Black Belt Productivity

One of the things I have been giving a lot of thought to this week is leadership, and the communication skills that it requires.

You would be hard pressed to find a good leader who could not communicate well with others. One of the biggest prerequisites to leadership is being able to convince others to follow you. Part of that ability is directly tied to communication skills.

Let’s think for a moment about communication in leadership.

What do leaders communicate?

• Organizational vision
• Expectations
• Instructions
• Processes & Procedures
• (Hopefully) Encouragement
• Changes in status quo

Michael and I received a nice memo from our friend Mirko Zorz this morning. Mirko recently wrote a column about GTD^® for a leading Croatian magazine. He included a scan of the spread. If you look at the lower part of the right hand page, you will find a reference to Black Belt Productivity.

Mirko told us that it says:

“Although relatively new, this blog features quality articles that aim to bring the GTD philosophy, as well as organization skills in general, to a wide audience. The authors depict how GTD has influenced their work habits and also show us the problems they tackled with during their own implementation of GTD.”

Well, the first week of my new system is almost done. It is outlined in My Trusted System Redux. I have gotten most of my 3×5’s filled out with NAs and Projects. I really like the Weekly Planner sections. I get a little thrill when I get to cross off my appointments when they get done.

Michael is a bit under the weather today. Originally, it was to be his day to post his Black Belt write up. However, since he is listed as “day-to-day” at the moment, and I have yet to complete my write up, I will post something brief today.

- Jason

As many of you have read lately, Michael has been overhauling his system. After rereading some of his posts on the process (especially the goal setting part), I determined that I need to get a fresh start myself.

I had a great session with one of my mentors this afternoon. I was bouncing some ideas off of him about career development. If you are like me, you have a lot of things on a professional level that you want to bounce off a trusted friend with more experience. Or maybe you just need some good ideas.

My son just turned 4 this past week. All of you who are parents of small children know this means a birthday party must be thrown. You invite all of the friends…have cake and ice cream…you know the drill.

In our house, event planning is my wife’s department (Hey, I know my place in this marriage). I am always available to be a “go-fer” whenever needed. But if momma is not happy with the party, no one is happy with the party.

In today’s installment on leadership, we will talk about the differences between management and leadership.

John C. Maxwell addresses this question by saying that the high level difference is the management deals with processes and leadership deals with people. Steven Covey often says that managers focus on climbing the tree, and leaders make sure we are climbing the right tree.

In his book, The 360 Degree Leader, John Maxwell gives us these ways to move from management to leadership.

I am finally ready to roll out my new trusted system. It has been a long time in development, but I feel that this will be a better implementation fo me. I am also committing to use it as described for the rest of 2006. I am one that is always looking for new, cool things to add to my system. I am going to take notes on things that are cool and re-evaluate them in January.

So, on with the system:

Today we would like to welcome in Frank Meeuwsen, creator of whatsthenextaction.com. Frank is based in the Netherlands, and is trying to get David Allen to take his Roadmap seminar across the pond. All it seems that he needs is guarantee that a room full of people will go and see it. So contact Frank if you want to take a little vacation and learn from the David at the same time.

Thanks to Frank for writing for us. It seems that we may have broke his writing back. We are most appreciative of him for taking the time to write for us.

As the plane that is my life starts ascending to the higher altitudes, I wanted to touch on my stops at 30,000 and 40,000 feet. I will only be discussing my professional side with this post since my personal side is, well, personal.

I sat down and really tried to come up with a number of goals for my job as Computer Services Manager at the City of Northport. I have only been in the job for 6 months now so I do not have a great feel for a lot of things yet. Chris in his comment said,