How to regroup with intention -- professionally

August 13, 2023 12:52 PM

I am looking for strategies for infusing my work with more intention. I am basically my own boss. Anything beyond "the building isn't on fire and we are turning a profit" is up to me entirely. Our busy season is coming to a close, and I would like to regroup, reset goals & priorities, and plan how to move forward with intention. It's something that I do periodically, but I am looking for ways to make it a more effective process. Workbooks or worksheets? Things you do that help? Tricks and suggestions? Corporate trainings? Ted talks?

I should note that my career is personally & professionally rewarding, and involves creativity and lots of staff management.

posted by Grandysaur to Work & Money (4 answers total)

So, so much of it is in the phrasing. Instead of saying “do this,” say “please do this.” Instead of saying “don’t do it this way,” say “I wouldn’t do it this way.” Inflection is important, too.
posted by Melismata at 1:24 PM on August 13, 2023

The Small Bus. Admin. used to have business people to review and give advice; was helpful to me many years ago,
posted by theora55 at 1:56 PM on August 13, 2023

Steven Covey Begin with the End in Mind.

Which (in my approach) I connect with the Five Whys.

Also, if I were you, I would go down the "Peter Drucker" rabbit hole. There's a lot of gold to mine in his books. Just one quotation of many: "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
posted by forthright at 3:33 PM on August 13, 2023

If part of what you're looking for is firming up on strategy, I'm a big fan of Richard Rumelt's model from Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (also summarised in a series of blog posts if you don't want to read the whole book).

The model encourages you to begin by building a diagnosis - what's your situation, and in particular what are the most pertinent aspects of your situation (something going really well that you could double down on, or something going badly that you could fix or pivot on).

Then you devise a set of guiding policies - the guardrails for how you will or won't go about addressing your diagnosis, based on the market you're operating in, the resources you have available within the business, and anything else that could be a constraint or an enabler given your situation.

Then you generate coherent actions - things you can do that will positively impact your diagnosis/situation, within the constraints of your guiding policies.

Getting to grips with this model was the difference for me between "strategy" seeming like this fluffy nebulous thing that people were mostly making up, to having a fairly concrete set of thoughts about how I'd go about being strategic in any given situation.

(Bonus fun fact: Richard Rumelt is Cassandra Clare's dad.)
posted by terretu at 2:10 AM on August 14, 2023 [1 favorite]