Leaders, Are You Too Busy?

Today on LinkedIn, I posted this Leadership Thought of the Day:

If you are a leader at the senior level of an organization and you say "I'm so busy," something is not right. Why are you so busy? What are you doing?  

It's my paraphrase of a comment made the other day during a client engagement by the CEO of an organization where I was facilitating a day-long retreat for the senior leadership team.

He further explained what he meant.

The participants, vice presidents and Department Heads in a rapidly growing global life-sciences company, were reflecting on what it meant to be leaders in their specific context.  One of the topics was Focus.

The CEO got up from his chair and went to the whiteboard to draw some diagrams and explain his point of view.

Using Stephen Covey's Urgency/Importance grid as an illustration, he emphatically drew three stars in the Quadrant Two area.  He said:

"If you say 'I'm so busy' but you are not spending time here (Q II), something is wrong. What are you doing? Are you fighting fires all day? Are you doing things that your people should be doing?

"You should be delegating, coaching, and developing your direct reports. That's the investment we need here at our Company."

That's what leaders should be busy doing. Spending as much time as possible in Q II means Quality Leadership Time in activities such as reflecting, reading, and reviewing. Planning, preparing, and preventing. Learning from experience, thinking about the future, and designing ways to get there.

To find more time for Q II, a leader has to get out of the other quadrants. To do that, she has to invest in developing others.

Build your people's capability, and they will build the business.

Terrence Seamon is a leadership development consultant, coach, and facilitator. Follow him on twitter @tseamon, and join his alliance on facebook, Facilitation Solutions.