Category Archives: Personal Skills

Seizing Your Time – the first step in time management

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There are lots of books, blogs and gurus on the topic of time management. Many have very good advice. This is no surprise since, as we have noted (as plenty of others have), time is the one resource you can not buy, borrow, or inventory. Time is the one resource everyone needs in order to make a difference. Learning to manage one’s time is the necessary first step in becoming an effective manager.

In recent work with clients on time management, we have taken a new tack on this old problem. Before we even begin to do the necessary work of logging time usage, pruning unnecessary meetings, reports, and so on, we have encouraged clients to simply seize a block of time during the week and get to work on the really important things they feel they need to do to improve their contribution to their company.

It works like this. Look at the next week’s calendar and mark off one or better two hours on some day where there is nothing now scheduled or their are meetings or tasks that really can be skipped. Send an email around to everyone who reports to you announcing the time for your Private Work session. Tell them that you will be working on an important initiative and that barring a fire, you are not to be disturbed until the session is over.

When the hour arrives put a sign on your door or at the entrance to your cubicle, “Private Work Session – Do Not Disturb“. Turn off your email, instant messaging, cell phone, Blackberry, or any other communication device that can interrupt. Sit down at your desk or worktable and get to work on that project that you have not gotten to because of all the other “important” tasks in your day-to-day work life.

Managers who have taken the step to seize their own time have found that they make real progress on their projects and the company does not grind to a halt.  They become daring and schedule two or three hours for the next week. Seizing personal work time also energizes their efforts to really learn how to manage their time. They already can see that they can make real progress working on the future of the company instead of constantly balled up in the day-to-day activties of the company. It is a demonstration of the power of spending significant time working on your company instead of just in it.

Meetings – The Drama Model

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Third in a series on meetings.

Think of meetings as dramas. Meetings should follow the basic shape of almost all dramas and movies. Act One sets the scene and hooks us into the action, introduces the characters, tells us what the drama is about, provides us with all of the information that allows us to participate. The Act Two is conflict. Discussions break out, issues parsed, pruned, and analyzed. The Act Three is resolution. The culprit gets his comeuppance, the love interest is played out, and so on.

In the world of organizations, the resolution, Act Three,  is usually a set of tasks.  Those accountable are clearly noted, deadlines set, resources committed, metrics for success defined, and the date for follow-up put on the calendar.

In a business drama, every formal meeting needs to have an objective, an agenda, time, place, leader, and participants. All of this must be made available to everyone involved before the meeting takes place. This provides the participants with time to review the agenda, gather information, think about the problem, in short, get ready to participate and not just appear at the meeting.

The leader of a meeting needs to think through each act. A key element of Act One is the hook. Everyone must understand very early in the meeting that something significant is at stake. This draws them into the meeting and gets them ready to participate vigorously.

Once you have applied this dramatic model to your formal meetings, think about how you can apply this to the informal meetings. Frequently, in contrast to formal meetings where Act One is critical, informal meetings fall down on Act Three, the resolution. How often do you walk away from a casual conversation about a project problem and wonder “What was that about and who is really responsible for bringing closure to the problem?”

Meetings – First – Don’t Have Them

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Second in a series on meetings:

No matter where you are in the food chain, meetings are critical to success as a manager. It is important to know how to initiate, lead, and participate in meetings. This series of Management Notes on meetings addresses some basic concepts and skills.

First things first – most meetings should not take place.

Any meeting that is about the status of, or problems with, a regular business process or activity is an indicator that you should solve the process problem. Good processes provide status indicators that can be seen by whomever needs to know, without a meeting. Recurrent problems should be eliminated, not treated as a moment for management to rush in to save the day. If you are in charge of, or have influence over a process that is producing meetings, then take those meetings as a directive for you to get to work on fixing the process.

Now is a good point to note that meetings don’t just take place in conference rooms. When a person in your department stops you in the hallway, or props themselves up outside your doorway, and says, “Can we talk about the Big Bonanza Project?”, you are about to have a meeting. When there is a flurry or emails and instant messages about a project, customer, or whatever, you are having a meeting.

Beware of meetings that you as a manger generate. Ask yourself whether your meetings fall into the categories noted above. Be disciplined about any meeting where the key outcome is to “keep you in the loop”.

Meetings – Understanding The Shapes and Roles

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First in a series.

No matter where you are in the food chain, meetings are critical to success as a manager. It is important to know how to initiate, lead, and participate in meetings. This series of Management Notes on meetings addresses some basic concepts and skills.

But, first, lets start with some discussion of exactly what a meeting is and how meetings function in our organizational lives.

Meetings come in many forms: meetings in conference rooms, in the hallway or parking lot, or over lunch. Email, especially the emails with lengthy lists of recipients and responders, those seemingly endless threaded discussions, present a new form of “meeting”. Instant messaging and, more frequently in dispersed organizations, video conferencing are new forms of meetings.

Meetings can range in size from two people to thousands.

Meetings can be formal with agendas, moderators, chairpersons, and written rules of conduct. Meetings can also be informal, impromptu, and fluid.

Meetings serve a wide range of functions in an organization. Formal meetings may be just for the dissemination of organizational news, policies, or procedures. Formal meetings may also be information gathering, problem-solving, and task setting events. Formal meetings are frequently regular opportunities for teams to check the status and critical actions required to keep a project, business unit or whole organization on track.

Informal meetings provide opportunities for exchange of views on the state of the organization, queries for information, requests for comment, critique, new ideas, challenges to the existing beliefs about the organization, and so on.

In every case the culture of the organization is being displayed, exercised, and critiqued in meetings. Meetings display clearly what is valued and prized by the culture. The way in which people conduct themselves displays how the organization values people and the way in which people should interact. Meetings also are the key arena for the robust dialogue that keeps every organization faced towards the reality of its performance, its customers, the changing environment, and the competition. Meetings require candor and honesty to be effective.

This suggests that managers must pay close attention to how they personally perform in meetings, meetings of all types, and, perhaps, especially in the informal meetings.

This suggests further that effective managers understand how important it is to have meetings that are productive and carried out in a manner that reflects the most positive interactions between people.

Effective managers also see meetings as an opportunity to diagnose the health of business processes as well as the culture and an opportunity to change behavior and achieve better results.

Making tough times harder by communicating too much!

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Good communications is important to the health of the organization. However, there are moments when managers should look carefully at their communications and push on the “not-so-fast” button.

During periods of organizational stress, like changes in ownership, senior leadership, layoffs, mergers, and others, managers may think that they can calm down the troops by increasing the frequency and depth of their communications. Unfortunately, this may lead to a surprising result. Employees, like everyone else, pay attention to more than the message. Marshall McLuhan got this right.

During times of stress, the tendency of managers to increase the frequency of communication with staff in fact sends the message, “Gee, the bosses are nervous about what is going on. Look at how much they are talking about it.”

So, be careful. Focus on brevity and facts. Be as honest as you can about what is going on.

But, be a good model for your staff. During times of stress and turbulence, redouble your focus on customers and day-to-day tasks. Get in early and be at work when the staff arrives. They will get that message. No matter what happens, being productive is always a good strategy, both for the company and the individual.

Time, the only resource you can’t buy more of, nor outsource

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The supply of time is completely inelastic. This fact must be a central focus for every manager. The only time you have is passing by now, never to be seen again, nor squirreled away for future use.

To be an effective manager, you must gain control of your time. Without control over your time all other management tasks are impossible. You are carried along by day-to-day pressures. You operate, but don’t manage.

Effective managers learn to: (1) diagnose how their time is consumed, then (2) prune out waste continuously. This allows them to (3) consolidate discretionary blocks of time that can then be used to do important forward looking management work.

The first step toward gaining control of time is to record how it is used. Keep a log for a couple of weeks. Include every work related activity. Track who, what, why, how long, and where. Keep a close eye on every meeting including one-on-one conversations, telephone calls, emails, instant messaging, and so on. Record every activity!

The second step is to analyze your log and prune out all of the wasteful activities.  Meetings are by far the most common time wasters, but don’t ignore reports and presentations that you must prepare. You can borrow from the Toyota Production System (aka lean manufacturing in the US and elsewhere) and ask the “Five Why’s”. For example: “Why am I at this meeting?”  “No, really, why am I at this meeting?” and so on. Get to the bottom of why this meeting is taking place, the root.

This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of pruning, but here are a couple of ways to look at meetings that will lead you to stop holding some of them.