The Four Capacities Every Great Leader Needs

By Tony Schwartz @HBR

When I was a very young journalist, full of bravado and barely concealed insecurity, Ed Kosner, editor of Newsweek, hired me to do a job I wasn't sure I was capable of doing. Thrown into deep water, I had no choice but to swim. But I also knew he wouldn't let me drown. His confidence buoyed me.

Some years later, I was hired away by Arthur Gelb, the managing editor of the New York Times. This time, I was seduced by Gelb's contagious exuberance about being part of a noble fraternity committed to putting out the world's greatest newspaper.

Over the last dozen years, I've worked with scores of CEOs and senior executives to help them build more engaged, high performance cultures by energizing their employees. Along the way, I've landed on four key capacities that show up, to one degree or another, in the most inspiring leaders I've met.

How To Stay Focused On What’s Important

Remember, Time is a greedy player who wins without cheating, every round! It’s the law. — The Clock – Charles Baudelaire

Focus on getting things done faster

One of the biggest challenges small businesses face is time – there’s never enough to get it all done.

In fact, I often advise businesses to create and promote features that save time and make use more convenient over any other when marketing to small businesses.

As a business owner one of the things that robs you of your time is lack of focus. It is so easy to get distracted by the thing that is calling the loudest, no matter if it’s the thing you really need to do today.

If throughout the day you have a finite amount of time and an infinite list of things on your plate, then it’s crucial that you develop a habit of focusing on the most important things on that list on a consistent basis.

Here are some tips by John Jantsch for staying focused and getting the right things done.

Planning Vs Execution

Planning without execution is another form of wasting time. If you plan to do something, but don’t do it, what’s the point? Many companies and marketers, however, do a lot of this. Lots of planning, lots of meetings, lots of PowerPoint presentation, but no action.

It’s fine to not execute everything you plan for. In fact, that’s a required part of the process. You have to plan and create a strategy, sometimes, to know whether execution is even worth it. But you should also make sure, despite investing time in a good plan & strategy, that you always have a bias for action and velocity towards getting something done to measure, optimize, and drive results. Plans don’t execute themselves.

Execution without strategy isn’t a whole lot better. It’s basically guessing. Too often marketers today confuse having a “bias for action” with moving straight to execution on a new idea. Sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn’t. Why? Because you didn’t take the time to know what success should look like, understand whether your execution is the best way to get there, and be thoughtful about how you’ll not only execute, but measure the revenue-generating results that come out of that work.

This doesn’t mean spending forever building a strategy. It just means having a plan and roadmap before the train leaves the station.