How can you NOT see a whale???

“It was just a subtle glimpse of movement, but it caught her eye. She held her breath. Could it be?

With her awareness now sharpened she kept vigilantly scanning the scene in front of her, waiting…willing there to be a reappearance of what she thought she’d seen: the blow of sea foam and air that marked the passage of whales.

Yes! There it was again. A spout exploding from the surface of the sea, followed by a lazy fin as the whale rolled and played several hundred metres out from shore.

“What a breath-taking way to start the day,” she thought, as a smile lit her face.

Still watching, as the whales punctuated their journey south with tufts of breath, she spoke to the man leaving the beach with his dog. “Do you often get whales down here?” she asked.

The man looked around, confused. He’d walked the length of the beach and back but hadn’t seen the pod of whales at all. Scanning the horizon now, he saw the spouts and agreed that whales were pretty common at this time of year, heading both south and north.

His response made her shake her head. She immediately drew a parallel to the lack of awareness some of her clients showed and wondered what it was that made business leaders prone to getting so involved in the day-to-day activity of business that they failed to see what was around them – even when it was bloody whale-sized!

Her mind started racing over the things that could so easily be missed when awareness was dulled down: opportunities for growth, poor behaviour from staff, customer satisfaction, cash flow, budgets, the business climate, competitor activity…any one of which could change the health of the business in a heartbeat.”

Awareness – it’s a crucial skill for a business leader, but one that gets pushed aside…because we think we’ve got bigger things to concentrate on. Yet if you only see what’s in front of your face, you can’t see what’s waiting around the corner…you can’t see the precipice until you’re upon it.

Too many business leaders fall short when it comes to strategic thinking (or seeing and imagining the bigger picture) because they get caught up looking at the day-to-day minutiae.

In my view that comes from needing to control things and it stems from not investing properly in coaching and training the people around you to do things in a way that fosters your trust.

By the same token, being too much of a strategic thinker means that some business leaders pass over way too much control of important things to people who don’t have the same level of care – people who don’t have their balls on the line.

You can’t afford to abdicate responsibility for the things that you don’t like, just because you don’t like them. That’s avoiding, not delegating!

Now, I’m not saying that you need to keep doing the things that you hate or are no good at BUT…you must first of all know how to do them at a basic level, so that you know what to look for and what to expect in the way of outcomes. Secondly, you need to receive regular summary reports about them (that you actually read and can understand!!!), so that you can keep your eye on things to make sure you’re not being duped, embezzled or taken for a ride.

Believe me, when the Tax Department comes looking for the person who failed to keep up to date with employee superannuation, they won’t be targeting the employee you delegated that job to, they’ll be holding you responsible.

So there’s this need for balance between being observant, “scanning” if you like, while looking to the horizon.

If you only look at the sand at your feet, you’ll miss the whales.  And if you watch only the whales, you’ll step in the dog crap that some careless dog owner didn’t bother to pick up!

It’s time to open your eyes and observe.