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Productive Leadership: A Simple Test For Action

Monday, October 26, 2009

Last week I was talking with a client who is the CEO of a burgeoning online content company. His ranks have grown rapidly and his team is distributed across the United States. The company is truly virtual - a structure that greatly reduces overhead commitments but produces challenges of its own.

Coordinating people and projects in a virtual working environment can be difficult. My consulting work with executives and professionals is focused on maximizing their individual productivity. However, the underlying reason for this effort is to foster their leadership effectiveness. As we draw near the end of our time together, conversations often turn to how their newly-developed productivity skills can be applied to achieve this over-arching goal.

Leadership in the Modern World

To remain effective today, leaders must add Productivity - the kind that relates to getting things done at every level - to their leadership skill set. In days gone by, in organizations other than the truly large, companies were relatively local with most executives, managers and employees working in one or, at most, a few locations. Most team members were near at hand and a leader’s effectiveness was largely related to physical presence and the ability to communicate face-to-face.

The greatest modern-day change to this scenario is that any company can now be distributed across a large geographic area, just as the multi-nationals have been for years. The result is that leaders who used to command their ranks physically have to now think harder about some of the key components of productivity to be effective over a distributed working environment.

The Key Components to Productivity

To be productive in this new model, leaders must be mindful of the four key components to getting things done: Vision, Strategy, Tactics, and Execution. At the risk of being pedantic, here’s a brief overview of each component, followed by a discussion of their application in the virtual enterprise.

  • Vision. This is the broadest statement an organization can make about itself. It describes the purpose the organization existences. Whether it is a brief statement or a manifesto, understanding and reinforcing the enterprise’s vision is one of most important things a leader does. A leader’s primary objective is to guide the organization towards achieving its Vision.
  • Strategy. With Vision in hand, a plan for affecting it must be created. This is where Strategy enters the picture. Linking together all the various efforts for achieving the organization’s Vision is the company’s Strategy. Engaging in the development and coordination of the business’s Strategy also fits into a leader’s primary job description.
  • Tactics. These are the specific plans laid out for each component of the Strategy to achieve the Vision. Where Strategy is about coordinating all the plans, Tactics involve affecting each plan. The responsibility for accomplishing specific action plans will often be delegated to managers and others who report to the leadership ranks.
  • Execution. This is where the rubber meets the road. Execution is what most people consider productivity – where things actually get done. However, as you can see from above, it’s just the last step in a process designed to achieve an intended result. Everyone is charged with some amount of Execution in every organization, but often leaders get too involved in the efforts of others instead of focusing on the components of Execution most relevant to their role - Vision and Strategy.

Utilizing these basic definitions gives leaders a working understanding of the architecture of getting the organization from A to Z.

Meshing These Components Together

Whenever you’re reviewing the various tasks at hand, the best way to eliminate/prioritize/delegate them is to ask this question:

How does ________ advance the organization’s objectives for which I am responsible?

Thus, for a leader, the analysis is to determine how their actions are advancing the company’s Vision or Strategy - the two most important objectives leaders must achieve.

Though all activities should past muster under this analysis, things not directly related to Vision and Strategy should, as a rule, be delegated to other people in the organization. Consequently, all efforts will ultimately advance the organization’s Vision and Strategy, but the actual doing of most will be affected down the chain of command. The net result is that the leader remains focused on accomplishing their primary objectives while managing those of others.

Staying Focused in the Fray

Leaders today are pulled to and fro during our hectic modern work days. With many demands on their time, it’s important to develop a method for weeding out the unimportant and focusing directly on those efforts that best achieve the organization’s Vision and Strategy. The model set out above is simple to understand and simple to apply. It gives leaders a solid tool for achieving success.

Batch Processing: The New Black?

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

A Stanford University study recently concluded what most of us have known for a long time – we mere mortals don’t multi-task well. Not to lambast Stanford for their efforts, but consider the last time you were trying to converse with while there were checking their e-mail. If that’s not convincing, consider sitting in the passenger seat of a car while the driver negotiates traffic and texts back and forth with a colleague. That’ll get your blood pressure elevated for sure!

All in all, it’s great to have an esteemed learning institution validate the notion that multi-tasking produces less than optimal results. In today’s 24/7 global working environments, so many people consider “on it” the only way to accomplish what needs to get done, preferring the idea that multiple “on its” result in multiplied productivity. This is simply not the case.

With multi-tasking functionally debunked as an effective means of increasing productivity, what otheroptions do we have for achieving that goal?

Re-Enter Batch Processing

Henry Ford figured out an effective way to get things produced over 100 years ago – batch processing. That is, group like tasks together because repeating the same task over and over in one “batch” increases productivity. Ford applied the concept to the manufacturing line, but the underlying premise holds true for any group of tasks that share similar actions for their completion.

Batch Processing Defined

Batch processing is a workflow behavior – a way (or “process”) for getting things done. To batch process means to gather together like items and act upon them at the same time – sequentially. In effect, it’s working through a stack of items in a repetitive way until you have completed the batch.

Take processing your physical mail as an example. Physical mail – a group of like items - is delivered in a batch by the post office each day. Most people grab the stack of mail, open each one, toss the junk out, and sort the meaningful items in some logical manner, then get back to the highest priority task. That’s batch processing.

An alternative method to processing the mail in a batch would be to grab one piece of mail from the stack, open it and then make three un-related phone calls and attend a meeting or two before grabbing the next piece of mail.

Doesn’t that just seem inefficient? Yet, when you’re multi-tasking, that’s exactly what you’re doing from a workflow processing point of view. It’s just more efficient and effective to batch process things whenever possible.

Things to Batch Process

Here’s a quick list of things you can batch process in your current work day. Give one or more of these a try to see if you find it a more efficient way to plow through your workload.

  • E-mail. If you have read my previous articles on e-mail management, you’ll know that I consider e-mail just another form of correspondence. Thus, it should be batch processed just like the physical mail example above. Instead of responding to each e-mail that comes into the Inbox as it arrives, I advise that you check it frequently – two or three times an hour – and process what’s in there. Powering through 5, 20, 50 e-mails all at once is far more efficient than doing each one separately. Moreover, many of the e-mails in any one batch will cancel out other e-mails in the same batch given people’s penchant for Reply All and Half-Thought Sends (you know who you are). The net result of batch processing your e-mail is you will move through it faster. (For more on my views about e-mail processing, read my related missives at www.quietspacing.com.)
  • Questions. One of the most difficult things to do for yourself and others is to group questions together – into a batch. We desperately want the answer to each question right now! Yet, constantly running down the hall to interrupt someone to ask a question devastates focus for both people. Regardless of whether you are the one asking or the one answering these questions, agree to set aside a period each day to ask and have answered all the questions that currently exist. The benefits of this are several-fold. First, questions will get answered in a timely fashion. Second, many questions will evaporate in the interim either because they get answered or they become irrelevant as new information streams into your day. Third, both parties will remain more focused on the task at hand with the interruptions eliminated, which means double the productivity gain.
  • Errands. Ask any stay-at-home parent if they run errands one at a time and they will ask if you’ve been getting enough sleep. Yet, at work, we often charge off on a “must-do” errand (personal or professional) just to charge off 30 minutes later to do another errand. Whether you need to move about inside or outside of the office, stack your errands in a pile near your workspace and do as many of them at once as possible.
  • Phone Calls. Another lost art is batch processing phone calls. Before the advent of voice mail, we received little message slips that included the pertinent information for calls we had missed. Many of us would sit down and return those calls in batch form. Now, because we get a blinking light or, worse/better, an e-mail with the message attached (and possibly transcribed), we react to them individually. No need. Carve out a set period or periods each day (10:30 AM and 3:00 PM?) to return calls.
  • Social Media. There’s an entire article here on the value proposition for social media in the business setting. However, for our purposes, the point is to review social media connections in batches. Whether it’s directly via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn or via an aggregator such as HelloTxt, HootSuite or TweetDeck, peruse these communiques only once or twice a day for short periods of time. Look for things of interest, act upon them and disregard the rest.

Seek Out Batches

Many of the tasks we must accomplish each day can be grouped into batches for more efficient processing. I encourage you to identify additional activities that can be grouped and accomplished in batches. It’s more productive and efficient, which are key components to feeling in command of your work environment.

Lessons Learned from the Laundry Room: How Organization Pays Dividends

Saturday, October 3, 2009

One of the odd things about our house is that it didn’t have a hall coat closet. This has to do with the layout and orientation of the home, which was designed to take advantage of the view. To remedy this shortcoming, we had purchased an antique coat rack and placed it in a spot where a coat closet would likely have resided.

We do, however, have a laundry room. It’s one of those closet-style areas with swinging doors and it runs along the hallway out to the back deck. Instead of bi-fold doors, it has nice whitewashed barn doors. It’s very attractive and not an eyesore for us or our guests when we head outside.

A Scheme is Born

During the winter months we spend a fair number of late evening hours watching television. Specifically, and I hate to admit this, we’re HGTV junkies.

Last winter we began discussing the desire to create a coat closet somewhere in the house to replace the coat rack. The solution we decided on was to remodel the laundry room, as the washer and dryer, though full-sized, can be stacked. Much discussion ensued about exactly what we’d like to do with the laundry room, which tells you just how long the nights can be in the Pacific Northwest!

The main problem was that, over the years, the laundry room had become a repository for all things homeless. If we didn’t have a preordained place to put something, it went into the laundry room. Not only did the washer and dryer reside there, but so did all the cleaning implements and supplies. Joining them was all the home repair and maintenance items and tools, along with spare towels and sundry other items. Fortunately (?), there was a cabinet mounted above the washer/dryer so we could store away some of these things, but many were stacked up on top of the washer/dryer or stood up on either side of them along the wall. Needless to say, the laundry room became a disaster area!

A Scheme is Affected

When summer was again upon us, we contracted with a remodeling expert to affect our dream and, with some excellent suggestions from our contractor, we converted the laundry room into a combination laundry facility and coat closet!

I know, “Wow, Paul! Breaking news!” However, there’s more to this story, as I’m sure you suspected.

The Epiphany Occurs

Just the other day I was tasked with a minor home repair. I toddled off to the new and improved laundry room, retrieved the tools I needed and went to complete my assigned duty. As I returned to the closet to store my tools, I was struck with two powerful observations:

  • Gone was the dread of opening the closet doors to retrieve/return things.
  • A well organized space was a pleasure to experience.

Again, this is not rocket science. In fact, that’s the point – small organizational changes can have large impacts on how we experience our lives. Let’s look a little closer at these two points in particular to see what I mean.

The Dreaded Closet

Prior to the remodel, the laundry room was a large closet with two big appliances ensconced in the middle of the space and a cabinet mounted above them. There was no “organization” to the space and, as a result, things were stored willy-nilly wherever they wouldn’t (probably) tumble to the floor. Over time, things heaped up higher and higher on top of other things making a trip to the closet a precarious proposition. If you could even find what you were looking for, you stood a strong chance of starting an avalanche when you extracted it from the pile. The laundry room was just not a place you went into unless absolutely necessary!

The new closet is well organized. The washer and dryer are stacked to the left side with just enough room to hang a iron/ironing board storage unit on the wall next to them. There is a custom-built, five-shelf shelving unit running vertically to the right of the washer/dryer that splits the space. The size of each shelf is adequate for the things we store and having five of them provides for good separation. The right side of the closet has a dowel stretched across it for hanging coats, etc. There is also adequate space to stand the vacuum, brooms, mops, etc. in that same area without interfering with the hanging items.

Because everything rests on a stable surface, instead of on something else, I feel entirely confident that I will not only be able to quickly find what I need, but that I will also safely extract it. I no longer dread going there.

Experiencing Good Organization

After conducting my household repair and returning everything to the closet, I stood looking at the newly remodeled space and felt a distinct sense of satisfaction that we had (1) fixed an irritating problem and (2) accomplished a terrific result through a little thoughtful analysis and action.

Many who know me will want to ascribe the sense the well-being I derived from this remodel to my latent OCD tendencies. However, I believe that we all experience satisfaction from accomplishment. And, more importantly, feeling satisfied (or good) is the measure of success by which we should gauge our lives. Therefore, whether I have OCD or not is irrelevant. The point is that I experienced well-being from a simple act of organization which also made my day both more effective and more efficient. To wit, I completed a task without undue delay in the preparatory or clean-up stages.

The Challenge

I hope you are able to translate this simple example into an opportunity in your own life to make a minor organizational improvement that positively affects your sense of accomplishment and well-being. Whether it’s in your personal life – like the example above – or your professional life, look for something that would be relatively easy to change, but could confer significant benefit to you upon its completion.

May all your laundry rooms be well organized!

Maximizing Productivity: Building The Three-Legged Stool

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

The science of increasing individual productivity is derived from the art of blending together three interrelated disciplines: time management, organizational skills, and workflow processing. This article summarizes each area and provides a list of specific QuickTips that will improve your productivity immediately.

Time Management

I often quip that there’s no such thing as time management because time ticks inexorably forward. Though you can’t really manage time itself, you can manage how you use it. The distinction is between managing something external – time – and managing something internal - behavior.

Changing long-established behaviors is difficult. I advise looking for one or two small changes to make to experience the positive feedback of success immediately. Once a number of small changes are paying productivity dividends, larger changes can be tackled. Here are several easy time management QuickTips to try.

• Eliminate/Shorten Meetings. If you control the occurrence or length of any meetings, ask yourself three questions.

  1. Does this meeting even have to happen?
  2. If so, how frequently?
  3. If so, can you cut the scheduled time for the meeting by 25%, e.g. reduce a 60-minute meeting to 45?

Many meetings are simply unnecessary and are counter-productive because people have to prepare for and attend them instead of getting work done. Even necessary meetings can often be reduced in frequency, e.g., a weekly meeting moved to bi-weekly. Additionally, work fills the time allotted. Consequently, 45 minutes will suffice for most 60-minute meetings and 20 minutes for most 30-minute meetings. The net result of these small changes can mean hundreds of hours in increased productivity.

• Group Like Tasks. It’s very common to see people charging around to get things done. However, if you watch what they’re actually doing, you’ll find much of the charging around is duplicative. A person may rush to the supply closet to grab a new tablet only to charge back five minutes later for a new pen! The same is true of people “dropping by” to ask a question - again and again throughout the day. The answer here is to simply group (and ask others to group) tasks into logical categories, so that they can be performed together to save time.

• Leave Time in between Meetings. One of the biggest mistakes most busy people make is scheduling meetings back-to-back. Two problems are occurring here. First, you are running out of one meeting without capturing all your thoughts and rushing into the next meeting not ready to focus on that subject. This results in unnecessary lost data on both sides of the equation. Second, you’re running and rushing around which only accelerates your mental exhaustion and reduces your overall effectiveness.

Leave at least five minutes open between meetings (15 is preferable), plus realistic travel time. These precious minutes will allow you to collect and record all the information from the last meeting before entering the next meeting. You will also be more focused when entering the next meeting with the last meeting put to bed mentally. Oh, and if you’re early to the next meeting, take a break and just enjoy the view of whatever is around you – it’s called relaxing!

• Use Subject Line Naming Conventions. When dealing with e-mails, calendar events and tasks, create and use a meaningful naming convention for the subject lines. Naming conventions will save you lots of time when you’re searching for information related to that matter. For example, for an appointment in your calendar, put the following in the subject line:

Mtg: John Doe (123-456-7890) - Re: Johnson Marketing Campaign - Mr. Doe’s Office

Now you can look directly at the event item on your computer (and smartphone) and see exactly what will be happening and where.

This is true of e-mail subject lines as well. Instead of:

Update

try something like this:

Johnson Marketing Campaign – Update Following Meeting with John Doe

It’s not only easier for you to search for and find later, the recipient of your e-mail will immediately know what the content of the email is.

• Coach Versus Instruct. When you manage others, the best thing you can do both for yourself and for them is to develop their abilities to do their job with as little supervision from you as possible. You’ll accomplish that by coaching them on how to get the result you need versus instructing them on the specific steps to accomplish that result. The difference is subtle but important. If you help them figure how to succeed on their own, you won’t need to look over their shoulder along the way.

Small advances in these time management behaviors demonstrate my point that it only takes a little savings each day to aggregate into a significant improvement over the longer term. Remember also, that I’m talking about both your productivity and your sense of accomplishment.

Organizational Skills

We’ve all seen the desk that looks like a hurricane recently passed over it. The oft-heard retort is, “But I know where everything is.” And that may be true to a certain degree. However, when pressed, it usually takes about 30-45 seconds to actually find a specific item. Those seconds add up over time, resulting in hours lost searching.

I’m not advocating that you live a highly structured life or keep your working environment Über-organized. However, small changes to your organizational behaviors pay big dividends both in terms of efficiency and greater peace of mind. Try a couple these QuickTips to see how they work for you.

• Create a Designated Work Area. This is the easiest way to improve productivity that I’ve ever discovered. Take everything off your desk and put it all behind or beside you. See that wide open space in front of you? It’s called a desktop! I call it a designated work space and into it should only go the ONE thing you are working on right now.

Multi-tasking is far less efficient than single-tasking. Seriously, just do a Google search for the hundreds of recent articles on the subject. Creating a designated work space allows you to focus on the one thing that needs doing. When you’re done with it, put it away and turn around and pick up the next thing!

• Develop a Structured Filing System (Physical or Electronic or Both). Papers piled high all around you is not a filing system. It’s a “noisy” collection that costs you and others precious minutes all the time. The same is true for your computer where you might have hundreds of e-mails stacked up in your Inbox and dozens of shortcuts on your screen.

Most businesses have a filing system for physical files. Take advantage of it and, if you have an assistant, delegate to him/her the task of grabbing finished items out of your workspace daily. If you don’t have an assistant, make it part of the “grouped tasks” above! For electronic filing, just duplicate your business’s physical system. Create folders and sub-folders and file stuff away, both in your e-mail and on your computer.

• Centralize Task List Management. Instead of having a dozen little sticky notes plastered all over the place, create a centralized task list and develop a method for routinely reviewing and updating it. The more things get spread around, the more likelihood of system failure. This is an easy one to do and will greatly increase your productivity.

• Use a Subject Line Naming Convention. I’ll say it again - leverage your subject lines wherever possible through a descriptive naming convention. See above for examples.

Consider organizational skills the oil in the machine. When things are where you expect them to be and you can readily find and/or identify them, everything runs more smoothly. The result is increased productivity and a greater sense of well-being.

Workflow Processing

In today’s world the phrase “workflow processing” brings to mind countless consultants descending on a business to make it all better. Though to some extent true, more simply viewed, workflow processing is just identifying the steps to getting something done. The struggle we all face today is the endless stream of interruptions and distractions that bombard us while we’re trying to do just that! Here are a couple of QuickTips that will help you navigate through the daily minefield more productively.

• Regularly Assess Workloads. Most people hit the office at a dead run these days. STOP! There are two times in the day when it’s vitally important that you assess what your workload is - first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. Determining what’s on your plate is the very best way to determine how to best integrate all the new things coming at you.

Instead of starting your day in your e-mail Inbox, first survey what is already on your to-do list then jump into your e-mail. Similarly, spend the last five minutes of each day assessing what’s on your plate before going home. Oh, and if you can, do it once mid-day to see your progress and to re-prioritize based what’s happened since your morning review.

• Practice E-mail Triaging. E-mail is the boon and bane of modern-day working environments. We’re fortunate to have it and hate to think about how it’s stacking up in our Inbox right now. The most significant problem with e-mail is that it has created a Pavlovian response mechanism in bright, capable people! We jump every time one comes in and we worry about what we’re missing if we don’t sit in the Inbox all day long waiting for the next one to arrive. Insanity!

Whether you use the QuietSpacing™ method or some other system, get in the habit of viewing e-mail as just another form of correspondence and triage it accordingly. If you start treating e-mail as correspondence instead of a lifeline, you’ll break the spell and get on with the work at hand.

• Set Outlook up as a “Command Center”. Now that you’re not salivating in your Inbox anymore (!), you can switch over to hanging out in your Calendar view. When you get there, set it for Work Week (View | Work Week) and add your Task View to it (View | TaskPad). Voila! Now you can see your entire week of events and an organized list of your tasks. The next step is to start creating Tasks and using them to collect your…well…tasks in one organized place. Hey, wasn’t there something above about that?

• Sequestering. If you can’t get people to leave you alone, then just leave them! That’s right, move to a conference room or an empty office. Take what you MUST work on (one or two things) and get those tasks done. Then head back to your workspace and tell everyone you were attending to business. None the wiser and you got more done!

• Aggressive Delegation/Prioritization. Oddly enough, all this new technology has created a never-before-experienced problem – a reduced ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. Just because we can do things doesn’t mean we should do them. It’s a lot like the Reply All button. People hit it because it’s there. If you stop hitting it, fewer people are distracted by unnecessary e-mails.

Look at your task list and ask of each item, “How will this drive my primary objectives?” If a particular item won’t move you down that path, de-prioritize it or remove it altogether. You’ll be amazed at how effective you become when you focus your efforts on more productive endeavors.

Sitting On Your New Three-Legged Stool of Productivity

You may or may not be successful with all these proposed changes. However, each small change generates increased control over your productivity and, generally, produces measureable results. The real win comes from continuing to ask yourself, “How can I do X a little better?” There’s always something you can improve upon and each time you do, you receive the reward of achievement!