Attitude is Everything
Harlan Hammack
I Help Business Owners Keep More of the Hard-Earned Money They Make | Business & Leadership Coach | Organizational Change Management Consultant | Author | Speaker | Podcast Host
This gauge can be found in the cockpit of all flying craft. It is called the Attitude Indicator or the artificial horizon.
This gauge shows the attitude of the pilot’s aircraft in time and space at a given moment.
The blue indicates the sky, the brown indicates the ground, and the white line through the center represents the horizon.
The small symbol in the center of the gauge shows the attitude of your aircraft in relation to the horizon. Stable, level flight is good. Nose up (more blue showing) indicates that you are climbing, nose down (more brown showing) indicates that you are descending. If the aircraft symbol is at an angle in relation to the horizon, it indicates that you are in a turn attitude.
That was always my problem. I would fly along, not paying close attention to all the gauges, and I would have one wing slightly off level. That “bad attitude” meant I would drift off course. Not significantly, but enough that my “bad attitude” would prevent me from reaching my intended destination unless I changed my attitude.
Hence the name Attitude Indicator.
In business, we don’t have a set of gauges that we use to manage our affairs. We have reports, we have metrics – key performance indicators, key result indicators – and financial ratios.
Just like the gauges in the cockpit, they each tell us something different about our business, and collectively they tell us whether our business is healthy or not, whether we are producing at capacity or not, and whether we are on-track to attain our strategic goals.
For my clients, I recommend a Strategic Plan; where are you now, where do you want to be, and how do you plan to get there.
Part of the Strategic Plan includes checkpoints or milestones that help you measure whether you are on-track or not, and what to do to get back on track.
Creating an executive dashboard that displays your key metrics is helpful, but however you do it, you need to keep an eye on your progress towards your strategic goals.
One way to do that is by using my RSSCO? Framework, my methodology for defining your personal or professional goals – we call them RESULTS – and then laying out the plan to achieve those results.
I’ve created a short online video course explaining my RSSCO? Framework and how you can use it to achieve every goal, every result you’ve ever wanted, 24/7/365. Check out the online course here: https://mastermind.com/masterminds/19451