https://www.forbes.com/sites/janbruce/2014/04/08/leadership-101-how-doing-nothing-makes-you-a-better-leader/#642f04036c96
LEADERSHIP LESSON - DOING NOTHING*
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10,953 views|Apr 8, 2014,1:54 pm
Leadership 101: How Doing Nothing Makes You A Better Leader
I write about stress and being agile and adaptable in the workplace.
Here’s the truth: No one ever reached unimaginable heights or made millions by hitting “reply” all day. It’s easy to do—and we all do it. Email is nothing more than our effort to get others to help us with our own to-do lists. And that’s fine—but if it consumes the lion’s share of your waking hours, there’s a problem.
Busyness, manifest perhaps most tangibly in our bulging inboxes, is a fact of business life, and a constant wear on your time and energy. But keeping all the day-to-day balls in the air is not your only job. You also have the responsibility and privilege of creative work, the work of envisioning what you could do, not just check the boxes of what you are doing. In fact, when you let busyness, and the stress that comes with it, consume you, you are maxing out your mental resources long before you’ve lived up to your potential as a leader. And at this point you also deprive your business of the true leadership it needs.
The problem, as an article in the Harvard Business Review (“The Case for Slacking Off”) explains, is that “doing nothing” is socially unacceptable. “As an adult, have you ever found anybody at work telling you to do nothing — to just take your time and reflect?” writes Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, professor of leadership development and organizational change.
“For most of us, doing nothing is associated with being irresponsible, with being on the wrong track, or even worse, with wasting our lives.”
Quite the opposite is true. It takes a kind of discipline and courage to step away from the constant clamor and give your mind time to reflect, recharge, and be decidedly un-busy.
And there’s fascinating research into the power of letting your mind wander that suggests that daydreaming can help “consolidate memories and synthesize disparate ideas and plans, yielding a greater sense of identity and personal meaning,” says Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D. in his recent feature (“Days of Glory”) in Psychology Today.
Daydreaming helps us see ourselves more clearly, since much of our daydreaming is focused on our future selves. Kaufman cites the work of E. Paul Torrance in that story, whose groundbreaking 30-year study of creative achievement, explored a variety of indicators of future creative and scholastic promise. Kaufman says that Torrance “found that the best predictor of lifelong personal and publicly recognized creative achievement—even better than academic indicators such as school grades and IQ scores—was the extent to which children had a clear future-focused image of themselves.”
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Bottom line: Daydreaming, musing, creative visioning…call what you want— by any name it is hardly a waste of time. In fact, it’s the source of your future genius and the promise of your future self. But you can’t do it checking email.
Stop Being Busy
Try to race to keep up with busy, and you lose. The only other option is to control the black hole of busyness and keep it from swallowing your life. Here are a few ways to do it and be a more effective leader in the not-doing:
1. Clear the decks.
Push everything you have on your desk to the side so that you’re faced with a clear surface and whatever note taking method you like to use (paper and pen, Evernote, etc). Now, without looking at your email (this is key), ask yourself, what would you most like to have done this week? Break ground on a new project, have that critical conversation with your team, put action steps around a pending deadline. What’s your highest priority (versus someone else’s)? Write down three to five things that you want to have done. Remember – less is more; too many and you’ll drown in busyness again.
2. Question your calendar.
What’s on there for today, tomorrow, and the next day—and how beholden are you to it?
Which of those meetings or obligations can be put off til next week or even next month? When everything’s a priority, nothing is, so it’s worth getting control of your time and recognizing what best serves you right now.
3. Daydream.
With email off, and a block of time (even just 45 minutes will do), and no one howling at your door, turn to a blank page and sit there. No typing, not toggling back and forth between browser windows, no dashing off a note to this person or that person. Sit and think, draw, visualize. Bring your full, open, creative mind to the table and let it breathe for a change. Don’t force a resolution or an idea. Let your brain do what it does best when put in a constrained yet unstructured space, and it may surprise you. As thoughts come to mind, jot them down.
4. Do nothing somewhere else.
Or better yet, leave the building altogether for a 20 minute walk without your phone. Let body and mind roam for a bit off the grid. Remember, try not to think or solve something, just roam.
5. Try not solving just reviewing.
This is the counter to the only touch it once, rapid fire approach to decision-making. But for significant issues, biggest dilemma or disappointment. Rather than try to fix it, get daydreamy about it for a few minutes: think of yourself as walking around it, viewing it from all sides, vision how where it might lead you and your enterprise.
You will be surprised what happens when you can let yourself just be for a few periods each week. Because in fact you’re not “doing nothing”; quite the opposite. You’re letting busy go so you can do the bigger, non-linear work that supports the future of your business and your career.
Jan BruceContributor
”Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”_ - Socrates
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Leaders!!! Do Nothing!!! Hah??? Pemimpin… Tidak melakukan apa-apa itu OK? Di tahun 2014 ada sebuah artikel yang dipublikasi oleh Majalah terkenal Forbes.com yang judulnya seperti ini: Leadership 101: How Doing Nothing Makes You A Better Leader by Jan Bruce. Artikel ini menjadi bahan diskusi menarik dikalangan banyak CEO yang di seluruh dunia.
Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/janbruce/2014/04/08/leadership-101-how-doing-nothing-makes-you-a-better-leader/#163e718c6c96
Mari kita liat cerita metafora berikut yang barangkali bisa memberikan inspirasi pada kita apa itu Pemimpin yang tidak melakukan apa-apa.
Disebuah sungai yang tenang di sebuah hutan yang ada di Amerika Utara seekor buaya tua tampak mengapung disebuah pinggiran, terlihat bermalas-malasan. Seekor buaya muda menghampirinya dan berkata: “Saya mendengar dari banyak buaya bahwa kamu adalah pemburu paling ganas di sepanjang sungai ini. Ajarkan donk kepada saya bagaimana caranya menjadi seperti diri kamu.”
Buaya Tua tersebut membuka matanya dan menatap buaya muda tersebut, kemudian dia menutup matanya dan tertidur kembali di atas air.
Merasa dicuekin, buaya muda itu pun bertekad memberi “contoh” bahwa ia juga bisa berburu dengan cepat. Ia pun menyelam dan segera saja mengejar ikan lele yang sedang berenang di sungai tersebut.
Kurang lebih beberapa jam kemudian, buaya muda itu kembali ke buaya tua itu. Buaya tua itu masih tidur disana. Ia pun mulai menyombongkan dirinya tentang kesuksesannya barusan dan keberhasilannya mendapatkan 3 ekor ikan lele yang lumayan besar. Ia berkata: “Barangkali mereka semua salah… kamu bukanlah pemburu yang ganas seperti yang mereka katakan… Ia pun tertawa…”
Sang Buaya tua kembali membuka matanya, tidak berkata apa-apa dan kembali tertidur lagi disana. Kali ini malahan ada beberapa ekor burung yang hinggap di atas badan buaya tua itu. Tetapi buaya itu diam saja tidak bergerak.
Tidak beberapa lama kemudian serombongan bison datang ke sungai tersebut untuk minum air hanya beberapa centi-meter dari kepala buaya tersebut. Dalam sebuah gerakan yang sangat cepat, buaya tua itu menancapkan gigi taringnya ke leher bison tersebut lalu menyeretnya ke dalam sungai.
Sang buaya muda begitu shok melihat kejadian yang cepat seperti itu dan terus bengong menyaksikan buaya tua itu memakan daging bison yang beratnya hampir 0.5 Ton tersebut. “Ba.. ba… bagaimana kamu bisa melakukannya seperti itu?”
Dengan mulutnya yang penuh dengan daging, buaya tua itu akhirnya merespon, “Saya tidak melakukan apa-apa, diam dan mengamati. Itulah hal terpenting yang saya lakukan.”
Banyak pemimpin yang sibuk menjalankan bisnisnya.
Mereka melakukan Business katanya… padahal tanpa mereka sadari mereka sesungguhnya melakukan Busyness. Kesibukan-kesibukan yang menghabiskan waktunya untuk mengamati dan mengambil peluang besar bagi kemajuan usaha dan bisnisnya.
Apalagi di era globalisasi seperti sekarang ini. Dengan arus informasi yang luar biasa dan organisasi yang multi ruwet, maka bisa jadi seorang pemimpin bisnis menghabiskan waktunya lebih dari 8 jam untuk dealing dengan proses-proses yang harus dilaluinya. Rapat, tanda tangan yang segunung, laporan-laporan yang harus dibaca dll. Sehingga ya… pemimpin tersebut sangat-sangat sibuk. Dengan volume kesibukan seperti itu Pemimpin menjadi sulit untuk berpikir jernih untuk membuat loncatan-loncatan baru bagi usaha yang ditekuninya.
*Quality VS Quantities*
Jika kita melihat pekerjaan seorang pemimpin, jika items (Quantities) kerja pemimpin tersebut terlalu banyak, bagaimana mereka bisa mempunyai Quality yang baik? Untuk meningkatkan kualitas kerja mereka maka sesungguhnya pemimpin harus pintar-pintar mendelegasi pekerjaannya supaya …. Apa? Supaya dia tidak ada kerjaan apa-apa… Dengan begitu ia bisa melihat setiap items pekerjaannya yang sekarang dikerjakan anak buahnya lalu meningkatkan kualitas bahkan output dari pekerjaan tersebut.
Jika Anda terlalu sibuk dan tidak mampu menghilangkan 50% pekerjaan anda, belajarlah dari Tim Ferriss, ia punya buku yang menarik yang bahkan sudah diterjemahkan dalam bahasa Indonesia. The 4-hour workweek.
Sekedar informasi aja, beberapa founder-founder perusahaan terkenal seperti Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Ferriss biasanya mempunyai apa yang disebut sebagai “Think Weeks”, mereka memasukkannya di dalam agenda tahunannya mereka “Think Weeks” tersebut. Mereka menghabiskan minggu itu untuk melakukan refleksi, membaca buku, berpikir dan “menyucikan” dirinya dari dunia bisnis yang digelutinya. Bahkan istilah “Think Weeks” ini menjadi terkenal karena Bill Gates yang sering mempromosikannya.
Jadi jika Anda adalah pemimpin perusahaan / organisasi, jangan lupa, set up Think weeks dan buatlah tangkapan besar seperti bison di atas….
Author of Hacking Your Mind Book
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