I am chair of trustees of a mental health charity in South East London. I spent part of yesterday morning with our Strategic Development Director, reviewing how we are taking our strategy forward. In the course of our discussion, I talked with her about how I see my role as chair. We agreed that a key part of it is encouraging the executive team to remain focused on the Important.
The demands of everyday management are such that it is all too easy to allow the Urgent to push the Important to the background. We all do this. There is always firefighting and the natural reaction is that the Urgent has to take priority.
Well, yes and no. Yes, because small fires have an uncanny knack of becoming bigger ones; and no, because without that focus on the Important, the risk is that the organisation stalls, and that strategic issues drift*.
The trick is to strike that necessary balance - easier said than done, perhaps, but all the same essential.
*And, in case you are wondering, in the charity we are all focused - trustees and executive team - on the Important. Yes, there are any number of Urgent matters - that's the nature of the services we provide - but we want to go on being able to provide them, and that means that the Important is important.
