Time management

Objective

Time management is not an objective of effective leadership but an instrument. Above all else, leadership is about people and most of your leadership time will be taken up talking with colleagues formally or informally. Prioritisation and quality of interaction is therefore at a premium. So your challenge is to ensure that you understand the value of time and the role that time management plays.

First of all, you must recognise that once you have worked through your key leadership priorities:

• setting a clear vision and strategy,
• implementing a supporting organisation structure,
• rigorously filling key posts in the structure with appropriate competences and
• setting up a complementary decision-making structure

… then you are nine-tenths of the way there. This is a short list but it involves decisions, and many leaders get them wrong – and if they get them wrong, they get the business wrong. So as leader, you must focus first on these and not on lesser details.

Once these four leadership priorities are understood (with a constant self-check mechanism in place) then be ruthless about the allocation of your time.

Context

How many of us have worked for or watched managers who send e-mails and make calls at all hours? Who are always the first in the office, or the last to leave, or both? Who convey the sense of constantly dashing from one appointment or meeting to the next? Who carry with them large bundles of papers, but have clearly not read them? These colleagues may perhaps have made the fundamental mistake in assuming that:

• leaders are judged by the hours they work;
• the most effective leaders are those who are best at juggling the heaviest workloads.

This is an essentially macho approach and is plain wrong – at the most basic level it confuses quality and quantity, substituting effect for effectiveness.

I have learned from bitter mistakes that effective time management cannot be achieved unless and until the leader realises what he or she ‘is there for’. A fundamental that we could all do well to remember is that the real difference an effective leader makes is limited to a few key decisions. This is why ex-Granada boss turned TV guru Gerry Robinson is oft-quoted as saying that he had to make only five or six key decisions a year.

Challenge

You learn to look for tell-tale signs that you are mismanaging your time:

• colleagues, staff or customers say that your vision and strategy are unclear;
• you constantly ask yourself if your strategy is right;
• colleagues tell you that responsibilities are unclear in the current organisational structure;
• key colleagues’ performance leaves you feeling uncomfortable or embarrassed;
• you start taking on tasks that key colleagues should be doing;
• low-level decisions are in your ‘in-tray’.

You should immediately recognise that a common characteristic of these (by no means comprehensive) examples is that they take up time – thereby representing a loss of time effectiveness which is self-inflicted and avoidable.

You also look for what could be called ‘superhero’ tendencies in your work patterns. These are characteristics suggesting that you have convinced yourself that you can take on a near-infinite amount of work – for example:

• your work agenda is back-to-back meetings – there is little spare, reflective or personal time;
• you have regular work schedules that extend from 7 am to 6 pm plus dinners;
• you attend meetings without having read key documentation in advance;
• you are regularly late for meetings because your schedule is so tight that there is little or no scope for slippage;
• your meetings are constantly being rescheduled and/or cancelled because there are so many, and any changes have a major knock-on effect;
• you have a long list of outstanding tasks, which never gets shorter;
• key actions are not being taken because they require concentrated time and thought – you simply don’t have the space for them.

When you realise that time doesn’t happen to you, but is yours to control, time management becomes an art you can do rather than a challenge you fear.

Success

Suggested strategies for success in managing time include the following.

• Time and strategic fit – you will be approached by many possible business partners and suppliers for discussions, deals, contracts, acquisitions etc. The golden rule is not to have any meetings with anyone for the sake of it – you must think through whether the partners have any conceivable strategic fit. A short preliminary phone call first is a good filter.
• Delegation – delegate as many issues as possible to your team, and make sure they have clear authority limits and regard you as the decision-maker in the last and not the first instance.
• Clear agendas – wherever possible, try to ensure that your meetings have a clear agenda and, where they require a follow-up, that minutes are taken – so that meetings are structured and don’t meander. A surprising amount of time is actually lost not because there are too many people-interactions in an organisation, but because they are allowed to last too long – and you will never find anyone who likes long meetings!
• Value – you must ask yourself, for every meeting or people-interaction, if you are adding value. You will be surprised to learn that if you follow your leadership priorities, you need to be involved much less than you think.

One final thought. There is a radical solution – a rethink of the basic approach to time. Days can be planned normally (major issues or emergencies excluded) to keep mornings wholly clear of scheduled activities. Instead, they can be clear for ‘personal’ work – e-mails, reports, reading, calls, preparation – and for colleagues just to drop in. In this scenario, afternoons are for planned meetings and interaction.

Leaders who take this on board may actually find that, if this is combined with a clear view of priorities, they have more time than they ever thought possible!

Pitfalls

If some or all of the following major ‘snafus’ happen, you should be hearing alarm bells:

• you arrive for meetings in the wrong place;
• you forget meetings altogether;
• you fall asleep in meetings;
• your assistant (if you have one) has a different calendar of meetings, even though you are both using Outlook;
• you are so unprepared for discussions that you have to be reminded what they are about.

If any of this strikes a chord at all, then you need to stand back and reappraise what you think you are there for.

Leaders’ checklist

• Be clear about your role as a leader – it is actually limited to a small number of core priorities.
• Be ruthless about giving time to non-strategic issues.
• Focus on quality time with direct reports – better to see them less often for longer, rather than for snatched periods of time.
• Keep formal meetings structured and to the point – it is easy to waste time and no one likes unfocused and overlong meetings.
• Think about a radical approach – there is nothing wrong with having clear periods in your diary.