How should leaders set their priorities?

How should a leader balance important work and urgent work?

Here's my picture of leadership priorities...

Thought Tweet #630 With the pressing of all those buttons, the 30-Second Elevator Speech is going down.

The Thinking Behind The Tweet

As you no doubt have noticed, there's been quite a bit of growth in the area of social media. This is impacting on good-old-fashioned sales work. The sales gurus are now recommending a 17 or 18 second Elevator Speech [AKA - 30-Second Commercial...or, should I say 17- or 18-Second Commercial?].

I favour shrinking the Elevator Speech to zero and, if and when the time is right to sense & catch attention, using words less canned and more natural.

Thought Tweet #629 When business leaders express their difficulties, we should listen well before we attempt to suggest solutions.

The Thinking Behind The Tweet

Often, when business leaders express difficulties we either:

• wave them off and change the topic,
• reply with a difficulty of their own, or
• reply with a quick and concrete piece of solution-advice.

These 3 reactions provide little if any value to the business leader [or to us].

If we want to help business leaders then we need to change the way we react/reply when we hear them express their difficulties. We need to listen better. We need to do our best to get into their shoes. We need to think, coming at the difficulty from different directions/perspectives. We need to do these things to (1) improve the quality of our response and (2) build trust with the leader.

When these things are done, then we can help with solutions.