If you're a senior leader, no matter how complex your job may be you ultimately have just three critical tasks. These duties are easy to understand and very difficult to put into practice:
1. Set your priorities.
Don't let them be set for you by others, by circumstances or by your Inbox. And the more senior you are, the more latitude and choice you have, the more you need to rely on your judgment and intuition. This requires being open to influence while resisting advocacy, being attuned to the data while knowing when to ignore it, and being prepared to take calculated risks.
- The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore
- Confusing Motion with Progress
- Taking the Leap (Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty)
2. Focus your attention.
Focused attention is your most important resource, not only because it's so powerful, but also because it's finite. Even when you work longer and harder, your capacity for truly focused attention is neurologically limited. So it's crucial to focus your attention on your priorities, without allowing yourself to be distracted by things that appear urgent but lack importance. This requires establishing boundaries to protect your attention, developing habits that help you maintain focus, and switching off the false alarms (digital and emotional) that constantly interrupt you throughout the day.
- Importance vs. Urgency
- How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)
- Growth, Profitability and Return on Attention
3. Manage your emotions.
Note that manage doesn't mean suppress. Emotions are essential to effective influencing and decision-making, and you need to harness them to serve your needs. You also need to resist being hijacked by them, and this involves not only the big emotions that disrupt you in dramatic fashion, but also the subtle ones that sidetrack you and slowly draw you off course over time. This requires an ongoing commitment to sense, understand, articulate and express your emotions effectively.
When you get these three tasks right, everything else tends to fall into place--and when you don't, you waste endless amounts of time and energy trying to compensate.
Updated December 2022.
Photo by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier.
