Paint Your Picasso (Yearly)
I was always surprised to see how many people weren’t aware of their own major accomplishments and more so that they weren’t even thinking in such big terms. Years would go by where people were not creating significant change in the company.
Artists have special skills. They are able to produce magnificent works: paintings, musical scores, songs, plays, movies, building designs - all taking months or possibly years to create. Artists have the ability to dedicate a significant amount of time, energy, and focus to an activity to produce a spectacular outcome that we all marvel at year after year and throughout history. WHY can’t we replicate that in business? We can!
Every January, during goal setting and prioritization reviews, I would tell my team - prepare to “Paint your Picasso”. This was a way of stating that each employee should set some significant goals for the year, and work with passion and focus to complete them. Do you think that Picasso spent most of his time collecting paints, cleaning the floor, or fixing broken easels? Of course, he spent some time on these preparatory things, but his laser focus was on creating treasured masterpieces.
We often get lost in the “trivial many”: projects, issues, and business activities that have little impact. Think more broadly about your goals - find the one or two per year that will create a step change in business performance. You have the ability and time to make more impactful achievements in your job and career – it starts by deliberately choosing where to focus your energy. Start by setting yearly goals including at least one major item, create a clear plan - a path to complete it - and you will hit that one big home run every year.
At the end of the year, I would repeat my theme and ask: “Did you paint a Picasso this year?”. This would help the team reflect, to see if they completed their major accomplishment (and why or why not, so they could better stay on track the next year). If you look back and can think of a major accomplishment, you have truly painted your yearly Picasso. Are you ‘painting your Picasso’ every year?
Let CAEDENCE develop your team’s proficiency in policy deployment, prioritization, and time management. Our interactive workshop will re-set expectations about how to distinguish between the “trivial many” and the “Picasso”, and provide the tools and know-how to keep on track.
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Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
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