Every executive has been mired in confusion at one time or another – which is why it’s important to understand how to dig oneself out of the chaos. Handling confusion and helping executives build a stable company is a huge part of what we do during our business management consulting.
Confusing situations can be extremely difficult to handle. Imagine this: a doctor has no office staff. Her phone is ringing while she is in an appointment, there is an emergency patient in her front office looking for help, her next appointment is in and a bill collector is there attempting to get paid for medical equipment. Pretty confusing, right? In a situation like this, someone who doesn’t know how to handle confusion will freeze up, allowing more and more situations to pile up until there is absolute mayhem.
I’m sure you can give me a number of other examples demonstrating times when things in your office or life were in a state of turmoil, but you get my point here. Confusion breeds more confusion.
So, how does a busy executive hold down the fort and keep confusion from brewing into a chaotic mess? Well, first one must understand the nature of confusion itself. The Oxford Dictionary has a great definition of confusion: ”A situation of panic; a breakdown of order.”
This holds the key to ending confusion. If there is a breakdown of order, you simply begin by creating order again. This is actually pretty easy. All you have to do is grab onto one of the challenges facing you and begin by handling that thing. In the case of the doctor, she may get herself out of immediate confusion by rapidly patching up the emergency or calling an ambulance. Once that thing is sorted out, she could complete her work with her patients, let the call go to voicemail, and put off the bill collector. When you take on each task step by step, the situation will get resolved. That may sound way too simple, and it is very simple – but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.
When it comes to business management, confusing situations need that extra step back that will get them permanently untangled. In our doctor’s example above, solving the immediate confusion doesn’t drill down to the overall cause of the confusion does it? She will continue to be interrupted in her valuable work unless she gets some office staff. Perhaps the real challenge she needs to grab a hold of is the idea that she can train and hire people to take over tasks that take away from her job. When managing, that decision could translate to “I can train and hire people to take over tasks that take away from my management of the business.”
Executives are creative and ingenious people who can find their way out of any confusion. Here we have given you the first step: find something within the confusion to sort out. Get that fully cleared up and then look for the next thing that needs sorting out. Once the immediate confusion is handled, discover why this all happened in the first place. That’s usually the point where we step in. We help busy executives build orderly, successful businesses every day with business coaching and organizational consulting. Contact us today and let us help you take the confusion out of your business.
