'You're not that important.' How not to fall into the most common leadership trap
A common leadership trap is failure to delegate and empower your team and shoulder all the work yourself.
By Michel Koopman
For Fast Company
Many senior leaders complain about running from meeting to meeting, from one fire drill to the next, from dealing with employee matters to investors, from presentations to spreadsheets, from Zoom to town hall meetings, board meetings to performance reviews, strategic planning to ops reviews, from checking email to moving calendars around, and the list goes on. Every meeting has an opportunity cost—a leader can never be in two places at once
Time management is an obvious priority skill for any senior leader. As a result, the executive coaching conversations I have with my clients are largely spent picking apart the executive’s agenda, priorities, team, colleagues, personal strengths and weaknesses, and areas of improvement.
Over time, we hope to master the simplest best practices to the more complex concepts. A simple best practice example would be to eliminate one-hour meetings or 30-minute ones. With a strong agenda, preparedness, and halfway decent meeting facilitation, anything that can be done in one hour can be done in 45 minutes. A 30-minute meeting can often be accomplished in 20 minutes as well. Here is the maximum potential: eight meetings per day save you two hours (15 min x 8), which adds up to 10 hours (an entire workday) per week.
The more complex concepts that can impact your own time management effectiveness include ensuring your team is well structured and tasked, but most importantly highly engaged, motivated, skilled, and self-sufficient. Having a strong team around you, supported by a positive culture with an ethos around purpose and trust, comes back to you in a major way.
Might there be a silver bullet to help determine how to best spend your time; what to do and what to ignore? An enlightening lesson emerged from a recent coaching collaboration.
I have the privilege of working with the cofounder and COO of a rapidly expanding and leading digital marketing agency. Recently, she faced a profound family tragedy, leading her to take a much-needed break for three weeks—a total disconnection from all professional communication methods. Given her intense commitment to the business’s well-being from the day it was founded until this terrible personal situation, a three-week break seemed completely impossible to her. It was loaded with anxiety around what would go wrong at work, but she knew prioritizing her personal life was imminent and her decision, albeit difficult, was the right one.
Even before this remarkable senior leader returned, she and I exchanged messages about how to get right into the swing of things to ensure a seamless transition upon her return. Much to her surprise and cautious expectations, the business had remained completely steadfast, thanks to the team’s unrivaled commitment to their responsibilities. Everyone stepped up and over-delivered to ensure nothing went awry with the day-to-day business. The team was able to forge ahead without the consistent oversight, guidance, and encouragement this executive normally provides.
This outcome, while not always the case and seemingly logical in retrospect given the esteem for the leader and the healthy company culture, might not have been anticipated. It highlighted that people can take initiative and troubleshoot independently when given the opportunity. She realized there were many items she could leave up to her team, saving her calendar from filling up and freeing time for her to use for key business priorities.
While no major critical aspects of the business were left open-ended, clients were handled and business was going on as usual. Not everything was perfect. What did become apparent was that the strategic initiatives, those that required senior thought leadership had not progressed and were stalled, in her absence.
For example, the project around unifying the customer experience across the many business units had not advanced and was well behind schedule. This initiative and others like it, are crucial for enhancing the business and its prospects. They require strategic guidance, stewardship, and motivation, an indication of where her involvement is needed.
If you are a senior leader overwhelmed by a schedule dictated by day-to-day operations try following this road map:
Challenge yourself to “reset” how you block out your day and imagine having to disconnect completely for three weeks.
Create a vivid vision and imagine being on the Moon (or somewhere else remote) without any communication.
Think about who on your team can and will take over the action items you would handle. How would they handle it? If the answer is they would do well, let them, even when you are at work. If the answer is, I am not sure, then let’s figure out why.
The item they would fail at may be yours to lead. If it is not, perhaps some team development is needed to allow them to thrive without you.
Save your calendar by empowering your team to lead tasks they would succeed at when you are on your imaginary break.
Always consider what aspects of the business would continue smoothly and which would stall without you. Be honest with yourself (don’t give yourself too much credit that all will fail). This reflection should help identify strategic priorities that warrant your focus, allowing you to delegate the rest to your trusted team.
Read the original article here.