“When corporate leaders make a sincere effort to give managers both challenge and choice, most managers can learn to direct their energy and improve their focus – and ultimately find their way to the sea.”
Tag: manager
Let’s first get one thing out of the way: there is no such thing as a self-centered leader. Leadership is made up of an amalgamation of beliefs and related behaviors geared towards supporting individuals and groups. The intentions that underlie leadership are outwardly focused and rooted in the need to help others. For the sake of accuracy, there are self-centered managers, but no leaders.
Bold people ask themselves bold questions. They like to challenge themselves. If you consider yourself to be bold, you may ask yourself these bold questions:
1. What do I really want in life?
2. What is the price I need to pay to achieve it?
3. Am I ready to pay that price?
4. What do I need to stop doing?
5. What do I need to start doing?
6. What excuses I am making for not moving forward in my life?
7. What am I afraid of?
8. What is it in me that is holding me back?
9. What kind of person I need to become in order to achieve what I want?
10. What skills I need to have in order to achieve my goals?
TEN BOLD QUESTIONS (BQ)
Bold people ask themselves bold questions. They like to challenge themselves. If you consider yourself to be bold, you may ask yourself these bold questions:
1. What do I really want in life?
2. What is the price I need to pay to achieve it?
3. Am I ready to pay that price?
4. What do I need to stop doing?
5. What do I need to start doing?
6. What excuses I am making for not moving forward in my life?
7. What am I afraid of?
8. What is it in me that is holding me back?
9. What kind of person I need to become in order to achieve what I want?
10. What skills I need to have in order to achieve my goals?
These questions might be helpful for delegating services to others:
1. Do you operate a policy of ‘if you want a job done well, do it yourself’?
2. Do you try to do everything yourself?
3. Would you trust your senior staff to do your job as well as you, given time and support? If not, why not?
4. Could some of your staff do it better? How do you feel about that?
5. Do you do a great deal more work than your colleagues? Why?
6. Do you feel stressed? What are the reasons?
Start today to pay closer attention to the things you do. Be more conscious and aware of yourself and your actions. Think about your tasks carefully before you begin. Identify your most important tasks and concentrate on them single-mindedly.
Do fewer things of highest value.
You must be continually reducing and eliminating activities that take up too much time and contribute very little to the goals you really want to achieve.
Phillips writes an insightful and sometimes moving explanation of what he has gained from his experience. He also describes accurately some of the problems of being a manager is today’s environment and how Zen can help people and organizations.
The Conscious Manager also presents other exercises, for example, ones that help readers not to overreact to things that happen every day, things that are not worth getting twisted up about. Both kinds of exercises help us find out what really matters to us, so we can pursue that effectively and without distraction. The book features vignettes in business settings that illustrate the value of this approach for managers.