The Greatest Secret I have learned from working with Successful People

The biggest and most important lesson I’ve learned from one of my first mentors is to “Look at the Business from a Bird’s-eye View.” This is perhaps the most profound lesson that I received as a young professional and I’m glad I learned it at an early stage in my career. And later on throughout my career working with highly successful leaders, I found out that they apply the exact same principle. So if we drill-down further, what does this really mean?

This is actually a CHANGE OF MINDSET. Don’t just do things the way you were told. Just because you were told to do things a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s the best way. Take a step back to understand the reason.

Ultimately, it’s not about the number of things you do or the amount of effort you spend. It’s about achieving results.

Tip – Always ask questions such as:

• Why should you do it in the first place?
• What is the purpose?
• What is the objective and end goal?
• Challenge the status quo. Perhaps there’s a better and more efficient way of doing it? e.g. faster, fewer resources, less effort, etc.
• What’s the upstream and downstream process?
• If you change the way you do things, how will it impact the end result you want to achieve?

For example, if a client provides you with a procedure on how to accomplish a certain task, ask those questions. Or even for existing business processes that have already been in place for the longest time, you’ll be surprised what you’ll find if you take a step back and look at it from an bird’s-eye view.

Usually you’ll find a lot of wastes and redundancies, especially for businesses whose various departments work in silos.

Conclusion:

You’ll be surprised why no one ever thought about what you saw. It’s because nobody ever bothered to take a step back and look at things from a birds-eye view. It’s because barely anyone else has that sort of mindset.

From the time I learned that lesson, I looked at everything in a totally different perspective. I can probably attribute a huge part of the success I have today to that one single change in mindset.

Call to Action

What about you? When will you start looking at your business from a Bird’s-eye View? What will you change moving forward? Comment below.

RobbieAgustin.com

I help transform businesses and take them to the next level with my expertise in Agile, Lean Six Sigma, Operational Excellence, and Intelligent Automation. Author of The Business Optimization Blueprint.