FranklinCovey-The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Sales Leaders

HABIT 3: PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST

HABIT 3: PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST Have you ever heard the expression, “It’s better to have a ‘B’ strategy and an ‘A’ execution than an ‘A’ strategy and a ‘B’ execution”?

For a long time, I thought this made sense, until it occurred to me, why can’t you have both? Why can’t you have an “A” strategy that is deeply meaningful to you and inspires you, and also have an “A” execution? The options are usually presented as mutually exclusive, but Habit 3—“Put First Things First”—is about giving you both. As Dr. Stephen R. Covey wrote in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and as I’ve been discussing in this document, the essence of Habit 1 (Be Proactive) is to realize that you are the creator of your life and you are solely responsible for what you accomplish (or don’t). Habit 2 (Begin with the End in Mind) is about creating that clear vision in your mind’s eye, and it results in a written document—a mission statement or a constitution—that will help keep you on course as you bring it into being. When you have invested the time in developing the habit of proactivity and envisioning what you want to accomplish, then Habit 3 is how you execute on your mission at an ‘A’ level. While the first two habits are habits of leadership (the “first creation”), Habit 3 is a management habit. It’s what Covey calls “the second creation,” where things get real. The key mindset Habit 3 teaches is to schedule your priorities rather than to “prioritize” your schedule. COMING TO TERMS WITH DAY-TO-DAY CHOICES I love the first line of Jim Collins’s book Good to Great: “Good is the enemy of great.” It’s a key reminder that the enemy of great isn’t “bad,” and it’s not “horrible.” It’s all the “good” things we get done. Most of us are good, and that is precisely

why there are few that are great. It’s easy to fill a schedule with good meetings, good activities and good projects. But what you lose sight of in all the good you accomplish is that this puts your most important priorities on the back burner. As a sales leader, you’ll find Habit 3 helps conquer good as an enemy in your day-today choices, which includes your responses to unplanned events, by making sure you’ve blocked out time first for those activities that contribute to your mission. What good are Habits 1 and 2—the habits of personal vision and imagination—if they’re unravelled by the day-to-day press of things that demand your attention? The principle of “Putting First Things First” is to execute on your priorities and take responsibility for accomplishing them by proactively planning your time, your day and your week. Instead of coming into the office on Monday and looking at all the emails waiting, the people wanting answers, the meeting invitations to accept, and trying to prioritize your schedule around them, you use time management differently. As Stephen Covey suggests, the phrase “‘time management is really a misnomer—the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.” This is an important discipline to build as a sales leader, especially since there’s no end to the list of internal meetings, visits with important customers, proposals to prepare, reports that are due, and decisions that need to be made to fulfil your role. Absent this skill, your most important priorities end up not getting done. But if you’re already overwhelmed with more than you can possibly get to in a day, how can you start to take control?

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