Making time to work smart

Here’s something we hear a lot, from coaching candidates:

“We’d love to work with you, but we’re really slammed right now and we don’t have time.”

These are smart people, so I know that they know that this is a circular argument - if you don’t change the way you work, you’ll never find the time.

So, how do you change the way you work?

I believe there are only 2 ways to create time and space for yourself (and your team).  And I believe these are pretty universal, and true at any level.

1) The first key step is prioritization - not strategic prioritization of “where do we go next,” but operational prioritization of “what are the most important things we should be doing - and more importantly, what are the things we’re doing that we should NOT be?”

We’re almost always doing more than we should be.  And no matter how each initiative is sold to us, everything comes with overhead.  Everything.  When you find yourself (or your team) too busy to invest in intentional improvements, you are likely getting eaten up with the cost of this overhead.  (I’ve banned use of the word “just” in my teams - no one gets to say “It’s just x and y…,” especially when talking about another team.)

Bounding the work you do (or your team does) is the first step. Until you have a frame of reference for capacity, you don’t know how to set expectations for what can get done.

I recently worked with a leadership team where all the other members were visionaries and kept coming up with new good ideas.  I used to say “we can’t determine work based on if these are good ideas, they are all good ideas; we only have the capacity to do the best good ideas.”  The only way to get alignment and shared expectations is to prioritize the work, determine the “best good ideas,” and force a swap when new best good ideas show up.

Of course, the trick is to know which things we’re doing that we’re not getting value from.

Many organizations still don’t have the A/B infrastructure in place to really know what has value and what doesn’t, nor the discipline to do the analyses necessary to have confidence enough for decisions.  And many organizations are too nervous to stop doing things that might have value, in order to understand if they do or not.

This is where leaders come in.  When you don’t have the information about what drives impact, you can’t just keep doing all the things that consume the team, and assume that magically down the road there will be time. You work with the team, figure out what everyone believes are the priorities, and ruthlessly scale back the work (with intent), keeping an eye on understanding where you might have to reverse decisions (by re-prioritizing, not by re-adding).

2) The other key step is delegating.

Once you’ve contained the volume of work your team is doing, you free up your own time by actively delegating, especially to leaders (or managers) on your team.

Many leaders I’ve worked with - especially Director-level - continue to think about their team as a group to be “protected.”  New initiatives come in, and rather than reprioritize the team’s work, they just take on more ad hoc projects themselves to keep the team on track.  

It’s seductive, especially when the project seems like low overhead, or when the person pitching it is an executive, to just take the shorter path of “I’ll do it,” rather than the work of “where does it go,” “who has enough knowledge to do it,”  “what does it replace in the priorities,”  “what are the knock-on implications of switching priorities,” and - maybe most difficult - “how do we say 'no' to this request?”

In addition to the toll this path takes on you personally in terms of mental health, there are drawbacks in that:

- you don’t have the time necessary to do the real leadership work you need to do

- you deprive your team of learning opportunities

- your team doesn’t operate with the clarity it should

- your performance on "found time" for ad hoc projects usually isn’t at quality

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Neither of these steps is easy to do - companies frequently create a culture where being smart about priorities and execution (in the form of saying “no, this is less important than other things we’re doing”) is perceived as “not being a team player” or “not getting it” or “not being ambitious enough.”  Maybe you work at a company like that, so this all feels too idealistic.

But, in the end… 

- the company won’t reward poor performance on something they assume is being handled

- your project partners won’t appreciate you under-delivering on your end

- your team won’t appreciate not being plugged in to projects that are perceived as high priority

You can’t afford to not learn how to work smarter.

If this is an area you might like some help, reach out to us for a free consultation.