A strategic team is a person or persons who, by virtue of their competencies, motivation, and reliability will:
Extend Your Reach – they make it possible for you to influence people and events far beyond what you naturally could. They provide access to people and events to which you would not normally have found entrance. In the next chapter I will explain how to discover what limits you and how to break through those barriers to a greater dimension of worry-free accomplishment!
Multiply Your Effectiveness – the efforts of many people, when focused towards one vision, make possible more dimensions of success than do the efforts of one. Settle it right now – this is about you. As much as you will need to be sensitive to your associates, you will need to become comfortable with putting your objectives and ambitions first. Your associates, employees, staff, whomever you work with and through are there to make you more effective. In chapter three I’ll show you how to do just that.
Divide Your Work – competent, responsible strategic partners relieve you of tasks because they become problem solvers rather than problem makers, they become profit not overhead, they permit you to focus on whatever it is you do best. Your work load will not likely decrease, but it will shift outward into your circle of concern. You can find the time to do what you like to do because you have found others to do what you had to do. Chapter four shows you how.
Quicken Your Pace – Most successful people carry around too much baggage. They handle too many responsibilities, oversee too many tasks, and maintain too many commitments. Forward movement personally, and usually professionally, slows when their number of activities increases. In chapter five I’ll show you how to lighten your load, how to get more done in less time and with less effort.
Without a staff to do these things for you, you are indeed limited. If your staff is not fulfilling those four reasons, they are most likely getting in the way and you are almost certainly better off doing things yourself.
Typically, your circle of concern is greater than your circle of ability. You’ve picked up this book because you want to learn the what’s and how’s of getting more done, achieving more successes, impacting a wider area than you ever have before. You’ve wanted to trust others with responsibility, but it hasn’t always worked out. You’ve met with limited success when you tried to garner the cooperation and employ the efforts of others.
Certainly, it takes time and energy you can scarcely afford to find and develop a strategic team. Lighting a fire under someone is not simple and I won’t mislead you, not just everyone is a promising candidate. But the paybacks will be substantial. If you can accomplish much now, just imagine how much you can get done when you are assisted by capable, trusted, cooperative, and knowledgeable associates.
My guess is you are reading this book because you’ve tried to light a fire under someone, but you’ve been burned. So, like Robert, you’ve probably decided it’s just easier to do it yourself. You can extend your reach, multiply your effectiveness, divide your work, and quicken your pace!
Your circle of concern is ALWAYS greater than your circle of ability. You care about a wide range of many things and care very deeply about a few things. Your natural abilities, refined by education and experience, yield a certain level of success.
But not enough!
There remains that outer perimeter of concern not yet touched. Your considerable energies produce an admirable amount of work.
But there yet remain things to be done!
Your people-handling skills and personality garner a wide field of influence. However, marching only to the cadence of the urgent, the summons of the important remains an unanswered call.
On Thursday: Two choices and two exercises.