Are you fighting fires, sitting on calls, or creating the next iteration of your business?
Every morning, noon and night is a flurry of notifications - dings on your phone, pings from people putting something back at the top of your inbox. You can silence the notifications, but that doesn’t hide the reality - there's no lack of things to do - things people need from us, things we planned to work on. There's an infinite tension between the two - what we planned, and what’s popping up.
And that's just the start. If you’re like most leaders I coach, you’re sitting in on a lot of calls. Those calls stack up, crowding your calendar. Keeping you from paying those pings their due. And from giving time to the things you really know you need to get to, dammit.
While some folks think meetings are a waste of time, I believe that they can be time well spent, if the leader hosting the meetings has taken time to master one of the core mindsets and skillsets I coach CEOs and senior leaders on: Facilitative Leadership. Facilitative Leaders know how to manage turn taking, ask powerful questions, and plan meetings better with the 5Es of experience design …and they even host silent meetings where appropriate. Leaders who think their meetings aren’t creating value might even want to have a meeting about meetings, to make sure more of them create value! Collaboration, when done well, can create outsized impact.
A huge source of impact as a leader? Making sure you have time to spend thinking, reflecting and planning - something I find most leaders struggle to carve out time for. There’s always another email, another meeting. And it’s all due yesterday.
This constant drumbeat of false urgency saps our energy and keeps leaders in the swirl of today and away from investing their time and energy in forward-looking strategic thinking. In my experience, the most successful leaders are looking past the next quarter, and spending as much time as possible considering what future they want to see three, five and even ten years out - and working to create that future. I always coach my clients to work within the largest vision possible. I’ve got a post-it on my monitor with the word “decades” to remind me of this.
Committing to creating that time and space to reflect, dream and plan can be hard. Setting a standing meeting with yourself is a start, but it can be a struggle to maintain momentum without support. Executive coaching is one way to create an anchor in your calendar for strategic thinking - and that is one reason leaders hire me - but Executive Leadership Forums are another powerful way to step back from the every day and make time for deep thinking.
Used in conjunction with coaching, Forums are extremely effective: Coaching is highly personalized and targeted to the needs of the individual leader, while Forums help leaders help each other. Often just seeing that some of their challenges are not unique, but shared, can be extremely helpful.
But still, some folks struggle to make the commitment to Forums. Recently, right before the start of a drop-in forum I host, one founder pulled me aside to tell me:
“We have a call that’s popped up - it’s halfway through the forum. We’re going to miss the second half. I hope that’s okay...”
she said, on behalf of herself and her co-founder.
“Actually, it’s not okay,” I responded. Then explained that in the first half of the forum they would be in small groups to share some of their wins and challenges providing the foundation for the second half - which would be the “payoff” for the work of the first half. I also explained that being part of the forum meant being fully present, all in, to listen and participate 100%. Leaving early wouldn’t just reduce their overall experience - it would diminish the experience of the rest of the group. So, no, they couldn’t come for just half the session.
I apologized, since they had come all this way to be at the session in person, but that they were welcome to use the adjoining space to prepare for and to take their call.
They were disappointed but considered my pushback. Realizing the value of having this rare time to be in deep conversation with other founders, they said they’d take a moment to consider if they could move that client call and make space for the whole Forum.
In the demanding world of startup leadership and executive management, making time for your own growth, taking time to think and reflect often takes a backseat to the relentless pressures of immediate urgency - the tyranny of the now.
At these moments it’s helpful to recall former US President Eisenhower saying:
““I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.
The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.””
It’s a good reminder that urgency is a signal - a signal that the thing knocking on your door might be less important than you think. If you’re familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix (or it’s new for you), I recommend that you revisit it - mainly because the way it’s traditionally drawn is totally wrong (you can read more about that here). One way to re-draw the Matrix from its traditional visualization is like so:
Most ways of sketching the matrix have the urgent/important as something to do. But I think another way to frame it is as something to doubt - is it *really* that important?! (many thanks to my friend Jon West for pushing back on my previous sketches of a re-imagined Eisenhower Matrix.)
I did consider giving the co-founders a pass. After all, life does happen - folks have had to leave in the middle of a Forum due to a real emergency and the group and the facilitator (me!) were able to adjust and make it work. But I held firm.
The co-founders had a quick huddle, and fired off an email to their client - they would need to reschedule the meeting. With nervous grins they told me that even though they hadn’t heard back from the client yet, they were all in and would be with the Forum for the full session.
At the break they came up to me and expressed their gratitude that I had said “No.” They related that it was such a relief and a joy to be able to slow down, step back and look at the big picture with other founders. They had already learned a lot from thinking about their challenges, and from hearing other Founders reflect on what was going on for them. They also pointed out that clients reschedule meetings at the last minute all the time and they just have to roll with it. Even at the halfway point, this was a much better use of their focused thinking than going to a call that could happen at any other time.
Urgency is Reactive. Strategy takes slowing down.
My coaching mentor Robert Ellis used a model he called the Futurosity Continuum to help leaders see how effectively they were distributing their time and attention between solving the problems of today vs creating the future they wanted to see.
The y-axis represents all your time, all your energy and all your resources. The x-axis is where you invest your attention. The red curve is a leader who is focused largely on reactive or proactive thinking leaving little time to take advantage of opportunities that pop up and even less time for deep dives, strategic thinking and action. Being proactive does sound better than being reactive, except that we're still solving the problems of the past. Being proactive just means getting ahead of those problems - not creating the next iteration of the business or building the future we want to see.
The blue curve is the common distribution for scaling and growing founders - mostly chasing opportunities with a little bit of time left over for strategic leadership.
The green curve is the leader who invests most of their time, energy and resources to strategic thinking, action and emergent listening - paying attention to what the universe is telling them about their strategic intent. The universe in this case can take the form of market signals, community or customer feedback or even the leader’s own inner voice. It takes real intention to slow down and push back against the Tyranny of Urgency and to invest in strategic reflection.
In this way, urgency kills growth, because the leader who spends all their time putting out fires, or wetting down the areas that may catch fire soon, rarely has the time to think about why there are so many fires all the time?! There’s never time to think about how to build the ideal future, to create unexpected growth opportunities, and to listen carefully to what’s really working.
Firefighting leadership can be effective in the short term, but in the long term rarely delivers dividends without a balanced attention investment curve. Committing to a Leadership Forum is one way of creating reliable accountability for investing in your strategic leadership.
The Compounding returns of Leadership Forums
If you’re unfamiliar, Forums are structured conversational spaces, where people share vulnerably and confidentially with other people. Participants both give and receive support. Companies like Vistage, YPO and EO pioneered the commercialization and democratization of the leadership Forum in the last several decades. But the Forum is based on much older “conversational technology” like T-Groups from the early 1900s, the Quaker religion’s Clearness Committee from the 1800s or even the deliberative listening styles of the Free Masons that reaches back to the 1500s and even earlier. The word “Forum” itself is taken from the Greek word for the space at the center of town dedicated to the real conversations of the day. I remember visiting Athens and standing in the Forum where Socrates stood in 390BC, having some of the most important conversations in the history of western civilization - it was spine tingling!
Sitting in a community circle and having a real talk is a tradition older than our ability to reckon.
The ROI of a long-term commitment to a leadership forum can’t be overstated. It’s like putting money in an IRA - the returns compound over time. My Forum has been meeting for nearly 5 years. One member of that Forum has been in another forum for almost 15 years! Treating the commitment as inviolable almost turns it into a sacred space, a real necessity for all leaders.
The transformative power of Forums is in two key aspects - in the reciprocal exchange (to listen and share deeply) and in the commitment to come, again and again. Each month is an opportunity to check back in - did your Forum-mate do anything about the challenge they shared about last time? The accountability and shared context is impactful.
In New York City, I host a “drop in” Forum for Founders monthly, and there’s a lot of value to be had in coming on any given month and seeing some old friends and making new ones. It mixes things up. But each time we meet, I need to re-create the container - making the rules about confidentiality clear, getting folks up to speed on the structure and format. Time given to that ramp-up is used to dive deeper in a longer-term committed Forum.
I’ve been part of and led two key types of Forums - Facilitated Forums and Peer-Led Forums. Some companies, like Vistage, will fully host and lead the Forum for you, so you can lean in and focus 100% on being fully present. On the other hand, peer-led Forums rotate leadership and facilitation responsibilities - notably, YPO does this. The peer-led forums give members the opportunity to practice the facilitative leadership skills that are essential to modern collaborative teams. One type of forum isn’t better than the other…both will deliver value over time, and just like investing, the best time to start is now.
At the end of the Forum, I checked back in with the co-founders. How did they feel about their choice? Had the client been okay with pushing back the meeting?
They shared that the client was actually *glad* to push the meeting to next week - my in-person forum meets on a Friday, and who isn’t glad to cancel a Friday meeting?! And the co-Founders shared that they are very rarely in the same place at the same time. I put them in separate break-out groups, and each founder had gotten a uniquely helpful perspective on some core challenges they’d been facing. The ROI of investing in longer-term thinking vs being pulled into the day-to-day was immediate.
What to do next:
Commit to yourself. Take some time to do a Time and Energy audit to give you a clear picture of what your current calendar is like. Link here to get you started.
If you’re in NYC, consider applying to my monthly drop in Forum.
Join a Forum or start your own. Making that monthly commitment to other people can help you prioritize strategic thinking over replying to those pings.
If you think one-on-one support to focus on your most important challenges can help accelerate your growth, you may be ready for coaching. Learn more here.