What will you write?
Yesterday I worked with Dana, a man who has successfully managed a logistics support business for 25 years. In short, he and his crew are the ones that haul the parts and products to the shipping ports and the airports.
Dana is the perfect example of someone that has unconscious competence. In other words, he does a fabulous job, yet he would be hard pressed to speak about what it is that he does, even though he has this deep Isaac Hayes voice that makes you trust that he knows what he is doing.
We talked about four stages of truck driving. Before you learn to drive a big truck, you have unconscious incompetence, because you don’t know what you don’t know. When you start truck driving school you have conscious incompetence, or you do know what you don’t know about driving a rig. When you finish the course, you have conscious competence, because you know very precisely what you know. You are very focused on exactly what it takes to drive the truck safely to your destination. After a while you develop what is called unconscious competence; because, like Dana, you are no longer conscious of precisely what you are doing. You are just driving that big rig…and listening to music on your mobile phone.
After enjoying talking about learning to drive a big truck, Dana decided right then and there that he needed to bring himself back to conscious competence. He started by writing down each of his roles and all the related duties that he performs that make his business the success that it is. He then ranked the duties in level of importance. He decided to do the things he labeled as the most important and cut the things he has labeled as the least important. He has also decided on which tasks he can delegate or defer till later.
Dana began his return to conscious competence by writing down his roles and responsibilities…and he recommends that you do the same.
QUESTION
What are your responsibilities to yourself, to your family and friends, and to your work; and how do you prioritize the tasks involved?
Chuck Scharenberg is the Founder of More Profit More Freedom, a consultancy that supports the execution of large-scale growth for small businesses. His practice has successfully grown businesses with processes that identify potential roadblocks and mitigation schemes to accelerate realistic execution.