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:
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