many as possible. Items that could not be handled with confidence could be carefully organized, prioritized, and brought to you with a recommendation or a note for your own action. In this way, within a few months your secretary or executive assistant could hand 80 to 90 percent of all the "IN" basket items and correspondence, often much better than you could handle them yourself, simply because your mind is so focused on Quadrant II opportunities instead of buried in Quadrant I problems.

The sales manager and last month's sales. A possible Quadrant II approach to item number four would be to think through the entire relationship and performance agreement with that sales manager to see if the Quadrant II approach is being used. The exercise doesn't indicate what you need to talk to the sales manager about, but assuming it's a Quadrant I item, you could take the Quadrant II approach and work on the chronic nature of the problem as well as the Quadrant I approach to solve the immediate need.

Possibly you could train your secretary to handle the matter without your involvement and bring to your attention only that which you need to be aware of. This may involve some Quadrant II activity with your sales manager and others reporting to you so they understand that your primary function is leadership rather than management. They can begin to understand that they can actually solve the problem better with your secretary than with you, and free you for Quadrant II leadership activity.

If you feel that the sales manager might be offended by having your secretary make the contact, then you could begin the process of building that relationship so that you can eventually win the confidence of the sales manager toward your both taking a more beneficial Quadrant II approach.

Catching up on medical journals. Reading medical journals is a Quadrant II item you may want to procrastinate. But your own long-term professional competence and confidence may largely be a function of staying abreast of this literature. So, you may decide to put the subject on the agenda for your own staff meeting, where you could suggest that a systematic approach to reading the medical journals be set up among your staff. Members of the staff could study different journals and teach the rest the essence of what they learn at future staff meetings. In addition, they could supply others with key articles or excerpts which everyone really needs to read and understand.

Preparing for next month's sales meeting. Regarding item number seven, a possible Quadrant II approach might be to call together a small group of the people who report to you and charge them to make a thorough analysis of the needs of the salespeople. You could assign them to bring a completed staff work recommendation to you be a specified date within a week or 10 days, giving you enough time to adapt it and have it implemented. This may involve their interviewing each of the salespeople to discover their real concerns and needs, or it might involve sampling the sales group so that the sales meeting agenda is relevant and is sent out in plenty of time so that the salespeople can prepare and get involved in it in appropriate ways.

Rather than prepare the sales meeting yourself, you could delegate that task to a small group of people who represent different points of view and different kinds of sales problems. Let them interact constructively and creatively and bring to you a finished recommendation. If they are not used to this kind of assignment, you may spend some of that meeting challenging and training them, teaching them

why you are using this approach and how it will benefit them as well. In doing so, you are beginning to train your people to think long-term, to be responsible for completing staff work or other desired results, to creatively interact with each other in interdependent ways, and to do a quality job within specified deadlines.

Product "X" and quality control. Now let's look at item number eight regarding product "X," which didn't pass quality control. The Quadrant II approach would be to study that problem to see if it has a chronic or persistent dimension to it. If so, you could delegate to others the careful analysis of that chronic problem with instructions to bring to you a recommendation, or perhaps simply to implement what they come up with and inform you of the results.

The net effect of this Quadrant II day at the office is that you are spending most of your time delegating, training, preparing a board presentation, making one phone call, and having a productive lunch. By taking a long-term PC approach, hopefully in a matter of a few weeks, perhaps months, you won't face such a Quadrant I scheduling problem again.

As you go through this analysis, you may be thinking this approach seems idealistic. You may be wondering if Quadrant II managers ever work in Quadrant I. I admit it is idealistic. This book is not about the habits of highly ineffective people; it's about habits of highly effective people. And to be highly effective is an ideal to work toward.

Of course you'll need to spend time in Quadrant I. Even the best-laid plans in Quadrant II sometimes aren't realized. But Quadrant I can be significantly reduced into more manageable proportions so that you're not always into the stressful crisis atmosphere that negatively affects your judgment as well as your health.

Undoubtedly it will take considerable patience and persistence, and you may not be able to take a Quadrant II approach to all or even most of these items at this time. But if you can begin to make some headway on a few of them and help create more of a Quadrant II mind-set in other people as well as yourself, then downstream there will be quantum improvements in performance.

Again, I acknowledge that in a family setting or a small business setting, such delegation may not be possible. But this does not preclude a Quadrant II mind-set which would produce interesting and creative ways within your Circle of Influence to reduce the size of Quadrant I crises through the exercise of Quadrant II initiative.

Sky, Land, River.