A Clarity Break Confession
Clarity breaks are essential for business leaders to practice on a consistent interval. A clarity break is a scheduled time to get out of the office with just pen and paper to think. Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.”
Normally I like to share stories of client sessions, but today I want to share my personal experience with clarity breaks. Something you should know about me is that I’m a doer. I love getting things done. And I have to confess that for a long time, I resisted doing clarity breaks and would skip them because I felt my time would be more valuable knocking items off my To Do list. Plus, taking time to just “think” made me feel like I wasn’t really getting stuff done—after all, “thinking” was never on my To Do list.
When you prune a tree, you remove the dead or diseased parts so the whole tree will grow and thrive. If you don’t prune the tree, the whole tree is at risk of dying.
Last week in a client session, two team members rushed in frantically just as we were about to start the meeting. They dropped into their seats with disheveled hair and scowls on their faces. One of them said they didn’t get any sleep the night before because they were up all night with a sick child.
The Elephant in the Room. The Sacred Cow. The skeleton in the closet. Every company has certain issues that they avoid bringing up at all costs. Sometimes the issues are too uncomfortable to confront. Or the same issue has been discussed many times in the past and still nothing is being done about it. Sometimes it’s because we’re afraid that someone will get personally offended just because we brought it up.
As your company grows, everything gets more complex. Keeping everyone in the loop used to be simple, and as more and more people are added to your team, it can become very cumbersome to keep everyone in the loop. Processes, systems and communications that seemed to at one time happen automatically, don’t occur so easily anymore.