Podcast EP 104 | Habits Successful Leaders Practice to Prepare for the Week Ahead

The most suc­cess­ful lead­ers Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence come across do the same things to pre­pare for the week ahead. It was a star­tling rev­e­la­tion they had, notic­ing that suc­cess was depen­dent on the prepa­ra­tion of each and every week.

In this week’s pod­cast, Brad and Kevin dis­cuss six key points they’ve observed about lead­ers who are suc­cess­ful, as they pre­pare for the week ahead.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:12

Wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast where every­thing we talk about is relat­ed to build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, com­pa­nies that scale and improve and get stronger as they get big­ger over time. That’s what Brad and I are pas­sion­ate about. And we’ll always be shar­ing some­thing relat­ed to that theme. I’m Kevin Lawrence here with my co host, Brad Giles. We’re not here. He’s down under. I’m here up in Cana­da. And, Brad, how you doing today?

Brad Giles 00:40

Love­ly, very good. I tell you what, I’m so glad that this sum­mer is over. It has been the hottest sum­mer ever, in where I live. And I’m delight­ed that Autumn is now with us.

Kevin Lawrence 00:53

I’m glad that our win­ter is over because sum­mers com­ing here. And I will tell you inter­est­ing­ly, last sum­mer that we had here in West­ern Cana­da was the hottest sum­mer. I think we set some records and hottest sum­mer I ever remem­ber in my life, it was incred­i­bly hot. But I’m actu­al­ly look­ing for­ward to some of that heat. Awe­some. So what’s your word of the day today? Brad?

Brad Giles 01:19

You’re gonna be sur­prised at this one — smok­ing. We are talk­ing about habits today. But a habit that peo­ple some­times take up and would like to quit is smok­ing, right. So smok­ing is a great anal­o­gy for the work that we do, about try­ing to get things to stick. So that you know, the rea­son that I say smok­ing is because when you want to give up smok­ing, they say the more times you tried to give up smok­ing, the bet­ter the chances that you will give up smok­ing. And so you try to think about all of the things that we know about build­ing a great endur­ing busi­ness, you can’t do them all at once. And the more times that you try to get any one of those things to stick, the bet­ter chance you have of get­ting that habit to stick smok­ing, giv­ing up smok­ing, keep try­ing. Keep try­ing, what’s yours give.

Kevin Lawrence 02:24

Mine is Dis­ney. And the Won­der­ful World of Dis­ney hap­pi­est place on earth. My daugh­ter and I went down to LA this week, and spent a few days down in Dis­ney and Los Ange­les and just con­stant­ly remind­ed how amaz­ing com­pa­nies cre­ate amaz­ing envi­ron­ments, which they do amaz­ing expe­ri­ences and right down to the thing with their app that allows you to, you know, pay some more mon­ey and beat lions or pre book rides. But they even they have like pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers every­where. And they used to sell you the pic­tures. But now if you buy the app, you got pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers every­where, they take your amaz­ing thing, these amaz­ing pic­tures, and they down­load them onto your phone onto your app, and you can have them for free. Now you can buy prod­ucts and ser­vices, but just how a com­pa­ny has tak­en and cre­ate an expe­ri­ence. Obvi­ous­ly the place is packed. That is just that every lit­tle detail is so good. And you just can’t. Even though it’s the insane­ly mas­sive crowd you can’t come away not feel­ing great no mat­ter what. And it’s just Dis­ney and the mag­ic of cre­at­ing amaz­ing envi­ron­ments. So we could say Dis­ney would be mag­i­cal accret­ing amaz­ing envi­ron­ments, and maybe they could even help you quit smok­ing. Maybe they could design a stop smok­ing pro­gram. I don’t know.

Brad Giles 03:52

Well, habits, the habits that suc­cess­ful lead­ers use to pre­pare each week. See? You and I many many years ago, I came across a book called Mas­ter­ing the Rock­e­feller habits. Great book, I rec­om­mend that every­body read it. And it talks about habits rather than best prac­tices. We spoke a cou­ple of episodes about your favorite sub­ject of best prac­tices. Yeah, but I think that was episode 1031 Or two. And so what are the habits that suc­cess­ful lead­ers have to set them out this to set them­selves up for a suc­cess­ful week? And you’ve got a bit of an insight I believe on this. Is that right?

Kevin Lawrence 04:42

Yeah, I’m just search­ing through so my team came up with these cards called coach alle­gories, which are, you know, meet­ing starter cards for peo­ple to get to know each oth­er because often we drop right into a meet­ing. And we’ve got ques­tions in there as you know what, what is the biggest hir­ing mis­take? or one that you’ve wit­nessed? Or who’s your great­est men­tor? And what is the best lead­er­ship book that I own? Are you wear­ing Adi­das or a Nike per­son, right, what­ev­er it have Mac or PC, just things to get peo­ple going. So I was in some meet­ings recent­ly, and one of the cards I was play­ing with, I’m try­ing to find it right now I can’t, is ask­ing peo­ple about what they do to pre­pare for the week. And it’s inter­est­ing, and I did it with a few dif­fer­ent exec­u­tive teams. And the sim­i­lar­i­ty was shock­ing. And I did­n’t know what one in India and one in Cana­da and one in USA, the ideas were so sim­i­lar. It was­n’t fun­ny. And, you know, and every­one had some of their own thoughts. But I sat back and thought about it. And I went, Yeah, of course it is. Because high per­for­mance requires prepa­ra­tion. Right suc­cess is when prepa­ra­tion meets oppor­tu­ni­ty, and you have to be pre­pared, it just, you can’t just show up and hope and pray that it does­n’t work. And if we look at our real peo­ple are gen­er­al­ly very orga­nized and very pre­pared. So you know, from that, you know, and then Brad, you and I talked about it, and you had also seen very, very sim­i­lar pat­terns. So so that’s what we’re kind of dig­ging into to hear today. And, you know, prepa­ra­tion is crit­i­cal. And there’s one of my favorite quotes from Sun­soo. They are the author of The Art of War. You haven’t read the art of war. It’s a spec­tac­u­lar book, it’s manda­to­ry read­ing and many busi­ness pro­grams. But Sun­soo says, you know, vic­to­ri­ous War­riors win first, and then go to war. While defeat­ed war­riors go to war first, and then seek to win. And that’s, you know, the best lead­ers have already thought things through, they’ve got plan ABCD. And they will pre­vail no mat­ter what, because they are prepared.

Kevin Lawrence 07:36

And some­times in life, not being pre­pared. And just going with the flow can be great. It can be relax­ing, and you can wan­der, because you don’t have to achieve any­thing on vaca­tion. It’s a won­der­ful thing to do some­times just see what hap­pens. Not when there’s a job to be done, not when there’s cus­tomers involved, or team mem­bers involved.

Brad Giles 07:56

Once ear­li­er, in this episode, we spoke about the smok­ing anal­o­gy, right? Just keep try­ing. But there’s a paint­ing anal­o­gy that I love here, which is, if you’ve ever been able to paint your own room or your own house, or apart­ment, you would know that every­thing is about the prepa­ra­tion, it’s like 80% of work in paint­ing is about the prepa­ra­tion and then apply­ing the paint is real­ly a very small job, in fact,

Kevin Lawrence 08:26

right and same in con­struc­tion, there’s a say­ing of Mea­sure twice, cut once. Dou­ble-check that you’ve got the mea­sure­ments, right, the cuts, are not that hard to do. Doing the right cut is hard. So we could get through it all kinds of good exam­ples and metaphors. But what we’re say­ing is the same thing. So we’ve got a list here today of six dif­fer­ent themes that we have seen in the not just in my recent con­ver­sa­tions, but in the exec­u­tives and lead­ers that we’ve worked with them, the most suc­cess­ful ones, the ones that we pay atten­tion to. And what they do, and the first thing that we saw in com­mon with these peo­ple of how they set them­selves up for a great week, aside from the fact they all had a rou­tine is every I’m sure every sin­gle one 90% At least said that they made a list of their most impor­tant things they need­ed to do. And you know, in my world from your oxy­gen mask first we break it down into work, self and life. Some peo­ple broke it down into work and life or, or work in per­son­al and fam­i­ly, what­ev­er. How­ev­er you carve up your list, it does­n’t mat­ter. But in all the areas that are impor­tant to you break­ing down the most impor­tant stuff you got to do. It’s not rock­et sci­ence, but every­body said the same thing.

Brad Giles 09:49

Yeah, and that is quite inter­est­ing. So when we run a quar­ter­ly or an annu­al off site work­shop, what you’re going to come away with is the most impor­tant pri­or­i­ties for the com­pa­ny and the most impor­tant pri­or­i­ties for the indi­vid­ual or the depart­ment. And there­fore, it gives you the pri­or­i­ti­za­tion for the next 13 weeks or quar­ter. And what we’re say­ing here is that peo­ple, the most suc­cess­ful lead­ers that we come across, are doing that on a week­ly basis, indi­vid­u­al­ly, per­son­al­ly prepar­ing so that they’re able to set them­selves up for suc­cess. So they’re focus­ing on the things that are impor­tant and not urgent, because if you don’t pre­pare your­self for the week, by focus­ing and allo­cat­ing time and ener­gy to the impor­tant and not urgent things, you’re going to end up on focus on focus­ing your time dur­ing the week, on the not impor­tant things on the things that

Kevin Lawrence 10:48

are non stop, there’s always some­thing more inter­est­ing to do, there’s always a fire, there’s always dra­ma, there’s always a prob­lem. But those things gen­er­al­ly aren’t on the top of your pri­or­i­ty list. But we get sucked into those if you don’t have a sol­id plan that you’re pur­su­ing or chas­ing. So absolute­ly, and it’s, that’s why you need this list. So you can pri­or­i­tize, and get clear on the stuff that has to hap­pen. And Brad, as you said, you know, in the com­pa­nies that we work with, and we’re encour­ag­ing com­pa­nies to have their work goals, also for peo­ple to have their own per­son­al resilience goal, and their growth goal along­side their work goals. Some in our time, we even have our most impor­tant life goal. So we got the holis­tic goal set there for peo­ple to be focused on. And again, this is an activ­i­ty of going back to that break­ing it down for the week. And of course, many of these peo­ple also do the same thing on a dai­ly basis after that, some­times hourly, but on a dai­ly basis, you know, break­ing it down fur­ther. So make a list of all the most impor­tant thing. And the sec­ond thing is to pri­or­i­tize the top few, like what are the ones that absolute­ly mat­ter most like, I don’t know what you have always got more things to do, then it’s pos­si­ble to get done. But I gen­er­al­ly in my plan for work self in life, we’ll make a list of the top three for work, top threes for self top three for life, I’ll do it for the week. And I do the same thing every day, most days, I do the same thing to make sure that the high val­ue or high impact things get done. And the low­er stuff that can be left gets left.

Brad Giles 12:19

Yeah, there’s a sim­ple tool that I use, which applies to a dai­ly or a week­ly. And that is, what are the things that absolute­ly must be done today. What are the things that must be done in the next few days? And what are the things that can be done some­day, and it forces you to the habit of pri­or­i­ti­za­tion, because you can’t have 100 things that need that must be done today. So then I frame today as being phys­i­cal or finan­cial harm. For exam­ple, if I don’t pay this bill, today, we will incur an inter­est debt. So it must be done. It must be paid today. If I don’t com­plete this task today, we might lose the client or we might not win the job, that type of thing. So it real­ly helps to reframe and pri­or­i­tize around the impor­tant things.

Kevin Lawrence 13:05

Yeah. And for me, I just have a sim­ple post, I’m already build­ing mine for this com­ing week. But a sim­ple post it note to start jot­ting it down. And then I’ll break it down into three columns with the high­est pri­or­i­ty ones at the top areas, not rock­et sci­ence. The oth­er thing is that I throw into this, and from a pri­or­i­ty in terms of ener­gy isn’t in my book, your oxy­gen mask first. There’s this thing called toads, they’re things that you pro­cras­ti­nate and put off because you don’t want to deal with them. And they gen­er­al­ly car­ry a mas­sive men­tal bur­den with them. So my rec­om­men­da­tion for peo­ple as you get to the dai­ly ver­sion is what’s the toad What’s the thing you don’t want to do, but you know, has to get done and have that as num­ber one on the list, get it done first. Nev­er mind it’ll give you a boost of ener­gy and take the bur­den off your brain. It also gives you great momen­tum for the rest of the day, because you’re not think­ing about it. So that it gets down into the dai­ly ver­sion of it. The key is just to know what is most impor­tant. So that’s num­ber two, pri­or­i­tize the top few that mat­ter most.

Brad Giles 14:10

So num­ber three, it makes me think about one of the most suc­cess­ful busi­ness thinkers of the last cen­tu­ry, which is Peter Druck­er, Peter Druck­er’s most suc­cess­ful book was the effec­tive exec­u­tive. And on page one of the effec­tive exec­u­tive, he said that the job of man­ag­er is to be effi­cient, and the job of exec­u­tive some­one who is in con­trol of their time is to be a fail­ure effec­tive. Yes. So if we think about those peo­ple who are exec­u­tives or are who, who are in charge of their own time, that’s when we think Alright, so we need to Audrain need to review their cal­en­dar so that the top pri­or­i­ties can get done and when we’re ask­ing here, are they effec­tive? How effec­tive are peo­ple around us?

Kevin Lawrence 15:07

Yes, and that’s their dri­ving effec­tive­ness, they’ve got the pri­or­i­ty list, and they got to make sure that it gets done in the cal­en­dar. The oth­er thing with­out effec­tive fil­ter on it, I like that broad, that’s a great reminder, thank you, is to make sure that the meet­ings that they are sched­uled for the week, one that they’re need­ed to, it’s clear on what the meet­ing is, and stuff, like there’s an out­come that’s been defined, and there’s agen­da, or that even that they’re pre­pared, but basi­cal­ly, that what they’re going to do in this week is of high val­ue, and they will be able to bring val­ue to those things. The oth­er crit­i­cal thing when peo­ple are review­ing and set­ting up their cal­en­dars is hav­ing time for the non tac­ti­cal stuff, the think­ing, strate­giz­ing brain­storm­ing, high lev­el prob­lem solv­ing, or you know, deep work, going back to that great book, deep work of real­ly one of the gonna have time to do that stuff. If you don’t block it into your cal­en­dar dur­ing the week, it often needs to hap­pen in the evenings or the week­ends, or it does­n’t hap­pen. So how do you carve out time? And in some cas­es, the right thought part­ners for that no mat­ter what, look­ing at the cal­en­dar based on my pri­or­i­ties, does my cal­en­dar match my pri­or­i­ties? And if not, how do I adjust or tweak my cal­en­dar to make it con­sis­tent with my pri­or­i­ties for the week, and then the month and the quarter?

Brad Giles 16:30

So deep work was a book by a guy called Cal New­port, I’m a huge fan of it. If you are enact­ing what Kevin is talk­ing about here, in your cal­en­dar, you may have for exam­ple, an appoint­ment that says some­thing like prepa­ra­tion time for meet­ing with Sue tomor­row. And you’ve got a cal­en­dar invite blocked out, you need to spend that time preparing,

Kevin Lawrence 16:58

as I was going through and doing some prepa­ra­tion for this com­ing week, because it’s Sun­day night here in Cana­da, I blocked out two hours tomor­row to work on a very impor­tant project that needs to get done by the end of the month. It’s stuck on one point that I need to be involved in and myself and anoth­er team mem­ber have two hours just to lock in and get it done. Tomor­row, we have to move some things around in the cal­en­dar to make room for it with oth­er peo­ple so that now we can go and just crush it tomor­row. Oth­er­wise, it’s not urgent, although it is very impor­tant. And it just it won’t get done for weeks if we don’t crush it tomorrow.

Brad Giles 17:36

And some peo­ple even take that as far lead­ing into the next point to allo­cate time for email pro­cess­ing. So they might say, I’m going to have 25 min­utes or 20 min­utes in the morn­ing, and then 25 min­utes in the after­noon, where I’m going to process emails, and focus on doing the oth­er work out­side of that. Yep.

Kevin Lawrence 17:58

So that was point num­ber three about going and look­ing at their cal­en­dars to make sure it match­es the pri­or­i­ties for is to already acti­vate very impor­tant pri­or­i­ties now, set­ting meet­ings, chang­ing meet­ings, ask­ing for infor­ma­tion about meet­ings, send­ing emails to for peo­ple for infor­ma­tion that you need to share or get del­e­gat­ing work or projects to oth­er peo­ple. And again, lots of peo­ple will do this and whether mon we’ll talk about when in a moment. But the idea is to already acti­vate the crit­i­cal stuff. So the week has already start­ed before you get into your week. Yeah, yeah. Num­ber five is per­son­al habits. Every­one’s got their own things that they need to do just like the rock stars, some of them just like green m&ms, what­ev­er your thing is, it’s it’s per­son­al habits. You know, and I’ve heard exec­u­tives say lots of things like you know, one word chat­ting with and I remem­ber this because we’d had just a great Sun­day night and din­ner par­ty games night. And I was hurt­ing a lit­tle bit on a Mon­day morn­ing had a lit­tle bit too fun on a Sun­day night. And one of the exec­u­tives said he stopped drink­ing on Sun­day nights. You know, he liked he enjoys his beers and bev­er­ages. But he said I stopped drink­ing on Sun­days. So I can be fresh and ready to hit the road sol­id on Mon­day morn­ing. Some peo­ple need to orga­nize their house. Some peo­ple need to make their plan their meal plans for the week. Some peo­ple need to sort their office, some peo­ple need to pack their bag if they’re trav­el­ing for the week, or pick out their clothes for the week or make their date night din­ner and movie plans or what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. Make sure they’ve got the time set aside for their kids, their activ­i­ties. Maybe they pick the run­ning routes, every­one’s got their own things they need to do. But there’s a bunch of those things to set the per­son up them­selves to be suc­cess­ful, just out­side of the tasks and work things

Brad Giles 19:53

that they need to do. Oth­er­wise those things will creep into your work time. So you need to pre­pare plan for those per­son­al things.

Kevin Lawrence 20:01

Absolute­ly. So that’s num­ber five per­son­al habits. Every­one’s got their own dif­fer­ent things. And then the six is when the heck two peo­ple do this. So con­sis­tent­ly, and in the West, we work on Mon­day to Fri­day week, gen­er­al­ly for office space peo­ple. You know, in oth­er places like India, it’ll be Mon­day to Sat­ur­day for a lot, or most Sat­ur­days and Mid­dle East. It used to be actu­al­ly inter­est­ing Sun­day to Thurs­day, but some of the coun­tries have now switched Mon­day to Fri­day. But basi­cal­ly, it’s the day before the night before I’ve heard peo­ple doing com­mon­ly Sun­day morn­ing or Sun­day evening is the most cit­ed times when peo­ple do this prep for the week. Some do it Mon­day morn­ings, but what peo­ple have said con­sis­tent­ly, if they leave it to Mon­day morn­ing, odds are some­thing hap­pens and it throws their week off, and then they don’t get to do it. So it’s we’re not rec­om­mend­ing every­body should work­ing on the week­end. And we need down­time for sure. It’s just com­mon for a lot of the high­est per­form­ers that we work with that’s a time­frame, they often do this before they step into Mon­day morning,

Brad Giles 21:10

of course, I’m going to be the out­lier here and do some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent out­side of the norm. Yeah. And so I, I pre­pare on a Fri­day night or Fri­day evening, after­noon, or Sat­ur­day morn­ing. Because I find, that means that if I’m pre­pared for the next week, I can kind of shut off from work, and then real­ly, real­ly be able to enjoy my week­end or not think about it. And then Sun­day night as mine, let’s say, but then I’m all pre­pared and ready to go and just start up. So I find for me, it’s a good way to close out the week, prepar­ing for the next week.

Kevin Lawrence 21:54

I’ve heard a few peo­ple say that, but you’re right back, because you can psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly close the week and be set up for the next week. And you don’t you’re not feel­ing like it’s you need to be think­ing about get­ting pre­pared, it’s already there. So again, it’s a per­son­al choice, what works for you. Awesome.

Brad Giles 22:14

And so an inter­est­ing chat. Today, real­ly, you know, this is just some­thing that we’ve observed, being pre­pared as a leader gives you the best chance of becom­ing more effec­tive this week. So as we quick­ly cycle through to close out, the effec­tive­ness of a lead­ers week is depen­dent on their prepa­ra­tion. If you don’t have a great week, you got to have a good amount of prepa­ra­tion. Kevin, as he said, he’d been sur­vey­ing in a infor­mal man­ner many lead­ers and found that every­one was kind of prepar­ing in a sim­i­lar way. And it’s the prepa­ra­tion that mat­ters. So make a list of things that are impor­tant, but are not urgent for the com­ing week. Things that you need to focus on in the busi­ness, to be able to set your­self up for the week. So make that list to begin with. pri­or­i­tize them from most to least impor­tant. Review cal­en­dars. To ensure that peo­ple around you are also work­ing on the most impor­tant things. Kevin, would you like to move on to num­ber four?

Kevin Lawrence 23:22

Yeah, and also with your own cal­en­dar review to make sure that it match­es your pri­or­i­ties. And as you’re not, you know, going down a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent track than what’s most impor­tant. And to take proac­tive actions to kick off the week of send­ing emails, meet­ing invites, ask­ing for clar­i­fi­ca­tions, so you’re ready to roll. And then there’s some per­son­al habits to just set you up for the week. And whether you need to pack your bag, orga­nize your house, drink or not drink, spend time with friends, pick your clothes out, pick a run­ning route, who knows what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. And then final­ly, it’s about when you do it. Lots of peo­ple in the West seem to do it on Sun­day morn­ing or Sun­day evening. Brad talks about Fri­day after­noon, which is even ulti­mate, if you can get it done at the end of the day Fri­day because you could close your week off and then be free of need­ing to think about it until you fire it back up again. Point is what­ev­er works for you. How do you ded­i­cate that half an hour or hour that you need to real­ly get ahead of your week­end as Sun­soo said vic­to­ri­ous War­riors win first, and then go to war. And the week can feel like a war. A nice ver­sion of a war any­way. And that you want to make sure that you are more than well pre­pared so you can lead your week and not have your week lead­ing you.

Brad Giles 24:39

Awe­some. Good chat, Kev. So my name is Brad Giles. You can find me at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au and Kevin, Kevin Lawrence is avail­able at Lawrence and co​.com. I’ve got a newslet­ter Kev­in’s got a newslet­ter. They’re both pret­ty good, maybe inter­est­ing. for you about our range of dif­fer­ent and inter­est­ing top­ics to build an endur­ing great busi­ness, you can also find us on YouTube. If you just search the growth whis­pers on YouTube, you’re more than sure to come across us. Thanks for your time today.