“I don’t have time for that, I have a battle to fight!”
A guy I was interviewing for membership in our CEO Peer Group felt the need to tell me that “time is my most precious resource”. I felt like responding; “No shit, Sherlock, do you think any CEO has time to burn?” Every CEO has far more to do than can be done in the time available and every CEO has developed techniques to prioritize tasks, perform them more efficiently, get them done by someone else or ignore them all together.
“I don’t have time” is the most common objection I hear as I interview potential members for the CEO Roundtable. Saying you don’t have time for a peer group is like saying you can’t go to the doctor because you broke your leg. Feeling as if you don’t have time to do your job is a prime symptom that you are not being an effective CEO and you should be looking for help.
A CEO peer group meets for a few hours a month to talk about issues that no one else can relate to. “It’s lonely at the top” because no one in our daily experience can be as objective or frank as insight and advice we get from our peers. What could be more valuable than that?
If you think you are 100% effective, allocating your most precious resource without any waste or misdirection, then you are pretty special and it isn’t a peer group you need. But if you are like the rest of us, a few hours with your peers will focus your time, eliminate waste, and help you to delegate more. Just the act of telling the group what you are doing with your time will reveal areas of waste as the words leave your lips. Your peers will challenge to you to justify why you are doing this or that thing, suggesting ways from their experience that will allow you to find a shortcut, delegate, ignore or otherwise move something off your plate.
A Far Bigger Benefit than this, though, is the stimulation to think about your whole business differently. While you are busy blazing a trail in heavy bush, your peer has has discovered a parallel superhighway. Or, as the old sales cartoon above illustrates, you are fighting a war with a sword when a machine gun is available.
The nature of most CEOs is that they will not sit back and play solitaire in all that found time. You will be just as busy, but far more effective, productive and produce better results by any measure.
The original article was published on LinkedIn