DirectorsMessage092311

With the constant stream of e-mails, voicemails, Facebook updates, Tweets, LinkedIn, and so on, it is a minor miracle that any of us can accomplish anything. With our Blackberrys or iPhones surgically implanted into our hands — and unfortunately some providers bring them into the treatment rooms — our time is sliced so thinly that we never have the focused time to develop the big-picture perspective required for an action plan, let alone the time to execute it.

“Daily routines, auto-pilot behaviors, poorly prioritized or unfocused tasks leech hygienists, dentists, office mangers and assistants’ capacities — making unproductive busyness perhaps the most critical behavioral problem” in business today, contend Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal in their book A Bias for Action.

For so many of us — whether dental practice owners, consultants, or solo entrepreneurs — there is a fundamental disconnection between knowing what should be done and actually doing it. Calling this disconnection the “knowing-doing gap,” Stanford University researchers Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton pose the question: “Why does knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fail to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge?”

Is there anyone in business today who hasn’t wondered the same thing?

The answer, argue Bruch and Ghoshal, is both simple and profound. They sum it up with the term “willpower.” They say the problem is not that managers’ time is sliced thin, but that their intention or “volition” is sliced as well.

Getting things done requires two critical components: energy and focus. Both are at risk in the modern workplace. Building a bias for action in yourself and your organization requires developing and reinforcing the skills to become a “purposeful” or “volitional” manager. These are people who can consistently achieve their objectives by making an unconditional commitment to their goals and then leveraging the power of that intention to overcome the obstacles in their way.

Burch and Ghoshal identify four key steps that form the basis of successfully taking action:

• Form your intention. To work, your goal must appeal to you emotionally and be something you can define concretely enough so you can clearly visualize its success.

• Commit unconditionally to your intention. This is the key step, which the authors liken to “crossing the Rubicon,” Caesar’s irreversible decision that led to his conquest of Rome.

• Protect your intention. Once you have made your commitment, you have to protect it from forces both within yourself and your organization.

• Disengage from your intention. Unlike Caesar, your Rubicons aren’t life-and-death affairs. You have to define your “stopping rules,” the point of success or failure from which you walk away and take up the next challenge.

I will add a fifth step.

• Coaching. Coaching employs a variety of processes, often grounded in evidence-based theories. Timothy Gallwey defines coaching as “the art of creating an environment, through conversation and a way of being, that facilitates the process by which a person can move toward desired goals in a fulfilling manner.”

From the commitment comes both the emotional energy and the focus that are critical to your success. Some of us reach commitment because we are ready to “take ownership of our time/life” or “ready to get off the fence,” or are “ready to close the gap between where we are and where we want to go,” realizing focus and positive energy are the catalysts. In short, the process of getting things done, whether solo or in partnership with a coach, is pretty much the same in any aspect of life: The only goals/things that get done are those that you genuinely believe in, and believe will get done.

Kristine A. Hodsdon RDH, BS
Director, RDH eVillage