• Home
  • >
  • Blog
  • >
  • Maximizing your personal speed to clarity

Les McKeown's Predictable Success Blog

  • February 8, 2011
  • minute read

Maximizing your personal speed to clarity 

Listen to Les McKeown read this blog post:

Audio version not yet available – please check back later.

How as the leader in your organization do you maximize your personal speed to clarity?

Three things*:

How's your speed to clarity?

1. Get a personal productivity system

As a basic principle, you can’t have clarity about anything if you’re swamped by data. This is such a fundamental concept I’m going to devote a separate post to it.

2. Get right with your environment

I’ve known many leaders who can speak (and think) with crystal clarity when we’re at lunch or in a nearby Starbucks, but who dissolve into a puddle of vagueness or procrastination when we get back to their office or factory.

When that happens it’s nearly always because their physical environment isn’t optimized for clear thought. 

They hate their office, or it has no windows, or their key people are miles away, or they don’t have the right technology to hand, or they’re looking right into an unadulterated mess of a warehouse.

Your mileage will vary of course, but if you find yourself inexplicably and perpetually fuzzy-headed at work, but clearer about things elsewhere, then your physical surroundings are almost certainly the problem.

3. Practice ‘inbox zero’ with your emotions

It’s relatively easy for me to earn my keep by helping CEO's and management teams be better at what they do…until it becomes clear that the underlying issue is an emotional one.

Telling someone they’re not thinking clearly (or not thinking clearly fast enough) because of unresolved legacy emotions isn’t easy. 

But the truth is, if you’re harboring annoyance at a team member, fear of pulling the trigger on a decision because of past failure, bitterness after shabby treatment by someone else, or have any other form of significant emotional undertow, then you’ll have a poor speed to clarity.

* Hat-tip to my constant friend and occasional muse, Robert Peake for sending my mind in this direction. Robert speaks more truth in jest (and in rhythm) than I can think in dogged prose.

What About You? How do you maximize your personal Speed to Clarity?

Let Me Know In The Comments Below!

RECENT BLOG Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}
>
Success message!
Warning message!
Error message!