Shallow people believe in luck. Wise and strong people believe in cause and effect.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I worked with an exceptional business leader once, who always asked his people these two questions :
- What do we want to cause to happen today?
- What do we want to produce?
For me those are the probably the best management questions of all.
Leaders and managers who have a hard time managing people simply have a hard time asking themselves those two questions.
Usually they are too busy thinking about what’s happening to them instead of what they’re going to cause to happen.
Ask these two questions, and soon your people will see you as a cause instead of an effect.
And when your people start to see you as as a cause instead of an effect, it won’t be hard to teach them to think the same way too.