For those of you who don’t know this about me, I was once upon a time, an Emergency Nurse, for many years before launching into leading search and recruitment businesses and ultimately co-founding Fusion Partners, six years ago.
Emergency Nursing/ Emergency Medicine teaches some fundamental truths that have been instrumental in my commercial career/ journey, including the following:
1. You can only personally control a key number of factors (often only a small percentage) and you need to roll with the rest
2. Learning to adapt fast, flex and improvise is absolutely key to survive and thrive
3. Being highly self-aware and taking control of your breathing and fight / flight response is critical to clarity of thought and being able to respond to any situation
4. You can absolutely NOT be successful alone and team work and connectedness is key for high performance culture and outcomes
5.Recognise and demonstrate vulnerability where needed – acknowledge when out of your depth and need to engage help/ support
6. Asking and receiving feedback and then turning these into genuine learning opportunities is key to growth and success/ mastery
7. Feel the fear and do it anyway! Get comfortable with pushing yourself out of your comfort zone/ being in stretch and start to seek out these opportunities – it just gets easier the more you do it!
Triage for Business:
In Triage – we were taught to very quickly analyse the most serious cases first and make on the spot decisions about how to respond accordingly.
Now in Emergency this can save lives but in business it can be seriously useful to use a similar mentality around where and how you allocate your time, how you get through tasks and manage day to day.
Having an approach that ensures you are, in reality, investing time in the right places and with people that need this.
We talk a lot about ROI in business and one of the things we see often is that people struggle to manage their time and priorities, which ultimately leads to feelings of frustration, stress , overwhelming pressure and poor performance in many instances as a result.
How to start you may ask?
According to the Emergency Severity Index (ESI), there are five levels of emergencies.
- Level 1: Immediate. Life-saving intervention required without delay.
- Level 2: Emergent. High risk of deterioration, or signs of a time-critical problem.
- Level 3: Urgent. Stable, with multiple types of resources needed to investigate or treat.
- Level 4: Less Urgent. Stable, with only one type of resource anticipated.
- Level 5: Nonurgent. Stable, with no resources anticipated.
Now how you weave this into your team mantra / business is entirely up to you and suggest starting by asking the following questions:
1. Where is the bulk of my time/ our time as a team spent ?
2. How is this time linked to the business strategy and overarching directions?
3. How do the above link into outcomes we are achieving?
4. Are our actions/ lack of causing harm to the business and where is immediate intervention required?
As an activity with your team/ exec – consider a team session to map out – How each of the above levels relate to our business areas and map these out into each area e.g.: Level 1 – 5 areas and these could be agreed with key actions and where the biggest areas for improvement, uplift and ROI impact can occur.
