Time Out ………… Use of Knowledge

Recently I posed the following question to a few CEOs and Senior Human Resource Managers in both the manufacturing and service sectors.

“What is the most significant change you would want to see in your leadership team?”

The responses centred around two focal issues (i) how the team thinks and (ii) how the team works together.

As I reflected on the responses, I recalled an article written for Forbes Magazine, by Alan Fine, founder of InsideOut Development and author of You Already Know How to Be Great: A Simple Way to Remove Interference and Unlock Your Greatest Potential. Fine says “the biggest obstacle to better performance isn’t lack of knowledge. It’s failure to act on knowledge we already have. Overcoming this obstacle requires a different method, a method built on the premise that high performance, from the front line to the C-suite, doesn’t arrive from the outside in but emerges from the inside out.”

It is difficult to imagine how and when this emergence takes place, if we are always busy. Busy in meetings, busy on blackberries, busy planning, busy having fun and the list goes on …. If organisation performance is to improve, leaders must be capable of taking the knowledge that they already possess, reframing it and generating more creative solutions to current issues.

Our best thinking has brought us to where we are today. What is going to propel us into the future? Take a Time Out ……. the intentional cessation of an incomplete task, and see what emerges.