9
VALUE
Focus on High-Impact Activities
How an executive does his or her personal work, and the milieu in which it occurs, is one of the most powerful aspects of managing that intersection of efficiency and effectiveness.
We know that time management determines how well we manage not only our own operational, day-to-day responsibilities, but that of our teams as well—and most of us do try to make sure we handle it in a manner that’s both efficient and effective. But the blunt reality is that most leaders don’t do it well.
Many of us waste more time than we should by trying to multitask and letting other people steal our attention a minute at a time. That’s why we’re wise to limit our activities to those that maximize productivity at the team level. But it all starts with your personal efforts.
THE IMPACT OF VALUING YOUR TIME
People say this so often that it’s a cliché, and you’re probably sick of hearing it. But I’m saying it anyway. Time is your most precious resource. We all get a finite amount, and once it’s gone, there’s no resupply. So you have to use what you have to maximize your impact.
Your best formula for both personal and team success is to make a serious effort to consistently value your time. Understand why your time matters as much as everyone else’s, if not more, and how to conserve it in both personal and team ways.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is to tighten your self-discipline. As painful as it may seem in the moment, controlling nonproductive urges will ultimately get you where you want to be, often quicker than you expect. It may not be any fun, but it does get easier.
Time Well Spent
How you spend your time, of course, is constrained at least partly by the needs of your job. Steve Gangwish of CSS Farms told me he divides his time this way:
I’d say I spend a third of my time talking to our team because we’re remote. We’re so spread out—a lot of times it’s on the phone, sometimes in person. About a third of my time is [spent] talking with customers or vendors, third-party type folks. But a third of my time is [spent] on the road visiting our sites and doing operations. Whatever the question of the day is, or whatever the season, we’re working on operational issues.
Microsoft’s Chief Security Officer Mike Howard once spent about half his time on tactical work, but that figure has steadily dropped over the last decade or so. In an interview, he says,
If I can look back twelve years ago, eight years ago, it’s shifted radically… . I was spending half of my time on tactical issues—putting out fires, responding to this, that, and the other thing. A big piece of that obviously deals with talent. As you’re vetting talent for a team, you obviously have to keep the ship running if you’re the leader.
So you’re spending a fair amount of time actually responding to a crisis situation, if something blows up in the Middle East or Africa or Europe. And the higher-ups are going to be pinging you directly for any information. “Hey, we heard this happened in Paris,” or “We heard this happened in Denmark, and what does this mean for us?”
Over time, as you get the right talent and they manage those tactical things, and as the bosses become aware of the fact that you’re informing them on a regular basis about what’s going on, you become less inundated with the phone calls, the one-offs from bosses and higher-ups saying, “Hey, what about this? What about that?” They know we’re taking care of it.
It has shifted so radically that I spend probably maybe fifteen to twenty percent of my time on tactical issues. Maybe once or twice a week there is a fire that needs to be put out at my level… . But usually my leadership team can handle anything that I normally would have handled five, seven, eight years ago.
Promote the Professional Touch
True professionals know you have to do what you have to do, even when it’s not pleasant or easy. They also know that to value and protect your time, you sometimes have to say no so you can reduce your workload to a realistic, productive level. No matter how eager to please you may be, killing yourself with overwork helps no one.
At the team level, this means you have to clear the way for your people to be equally as productive as you are. So make sure they understand what you want and need. Get acknowledgment from everyone in all directions. Productive communication will make sure your orders and requests are clear and understandable, thus saving time. Then you can climb onto your managerial bulldozer and act as the facilitator, removing any obstacles to your team’s success.
The big goal is to save time for everyone. I firmly believe that too little work time is the biggest obstacle to doing productive work. So learn the art of the positive negative. That means when “don’t” is the right choice, put it into effect. You have to know what not to do just as well as what you must do. This includes cutting the fat out of meetings, undeniably the most common time-waster executives deal with on a regular basis.
Time Management and Your Self-Worth
How much do you personally value your time? You may never have seriously considered the implications of that question, possibly because you don’t really want to know. But to lead effectively, you have no choice but to address time-wasters and why they matter.
You’re important to your organization; otherwise, you wouldn’t hold the position you do. Therefore, your time must also matter a great deal. Don’t assume your value is equivalent to your salary; the amount of money you earn is likely to be a lot less than the true worth you bring to the table. That’s one reason your leaders value you. And as Microsoft’s Mike Howard told me, “You cannot invest in yourself if you cannot manage your time properly, whether it’s exercise or leadership or bettering yourself… . It all comes down to time management.”
To do the best job possible, value your time both realistically and highly. Depending on your leadership position, your value to the organization may be thousands of dollars per hour. Once you’ve pinned down the value of your time, use these tips as you move forward:
1 DELEGATE LIKE CRAZY. Delegation is a basic tool of leadership, and your superiors expect you to use it. So delegate your authority and tasks as widely as possible, to capable people who can do certain things better than you can. Retain the few high-priority, high-value tasks only you can do most profitably. If your personal value is $1,000 an hour, don’t waste time photocopying—the intern can do that for $10 an hour. It’s your responsibility to match each duty to the best, most efficient team member for the price, or to outsource it if that makes better sense.
2 AVOID FALSE ECONOMY. If you go to a convention and pick a hotel a brisk fifteen-minute walk away from the convention center because it costs $75 per night instead of staying at the $125-per-night hotel hosting the convention, you’ve devalued your time. That half-hour spent walking back and forth may save your company $50 a day, but it costs the company $500 a day if you value your time at $1,000 an hour. That’s really a loss of $450 per day.
If what you’re doing costs more in terms of the value of your time than it’s worth, stop doing it.
3 ASSESS YOUR TEAM’S TIME VALUE AND MAKE CHANGES. Have you ever thought about how much it costs some people to commute to work and back? If you have an employee with a long commute, consider allowing that person to telecommute. Let’s say Sally lives an hour away from the office. She spends two hours in the car every day—about five hundred hours a year. Then there’s the cost of gas. Assuming $15 per day for gas at 2015 prices, she spends about $3,750 annually (we won’t even go into auto maintenance, oil, insurance, etc.). Now suppose she makes $25 per hour. If that’s the basic value of her time, five hundred hours of commuting comes to $12,500. So far we’re up to $16,250 (from her perspective) just for gas and time. Instead, let her telecommute so she can use those two hours productively, and renegotiate her hourly rate to reflect the new arrangement.
Think in Tradeoffs
Valuing your time and your team’s requires considering the possible tradeoffs of everything you and they can do, from the structure of your work schedule to the best way to save money when traveling. Keep in mind that value constantly changes, so start thinking about and respecting your time in ways you’ve never done before.
Consider all the ways to improve your life and productivity from this single shift in perspective. Raise the value of your time, abandon false economy, and stop trying to do everything on the cheap.
CRACKING THE WHIP ON TIME-WASTERS
You’ve no doubt learned how to apply self-discipline, or you wouldn’t have made it as far as you have in your career. Now apply that discipline to your team to ensure they aren’t wasting valuable time either.
Clarify goals. Team goals will reflect your organizational goals, with some details specific to your crew. That doesn’t mean everyone will know what to expect right off the bat. So when you first organize your team or when you add new people, spend face time with them to directly communicate the team goals and what you expect in their specific roles. Review those goals at regular intervals to maintain their clarity.
Rules matter. Clarify the organizational environment your team works in, explaining to team members precisely what you’ll accept, what you won’t, and what’s explicitly against the rules. Detail the policies and standard operating procedures (SOP) regulating their actions. Once the SOPs and legal rules are understood, allow them to help shape the organizational environment.
Accountability is expected. Make it clear that, while you don’t intend to be punitive (unless something goes badly wrong), you expect people to accept responsibility for everything they do, regardless of the outcome—yourself included. Honesty may be painful sometimes, but encourage your team members to come clean. How else can they learn?
Control boosts productivity. Self-control is crucial. Give your employees opportunities to improve their productivity by eliminating bad habits: overly long breaks, failure to take enough breaks, unproductive discussions, multitasking, procrastination, web surfing, and other time-wasters. Provide alternatives, and, if you must, let them know what to cut when they need to tighten up to be more productive.
Set a good example. If you make your own reputation and work habits assailable, your team members will follow your lead. If you show poor self-discipline, they’ll be lax, too. So act as a role model and follow company policy. Don’t expect the team to do what you say rather than what you do; the real world doesn’t work that way.
Some leaders worry that having their people toe the line might trigger resentment and result in high turnover. Yes, it might, if you micromanage. But in my experience, workers expect and desire strong guidance. They respect tough-but-fair managers, especially when their management results in top marks and recognition from upper management, which can result in bonuses and promotions.
Firing Up the Managerial Bulldozer
As pointed out in chapter 5, leaders can no longer legislate strategic execution or plan too far into the future. Rigid strategies quickly become stale in the current business arena, and binding our front-line team members to them may result in failure. A more effective solution? Empower individuals to take ownership of their jobs so they can use whatever strategy works best in the moment to execute effectively and productively.
The truth is, leaders don’t always know the best way to achieve a goal; they rely on their team members to tell them how. Today’s leader functions best as a collaborative facilitator, asking questions and learning what obstacles lie in the way of success. They scout ahead and smooth the way for the team, so everyone can succeed more quickly.
A Broad Initiative
Here’s how you can remove barriers to productivity:
1 ELIMINATE TIME-WASTERS by:
• Removing distractions.
• Walking around to understand what’s happening.
• Clarifying priorities.
• Establishing a weekly interruption-free period.
2 DELEGATE LOW-VALUE TASKS. You have interns and entry-level employees especially for low-level tasks; if you don’t, hire some. Don’t let your people waste time on activities that belong to others.
3 GRANT HIGHER LEVELS OF AUTHORITY. Workflow should never slow or grind to a halt just because you have to give the okay to every little thing. Give people broad discretion to own their jobs and let them take action in a nonpunitive environment. That way, they can make the best decisions and get on with it. Often it’s easier to beg forgiveness than get permission, especially when the supervisor isn’t available.
Microsoft’s Mike Howard advises,
Part of continuous improvement is allowing people to make mistakes. If they make [the same mistake] twice, that’s a problem. Allowing people to make mistakes and not killing them over it is important, while encouraging them by saying, “Okay, you can learn from this,” and “How do you learn from this so it won’t happen again?”
Colin Powell always said, “When troops stop bringing me problems, that’s when we’ve got a leadership issue.” You want them to be comfortable with bringing problems to you, knowing that even if it’s something bad, you will work through it. I’d rather have them bring it to me than try to fix something they can’t fix on their own, and then it gets worse.
4 INTERCEPT THE RED TAPE. Deal with the bureaucracy or politics yourself, so your team won’t have to. When you can’t, work toward streamlining bureaucratic requirements so you won’t have to deal with so many workflow bottlenecks.
Obstacles Aplenty
In any organization, scores of obstacles will gouge potholes in your team’s path or plop boulders in their way. Those obstacles may be bureaucratic, technological, procedural, or artifacts of old ways of thinking. In the old days, maybe it was acceptable to let your people thread their way through that minefield on their own. But you can no longer spare the time. Fire up the procedural machine and put the hammer down, filling in the potholes and pushing those boulders out of the way so your team can follow with ease.
Think of yourself as Daniel Boone with a bulldozer. Now that’s trailblazing.
ENABLERS TO HELP OTHERS SAVE TIME
Every second you or your team members save goes toward increased productivity. Sometimes, knowing what not to do is the best thing for you—though this fact can become difficult to recognize if you focus so tightly on what you can do strategically that you miss the obvious choices regarding what not to do.
Short, Sweet, and to the Point
Not only do you have to say no to yourself when dealing with unprofitable tasks but sometimes you also have to say no to your coworkers, even your supervisor. And when you do, you have to mean it.
In a corporate environment where a can-do, go-team attitude is important for success, you may think you should say yes to every task thrust at you. Sometimes it seems impossible to say no. If your manager drops another project on your plate while you’re running out the door, or an end user asks if you can add just one more little feature while you’re elbow-deep in the code, it’s challenging to refuse.
But while it may make you feel anxious to say no, sometimes you have no choice but to refuse requests—or demands—to avoid drowning in overwork. After all, a physical or emotional breakdown would be bad for your productivity. Even if you’ve never broken down, you’ve seen it happen to others, and you’ve probably felt the strain when you’re weighed down by enough straws to almost break your back. Feeling overstressed can happen to anyone with responsibility who juggles multiple projects.
When you’re on the ragged edge of taking a hammer to your computer, something’s gotta give. If you learn to say no to people just a little more often, it won’t be you doing the hammering.
Revenge of the Yes-Man
Years ago, I saw a Wizard of Id comic strip that made me laugh. It showed a man in courtier’s attire running over the landscape, shouting “No! No! No! No!” When one soldier asked another, “What’s with him?” his buddy replied, “That’s the king’s Yes-Man. It’s his day off.”
Like that Yes-Man or Yes-Woman, you have to say no at times, because things will keep coming at you until you wave the white flag. Overcommitting to work will tangle you up so badly that your performance will suffer. So when one of your coworkers asks if you can do just one little favor, check your schedule. If you don’t have enough time, tell that person you just can’t take it on right now. Don’t be snappy about it; just don’t take everything people try to hand you.
And don’t put everyone else’s needs ahead of your own. Don’t “volunteer” to coach the company’s softball team, or bake a cake for someone’s birthday, or do a quick analysis for the guy in the next cube—no matter how much someone pressures you. The one exception? If that person already has your manager’s backing, and you can’t validly challenge the request. You only have so much time in any particular work-week and there’s no way to add more, so don’t let someone else overdraw your account.
Here are three creative ways to say no:
1 OFFER TO MEET PEOPLE HALFWAY. Unless the item is higher value than what’s on your plate and has your manager’s blessing, tell them, “I can’t handle this now, but if it can wait two weeks, I can look at it then.” If it’s time-sensitive, you’re off the hook. If not, it can wait until a slot opens in your schedule. Or your coworker may magically find someone else who can do it now. You can also make an introduction. Say, “While this isn’t a good fit for me right now, here’s someone who might be able to help,” or “These resources might help you find what you’re looking for,” and direct your coworker accordingly.
2 ASK IF YOU CAN GET STARTED NOW AND FINISH LATER. If you can do a certain amount of the task but can’t do it all, offer to do what you can. The person might be able to find someone else to do the rest.
3 PUNT IT. If others ask for your help with a task and you can’t or don’t want to give it, ask them to make the request through your manager. They may be reluctant to do so, and, even if they do, your manager might shoot them down. My friends’ assistants often ask my office manager to show them how to do something or train them, and she always copies me in, so I can say, “Her time is fully committed supporting our business, so I regret we won’t be able to do that for you.”
What If It’s Your Boss?
If your direct superior keeps putting more projects onto your already overloaded plate, you’ll need help prioritizing. Find out the ranking of the tasks in terms of importance and give your manager your estimated dates of completion. When asked, some managers will reply with a less-than-useful, “Everything’s top priority.” In other words, nothing is. Discuss a priority framework to guide you, so you make sure to accomplish the top priorities first.
Others may want you to do everything ASAP. Not useful. If this is the response, you’ll just have to say, “I’ll work on Project A first, then …” If you get an objection, ask what you should do instead. Point out you can only do one thing at a time effectively and ask for help prioritizing. There’s no way you can complete five significant projects all due Friday without something breaking down.
Even when you believe you can’t say no, find a way to do it anyway. Your productivity and sanity will thank you. And recognize the value of this technique when your team members apply it to you, too.
Put Your Foot Down
It doesn’t matter what people do in their free time as long as it’s legal. But in almost every case, that right ends at the office door.
Furthermore, doing anything morally off-base delays the achievement of an organization’s strategic goals, and the gnashing of teeth that ensues from such behavior wastes valuable time. While team members are in your domain, make sure they put on their teamwork hats, leaving personal opinion, prejudices, and negativity behind until they go home. At the same time, be careful if you’re conducting professional interactions on your personal time. Remind them:
1 DON’T GOSSIP. People are social beings who tend to spread news about others, especially if it seems juicy. Don’t. So what if someone’s marriage is in trouble or if so-and-so has no sense of style? Silly gossip wastes time, while making you and your team look bad. It may damage the reputation of those involved. For example, a colleague recently had the displeasure of watching a family member’s small business erode because of vicious lies spread by a former employee.
2 DON’T LET ANYONE DUCK RESPONSIBILITY. Accountability offers a touchstone for both integrity and success. Urge your people to admit when they’ve done something wrong, or when something they tried didn’t work. Despite the example set in corporate scandals during recent years, finger-pointing, scapegoating, and ducking responsibility all damage trust and inevitably degrade the team. Accept your errors, take your licks, and move on.
3 AVOID DEFEATIST THINKING. Sometimes a team needs a devil’s advocate to help them move forward along the most appropriate path. But once the team or team leader has made a decision, team members must accept it and go on, not whine about how the decision is unfair and will never work. Being a “PITA negatron,” as one colleague calls it (I’ll let you figure out what the acronym stands for) won’t win you friends and will inevitably slow workflow.
Enable More Productive Meetings
As you can likely attest, most business meetings waste productive time and last far longer than they should. But until humans learn to communicate telepathically, meetings will remain a necessary evil—not only as a means of exchanging ideas and information but also as a way of building relationships with others.
You might not like them, but you can certainly make them more tolerable by applying these tips:
1 DECIDE IF THE MEETING IS EVEN NECESSARY. Can you handle the issue with a few emails or a conference call? If so, do it. Why call a full meeting if you don’t need one?
2 START ON TIME. If people don’t arrive on time, tough. Start when you agreed to, and don’t start over just because individuals arrive late. Latecomers can check the minutes later to find out what you discussed before they arrived, or they can get notes from a colleague.
3 USE A FACILITATOR. Have someone direct the meeting. That person’s role should include keeping the discussion on topic, acknowledging speakers, soliciting opinions from quieter attendees, and keeping a few people from dominating the meeting. They should also end the meeting on time. This will go easier if you make the agenda crystal clear well in advance. People need to know why they’re meeting and what you expect to accomplish as a result. Distribute the agenda and associated materials at least twenty-four hours in advance. Be clear at the end about what decisions were made, as well as who’s responsible for what and by when.
4 LIMIT ATTENDEES. If a meeting has little to do with particular people, don’t invite them. “Showing the flag” isn’t a good enough reason to have someone at a meeting. Send those who don’t attend a copy of the minutes if they need to have a general idea of what happened. It’s cheaper and simpler. The same goes for you attending other people’s meetings. Mike Howard at Microsoft puts it this way: “I don’t take meetings unless I need to make a decision or if my boss is calling for me to be there… . If I’m just going to sit there like a bump on a log, I’ve got better things to do.”
While business meetings may never be a blast, you can make them effective and efficient if you implement the points suggested here.