There are many things we can do to try to get on at work, none of which guarantees we will get on at work – there are just too many variables. But as a school leader, one quality stands out for me, when I am thinking about people’s performance and I have to decide, for example, between candidates for an internal promotion. Barak Obama put it this way in a clip from a recent interview that I watched on YouTube: he said ‘Just learn to get stuff done!’
He was referring to our almost-instinctive tendencies to: get distracted; prevaricate; lose enthusiasm for a project; be waylaid by circumstance; and be painfully slow in doing stuff – in other words, the frequency with which we fail to see things through to their conclusion.
People who get on with doing things, big and small, day in day out – these are the people we can rely on. By doing things, these people are saying, all the time, ‘Give that to me, I’ll take care of it – you can rely on me’.
I have around a dozen rules for living; they’re unwritten but I refer to them in my head all the time. My number 1 rule is, ‘Whatever I say I’ll do, I do it’. Doesn’t matter that I feel rough, that it’s pouring, doesn’t matter that I don’t fancy it, doesn’t matter that I suddenly have other urgent priorities – I said I’d do it, so I do it. It’s good to have some rules to guide us in life. Your rules might be different from mine and that’s okay – they’re your rules.
I notice people who just get on with getting things done, on time, every time; they’re the ones I want to give the job to. They’re the ones who get on for me, because they get on with it.
