People appreciate those who are all in all the time. Their actions speak volumes about their passion and commitment. The trouble is that it’s exhausting and inefficient. You can’t be everywhere all the time. In line with Tuesday’s article on team time management, stop trying to be at every meeting and, especially, stop trying to be at all of every meeting. Instead, consider showing up for just the most valuable parts of the most valuable meetings.
You can do only one of four things in meetings: learn, contribute, decide, or waste time. So, skip the parts where you’re not doing one of the first three.
If you’re learning, attend only the parts where you have something to learn.
If you’re contributing, attend only the parts where you have something to contribute.
If you’re deciding, attend only the parts required for you to make a decision. In many cases, you can let the rest of the meeting attendees ratchet up their learning and contribute to a recommendation. Then you can come in, get a synopsis of their learning and a briefing on the rationale for their recommendation, and either help them further ratchet up their thinking or make your decision and get out of Dodge.
Imagine a day with eight back-to-back one-hour meetings. Attending all of those meetings would take eight hours of your time.
On the other hand, if you let people work together for 45 minutes in each meeting and then come in for the last 15 minutes to hear their learning and recommendation, you could free up six hours to do other things.
Obviously, this is a gross oversimplification. You will likely want to be in all of some meetings. Just not all of the meetings.
The art of delegating
This directly links with the Art of Delegating framework and is one of the tools you’ll use in delegating and trusting.
- Do well yourself – Individual contributors’ main area of focus
- Do yourself, but just well enough – Individual contributors
- Delegate and supervise – The realm of managers
- Delegate and trust – Senior leaders enabling and empowering managers
- Do later – Senior leaders’ prioritization/deprioritization saving others time now
- Do never – Senior leaders’ ultimate deprioritization, saving others time and attention
Furthermore, delegating and trusting requires especially clear delegation in terms of:
- Direction/objectives/desired results/intent
- Resources (human, financial, technical or operational)
- Authority to make tactical decisions within strategic boundaries/guidelines
- Accountability and consequences (standards of performance, time expectations, positive and negative consequences of success and failure)
Span of control and number of priorities
This matters partly because of the inverse relationship between span of control and number of priorities.
More junior, task-focused people can focus on perhaps five things at a time.
More senior leaders should probably have no more than three of their own priorities, delegating primary responsibility for the rest.
CEOs should lead one or, if stretched, two enterprise-level priorities at a time. This is because the highest performing CEOs spend 25% or more of their time managing their board and ownership and 25% or more of their time outwardly-facing with customers, suppliers, community leaders, media and the like. That means they have to spend less than 50% of their time inwardly-focused.
Two-way time management
Doing this well allows those working for you to be part of a two-way approach to time management in which all are clear when you’re coming in to a meeting to:
- Decide or approve in response to a well-thought-through and well-presented recommendation.
- Contribute as a coach or guide and not the boss.
- Learn about things either before or after they happen so you can use that knowledge elsewhere.
Communication
This requires alignment around communication so people know when to inform you in advance versus report after the fact
If they:
- Ask, you can tell them what to do and they can comply.
- Discuss, you can figure it out together with both of you contributing.
- Recommend, you can ratchet up their best current thinking without diluting their commitment.
- Inform you about what they intend to do before they do it, you can still provide input, or not – which may be exercising your veto rights in some cases.
- Report to you after the fact, you can prepare for what happens next.
- Skip sharing information with you, you can focus on other things.
Click here for a list of my Forbes articles (of which this is #795) and a summary of my book on executive onboarding: The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan.
