Perry Maddox explores how leaders make the main thing the main thing and explains how leaders can use this approach to slow things down.
A few years ago, the coach of my favorite football team kept repeating the same mantra.
“Make the main thing the main thing”
In a quick few years, his leadership turned an perennial underperformer – the kind with all the talent and resources who just couldn’t put it together – into an annual contender.
The saying caught my attention, and I started leading our teams at Restless Development to do the same. Following a period of rapid growth and successful diversification, our story had become too complex. Our ‘glossy’ external-facing strategy was around 30 pages long, after all.
That’s a lot of words that few people ever read.
Using the mantra, we stripped it back and regained strategic clarity around the main thing for us: youth leadership. This focusing exercise clearly worked, channelling our efforts strategically across the board.
Only recently did I realize I’d seen the line before.
Leaders Make the Main Thing the Main Thing.
Turns out I’d read this saying many years before in a leadership classic.
Steven Covey is most known for the phrase: “The main thing is to make the main thing the main thing.”
Talk about a mouthful. Good luck saying that three times fast. So let’s break it down:
- The main thing…
- Is to make the main thing…
- The main thing.
Translated, it tells us that:
- A leader’s most important job…
- Is to identify and ensure that the most important goal …
- Is where we focus our teams, energy, attention and resources.
Whether you lead a giant organization or a small team, this is job number one, leaders.
We Have a Lot Coming at Us, Leaders.
How’s your to-do list these days?
Mine is split across four different notebooks, spanning multiple pages and growing by the moment, just like my inbox and the ever-increasing number of people who want my time.
It’s not just work, either. Moving house, countries, jobs and family with young children during a pandemic has not been easy.
Still, even as we settle and I begin to get my feet under the desk, I do not expect much of a decrease in the speed or volume of information, requests and action coming at me. That’s leadership for you.
To slow it back down, I go back to the mantra.
How to Make the Main Thing the Main Thing.
When it’s all coming at you too fast, when your to-do list is overflowing, and when you feel overwhelmed, don’t panic.
Take a deep breath and tap into the power of this tongue-twisting saying with three simple steps:
- Identify what’s most important.
- Keep that top of your list.
- Focus your energy there.
Rinse and repeat. This little mantra is powerful medicine for a leader’s mindset.
But don’t stop there. This saying is most powerful when we teach our teams to do the same. Help them to train their focus on what matters most, and over time you’ll build more impactful and more autonomous teams.
As a friend and fellow leadership fanatic Dr Leslie Hughes recently told me: “our role is to multiply meaningful action.” Training and empowering our teams to put this mantra into action is a great way to multiply meaningful action.
That works whether you’re leading a staff team or a college football team.
Go Dawgs.
2 Comments
Hey Perry, loved it.
Especially that you did take the Covey line and added more texture to it in translation. As we do for our Lives, so we do for our Leadership: what’s the Vision? It seems to come up with so many of these great thinkers we are learning from: the Definite Chief Aim card, Life Vision, Essentialism etc.
I feel my job is to experiment how to keep it in front of my eyes every day.
Meditation certainly helps, because that starts and ends my day, so there I have it integrated. The in-between, throughout the day is where it gets trickier.
It’s a fascinating process though, adapting, staying clear but not harsh.
I like your notebook usage, you shared on it earlier on IG, I recall.
More of your approach and Character to the world’s Leadership infused (I’d add here the both hands up celebrating emoticon).
Your ideas keep inspiring, so thanks for sharing them.
Take care of yourselves (hope lil’ one is back up and running/climbing around healthy again).
T.
Thank you Tamara! I just love your line about making your chief job to experiment on how to keep it in your sight…and then adapting without being too harsh… that feels really true to me. Like you, I have a grounding morning/evening ritual of meditation, reading and journaling… although I never seem to wake early enough to beat our 1 y/old out of bed… and that grounding at least brackets me when I drift during the day. Thank you for sharing such rich reflections and insights here and on Insta. It’s been such a joy to connect 🙂