Breathing Room & Thinking Time

“Poirot,” I said. ​“I have been thinking.”

“An admirable exer­cise, my friend. Con­tin­ue it.”

- Agatha Christie, Per­il at End House

Most lead­ers become lead­ers because they are high-per­form­ing doers.

But it’s a trap. If you want to make the shift to becom­ing a high-per­form­ing leader, you need to become a high-per­form­ing thinker.

The most impor­tant goal for any leader is to have a team strong enough to man­age them­selves — so that you have time to breathe, to think, to look up at oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties, to explore new oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges — to think about the future moves of your company.

If you’re in fire-fight­ing mode all the time, and solv­ing prob­lems you’re going to be very busy. And while that’s good for the busi­ness today, you’re not real­ly doing strate­gic leadership.

The chal­lenge is to find a way to carve out, ide­al­ly, one or two hours a day – or at least a cou­ple of hours a week – to think about the true future of the busi­ness, and move it forward.

When I talked to 50 suc­cess­ful CEOs around the world for a recent book project, one of the things we talked about was strate­gic think­ing time.

One CEO did his great­est think­ing while walk­ing the dog, anoth­er when he had his week­ly strate­gic plan­ning break­fast with his exec­u­tive team. Oth­ers found think­ing time while run­ning or bik­ing with a part­ner, or swim­ming laps, or smok­ing a cig­ar alone at night.

I do my think­ing on air­planes, after work­ing out, when col­lab­o­rat­ing with oth­ers (par­tic­u­lar­ly my coach) and jour­nal­ing. It feels like my IQ dou­bles when I sit with a pen and paper to work through a situation.

So, it doesn’t mat­ter where or how — by your­self or with oth­ers. You just need more think­ing than doing, in a planned fashion.