Ink & Inspiration

In his book, Clockwork, Mike Michalowicz presents a useful tool for managing your time as a leader. In his 4D framework he distinguishes four types of action:

Do - Execute Task
The least important type of action, but the one most leaders spend most of their time on: doing the work themselves. While there always is some work that you need to do yourself, the key message here is: spend as little time as you can on this first category.

Decide - Assign Action
One level higher, but still not a core activity for leaders is making decisions. If you make all the decisions, it means you have to be involved and informed about everything that happens. While that may have been a sign of leadership in the past, it is no longer today.

Delegate - Assign Outcome
Now we’re arriving at the more important categories. Delegating is an important skill for leaders. Rather than doing the work or making decisions themselves, they delegate this to others. This makes their own task one of assigning who is responsible for which outcome.

Design - Create Future
The most important type of action, but the one most leaders spend least of their time on: designing the organization of the future and creating the right conditions for that organization to emerge. This is truly working ON the business rather than IN the business.

Actionable two steps after reading are:
1- Assess how you spend your time today. Assign percentages to each of the four categories.
2- Define how you should spend your time. Again, by assigning percentages to the categories.

Useful perspective on how to deal with narcissists in the workplace. Narcissism is profound sense of insecurity, lack of empathy and seeking admirations most of time. It is not always bad some of them are healthy and certain level of Narcissism help to be resilience and confident but when volume goes up then we have to deal it carefully.
One of the good advice I learnt from this this podcast is better not to deal and debate in publicly rather deal in 1-1 conversations with care and practice praise them publicly for some good work. Most importantly, we have choices to control our emotions, responses and energy level rather trying to control other to avoid unnecessary conflict.

‎Coaching for Leaders: Holding People Accountable Without Authority, with Bonni Stachowiak on Apple Podcasts ‎Show Coaching for Leaders, Ep Holding People Accountable Without Authority, with Bonni Stachowiak - 24 Sept 2023