The final topics under Building a World Class
Organization are Managing the Manager’s Time and Helping the Workers Manage
Their Time. I’ll discuss managing your time in this lecture and how to help
your workers manage their time in the next three lectures. Points discussed in
this lecture include:
•
Schedule time by the week
–
Keeps precious
time from “melting”
•
Have an open door policy and accept time wasters
gracefully to maintain good personal relations
•
Accept the reality of daily crises
•
Be effective with people; efficient with things
•
Use lunch hours for formal and informal communications
with staff
There are
many systems for managing time and you must select one that works for you. I
like one recommended by Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In simple form it involves
allocating time to your job and to your personal life. Your job should have six
to eight objectives for both the long and short term at any given time. Having
more limits the time available for each objective so that it takes a long time
to accomplish the objectives. Therefore it is better to limit the number of
objectives to six to eight so that they can be accomplished effectively before
adding new objectives. There are three parts to your life; physical, mental and
spiritual. This means allocating time to keep yourself physically, mentally and
spiritually healthy so that you are able to be effective in your work; and with
your family and friends. In the mental part you must allocate time for learning
in order to keep up with technology and your career ambitions and time for hobbies
or other mental recreation. It is important to take the time to write down your
objectives for your job and your life and develop plans. These plans don’t have
to be detailed written plans but you should think about what is necessary to
achieve your objectives.
Personal Observations about
Work and Work Hours
This is a good point to insert
some observations about work from my decades of management experience. The
number of hours spent each week on work depends on three factors. These are the
culture of the enterprise, the business environment at any specific time and
the choice of the worker. Some organizations have a culture of working 60 or
more hour weeks and workers that don’t put in those hours are looked down upon.
The culture in other organizations admires those who work just the scheduled 40
hours and of course there are cultures that expect between 40 and 60 hours.
Similarly there are times in any organization when critical deadlines impose
the need for long hours for a few days or even weeks and other times when work
can be easily accomplished in normal work hours. Even without such cultural or
business environment constraints there is a distribution of typical work hours
among workers. Some want to work excessive hours and others want to work just
the minimum required. For this discussion I want to ignore the first two
factors and consider the factor that is the clear choice of the worker most of
the time.
There is an optimum amount of
work time per week for each worker. For some it may be just 40 hours and for
others it may be 60 or more hours. Working more or less than your personal
optimum isn’t effective in the long term because you can’t be as effective in
either your work or your non-work life. Those who become “workaholics”
voluntarily usually don’t accomplish any more in their long hours on the job
than other workers accomplish in their optimum times, even if their optimum is
only 40 hours. This is because workaholics often don’t work effectively. They
get involved in unimportant tasks, they often spend too much time in social
activities and they lose creativity due to lack of involvement in activities
outside of work. Workaholics thinks they are helping the enterprise or their
career or both when in fact they are not; except in those deviant cultures that
prize excessive work hours.
Now to explain what I mean by
an optimum number of work hours for a person. Each of us has different
obligations in our life outside the job. Each of us has different needs for
recreation and relaxation. Individuals with few outside obligations and low
need for recreation and relaxation can work more hours effectively than an
individual with many outside obligations and high need for recreation and
relaxation. To be effective in our work we must have a balance between our work
and other activities. Working more than our personal optimum for protracted
times isn’t effective because our mind is on our failing to meet obligations
and personal needs rather than on our work.
It is important to remember
that work isn’t the most important thing in our lives. I have observed several
people that made work more important than necessary. Then comes the time when
they are faced with a family crisis or get a health scare, e.g. chest pains
while on a business trip. When faced with their mortality they change their
priorities. Suddenly their families are the most important thing in their life
and work is relegated to second place or lower. Don’t let that happen to you.
That is what I mean by having a balanced life. The relative unimportance of
work, compared to our families, is easy to understand near the end of or after
our working life. It’s much harder to understand when we are young. However,
young people do see older people that have led an unbalanced life and suffered
the consequences. Use these examples to remind yourself to maintain a balanced
life.
Scheduling Time by the Week
After completing the definition
of your objectives and thinking through plans to achieve them you are ready to
schedule your time. It is very important to schedule a whole week at a time.
The reason is that you cannot work on six to eight objectives in one or even
two days, but you can over a whole week. There are too many uncertainties in
life and jobs to schedule longer than a week without rescheduling every week so
just do one week. Pick a time each week when you can be alone for 20-30 minutes
and make this your scheduling time. Early Sunday evening after dinner is a good
time for me. If I try to develop a schedule on Friday evening after work my mind
is filled with minutia resulting from the weeks crises that seem important at
that time. Scheduling such minutia pushes off work on more important but
seeming less time critical objectives. By Sunday evening most of this minutia
has receded in apparent importance and I can better focus on things that
contribute to achieving my objectives.
Select a format for your
schedule that suits your taste. I prefer a single sheet of paper for each
week’s schedule. The format isn’t important but I find it easier when I can see
all the hours of a week at one time along with my lists of objectives and tasks
for the week. I make up a form using a spreadsheet and prepare copies of the
blank form. You may prefer a printed calendar or a software schedule on a
personal computer or personal digital assistant. The key is to allocate some
time to each important task you have for the week. Allocate the tasks for the
week by one or two hour chunks and leave several unscheduled hours each day
during work time. This unscheduled time is necessary to fight daily fires and
to go back and complete tasks that were interrupted by firefighting or other
unanticipated events.
A planned and recorded schedule
works if you discipline yourself to stick to your schedule and work the task
assigned for each period. You will find that this discipline results in getting
significant amounts of work done on major objectives in the one or two hour
chunks of scheduled time. The biggest benefit is that it helps prevent you from
filling in your time with displacement activities. Without the discipline of
following your weekly schedule you tend to fill your time with what Stephen
Covey calls urgent but not important tasks. With the weekly schedule you are
more likely to work the important but not necessarily urgent tasks. As a
result, at the end of the week you have accomplished a number of important
tasks that contribute to your objectives whereas without the schedule the week
is filled with the urgent but not important tasks and very little that is
important is accomplished. Think of your weekly schedule as a refrigerator that
keeps your precious time from “melting away”, i.e. being wasted in doing urgent
but not important tasks.
Open Door Policy
Having an open door policy is
important at all levels of management. For first and second level mangers it
means being open to interruptions by any of the people working under you as
well as your peer managers and superiors. If you are more senior then you need
a gatekeeper that will filter those allowed to interrupt you but you should
allow interruptions by all of your direct reports, your peer level managers and
of course by your superiors. The reason it’s necessary is that if you don’t
maintain an open door you are not likely to hear all of the information you
need. You are at the mercy of the “chosen ones” who are allowed to interrupt,
thereby filtering what you hear. (I’ll address how to use vertical staff
meetings to obtain unfiltered information from levels below your direct reports
in the lecture on meetings.) Having an open door means that you will be
interrupted with trivial matters from time to time. Accept these time wasters
gracefully as the price for maintaining good communications and good relations
with others in the enterprise. If someone abuses your open door, i.e. takes
your time to discuss non work related items; then say you have a deadline and
suggest continuing the discussion over lunch or after work.
Make Sure You Are Effective
With People
Don’t become a slave to a rigid
schedule. You must accept the reality that there are daily crises that require
your attention. That is why you leave unscheduled blocks of time in your
schedule. Attend to the crises when they arise and then go back to your
schedule and use the unscheduled periods to catch up. When you are dealing with
a person make sure the time you spend is effective and spend the time necessary
to be effective. Don’t rush through a conversation so that you can get back to
what you have on your schedule; otherwise you won’t achieve effective communication
and will waste the time spent.
Learn to Be Efficient With
Other Tasks
Learning how to work with a
good secretary or administrative assistant is essential to being an efficient
and effective manager. When I started working there were no personal computers;
secretaries were numerous, available to all and used by all knowledge workers
because the secretaries had the typewriters. By the time workers became
managers they had usually learned how to work effectively with secretaries.
This is no longer true due to the introduction of personal computers, which has
led to fewer and fewer secretaries and less opportunity for workers to learn
how to work with them effectively. I now see vice presidents that haven’t a
clue to how to work effectively with their secretaries and are either too
arrogant or ashamed to ask the secretary or other managers for advice.
I have had the pleasure of
working with some outstanding secretaries and I know that they at least doubled
my effectiveness. Not all secretaries are good at everything and manager’s
needs vary. For example, in my case I could cope with secretaries that were not
expert at filing, although it was great when they had that skill. The skills I
sought most, and needed most, were the ability to take care of administrative
work independently and to keep in tune with the organization’s grapevine. As a technical person I focused on business
issues and would have missed important personnel issues without having a
secretary that alerted me to people issues that needed my attention. Let me
relate two examples of how a good secretary can improve a manager’s
effectiveness.
For several years I was general
manager of a company in a small town and it was necessary for me to spend at
least 5% of my time involved in civic activities on top of the demands of
running a difficult business. I was fortunate to have a secretary that was
outstanding at administrative work as well as having good secretarial skills
and being in tune with everything that went on in the company. This was before
email was widespread so there was a lot of paperwork traffic. My secretary
prescreened all paperwork; eliminated junk stuff, handled the easy stuff
herself and came to me for 15 minutes each morning with the small amount that
she couldn’t handle. She came in with everything sorted; some for my signature,
some for questions and some she wasn’t sure what to do with. She summarized
each item, often giving her recommendation or telling me what questions she had
about the item. I only needed to give her quick verbal instructions on most
remaining items. Typically there were only one or two items daily that I had to
handle in detail myself. She saved me more than enough time every day to cover
the civic activities I was involved with.
At another company managers
were required to send a weekly report up the management chain that was
distilled by senior managers and eventually went to the corporate offices.
Every manager at the division level and below knew these reports were useless
but our pleas to drop the requirement for them were rejected. My solution was
to select a secretary that could write them without my help. In eight years I
didn’t write a single one. I read, edited and signed the reports my secretary
wrote and there was never a problem. This skilled secretary saved me roughly an
hour a week; precious time for a manager.
I had learned in my first
management job that, although widely used, written weekly reports are a useless
communication tool and therefore I quit spending precious time on them. If I
needed to communicate something to my superiors I did it face to face or during
meetings so that I was sure my concerns were heard and understood. Don’t
require weekly reports from your workers if you have a choice. Walk around and
talk to them to find out what is going on. This takes no more of your time, a
lot less of their time and is more effective for understanding what is really
happening compared to reading sugar coated reports.
If you are fortunate enough to
have a secretary or access to a secretary please learn how to dictate to them,
if they know shorthand, and to electronic dictation equipment. I have timed my
work and found that it is three times faster to outline and dictate something
than it is for me to write it out or type it. Just as important I can dictate
things while driving to and from work or at home if I think of something I
forgot that is critical for the next day. Today I see many managers doing their
own typing and spending hours at a keyboard. This isn’t fun and it isn’t
effective. Learn how to offload such work to a secretary and it will make you
much more effective. There is a more in depth discussion of the benefits and trade-offs of dictation in the next lecture. Here I want to make the point that
managers must learn how to effectively use secretaries to become more effective
and if they expect their staff to follow their lead.
Many of us need the time
allocated for lunch not only to eat but to wind down from the morning and
regenerate our energy for the afternoon. However, we don’t have to spend every
lunch period unwinding or socializing. Spending a couple of lunch periods a
week on some formal or informal communications tasks is well worth while.
Examples include “all hands” meetings for your organization. Lunch hour is
about the only time you can expect to have your entire organization available
to listen to you or to each other on topics of interest to all. The cost of
providing lunch for the group of workers is a good investment for having their
attention for important communications.
You can also use lunches to
catch up with what individuals are doing in their jobs. It’s much more
effective to discuss job performance during an informal lunch than it is across
your desk. In informal lunch sessions with subordinates it is easy to focus the
discussion on their tasks, processes associated with their tasks and the system
encompassing the work. Such discussions are more effective in evaluating the
subordinates’ work than a formal review in your office and they certainly are
more pleasant for you and the subordinates. In a formal review both individuals
are tense and guarded so truly open and honest communication rarely takes
place. An exception is formal discipline of an individual, which should always
be discussed in your office or other private setting.
Exercise
1. Write
down your objectives for your job and your life outside of the job remembering
to include both long and short term job objectives, the physical, mental and
spiritual parts of your life and your relationship with family and friends. You
may want to spend a day or two doing this and if possible do it while on a long
weekend or even on vacation. You can think more objectively about your life
when away from your normal surroundings and work environment.
2. Think
through plans to achieve the objectives listed under number 1.
3. Identify
tasks that you should work on over the next week that will begin to implement
your plans and contribute to achieving your objectives
4. Decide
on a format for a weekly schedule and prepare a schedule for the next seven
days
5. Begin
to follow your weekly schedule starting the next morning when you report to
work.
Maintain
the discipline of scheduling your time by the week for at least a month and
then evaluate whether it is helping you achieve your objectives. You may find
that your planning works well or you may need to adjust the planning depending
on how well your schedules have worked for you.
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