If you spend all of your time organizing the activities and events for the passengers on board…how will you determine if the ship is progressing to its destination?
Busy, busy, busy. Do, do, do. To and fro…on and on we go!
Today’s leaders are inundated with an ever-expanding list of duties and busy work…at a time when we find ourselves and our organizations yearning for strong and authentic leadership. More and more leaders are finding it difficult to engage in the charting of the journey, in the steering of the ship…when they spend the majority of their time tossed to and fro on the waves of the urgent.
Many leaders spend so much of their time attending to the ship and the passengers that they never make it to the journey…they never actually set sail.
While the many leaders that do cast off and actually leave port, often find themselves adrift in other duties, with little or no time to chart course or steer the ship…heading them off towards destinations unknown.
And those that finally do make to the captain’s seat and can take hold of the steering wheel…often find themselves awash in so many course corrections that they end up either missing their destination or running their vessel aground.
As leaders, if we are not acutely aware of how we using our time…the urgent will eventually overwhelm the important. We will become more of the ship’s event organizer than the captain. We will end up losing our way, missing our destination, or possibly running the vessel aground.
We become very good at the ‘what’ without having any true understanding of our ‘why’.
We become the event organizer.
In times of turbulent change…patience is difficult. We want to do, to plug holes, to give people what they want…instead of what they truly need.
DCulberhouse 
I can relate to this very well! Much of our time is taken up by unplanned events – we often lose track of where the ship is headed.