Spinning Plates

For the past couple of years, it’s been my privilege to serve as the Chief Plate Spinner here at Miles & Company. With a varied menu of services, clients and harebrained schemes, there are many details to be managed for a remote-working, creative company like ours.  While that’s totally a made up title, it pretty much reflects the day to day operations.  

Today I’m sharing my Plate-spinner’s Checklist of Awesome with you multi-taskers out there. Here’s how I do what I do each day:

1. Use tools. Find what works for you and dig in to using them to the best of your ability. And remember, one of your primary tasks should be helping the others on your team use these tools as well.
2. Communicate well. Often it is our intention to tell people something, or we tell them once and expect them to remember all the details. Good communication is kind and professional. Good communication ensures that the message is received and understood. Good communication is the responsibility of everyone on your team, but you must set the example.
3. Remember the “why.” When overwhelmed by a multitude of tasks, I find it helpful to remember why it is we do what we do. For us at Miles & Company, we exist to unlock the genuine greatness inside people and companies. We truly believe you are great. We just want to help you unleash your greatness. No matter how busy/tired/overwhelmed I get, that is something I can get out of bed in the morning to go do, with enthusiasm.
4. Filter your actions through your company’s brand diamond. The brand diamond is a four word filter for the essence of who you are as a company. For us at Miles & Company, in everything we do, we aim to be wise, clear, helpful and playful. In all my tasks from blog writing (ugh) to emailing clients (yay), I ask myself: Is this wise? Is it helpful? Have I been clear? Did I take myself too seriously? This 4-way filter is what we call our brand diamond, and it’s super useful in our day to day operations, as well as big picture stuff.
5. See the wall before you hit it. I’ll be honest; I’m not very good at this. We work hard at Miles & Company. Sometimes too hard. It’s important for me to step away, take time off, and get some perspective (fully supported by our leaders, by the way) in order to be the best I can be at my work.  And I need to do this before someone else has to tell me I should.

In a few weeks, I will be delighted to hand off the plate-spinning portion of my job to someone else. This is the check list we will use to transition.

I have every confidence Mark will serve our clients well and keep us all advancing the football on projects we want to accomplish, big and small. To my delight, I get to keep working along side my little brother, Tim, helping our clients and architecting some programs we really believe will help them, and you.

If there is something Miles & Company can help you with this week, be sure to let us know. In the meantime, Mark and I will be keeping the plates spinning until further notice.