Instant Gratification: For Leaders Who Want Results
by Suzanne Bates Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Suzanne Bates is the author of two business best-sellers, Motivate like a CEO, Communicate Your Strategic Vision and Inspire People to Act! and Speak Like a CEO, Secrets for Commanding Attention and Getting Results. She is President and CEO of Bates Communications and author of www.thepowerspeakerblog.com.
Full Bio
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but imagine if those Romans had had the internet. They would have loved it. Log into Monster.com and hire the team; order supplies and get overnight delivery from Lowes; Google winning city architectual plans and then go to Amazon to choose business best - sellers on project management. Way cool.
Yes, it is incredibly comforting to know that many of our needs can be met in an instant. I’ve just started to wonder what impact this has on leaders. If we all are conditioned to expect it now, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I’ve never been a patient person so this is my era. The Easy Button from Staples? That’s a potent fantasy. I love Google. The other day I googled Mika Brzezinski chatting about ”working with the White House on talking points on the Gulf oil spill,” and watched the video clip before my Keurig Single Cup Coffee Maker finished brewing that cup of Chocolate Glazed Donut coffee - which we ordered because it takes too long to brew a whole pot.
If our parents thought we wanted everything yesterday, they should see us now. We are truly, madly, deeply in love with instant gratification. I don’t have to go to the bookstore or even go online and order a hard copy from Amazon.com (and wait 4 days to receive it.) I can fire up my Kindle, press three buttons, and download any one of 500,000 books in 6 seconds.
In today’s world, is patience still a virtue as your grandmother said? I don’t know. It would be foolish to judge our generation as better or worse. We are a product of our environment. However, the question is how to harness the good part of impatience and get things done without driving people crazy.
You know what you must do. Set goals. Assemble the right team. Get them working together. Engage them and keep them motivated. Hold them accountable and measure success. If you want to do that faster then you must cultivate one additional skill- one that every leader must have. That is - the ability to communicate what you want in a way that engages and motivates others to do it when it needs to be done.
If it’s all in your head - you’re just wishing you could push that Easy Button – then good luck to you. If nobody knows what you want, then how can you expect quick results?
Think about it like Google. Capture it in a key phrase. Articulate a clear, succinct powerful idea. It’s harder than you think. Recently, while working with a group of leaders I challenged them to use our “Big Idea” process to clarify what must be done and why. The trick is they have to do this in 25 words or less. They worked for 2 hours and were still debating it. Like I said, it isn’t easy. As Mark Twain once famously said, I would have written a shorter letter if I’d had more time.
So the Easy Button is just a chotchke, but you can get faster better results when you get specific and clear in your communication. Get it right and watch those results populate like Google filling your search page. Good stuff in, good stuff out, at the speed your business needs to move right now.
Yes, it is incredibly comforting to know that many of our needs can be met in an instant. I’ve just started to wonder what impact this has on leaders. If we all are conditioned to expect it now, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I’ve never been a patient person so this is my era. The Easy Button from Staples? That’s a potent fantasy. I love Google. The other day I googled Mika Brzezinski chatting about ”working with the White House on talking points on the Gulf oil spill,” and watched the video clip before my Keurig Single Cup Coffee Maker finished brewing that cup of Chocolate Glazed Donut coffee - which we ordered because it takes too long to brew a whole pot.
If our parents thought we wanted everything yesterday, they should see us now. We are truly, madly, deeply in love with instant gratification. I don’t have to go to the bookstore or even go online and order a hard copy from Amazon.com (and wait 4 days to receive it.) I can fire up my Kindle, press three buttons, and download any one of 500,000 books in 6 seconds.
In today’s world, is patience still a virtue as your grandmother said? I don’t know. It would be foolish to judge our generation as better or worse. We are a product of our environment. However, the question is how to harness the good part of impatience and get things done without driving people crazy.
You know what you must do. Set goals. Assemble the right team. Get them working together. Engage them and keep them motivated. Hold them accountable and measure success. If you want to do that faster then you must cultivate one additional skill- one that every leader must have. That is - the ability to communicate what you want in a way that engages and motivates others to do it when it needs to be done.
If it’s all in your head - you’re just wishing you could push that Easy Button – then good luck to you. If nobody knows what you want, then how can you expect quick results?
Think about it like Google. Capture it in a key phrase. Articulate a clear, succinct powerful idea. It’s harder than you think. Recently, while working with a group of leaders I challenged them to use our “Big Idea” process to clarify what must be done and why. The trick is they have to do this in 25 words or less. They worked for 2 hours and were still debating it. Like I said, it isn’t easy. As Mark Twain once famously said, I would have written a shorter letter if I’d had more time.
So the Easy Button is just a chotchke, but you can get faster better results when you get specific and clear in your communication. Get it right and watch those results populate like Google filling your search page. Good stuff in, good stuff out, at the speed your business needs to move right now.