Ask seasoned business owners about the threats they face in making the venture successful and a number will mention the struggle between working in the business and working on the business. Put simply, working on the business is doing what is critical to its growth and sustainability. This includes sales, marketing, and product development. Working in the business means putting out the endless personnel fires, completing regulatory forms, and paying bills. Unfortunately, working in the business demands precedence unless the business owner learns to find a solution to this struggle.
The same is true in larger organizations. The flavor of the challenges is just different. Managers can find themselves too easily consumed by corporate reporting, compliance issues, staffing challenges when they should be focused on meeting the goals that will propel the organization.
Having run my own business for more than 30 years, I, and perhaps you, have found this challenge insidious. It sneaks up on you. Just as you’re about to focus on something productive, a seemingly urgent distraction demands you take care of it first. I say “seemingly urgent” because many times that’s not the case. But it can be so tempting to think, “I’ll just take care of this so I don’t have to deal with it later.” But then another one pops up and another. After a while, you wonder where your day has gone and frustrated that you didn’t get to the sales calls or product development you wanted to.
A big part of the reason for this is the way the brain operates. The brain’s first job is to keep you safe. Therefore, any time you are facing uncertainty, it creates a sense of discomfort by releasing the stressor hormones adrenaline and cortisol into your system along with bringing to mind what might happen if you do something wrong. In many cases, uncertainty is a natural part of working on the business. It might the cold calls you need to make. It might be developing a product you’re not sure will sell. It might the big project you’ve been asked to complete while not knowing exactly how to do so.
Most of the “in the business” distractions do not involve uncertainty. You know what you need to do. It just takes the time to do it. So the brain naturally urges you toward doing the safe stuff first since you know what the outcome will be. As a result, you enjoy the feeling of closure for completing the form, dealing with the personnel issue, or even paying the bills. You can cross it off the list. But these items don’t contribute to business success. On top of all this, you may be dealing with the urgency in the person’s voice who’s brought you the problem. Or maybe it’s the tone of the regulatory letter threatening to take your first-born child if you don’t respond to the agency’s demand by noon tomorrow.
So how come some people are better at managing this struggle between in the business and on the business? In my observation, it comes down to two characteristics they have developed and continue to hone through practice. First, they do not allow themselves to get sucked into the urgency of nuisance tasks and meaningless crises. They are comfortable saying, “I’ll take care of that later,” even if the person presenting the problem says the world is going to end if they don’t resolve it right away. In many cases, they refer the problem back to the person bringing it by saying, “How about figuring this out on your own and make a decision without me? I trust your judgment.” While this approach takes persistence at first, after while this fosters a team of independent thinkers.
They also set aside time for adjudicating the requirements of running the business such as payroll, compliance, and other necessities. When these issues come up, they file them away for a dedicated time when they will be completed. This allows them to maintain focus on the important stuff.
Second, they hide. Yes, that’s right. At one point, I had a staff of eight in my organization. While they all did a good job, there always seemed to be a parade in my office. So I made it a habit of working at a coffee shop for the first two hours of every day. That way, I could focus on the content and presentations so critical to the success of what I was offering. When I arrived at the office, I knew the first 30 minutes would be consumed with questions and crises. But that was okay since I had completed the focused work. In my interviews with lots of other leaders, I have found this practice to be prevalent. Just because you work in a large organization doesn’t mean you can’t disappear in order to get the important stuff done. Don’t ask permission. Just do it. People will adapt and you will find the time for focus.
Granted, mastering these two attributes takes time and persistence. But which would you rather deal with, the ongoing struggle to deal with endless urgencies or developing the mechanisms to compartmentalize the urgent and the important?