You are more than aware that you need to do something. You know that it doesn’t feel right. You know that you’re going to decide at some stage. However, did you know that you’re choosing not to choose? You’ve made a choice, and your choice is to do nothing.
What is preventing you from making that decision?
I typically find that we only make decisions when we’re in pain. When the pain of not doing something outweighs the pain of doing it, then we make that choice.
For example, you have a friendly staff member. You, along with everyone else, gets along with them. However, they are not doing their job correctly. Over time, you have let things slide because they are a nice person, but now the pain of them not doing their job correctly is impacting not only on your customers but also your team.
Before you realise it, the morale in the office is low.
They don’t mean to do their job incorrectly; they’re just not doing it. However, it’ll get to a stage where the pain that it’s causing to both your business and yourself soon outweigh the pain of the conversation, and you’ll do something about it.
So my challenge to you is to choose before the pain gets too great.
Think about your business. What’s causing you pain? What’s keeping you awake at night? What do you know that you’re going to have to do something about, yet you still haven’t done that?
What are your goals?
• Do you have a strategy?
• Do you have a financial goal?
• Do you have a system’s goal?
• Do you have a people goal?
• Do you have a corporate social responsibility goal?
• Do you have a market goal?
• Do you have a personal goal?
• Do you have an emotional goal?
• Do you have a well-being goal?
It’s a little bit like going on a diet. You’ve known that you’ve needed to lose a few extra kilos, yet you’ve done nothing about it. You thought, “Oh, look, I’m not too unhealthy, and I’ll get around to it. One day.” Then you start to get a few chest pains, and then you realise that today is the day that you have to ‘get around to it’ as the doctor says to you, “Well, sorry. It’s about time that you did something about it.”
You know that the pain of your chest pain is greater than the pain of having to think about it. You also realise that you need to start eating healthy and prioritising time for exercise.
However, the big question is, why did you wait?
Because choosing not to choose is still making a choice. If we could all be more proactive, life would have less pain.
We have been working with a client for over a decade. Their management team are also the directors in the business. Their management team are good managers; however, they cannot govern board directors. Finally, the pain of the CEO, of reporting to incompetent directors or managing them as managers, got so much that he finally decided to do something about the competency of the governance boards.
Why did it take so long?
Because the pain wasn’t great enough, it was only when the incompetency eventually impacted his bottom line and retirement plan that they finally decided to do something. The result is that we now have higher-performing managers and a more competent governance
board. An advisory board also complements this governance board, and the advisory board assists the CEO in setting the direction, and we now have a better outcome.