Are You Addicted to Being Busy?

All right, I'm going to say it. You're not hustling and grinding. You're just addicted to being busy. The secret benefits of stepping back is what I want to share with you today. Imagine this. You take a week off or a month even. No conference calls, no interventions, no client calls. What happens? Does your business crumble, or does it thrive in ways that you never expected? Here's the thing. Stepping back from your business isn't just about self care. It's a leadership strategy all in itself. And the leaders who've mastered it, they're not just surviving. They're scaling better, stronger, with more resilience, stronger teams than the rest of us are. So I want to dig in now to why doing less might actually help you achieve more. Let me tell you a couple of different stories. I've got a CEO that I worked with recently of a fitness business. This guy's got a great life. He's got date night on the regular. He's got time for his kids and family. He's got time for his friends and his hobbies. He's in great shape. Of course, he's in the fitness business, right? So he ought to be in great shape, right? He's caring about his. His team, though, is among the strongest that I've worked with in many years. His team are doers. They step up, they get the job done. And from time to time, they. There's a person on the team who isn't stepping up, right? What does he do? He gives them a nudge. He says, come on, man, you could do this. I believe in you. I know you got it. I need to see more from you. I need to see a better effort, a better focus, like whatever, right? He pushes them a little. Sometimes they step up, sometimes they don't. What happens if they don't? He lets them go, Right? But he doesn't step in and fill all the gaps for people all the time and ruin his life, his fitness, his romance, his family. Family life, his fun, his friendships, Right? He doesn't take the joy out of his life. And in. And in doing that, he actually creates opportunities for his people to step up. And he has no tolerance for people who don't step up. If it's clear that you're not stepping up on the team, you don't stay on that team for very long, right? And that's the difference. Too many times we fill in for people and they either hold back or. Or they don't ever have to drive and we're exhausted and we can't get away from the business and we're solving every problem. And they come to us because they're used to it, because we've trained them to do that mostly unconsciously, right. You didn't start out to be the kind of boss who ruins your life and disempowers your team, but we often end up that way. And then we tell people because it's in our culture, I'm hustling and grinding. In truth, we have an addiction to being busy, right. I worked with a guy many years ago, a very different guy in an early point of my career who was always calling in from like the beach to give his daily reports and stuff. He's like, I'm double my quota, I'm taking the time off. I'm going to the beach this afternoon. It's a great day. Right? He was very much about productivity exceeding his number that he needed from a plan standpoint and from what he needed personally for his ego, ambition, lifestyle, that kind of thing. And then taking some great time off, right. This is early on and, and I learned from him as an example that I don't always match up to that the productivity is far more important than the busyness. But we have a way of saying, like, how are you doing? Oh man, I'm so busy right now. It's great though. It's great to be busy. Yes, it is. We feel useful. We feel like it's not okay to not be busy. It's not okay to take a two hour lunch and linger and think about and appreciate our lives and take a walk around the block without handling a phone call or whatever, but just look up into the trees or, or listen to the birds, right? We don't allow ourselves that. And yet there's actually a cost on the business, right. Years ago, my wife and I were in the middle of a really significant business challenge. And when we realized that our kids were hitting an age where we promised ourselves that we were going to like blow out, that we were going to go take months and years off, not really. Like we wanted to just make sure that we had enough time when our kids had a certain age. And really it was the time between 10 and 14, between 10 and 14, we thought, and we decided in our view that that's when kids would remember the travel and the time the most and appreciate it. And they weren't yet too much into the teen years where they didn't want us in their lives at all when they, you know, when a lot of kids spend time hating their parents anyway. So now we're in the middle of the challenge, and we see this time approaching, and I'm like, I can't take a month off. I can't take the summer off. I can't take a year off. I can't even get away for two weeks without being locked into various calls and meetings and things like that. In our business, I like, we're just too small of a company, right? And so we looked at each other, we said, you know what? No matter what, next year, when summer comes around, we're going to take the summer off. And now, look, some cultures, in some places, that's a normal kind of thing. But it wasn't in. It isn't in North America for the most part, certainly not in the United States. We just don't work that way. It's not the way we're wired, not the way our companies are run in general. So that's kind of extraordinary. It's true in Europe and some other parts of the world that that might be a lot more normal, but for us, it just really wasn't. It was going to take something. Now, I already had learned scaling up. I'm already practicing scaling. If we have meetings, great weeklies and daily huddles and dashboards and scorecards, we do quarterly planning, annual strategy work, all that stuff. We're already doing that. And yet I still can't take the time off, Right. Why is that? Because of the way I was as a leader. So I looked at the mirror and I looked at my people, I looked at the way I work and. And I said, for me to do this, people have to learn to act without me. They have to learn to think on their own and to be confident. And I have to be confident in them. They have to be confident in themselves. They have to know how to act against the values of the company and against the plans of the company. Without my solving every problem. We need more of an ownership mindset. I've heard that so many times from other CEOs. So I'm like, okay, I have to deal with me. So I just started reminding myself every day, in every way, I put physical reminders around my office. Don't solve the problem. Ask another question. Ask what to do. Ask what ideas they have. Various reminders, and I kept changing them. And for about 10 months, I made a concerted effort to stop solving problems for people. So people came in my office and they came in with a challenge. And I said, instead, what are you going to do when I'm not here? Well, how would you solve this? If I wasn't here today, because next summer I'm not going to be here. And, and slowly but surely, we trained each other. I trained myself and I trained them not to have me solve every problem, to have the confidence to go ahead and make some decisions on their own without my intervention, and decisions that I would be proud of, we'd all be proud of at the end of the day and how to communicate with each other and so on. And then summer finally arrived. Kids got out of school, we went to Italy for a whole month. Now, it wasn't the whole summer, it was just a month, but it was a month where I wasn't solving problems. I got a daily report from my team and my email and I could see that things were fine. I got a picture of the dashboard and some facts and then I got a little extended thing every week and everything was fine. And the company started to operate on its own without my daily interventions and things. When, when I came back at the end of that trip, I was involved and engaged in lots of different things. But I never had to go back to being that hands on, domineering, fixing every problem kind of CEO again. And I was able to start to extricate myself in coaching from running that company and go on to coaching. Right? It's one of the things that led to it. So this whole, like addiction to being busy is something that you could train yourself out of. It can make a difference. So in doing it, you will empower your teams, you will bring more innovation, you'll create more ownership mindset. People will level up, they'll be proud of their own work, they'll see their careers progressing, which will lead to more good work and better retention and better employee morale. Right? And it creates a more sustainable growth for the organization. And an organization that is saleable, like you could leave that kind of a business. Here's the thing, there's so much opportunity in this kind of thing. Think about my fitness CEO now. Think about that trip that I took to Italy. Think about then how you work and what it would take for you to start to shift the way that you act as a leader. Right? You've heard the tools if you've been watching, listening to the show, or you spend some time now going to it. You'll hear about dashboards and scorecards and picking the right metrics and balancing metrics and leading and lagging metrics. And you'll hear about quarterly planning and annual strategy work. And you'll hear about the 4D meeting for the weekly. And you'll hear about daily huddles and you'll hear about process, like all that stuff, right? But then take a long hard look in the mirror and think about the way that you work and think about the kind of stuff that you really should be doing and what your team should be doing. And stop complaining about your team and instead start shifting the way that you work to create opportunities for them to step up and to sustain that performance over time. That'll make the real difference. That's the kind of thing that we're talking about here, right? Business owners again and again work way too hard but still feel stuck, feel like they're running in place, feel like they're not leveling up. We want you to help build a strong team, right? That starts with shifting the way you work so that you can scale with ease and grow your business. Grow a big huge business, a global business, a billion dollar business. I've done multiple billion dollar businesses, right? And regularly do businesses in the hundreds of millions with exits for CEOs. Almost every year we have at least one like that, right? You can grow a business like that without sacrificing your life. It's a business that you'll really be proud of and you'll be proud of yourself in the mirror. You can forever change the way you lead as a leader and the kind of business that you create. I hope that's helpful for you. I hope it helps you to scale your business with a better life and a business that you're truly proud of. We'll talk to you again next time. In the meantime, keep scaling you. Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think Doxa Talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talk to docsatalant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatalent. Com Bill G. Again, that's doxatalent. Com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent. Com Bill G. Check it out today.