07. Leadership and Management Focus: Now or Future?

Foreign welcome to episode seven of Leadership in a Nutshell where we are cracking the code of the driven mind. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman and I'm super excited to talk to you today. Today we're talking about management focus now or in the future. And you go, well, Kenny, obviously both. Thank you very much. Right, I've got to have my focus on now and in the future. I've got to have my entire team of managers, regardless of size of business. We've got to be focused on what's happening today. We also need to be focused on what's happening next quarter, in the next quarter after that, perhaps next year. Perhaps we're in the middle of a three year strategic plan. Perhaps I've done a ten year plan and know what I want to do personally. I operate on 25 year blocks of time of what I want to accomplish in my life. Now let's reel it back for a moment. One of my great mentors, Dan Sullivan, taught me the concept of the fact is there's always two focuses that happen and we go, well, you can't be split focus. Absolutely right. And that's why I wanted to come to you today with this episode. Management focus now or in the future. Well, here's the reality. It's very much like driving your car, right? So if you're driving your car and you're just looking way, way down the road, if you're way off in the future, you what's going to happen? You're going to crash that car, you're going to come up on a hairpin turn, you're driving through the mountains of Colorado where I came from and whoop, off you go. Oops, bad, not good right now. That also being said, if I'm just focused on the, on the 10ft in front of my vehicle, then I'm also going to probably crash because I'm not going to see the turn that's coming until it's too late. How many of us have that happen in business where all of a sudden a curveball comes and it's thrown at us? I'm a baseball guy, so forgive the analogy, but I know that I was a pretty good breaking ball hitter because I had an instinct for being able to pick up the spin on the ball. And so it's not about where the ball leaves the pitcher's hand necessarily, perhaps depending on the exact style of pitch or different things. But if you can pick up the fact that a knuckleball is held a specific way, if you can pick up the fact That a curveball has a rotation a certain way and a split finger fastball is coming a different direction or a two finger fastball and all those things matter. And it gives you a little bit of time to respond. Now the challenge becomes when we're in business like we all are, and we're managing teams like we all are, and we get focused too much in one area and we're like this with our head down and we're covered up and we're not looking at what's going on or we're just all, all about the future. Here's the reality. People, people love to do strategic planning when, when we have, and when we, we have courses and different things that, that I'll get involved in and teach planning and strategy sessions and think people love that stuff. Why do people like to set New Year's resolutions so much? Clean slate. Going to be a great year. Super excited. I can dream it. If you can dream it, you believe it, you can do it. All those different types of things. Guess what? I say that a little bit tongue in cheek, because I do believe that you can accomplish, create desire, anything that you want in your life, you can manifest into reality. No question in my mind. However, the key word there is manifest. To manifest means you need to take action. And to take action means that you need to focus on what you're going to do and then, by God, go do it, my friend. And sometimes we get caught. You ever heard the term seminar junkie? I'm blessed to do a lot of speaking all over the world, as a matter of fact. And I get to see some of the same students come around and the same people come to different things. And I know, I love it. I'm a seminar junkie myself. But here's what sets me apart from a lot of people. I'm an implementation junkie as well. And so what does that mean? I get to sit in the seminar and think about where I want to go. I'm looking at the roadmap. I'm going down the road a little ways, but then I go into my implementation mode, which means now I'm in the cockpit of my car. I don't have a. I don't have a. That shows you how I drive, right? I'm going to call it a cockpit of my plane. Maybe I drive my car a little too fast, but here I am in the front seat. Now I know, okay, I've got to go into gear. I've got to start rolling. I've got to do this. And then I've got to do that. It's very similar. It's very simple, I should say. And it's similar to a roadmap. If you know where you want to go now, you focus on that enough to get an idea, get a kind of general direction. But the reality is that when you focus too much now, you don't have enough, like, really momentum behind you, if you will, to get to where you really want to go and to accomplish the things that you really want. And then all of a sudden you end up feeling like you're just doing the same things over and over. And you realize that, man, I, I missed an opportunity to maximize. I didn't double down on an opportunity that I had. And for you as the leader, I want to speak to you strategically for a moment. If I think about this with my own team, right? Every company is in the people business on some level. I don't care what industry you're in, my friend, I want you to think about your own business structure. No matter what it is, at some level, in some capacity, people are a big part of that structure. And you as one of the top leaders in the company and in your world, if you're listening to this and you're not in business, you just like leadership. Guess what? You're leading your team. You're leading communities. I talked to a buddy at the time where I'm recording this this morning that just was involved in a community event. He doesn't own any businesses right now, but he was involved in a community event where he's trying to create some leadership in his community. Now, he doesn't want to get into politics or any of that, but he's holding some community meetings. Guess what? That's leadership. And so regardless of where you're leading, you've got to look at, okay, what is going on now, what's my focus now and what's going to happen in the future. Now remember, there is a difference between leadership and management. And management is maintaining. It actually comes from a word that means maintain. And so I named this, entitled this episode management Focus. Because what are we maintaining focus on now or the future? Meaning that sometimes I need to know where I'm headed as a manager. So now let me speak to you directly as a leader. As I mentioned, you've got to know further out where you're going than your management team does. Now, it doesn't mean that they don't have the goal, they don't have the plan. They don't. Or the, the strategic plan. Maybe the vision of the Three years, what the company looks like, when that takes place, how it's going to happen. Now, I know for a fact, back when the pandemic first struck, that many of us had the opportunity to operate through in different things. I didn't know exactly what was going to take place, but I had a strategic vision that I was working with my own personal clients, with my own team, that we're headed in a specific direction. Our route might change back to the roadmap. Maybe something got in the way, maybe there was a landslide. In this case, there was complete chaos, complete change. We had to hit the brakes, we had to slow down, we had to retool, and we had to figure it out. I want you to think about, you know, in. In change management, we talk about creating race car turns. My late father was a race car junkie. Like, love to go to the races. I personally have been to the Indy 500 four times, three times with my late father as a younger man, I think I went when I was 10, 11 and 12, 80, 81, 82, something like that. And so dad was big into race cars. And then as he got older, he inherited some money from my great aunt Tiny. And he kind of went through that. Read one of my books if you want to get that story. But the whole point is he went through this money very quickly. And part of the way he did it was wasting it on race cars, wasting any out of life experience. But it didn't create a return on investment like we are doing with even our time together here today. We want to create a return on investment in what we do in life, right? And one of the things that I did learn from dad about race cars, he went to race car school, driving school. And it's a fascinating thing where, you know, in racing where you focus really matters. And that's where I want you to think about today as we, you know, begin to wrap our time up here. Where you focus matters, and when you're. When you're going into a turn. Racing has been said that, you know, whoever manages turns the best wins the race. And however many miles it is, doesn't matter. However long it is, doesn't matter really. However many turns there are that somebody has an opportunity to navigate turns better than somebody else. When you're on the straightaway, you're. You're full out no matter what, right? Regardless of road, track, dirt, track, whatever. When we're on straightaway, going as fast as we can, how you maneuver turns is what truly matters. This is true in business. This is true. In leadership. And as you head into a turn, what happens? You've got to break first. You've got to apply break. And so you shift the youth. Slow down a little bit and get your bearings to go a little bit. Now you start looking for the apex. You're beginning to see, where is that turn coming? Where am I going to hit my line? Same is true in business. Where do I want to get to so I can get on that accelerator and give it everything I've got coming out of the turn? That's where the turn is. One slowing down break, set the tone, figure out the focus and the line that I'm going to take. As soon as I know I'm going to hit that, my eyes are up, never against the wall or never in the turn, but down the straightaway where I'm going. And now I am full out going as fast as I possibly can to get down the straightaway and create as much momentum as I possibly can before the next turn. How is this showing up in your business when you think about management focus? Are you a little too focused on the right now? Are you hitting the brakes a little too hard, perhaps? Are you really looking up a little bit? Yes. We got to look down, we got to slow down, we got to hit the brakes and go, wait a minute, what's happening? Then I've got to find, what are the turns? Where is the pivot point? Where's my apex? Where am I trying to hit that point point so I can mash that accelerator and get on to getting the results that I want, that my management team wants, that my Frontline wants, that my clients want, that my investors want, that everybody around me that I influence, that they want. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to think about your next week. Three to five rocks that you've got going. Rocks meaning implementation things, things that you want to accomplish. Goals for the week, whatever it is, I want you to think about those things. And where are you thinking? A little too close to the vest, if you will. Where are you kind of still hitting the brakes. Which one of those do you need to focus on? Going out a little bit further. Three to five of them. Write them down. Writing sets you free. I want to thank you. If you're enjoying our time together, please rate and review this podcast this time together, our episodes here really matters. Really matters to how we grow this community. I'm Kenny Chapman, your host of leadership in a nutshell. Thank you so much for being here. Make it a better than fantastic week I'll see you real.