right seat means that each of your employees is operating within his or her area of greatest skill and passion inside your organization and that the roles and responsibilities expected of each employee fit with his or her Unique Ability®.1 This is a concept created by Dan Sullivan and is a registered trademark of The Strategic Coach, Inc. In the book Unique Ability, authors Catherine Nomura, Julia Waller, and Shannon Waller explain that everyone has a Unique Ability®. The trick is to discover yours. When you’re operating from within your Unique Ability®, your superior skill is often noticed by others who value it. You experience never-ending improvement, feel energized rather than drained, and, most of all, you have a passion for what you’re doing that presses you to go further than others would in this area. When this combination of passion and talent finds the right audience, it naturally creates value for others, who, in return, offer you greater rewards and more opportunities for further improvement. It’s like your personal core focus. When a person is operating in his or her Unique Ability®, he or she is in the right seat.
4. Thou Shalt Not Rely on Secondhand Information You cannot solve an issue involving multiple people without all the parties present. If the issue at hand involves more than the people in the room, schedule a time when everyone can attend. Tyler Smith of Niche Retail calls these “pow-wows.” When someone brings him an issue involving others or secondhand information, he says, “Time for a pow-wow” and pulls everyone involved together and solves it.
He asked these companies if he could interview people who they thought best exemplified work-life balance. What he discovered after interviewing these people was that they actually worked an average of nine hours more per week than their counterparts did. They valued job satisfaction over work-life balance. So, when you focus your efforts to improve your people’s satisfaction level with their jobs, versus the number of hours they work, think of the upside.
Luftmensch is a Yiddish word made from two others; luft means “air” and mensch means “person.” A luftmensch is an “air-person,” someone who has his or her head in the clouds. I don’t mean this as an insult. Ideas come from having your head in the clouds. Most visionaries would agree with me. That is their gift, their strength, and their value. Nothing exists without visionaries. Yet once the vision is clear, you need to go from luftmensch to action.
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