A Bias for Action reveals how great managers get results by engaging their own willpower through a combination of energy and focus. The authors present simple strategies for bolstering willpower and provide ways managers can use the willpower of others to encourage collective action.
Management is the art of doing and getting done
Most managers do not reach for the opportunities for significant achievements. Although their days are filled with a constant stream of meetings, conference calls, emails, voice mails, pages, etc., they tend to ignore or postpone dealing with the organization’s most crucial issues.
Those problems require reflection, systematic planning, creative thinking, and time. Instead, managers let operational activities requiring more immediate attention squeeze important problems out.
Unleashing organizational energy for collective action
Marshalling organizational will to support the productive energy and focus not only of individual managers, but also of the company itself, is the final aspect of building a bias for action.
In companies that have successfully focused their organizational energy, the leaders unleashed the energy inherent in their organizations, and created a strong collective force that fueled purposeful action-taking and led to extraordinary results.
Management is the art of doing and getting done
Most managers do not reach for the opportunities for significant achievements. Although their days are filled with a constant stream of meetings, conference calls, emails, voice mails, pages, etc., they tend to ignore or postpone dealing with the organization’s most crucial issues.
Those problems require reflection, systematic planning, creative thinking, and time. Instead, managers let operational activities requiring more immediate attention squeeze important problems out.
Crossing the Rubicon
Volitional managers discovered their deepest, innermost feelings about their goals. Volitional managers search for solutions in which their thoughts and emotions about their goals naturally overlap, and, if necessary, they modify their goals to harmonize with their emotions.
Their thoughts about their goals assumed a new clarity, and they became confident of achieving their objectives. They aligned their emotions and thoughts about their goals.
Distinguishing purposeful action from active nonaction
Managers who take effective action—those who make the seemingly impossible happen—rely on a combination of two critical aspects of executive work: energy and focus.
Energy is what pushes managers to make exceptional efforts when tackling heavy workloads or responding to tight deadlines. Focus requires that a manager is intentional, channeling all activities toward achieving the desired goal.
Developing purposeful managers: The organization’s responsibility
To benefit from volitional action that aligns with corporate goals, leaders must ensure that people at every level internalize the overall purpose of the company. That means crafting a shared vision and a set of common values that everyone authentically subscribes to as a personal source of identity and meaning.
Freeing your people to act: A mandate for leaders
To create managers who act from personal willpower, you must offer them choices, make them perceive and develop the courage to use these choices — and then step back.
To be creative and to engage willpower, managers must not only have the freedom to act but also feel that they have it. Leaders must provide managers that space and freedom in which to act, as well as convince their managers to use that freedom.
Marshaling energy and developing focus
Managers who want to cultivate a bias for action must take full responsibility for their intentions or goals. Without this kind of personal commitment, it is easy to go astray or blame others for setbacks. To make such a commitment, your intellectual assessment of your job must align with your own intuitive and emotional desires.
Moving beyond motivation to willpower
Willpower separates the executives who remain stuck in unproductive behavior from those who overcome their procrastination, detachment or frenzied busyness to develop a strong bias for action.
Willpower enables managers to act in a disciplined way even in situations when they have no desire to act, feel unmotivated because they do not expect to enjoy the work, or feel tempted by alternative opportunities.
