We are such creatures of habit. Guys have roughly 50 neckties in a closet yet routinely wear less than ten. Cities have dozens of restaurants yet, people get stuck in going to the same few. We sit at our desks and push the same papers, answer the same calls and talk with the same people most every day.
The difference between a rut and a groove is you want to be in a groove, you find yourself stuck in a rut. Do you know the difference between a rut and a grave? Depth.
Use today to leap out of your rut and do everything different.
1. Brush your teeth with your opposite hand. Harder than you thought? So are lots of simple tasks others have never tried. Explain action expectations in detail.
2. Drive to work along a different route. What contingencies do you need to discover for your routine business practices?
3. Assign another attendee to lead the managers meeting. Hand off the meeting at the last minute. See how well that person responds under pressure. How ready are they for a leadership role?
4. Spend more hours outside of your office getting to know your workforce on a deeper level. You don’t know your employees as people as well as you think. Make the effort.
5. Take two hours in the afternoon uninterrupted in your conference room with three other executives. Post flip chart paper on the walls each with a separate title: Marketing, Sales, Leadership, Products, Services, Customer/Client, Employee morale. Hand each executive a pad of small sticky notes and take the full two hours generating new ideas. Post the idea on which eve r topic it applies to. Create an action plan for those ideas you want to immediately put to work.
6. You should be feeling the walls of your rut get smaller. You should be accessing parts of your brain that hasn’t fired for too long if you are working the previous idea correctly. If not, dig deeper. In fact, dig deeper anyhow.
7. Interchange a few employees between jobs today. They will each have a better appreciation of what the other job entails.
8. Ask every executive to turn off their computers and phones for one hour and tell them to use that hour to think of what could be done better in their department. Yea they freaked out at this idea, but you do this when you are in your manager meetings an hour too long already? This will be constructive.
9. Bring in lunch from a brand new restaurant and tell all the executives they don’t get to leave the building for lunch. Will they be upset? Yea stretching into new ways can be tough.
10. What information are you “saving” for the managers meeting? Tweet it, text it or blog on it. Use faster methods of information distribution.
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