The Most Important Thing

Hi everybody, Happy Monday!  I hope you had a great weekend.  While I was away, I managed to find  time to read a really interesting book.  Nothing like a 6 hour flight to Los Angeles to provide for a little reading time!  The book was called The One Thing – The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan.  The premise of the book is that extraordinary results are achieved by leaders who are able to determine the one thing that is the most important thing they could be doing to achieve a defined goal, and focusing themselves, and their organizations on executing this one thing.  The concept is really powerful, because first, it forces you to set one clear goal and then to examine all of your actions to determine how they are either advancing or working against achieving the goal.   The process forces you to determine what is the one action at any given time that will have the biggest impact in helping you reach the goal.

At some point, some of you may have heard of something called Pareto’s Principle.  This scientifically proven principle states that 20% of our actions are responsible for 80% of our results.  These means it is only a small amount of what we do that is responsible for our most important results.   If this is true, it stands to reason that we should want to spend more attention, time and effort on these high-powered actions.  We should also want to identify and maximize these efforts that generate all this bang for the buck.

In each of our days and weeks, it is important to keep focused not just on being busy, but on getting the most valuable work done.  We need to look at all of our actions to determine which ones deliver the best results.  Once we have identified them, we need to make sure that we always prioritize them.

Let me give an example.  As a restaurant company, goal setting is pretty easy.  We come to work every day to make our guests happy.  If this is the goal, what is the one thing we can do that will have the greatest impact towards this goal?  For the GM, maybe this is hiring.  We have big robust teams, and the GM needs to make sure they are dedicating enough of their time to attracting & retaining and great teammates.  For the AGM and the MGR, maybe it is training and coaching, and for the Chef maybe it is time spent on quality control.  With the most important action identified, now we need to structure everything else around making sure there is enough time for our most important thing.  Cash outs, inventory, ordering, cleaning the office, checking side work, talking with vendors, meetings, etc are all important tasks, but none can be allowed take on more importance than our most important thing.  This is only one example, I look forward to working with you all to define the highest priority together

This week, think about what you do that delivers the best results.  Once you have found it, figure out how to spend more of your time doing it…… the results will follow!

Have a great week!