Vision
Which is for you: Doing things right vs. doing right things?
Tactical thinking and strategic thinking can be broken down – doing things right vs. doing right things. Doing things right is a tactical approach. It could be anything from providing good customer service to hiring a quality employee. Most of us who have achieved some success in our career or business are good at tactical thinking. You wouldn’t have made this far without doing things right. While tactical thinking is needed, it takes more effort take a strategic thinking approach – doing right things.
Strategic thinking usually involves planning and preparing for long term sustainability. There is no immediate reward for doing the right things. Some examples of doing right things are creating policies that affect a company’s paid time off for employees or creating a five year budget to go along with your five year strategic plan for growth. If you are busy working in operations, productions, daily tasks, etc., how will you know when your time, effort and money have not been placed toward the most important aspects of your career or business? You have to take regular assessments of yourself to know when you are being most productive.
[wpob id=”2″]Doing right things means preparing and planning so that you will not do wrong things. When you are building a career it is important to become efficient and forward thinking of your path. However, you must produce good work along the way. As you sit down and decide if you are doing things right vs. doing right things, understand that you will need both approaches to be productive and obtain the ultimate success. Doing things right is implementing the vision, but before you implement it you must create it. Doing the right things is creating the vision. It is safe to say they go hand in hand. First, you must have the vision, then you can put it to work for you.
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During reading this I was reflecting on myself as both a facilitator of learning and a teacher leader. Have I been only doing things right or am I creating the vison of learning for my students and doing the right things? The Effectiveness/Efficiency Matrix is going to be my go-to as I continue my process of a future leader making sure I am I doing the right things and keeping the questions of at what method am I doing them in the forefront. Great Post both powerful as a teacher leader, but also eye opening to how effectively or efficiently the work is getting done in any profession.