Free yourself up to create more value and joy at work

Busyness in the form of tightly scheduled calendars creates a pseudo feeling of productive and importance. It is great to be needed and adding value – therefore allowing the busyness consume you in phases when it is genuinely needed.

Continuous self-encouragement for busyness without allowing anytime to read, reflect, process one’s own thoughts, learnings, experiences towards a point of view for one’s team creates a lack of connection. As leaders, nothing matters more than making space for personal thinking and doing time and then time to connect with one’s teams to share, discuss, debate, agree and disagree – all for forward momentum.

In recent times, I have worked intentionally to create space in my schedule, especially early mornings where I doing focused reading, information processes and making my views, including challenges towards things I do not fully understand yet.. It is not always easy with competing priorities.

Together with my team, by making behavioural changes and breaking old patterns through different responses such as – more working sessions over meetings, clear descriptions, agenda and expectations from the sessions, relentless use asynchronous communication and declining meetings that don’t add value – has made it possible for me to achieve the goal of creating space for learning and reflection.