Leadership demands a mastery of time management. Balancing tasks, setting priorities, and ensuring productivity are all part of the equation. Let's delve into strategies that can help leaders manage their time more effectively, fostering a more efficient and successful environment.
Working people are expected to run at a fast pace and be highly productive
At the same time, there is a chronic sense of individual and collective slippage, less than optimal work performance, and impending burnout
- The ability of leaders to manage the increase in both workload and burnout more effectively is essential because their behavior has significant impact on others
- Increasing personal efficiency alone is inadequate for helping leaders resolve this key strategic issue: how to achieve high levels of sustainable, long-term performance while meeting the challenge of doing more with less
Managing Time in Four Domains
Spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical realms correspond to four key functions of leadership: mobilizing commitment, thinking strategically, building relationships and community, and organizing for action
- Effective leaders must deliver in all four areas, personally or indirectly through people they support
- Mobilizing Commitment
- Highperforming managers demonstrate high degrees of both focus and energy
- Their resulting strong sense of purpose enables them to apply their limited time to greatest advantage
- Thinking Strategically
- Clarifying the unique contribution you want to make enables you to set a limited number of goals
- Building Relationships and Community
- Organizing for Action
7 Steps to Change Behavior
Know Your Purpose for Change
- Establishing a powerful purpose for change is key to sustaining energy and motivation for engaging new practices.
- Create Your Vision
- Visioning helps people establish a new direction that lifts them out of today’s problems. It is often used to describe a long-term, big-picture aspiration. Visioning is a useful tool for re-crafting actual days and weeks.
- Take Stock of Current Reality
- Take stock of current reality involves recognizing the cultural, organizational, and personal pressures that influence your workload.
Increasing Sustainable Productivity
Leaders need to think in terms of increasing not simply levels of work and productivity, but primarily the level of sustainable productivity
- Getting the right things done, well, in a timely way
- Preserving and restoring resources including oneself, one’s good standings with colleagues and customers, and one’s relationships with family, community, and the natural environment
- Experience shows that time is not something that can be saved; it can only be spent more or less wisely
Summary
In today’s 24/7 world, leaders need to focus on ensuring the sustainable productivity of themselves and the people in their organizations.
- They need to think of time management as a discipline of making wise and sometimes difficult choices-not an exercise in doing more with less.
Reducing Phantom Workload
One of the best ways to increase sustainable productivity is to reduce what we call “phantom workload.”
- Phantom workload is the unintentional work created when people either take expedient but ineffective short cuts or avoid taking on such essential, difficult tasks
- The important tasks that leaders avoid tend to be difficult, unpleasant, or anxiety-provoking.
- Therefore, addressing phantom workload as a way to manage time calls upon people to confront what is difficult. It requires leaders to go beyond doing current tasks differently to address what they are not doing.
