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.

Pareto on Time Management

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my previous post, I discussed the importance of focusing on what is really important for your business. I was saying that people are trying to do way too many things, often avoiding what is most important to them and their business. The essence is when you can eliminate everything that is not necessary from your agenda and focus only on what brings the most value to your life, business, team, or project. Doing things that do not bring value will simply waste your time and send you away further from success!

Of course, this is good in theory! What is a lot tougher is to decide what to remove from your agenda and what to keep! To help you do that, I’d like to explore a simple rule with you today that, I’m sure, you have heard about before. The rule is the Pareto’s rule, which is better known as the 80/20 rule. Vilfredo Pareto demonstrated in the 19^th century that 80% of the wealth and income is produced and possessed by 20% of the population. Pareto’s law becomes more shocking when you find out that it also applies outside of economics! Pareto himself found that 80% of his garden peas were produced by 20% of his peapods. So, more generally, this law is known as “80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs”.

So, how does this relate to the problem of removing un-necessary things from your agenda? Well, according to Pareto’s rule, you can say that 20% of the action items currently on your agenda will bring 80% of the results! So, start asking yourself the question: what are those actions? If you can identify those 20%, then you are golden! Here are some Pareto statements to help you thinking through your junk removal activity. Hopefully this will make you look at the world from a different perspective...

• 20% of your staff brings 80% of your results (please focus on them!)
• 20% of your customers will bring 80% of your revenue (please focus on them!)
• 20% of your actions will bring you 80% of your results
• 20% of the time spent working will get you 80% of your goals
• 80% of your crises are created by 20% of the people you interact with

I have not verified these statements scientifically but they feel right to me. Do you agree that they make sense?

So, I suggest that you go through your agenda, that you observe yourself and ask what can be these 20% of anything you do that brings most of your results and successes. Once you identify those items, it will become much easier to toss the rest aside or put less emphasis on it. What do you think, dear manager and leader?

Until next time,

Remi Cote

Perfection in Simplicity

"Perfection is not when there is no more to add but no more to take away" - Saint-Exupéry

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I would like to take a few moments to reflect on these words from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I think it is quite profound and is counter-intuitive to the way we live our lives nowadays. Most people these days want to do as many things as possible in the shortest time possible. They really push their limits and the limits of those surrounding them to succeed in their quest for numbers, their desire to destroy competition in the saga of achievements.

We often see this in the workplace. Tim Ferriss mentions with humour in his “4-Hour Work Week” that a good way to get promoted in corporate America is to walk around the office, constantly speaking to your cell phone and carrying documents. Of course, this is exaggerated, but it points to the problem of the importance people give to being busy even if what they do is irrelevant, or does not bring them closer to success.

Saint-Exupéry has a clear way of pointing you in the right direction of success. He tells you that doing more and more will never get you to success. What you have to do is rather to remove everything you can on your agenda or to-do list to be left with what is really important to you at the moment, what is essential, and then give these items all your focus! The tough thing, of course, is to define what is most important to you at the moment. I will discuss that topic some more in my next post.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

Meeting or Not Meeting... That is the Question!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

Meetings... If there is one element in the work life of a manager or leader that can really take a lot of time without producing real results, it must be those long hours spent sitting in meeting rooms with your colleagues. I remember one meeting I was in a long time ago. Back then, I was a software developer. I was asked to present an idea that I had about improving some processes to a number of senior executives. With a lot of luck, I was asked to present late on a Friday afternoon. Well, while I was presenting, I noticed that three out of four people in the room had their eyes closed, sleeping. One of them even snored at some point. I was furious! Maybe I was not a great presenter, but nonetheless I felt that these executives should have told me “no” up-front instead of wasting my time like they did. Needless to say, my idea was never approved.

Anyways, there are some ground rules that should be followed to ensure that you have meetings only when necessary and to guarantee their success or at least their productivity.

(1) Have clear objectives for each and every meeting you hold. If you cannot state clearly what the objectives of the meeting are, then cancel the meeting. It will be a waste of time.

(2) Send a meeting agenda ahead of time to the invitees to make sure that everyone will be ready for the meeting.

(3) Ask that people provide you with all the data they need to bring into the meeting prior to the meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, take a very brief amount of time to summarize what people sent you. You do not want the meeting to turn into a round table where everyone falls asleep.

(4) Meetings are usually about one of the three following things (see Seth Godin’s recent blog at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/03/three-kinds-of-meetings.html):

a. Provide information to the people present. This is a one-way meeting and even though questions are allowed, the decisions have been made prior to the meeting
b. Discuss something. This is an open forum where the leader wants feedback from the invitees.
c. Get permission. Here the leader needs approval to do something. The audience is expected to say yes, but can still say no.

Don’t confuse these three types of meetings. It should be clear from the agenda what type of meeting it will be.

(5) Always define the end time of the meeting. Most meetings should last 30 minutes or less. In Agile methods, they even mandate that the daily “scrum” meeting be held with people standing up to make sure the meeting will remain short!

(6) During the meeting, leave no space to chit-chats or discussions going off a tangent. People who want to socialize can do so after the meeting.

(7) If a point requires more discussion between a subset of the attendees, make someone responsible for that topic and postpone the discussion to a later time.

What about you, dear reader. Do you often find yourself wasting your precious time in un-productive meetings? Are there any other meeting ground rules that you use to ensure productivity? Please share your thoughts with this group!

Until next time,
Remi Cote

Time management for leaders: The Outlook game!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

Have you ever experienced the panic of having a line-up at your office’s door? Have you ever forgotten to act on an action item that your boss gave to you? Have you ever forgotten about that “important” task that you delegated to someone on your team (ouch!)?

You know, as you grow higher in an organization, when you start to take on more leadership roles, more responsibilities, you also start to be connected with more people and to be involved in more activities. You almost invariably end up with a busier schedule! This can be tough to manage when you are not used to it.

There is also a weird shift that is happening when you get to a leadership position. Before, when you were an individual contributor, you almost had complete control over your schedule. Maybe your manager had a weekly meeting with you but, aside from that, you were the master of your calendar! Once you are in a leadership position, the situation often changes dramatically. People around you start to take control over your calendar. People schedule meetings with you, you have to participate in all sorts of activities, you have to represent your team to upper management, etc. All sorts of things to reduce the time you have to focus on what you have to do!

On top of all those activities, you have to monitor what your team is doing. You have to interact with your team several times a week, if not several times a day to make sure that your team members are staying on course. If they are blocked on something, you need to help them find solutions. If people complain about your team, you have to calm them down and make sure that your team delivers. All this is tough to manage, no?

As you can see, it is tough for a leader to find time to perform his work! There is always something else to do, and there will always be more people asking for your attention! However, there is work that a leader needs to do on his own. A leader must find time to think about solutions to issues, he must close action items, and he must find time to delegate tasks properly. This is essential to the success of the leader and to the success of his team.

The secret is to make room in your agenda. You must reserve space in your agenda that no one will ever be able to steal. When you plan for your week, you first have to estimate the amount of time that will be required to complete all the things that you need to complete by yourself during that week. Then, you have to block enough space in your agenda to do all the activities that you have planned for the week. That way, people will see that you are busy during those hours and no one will be able to steal that precious time from you. This will allow you to perform your work and succeed! I call this secret "Playing the Outlook Game"!

As you plan for your week, please be realistic! If you pile up so much work for yourself that you no longer have time to spend with your team, then this will not be good at all! You have to consider the entire picture and balance the time you spend alone in your office working on your personal activities and the time you spend with your team and other people in your surroundings. Also, it is always possible to realize at the beginning of the week that you have too much to do. This is when you start asking yourself what can be delegated to your team members! Isn’t it good to have people on your team?

And you, dear leader, what are your tricks to reserve time in your agenda? Is there anything special that you would like to share with this group?