You have to sit down and say, “This is what’s influencing me,” and look at your mental model. You have to see those influences and how you are handling it and recognize what’s happening to you in your situation, first, right? Can you give me an example of a couple of things you might tell me? – I asked Ed Muzio, president and CEO of Group Harmonics this question and his reply:
Related Podcast and Transcription: Creating a Great Workplace
Ed Muzio: You have to pay attention to what is going on around you. The patterns of behavior that I’m advocating, by the way, are not complex. It’s not that you need to spend hours doing this. It’s things that you can do in five minutes when you think of it, so that over time you start to build these new behaviors. Honestly speaking, if I tell you, “Hey, Joe, the best thing in the world you can do, do this, it’ll take you four hours a day.” You’re not going to do it. You don’t have time, but if I say, “Do this, it’ll take you five minutes. Do it every day for a week, “you might try it. If you try it and it works, it’ll stick. That’s the only way to effect a change, again it’s the only thing people have time to do.
One of my favorites is what I call Verbalize Summary Objectives or VSOs. That sounds complicated, but all it is, is a way of talking about your work. If you listen in most workplaces right now to people talking about their work, they tend to talk about process. By that, I mean; they’ll tell you how busy they are, they’ll tell you how many meetings they have, they’ll tell you how they had to travel last week, they’ll tell you how the business processes are difficult. That’s what the content will be. What a VSO is, it’s a way instead, of talking about your work in terms of your output. So instead of saying to you, “Hey, Joe, I spent two hours in meetings this week trying to do something with customers, ” I would say, “You know what Joe, one of the things I am working on is, I have one customer who needs to increase their output on their production line by 20%, and I’m working on that with them. My job is to help them do those.” You can get as specific as you want. The VSO is almost like you’re the elevator pitch from sales where you talk in 90 seconds about your companies’ value.
It’s just like that, only you talk in 90 seconds about your own output. So if you start to do that, the next time you open your mouth to tell someone how busy you are, instead you start to talk about the output you are producing. What that does, if you look at if from a system, is it starts to educate the people around you in that network that we talked about, as to what you are actually doing. If you start to do that, people will understand what you’re doing, they’ll stop asking you to do things that you’re not working on and over time, if everyone starts to repeat that behavior, the system gets smarter. In other words, everyone knows what everyone is doing so new work will get routed more efficiently. That’s one simple thing you can do, it takes no more time than the time you already spend talking about what you are doing, but it makes the system more efficient, more effective.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Creating a Great Workplace
Lean Sales and Marketing: Lean Engagement Team
Special Marketing with Lean Book and Program offers on Facebook