Search This Blog

Thursday, February 21, 2013

20 to 22 Helping the Workers Manage Their Time


At first reading your reaction may be that helping workers manage their time is not the manager’s responsibility but bear with me. One principle of leadership is that it is the leader’s job to make subordinates’ jobs easier. Ken Blanchard (Co-author of The One Minute Manger) and Phil Hodges wrote an excellent book, The Servant Leader, that provides an in-depth treatment of this principle. Their book shows that Jesus Christ is not only a model for spiritual leadership but also a model for organizational leadership. They define this model as the “Servant Leader”.
Helping workers manage their time is important to having an effective organization and the aspects of worker time management discussed here are those that the manager can influence. This topic is a bit long so I treat it as three lectures.
It’s quite likely that you as manager are the biggest source of wasted time for your workers. At least that’s probably what they think. Therefore the topics we cover in the first lecture are:
        Eliminate time wasters that are the manager’s fault
       Crises that occur more than once
       Too many meetings (examine  job and organization structure to  see why meeting are needed)
       Poor  information systems (holding meetings to gather information that should be automatically reported and processed)
       Overstaffing to correct schedule delays (leads to time wasted in interacting)
Many would argue that meetings are the biggest time wasters so meetings are the topic of the second lecture:
        Managing meetings
       Meeting to communicate
       Types of effective meetings
       Guidelines for effective meetings
Finally, an insidious time waster is workers doing work that can be done faster and cheaper by others. This is the topic of the third lecture:
        Identify work that can be done better by others
If by studying and practicing the ideas discussed in these three lectures you are able to save two hours per week for each of your staff members you will have improved your organization’s productivity by five percent. Actually it will be more than five percent because many time wasters interrupt workers from their core tasks. Some researchers claim it takes twenty minutes for workers to regain focus and effectiveness on a task after being interrupted. This productivity gain will be achieved with no investment other than your time learning and practicing better methods.
  
If you find that the pace of blog posts isn’t compatible with the pace you  would like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” at:
or hard copy or for nook at:
or hard copy or E-book at:


No comments:

Post a Comment