August Turak is a writer at Forbes, as well as an entrepreneur and
inspirational speaker, and he’s got a great piece up about leadership tips that
he learned from his mentor at A&E: Jim Collins.
These tips are ones that he remembered because they are eminently
practical and easy to use. According to Turak, Collins gave him these
tips on a day when Turak was particularly overwhelmed by a project that he was
working on.
The first tip that Turak discusses, is to never work on more than
ten things at once. Make a list of everything you have to do, then pare
it down to ten things that you get your boss to sign off on. Once you
complete a task, go ahead and take a goal from your complete list and add it to
the ten, but never work on more than ten things at a time.
The second biggest tip that Turak learned from Collins was to go
ahead and let fires burn. As he puts it, “lack of focus is the single
biggest reason for failure. Confronted by multiple fires we tend to spread
ourselves so thin that we never succeed in putting any of them completely out.”
Turak also suggests interviewing constantly, rather than when you
only need people, and to move quickly when you do take a new job. First
impressions are incredibly important, and it’s always best to blow your new
employer away. He also suggests that if a job isn’t working out, if you
are unhappy and don’t think that there is any way to change your circumstances
then it’s important to find a new job as soon as possible rather than becoming
more and more disgruntled and difficult to deal with.
But perhaps the best tip that Turak gleaned from Collins was that
you shouldn’t ever procrastinate when firing someone. Essentially,
waiting to fire someone who isn’t working out it usually just prolongs the pain
and ends up worse for everyone. According to Collins, you interview twice
and if that doesn’t work out then you let the person go.
It’s a good group of tips, and we recommend reading the entire piece
by Turak over on Forbes.
