Proactive vs. Reactive
Kelly at Simply GTD has another excellant post up on being proactive vs. reactive. Money quote, “People are likely interrupting you because you’ve trained them it’s OK to do that.” There are other great points at the link, but this is a key concept in GTD. It is one of the focuses of Blanchard’s The One Minute Manger Meets the Monkey (reviewed here). She also makes the point that when people delegate they don’t look at how it affects the person they are delegating to. My boss taught me a great lesson, which as Kelly notes, you have to have an updated task list to implement. When his former Executive Director would give him a new assignment, he would reply, “These are the X things on my schedule for this week. Which one do you want me to not do in order to accomplish this new task.” Unfortunately, I used to-and sometimes still do-just say, “sure, I’ll take care of it.”
We are constantly training people-staff, supervisors and collaborators. We do this by accepting people wasting our time by being late, doing other people’s jobs for them, by automatically taking leadership of a new project or committee. Conversely, we can train them to know that the meeting will start without them if they choose to miss the start time, that we will take the time to talk with them, but at a time that is more condusive to our schedule (can it wait until the weekly meeting? or at least until after this report is done), that we will coach them on solving the problem, but we will not take on ownership of the problem, that we are comfortable with the uncomfortable silence when the role committee chairperson comes up since we already know we cannot lead everything. How are you training the people that surround you?
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