This month, we highlight time management as a leader. This is a crucial skill as a leader, enabling focus on the few priorities that drive your strategy to success. Mastering your schedule multiplies your productivity, controls the pace of progress, and empowers your team through increased responsiveness. Let's learn more!
Carefully Evaluate Commitments
As a leader, many people will vie for a slot on your calendar. You cannot say yes to everything without diluting your effectiveness.
Conduct a thoughtful assessment of any commitment before agreeing. How does it align with key priorities and strategy? Who really needs to be involved? What value will my participation provide?
Build buffers into your schedule rather than booking yourself solid. This allows room for handling unexpected or more pressing issues and avoiding frustration from constant rescheduling.
Don't be afraid to say no if a request doesn't serve a strategic purpose. Reframe it as prioritizing key objectives rather than declining. You can even ask which current commitment should be swapped out.
Look Beyond Surface-Level Time Allocations
Meetings, calls, and appointments crowd a leader's calendar. But duration alone doesn't reveal how that time is spent from a productivity perspective.
Regularly analyze how you are spending time against what really moves top objectives forward. Just because something is on the calendar doesn't mean it's furthering strategy.
Categorize activities based on whether they involve leading your team through complex tasks or purely consumption that could be asynchronous. Structure more of your time for active leadership.
Identify meetings that feel obligatory but yield little strategic progress. Convert them to email updates or revisit the attendee list and agenda to repurpose them.
Empower Others to Achieve Goals
As an executive, you cannot single handedly drive your team to success. The most strategic use of your time involves enabling your team.
Delegate to those aligned with the organizational mission and give them ownership of appropriate objectives. Trust their judgment without micromanaging.
Shift involved tasks with limited strategic impact to those with capacity. Utilize their specialized expertise rather than taking on yourself.
Coach your management team on priorities and decision-making guidelines so they can take the lead on suitable activities without your direct input.
Real-World Scenario: Leading Through Change
Put your time management skills to the test with a real-world challenge!
The following activity is called the 30-second experience. Participants must determine what story or achievements they can comfortably share with the team. Then, the participants will have to share the most significant part of the experience in just 30 seconds. Other team members must also be able to comprehend the main idea of the experience, including its significance to the narrator.
The 30-second experience challenges leaders' time management and productivity within a limited time, teaching participants how to communicate the most important aspects of various issues.