What's the balance between "thinking" and "doing" on your team? - SmartBrief

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What’s the balance between “thinking” and “doing” on your team?

SmartPulse -- our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership -- tracks feedback from more than 210,000 business leaders. What's the balance between "thinking" and "doing" on your team?

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Leadership

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SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 210,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our e-newsletter.

What’s the balance between “thinking” and “doing” on your team?

  • We do too much thinking and not enough doing: 38%
  • We have a good balance between thinking and doing: 28%  
  • We do too much doing without enough thinking: 34%

Balancing thinking and doing. Many of you face the challenge of too much thinking without enough doing or too much doing without enough thinking. Either one of those can cripple your organization. If you’re doing too much thinking, it’s likely because you’re not breaking big problems into smaller ones with more actionable solutions. Have a bias toward action. A smaller problem is easier to solve and act on. If you’re not doing enough thinking, consider changing your decision making style to make it more inclusive of other perspectives. Doing so will help you avoid mistakes you should have known you’d make before you made your decision.

Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS and the host of the upcoming Executive Insight 16 — a leadership conference being held in New York this November.