Give the Gift of Time

“If there is no time for reflection, there is almost no chance for improvement.”-- Fred Harburg, senior VP of leadership and management development, Fidelity Investments Company

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I was talking to someone this morning about the necessity for a leader and his team to work on important things that are not necessarily urgent. The important but not urgent things are the ones that will bring a lot of return to you and your team, not necessarily today, but down the road. As a leader, the best and most important gift you can give your team and yourself is the gift of time, time to reflect and work on important but not urgent things that matter to your team.

What are those important things that you should be working on? Well, I cannot list everything here and some items would be very specific to your situation. But let me list a few generic things that, I hope, will get you thinking some more about what is the important elements that you should spend time on. If you feel like it, please add more elements in your comments. This will help everyone with this “important” topic!

• Improve processes used by your team
• Refine your team’s sense of purpose
• Refine your team’s and team members’ specific objectives
• Better planning for your projects that includes risk analysis and mitigation
• Ensure you develop a culture for your team
• Ensure that workload is well balanced within your team
• Social bonding within the team
• Learn new skills or perfect ones that you possess
• Listen more to your team members
• Think about the next few brick walls that your team will have to face in the near future and define strategies to work around them or to tear them down before your team gets to them (that means less fire fighting!)

Now let’s face it, most leaders already have their hands full just dealing with what is urgent. Extinguishing fires every day takes up a lot of time! How can they even think about working on things that are not urgent, just important? Well, the paradox lies in the fact that, without spending time working on what is not urgent, a leader will always be stuck in fire fighting mode.

So, how can you get out of the fire fighting spiral? The first advice that I can give you is to make a conscious decision to work on important things that are not urgent. This is the first event that must occur before anything else can happen. Then, you must reserve some time every week in your agenda to work on important aspects of your work that are not urgent. Label these reserved time slots “IMPORTANT MEETING” and write them down in your agenda. Make the commitment to never remove them. My advice here would be to start small. You will see improvement even if you have a single one-hour IMPORTANT MEETING with yourself every week. This would probably be a good place to start.

Once you have the IMPORTANT MEETINGs reserved, I’d say that the next step is to come up with a plan as to what to attack first. However, don’t be too structured during those sessions. Give yourself time to brainstorm and think without too much structure. Dreaming about the future is also an important aspect of leadership...

Note that I’m definitely not the first to discuss this topic. Stephen Covey is covering this in great details in "Habit 3" of his excellent book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.

What about you dear leader, are you spending time working on important but not urgent elements of your work? Have you ever come to realize that this was an essential part of your work and changed your ways to “make it happen”? Please share your experience with us here so we can all learn how to best approach this problem!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.