A Culture With Time Management
by Jonathan Jones
If you cannot manage your own time, how do you expect to manage others? Time management is a vital element of leadership. To increase your effectiveness as a leader, I highly recommend expanding your focus from yourself to your culture. Train your people and make it part of your culture of discipline. Here are some suggestions:
• Meetings can be your biggest time-waster. Train the whole organization on running disciplined meetings and model how to do so. Have a clear agenda and a time expectation for each meeting. Meetings need to have a “pulse” with consistent timing. Daily check-ins need only take five minutes. Weekly staff meetings should stay around an hour. Quarterly strategic meetings may take longer. Train your organization on what you want, model the behavior, and stick to the discipline.
• Task lists can be a systematic way people keep track of work. Standardize the way people keep track of tasks. When assigning tasks, ensure others put the items on their task lists. Use your meetings to follow up on tasks in a systematic way. If project management is a key part of your business, then put all tasks on a timeline and manage the timeline.
• Delegation is the most powerful time management tool. It allows a manager to multiply her time through others. Imagine that effective delegation were part of an organization. Leaders could delegate any important item. Most employees can handle more than they are assigned. If delegation is an expectation, employees can thrive on projects that challenge them. Leaders can focus on strategic thinking while developing future leaders.
If you want time management to be an asset to your culture, you must commit to training employees, modeling the behavior expected and reinforcing the behavior you demand.
Jonathan Jones (Jonathan.jones@vistagechair.com or 314-608-0783) is a CEO peer group chair/coach for Vistage International.