Episode 222 Transcript:

0:00:00 Ramona Shaw: Ever wondered if you’re spending your time on the right things, especially as you elevate in your leadership role and you get more and more opportunities and more and more responsibilities that are calling for your attention and it can sometimes get really tricky to figure out. Are you spending your limited time on the things that matter most? This is a question that often comes up in coaching conversations in I thought I’ll talk about it on the podcast.

0:00:26 Ramona Shaw: Here’s the how do you successfully transition.

0:00:29 Ramona Shaw: Into your first official leadership role?

0:00:31 Ramona Shaw: Build the confidence and competence to lead your team successfully and establish yourself as a respected and trusted leader across the organization? That’s the question, and this show provides the answers. Welcome to the Manager track podcast. I’m your host, Ramona Shaw, and I’m on a mission to create workplaces where work is not seen as a source of stress and dread, but as a source of contribution, connection and fulfillment.

0:00:54 Ramona Shaw: And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead so everyone wins and grows. In the show, you learn how to think, communicate, and act as the confident and competent leader you know you can.

0:01:08 Ramona Shaw: Be welcome to this episode of The Manager Track podcast. This episode is on spending your time on the right things, figuring out whether or not you’re doing that. And I’m also going to talk a little bit at the end about how to detect whether or not your employees are spending their time on the right things and how you as a leader might distract and derail them from doing the work that they should be doing that would lead to the biggest and best outcome. Sometimes before I record a podcast episode, I read some of the comments of what people say.

0:01:48 Ramona Shaw: And actually this came about because a few weeks ago I stumbled across this Reddit article where people were talking about how their manager wastes their time during the day, and it was a total rabbit hole, but fun nevertheless to read about how employees feel managers are wasting their time. So back to the main point. The question of whether or not you’re working on the right thing is really dictated by you knowing your goals, knowing what you need to do to achieve these goals, and most of all, knowing what your role is and how you as the leader are going to add the most value to the team.

0:02:36 Ramona Shaw: And there’s no one single right answer to this question, and it actually is a great topic for a coaching conversation. Hence, this is why it comes up often in coaching, because we have to truly think about our goals, our value, add our unique approach, and often be really disciplined and rigorous in thinking through what is it that I like to be doing and what is it that I need to be doing, what energizes me.

0:03:05 Ramona Shaw: And so I am pulled and gravitate towards that work versus what is actually required and demanded of me to be doing so that we achieve or have the best probability of achieving our goals. And so many times our own behavior. Sometimes it’s lack of confidence and that goes with need of control. Sometimes it’s just lack of awareness of how we might be spending our time inaccurately. And sometimes it’s really a bit of the ego that’s driving us into a direction that is not useful or ineffective.

0:03:40 Ramona Shaw: And I will call out a few of those that I observe, either myself when I notice I’m going off track to where I should be spending my time or that I encounter with people that I work with. I’m going to emphasize one more time what will dictate how you should be spending your time. And then we’re going to go into all the ways that you might be getting sidetracked. But you have to clearly know what your goals are and what the team’s goals are.

0:04:06 Ramona Shaw: You have to clearly understand what is required of you and the team to achieve those goals. And then from that question, you’ll look at what is it that is unique to you, either based on your strengths or based on your position. Not everyone has the same authority or agency as you do, and so certain things naturally will land on your desk. So what are the goals? How are you going to get there? And what is unique to you?

0:04:38 Ramona Shaw: The things that get in the way that I often see is poor prioritization. That’s one. And actually, I could probably record an entire episode on poor prioritization. But the one sneaky way I see this often is that people will start with the small stuff first. We want to sort of ease into the day or tackle comfortable things and get those out of the way before we tackle the big work. And it could literally be checking your inbox and responding to emails before you address the big important work.

0:05:15 Ramona Shaw: Let’s say you have to backfill a role and you have to hire and look through resumes. And that is often, by the way, the most important thing for a leader because no one else can do it. I mean, yes, you probably have helped from your HR team to go through resumes, but whatever tasks are assigned to you in this whole process, this is one of your key priorities. The longer that you delay the process, the harder it is for everyone involved.

0:05:42 Ramona Shaw: Okay, so let’s say instead of going through the resumes that were assigned to you, you might choose to respond to emails in the morning instead of going through these resumes. You might get involved in quick questions and little fire drills that make you reactive. And I’m not living in a dream world where I think that none of this will happen. I totally get it. And I understand that this is difficult sometimes to take ourselves out of such moments when we realize everyone’s looking to you to provide an answer or it seems like they’re not going to be able to progress unless you get involved.

0:06:19 Ramona Shaw: That in itself is a question of are you having too much of a dependency or are your employees too dependent on you and your involvement? Totally different conversation or are you communicating to your team that you are available? They may be checking your status on any of the collaboration tools. They may be seeing you in the office, at your desk and chatting with people. They may look at your calendar and see that you have no meeting, so they’ll walk by or ring you up.

0:06:50 Ramona Shaw: Or they may just assume that you are quick with getting to your emails. And so they send an email and say, hey, quickly, I need this. Otherwise I can’t. I move forward. Can you respond to me as soon as you see this email? And if that happens and you get sucked into it, the issue is that you didn’t communicate what your availability is. Let’s say I’m not going to respond to emails and not even read them until 10:00.

0:07:16 Ramona Shaw: I’m not going to be on slack or teams until 10:00. If something urgent happens, you have to actually pick up the phone and call me. That would be a way to communicate your availability. That then allows you to tackle the big items first. I just see this often happen where the small things suck up the maturity of the day and the time of the day when we’re most effective in our deep thinking, analytical, or strategic work, it’s definitely not right after lunch or it’s likely also not at 05:00. You might be great at this later at night depending on your sacradian rhythm, but for a good amount of people, those golden hours are somewhere between eight and 11:00.

0:08:03 Ramona Shaw: So that’s one how do you prioritize your day and are you actually tacking the big priorities and in your calendar? Would I actually see, and if I observed you, would I see that you’re prioritizing your priorities or if you’re spending your energy and time on small stuff? The other one is this idea that perfect is the enemy of good when we’re getting so involved in making something great before we either involve other people, before we share it, or just before we’re satisfied with the work product.

0:08:38 Ramona Shaw: Not everything needs to be perfect and wanting things to be perfect if you know you have perfectionistic tendencies, we’ve got a few podcasts on that, by the way. We’ll link that in the show note. But that’s something to tackle because it can most definitely derail you from working on the things that matter most and on the right things. Number three is ineffective and unnecessary meetings. I don’t believe and subscribe to this idea that we shouldn’t have any meetings. Like we all love the days or the half days where we don’t have meetings and we can really get in the flow and work without having deadlines. I love for that reason to do some work on the weekends where I have no calls scheduled and I can just get in the groove of the work.

0:09:27 Ramona Shaw: But in a company and working in a team and leading a team, meetings are part of your work. Meetings and conversations and your communication in meetings is your responsibility and is a way to like, be productive throughout the day. Not all meetings are bad, but if you’re not sure if you’re spending your time on the right things, looking at meetings is most definitely one of those top things here and meeting assessing your meetings is key.

0:09:55 Ramona Shaw: Do they end on time? Do they overrun? Should you be in this meeting or can someone else represent your team in that meeting? Does the meeting even need to exist? Are you accepting meetings on topics or four topics that could be emails? Are you having unstructured meetings that are people just talking in circles? You never come to conclusions or seem ineffective. That’s one item to look at. Another one is the lack of focus and the distraction of tasks that get in the way a little bit. We talked about this earlier, but the more common and actually often not talked about distraction is the emotional distraction.

0:10:38 Ramona Shaw: And this can happen when we’re in a meeting and someone talks over us or someone takes credit for our work, or we get an email from our boss and it just screams micromanagement. Or we get some like snappy comment by someone on teams or slack or some tool and we start to feel agitated. And that kind of emotional response while we are possibly containing it and not letting that get in the way of our professional conduct, it may really distract us from doing work.

0:11:17 Ramona Shaw: Now our mind and our thoughts are circling around what you should have said or what you should be saying or how you should be responding and the reason for why they did or said what they did. And you’re starting to get absorbed in this emotional bubble. Some people tell me it takes them whole days, sometimes hours to get back out of it. And if you recognize that you’re often in such a bit of a roller coaster and that emotions distract you from doing high quality work, I definitely recommend looking into this. And working with a coach would be one avenue to do so.

0:11:55 Ramona Shaw: And then the fifth one where I see managers not spending their time on the right things is when they’re working on stuff where the outcome is not clear. So they might like what they’re doing. They may find it interesting to engage in a certain conversation or to take a sales meeting with a vendor, but there isn’t a clear outcome. And in fact, that also goes into being mindful. What drives most value?

0:12:25 Ramona Shaw: If you have a set of responsibilities on your plate, on one hand you manage your team, and then you have some sort of like ic work that you’re engaged in, so sort of tactical work, and then you have an initiative that you’re leading, then you’re also engaged in conversations or project proposals up to senior leadership, and then maybe you’re volunteering on a couple of projects or other things in the company or in your industry.

0:12:55 Ramona Shaw: There’s a time to say yes to a lot of things, and there’s a time to say no to a lot of things. And what most definitely gets in the way of managers spending their time in the right way is if they have said yes to too many things, and that then compromises their ability to work on the things that matter most. The things that actually are of highest value, not just for themselves and their team, but also in the eyes of the executives and senior leaders.

0:13:24 Ramona Shaw: I’ve seen too many times where leadership teams look at who will get laid off. This happened a lot over the last few years, and they’re going to assess who drives and is contributing directly to the main, either revenue streams or core processes of the organization, and who spends little time on those necessary core pillars and spends most of their time on other, like nice to haves. And people who spend a lot on like nice to haves and help here and help there, although they’re very busy and effective with that and it’s useful. But in a time of sort of distress in a company that won’t help you secure your job, because in the eyes of executives, again, you’re contribution to the core pillars is not as, relatively speaking, not as big as those of some of your peers, possibly.

0:14:16 Ramona Shaw: So I’m going to quickly repeat poor prioritization. Perfect. Being the enemy of a good ineffective, unnecessary, overrun meetings, the lack of focus and distractions in terms of tasks, your ability to manage your time and being staying focused as well as the emotional distraction and then not working on what matters most and drives value. Okay, so these were the big pillars. As a bit of a bonus, I’m going to add a few more things and I’m going to make this super quick bullet points.

0:14:47 Ramona Shaw: A lot of managers spend too much time managing an underperformer and they totally forget to spend time on managing the high performers or the solid performers. So tolerating underperformers and spending a huge amount of your time on them, it’s a time suck. Now. Yes, when they are underperforming, you have to coach them and support them and most definitely will take more time than your high performers. But that should be time bound, time limited.

0:15:12 Ramona Shaw: That’s not something that can continue for months. Over involvement in onboarding. Like the onboarding process should be a team effort. That’s not on you as a manager. Getting caught up in details sometimes really interesting. You’re curious, you want to be helpful, but you have to be very disciplined to not get caught up in the details unless it’s necessary. And you have to in order to fix the bigger issue.

0:15:35 Ramona Shaw: But you have to be very careful with where you go into the weeds of things and where not. And then lastly, with the whole being reactive to fires, there are times when we are reactive to fires and that is necessary. But I would say, like, generally speaking, if those fire drills are reactive mode lasts longer than, let’s say a month or so, then you have to take a step back and ask yourself, what do I need to do to stop being so reactive?

0:16:04 Ramona Shaw: Now? It’s no longer an effective strategy. Now it starts to become a pattern of how things are run and how people see your leadership. So if your fire drill in reactive mode lasts more than a month, worth investigating. Now, every so often in a coaching conversation, a client might say, I still need to be involved in so many different things. And that’s what makes it hard for me to actually spend the time on the things that I realize I should be spending them on.

0:16:34 Ramona Shaw: So how can you shift time to where it matters most while also making sure the plates keep spinning? I have three approaches to that. The first one is remove yourself completely, pass it on. Say from here on out, you’re going to own this. I’m not going to be part of this anymore. I trust you. I’m confident that you will learn this, that you will do this well. And I got your back if things go sideways.

0:16:58 Ramona Shaw: The second one is to reduce your involvement. So instead of saying I’m totally passing it on, you’re providing more clarity on when you should be involved. I’m only going to be involved if it involves these key clients. I’m only going to get involved once a month. The other weeks, I want you to run it. I’m only going to get involved if it reaches a dollar amount of, you know, $10,000. Whatever the criteria are that you want to set, that gives about 60% to 80% of the work to another employee. And then the third one is if you want to keep the plate spinning but not get sucked into it is to get really clear on the communication channels.

0:17:39 Ramona Shaw: I mentioned this earlier. When are you available? For what? What kind of information should be communicated through email versus public channels on collaboration tools, what should be escalated to you and what shouldn’t. Oftentimes leaders expect other people to know and to read their mind or to have a similar type of assessment of how these things should be handled, but that’s just not the case. People are making this up and making assumptions of what deserves your attention, and again, what should be escalated and so forth. So get really clear on how information flows through which channels, what constitutes an emergency, and lay that out. Clarify it. You can collaboratively do this with your team, but that will help keep those plates spinning while you’re freeing yourself up and are able to spend time on the things that matter more.

0:18:32 Ramona Shaw: Okay, I’m going to repeat one more time the three questions to ask. What are your goals, the team’s goals, how are you going to get there, and what is your unique contribution, your unique value? Add in achieving those goals, and if you’re not clear to what the answers are to these three questions, especially the last one, then everything else will get harder because it’s a lot more likely that you get sort of sucked into the needs of the moment and the urgencies of the day, and it’s harder for you to pull yourself out of that and actually dedicate time for important but non urgent items.

0:19:11 Ramona Shaw: Okay, like I said in the beginning, I’m going to spend the last few minutes here talking about wasting employees time. Now, on this Reddit article, there was a lot of like, non useful stuff, not things that I would mention here in the podcast. But I here are some that I definitely think are worthwhile mentioning that I’ve experienced myself at times, or that I hear about in conversations with leaders.

0:19:36 Ramona Shaw: One of them that employees realize I’m wasting my time, is if decisions are made over and over and over again. It’s like we’ve decided, but then a week later we question that decision yet again and we’re back into that conversation of figuring out the answer to the question. When you make a decision, it needs to be documented or communicated. If you find yourself in such a situation where you realize, we kind of keep deciding on the same things, document the decisions, have a decision tracker or somewhere where you capture those things so that when a person in a week forgets what was talked about or wasn’t in the meeting where that decision was made, it doesn’t stir up yet another decision conversation.

0:20:24 Ramona Shaw: But you can immediately drop a link to wherever this is documented and say, we’ve already decided, we do not need to talk about this again. Another one is not being conscious that you in a position of authority have the ability to easily distract others. And you probably can relate to this, because if you, your CEO, or even just your direct manager or your boss’s boss sends you an email or messages you on a collaboration tool and you see their name pop up, the chances are high that if you see it, that you’re going to move away from what you’re doing and you’re going to read that message and try to respond as soon as possible.

0:21:08 Ramona Shaw: And in very few situations is that actually what’s warranted. More often than not, the leader who sent the email or even called you or dropped that message, public dropped that message, just had an idea in the moment or a thought in a moment and wanted to communicate it. And there’s two things for you to realize as a leader. If you send messages, people will move away from whatever they were doing and they will read and try to respond to your message.

0:21:38 Ramona Shaw: So the more loose you are with when and through which channels you’re communicating, there’s a high potential that you’re wasting other people’s time. So two quick suggestions. Be very specific in your messages on whether or not this is urgent, like have some kind of language that says, hey, this is urgent, or please respond, saip or not urgent. I don’t need to respond until Friday or anytime. So be really clear in what you expect.

0:22:06 Ramona Shaw: And two, be mindful where and how you send this message. If you drop it into a public, let’s say Slack channel, where you have 20 people seeing it now, 20 eyeballs are going to go read your message because you’re in a person with authority and that has a ripple effect on their productivity. If really only two people needed to see that message, send it to two people, I have a funny story. This is long ago, maybe ten years ago or so, I was working at a company and I want to say there were maybe 500 people in that specific office.

0:22:44 Ramona Shaw: Everyone had access to the distribution list. You literally typed in DL, you know, main office, whatever, and the 500 people were part of that email. And it was raining pretty heavily outside and someone had the idea, just ask the entire office, 500 people, if they had a spare umbrella. And that email went out to every single person. And that person, while well intended, didn’t think much about it, but got roasted. The backlash from the executive team was really, really bad.

0:23:17 Ramona Shaw: And of course was one of those incidents that led to the DL being restricted. But that may sound like a funny incident and we’d be like, okay, yeah, you know, maybe don’t do that. It’s pretty obvious. But we do little stuff like this all the time. It pops in my head and then I think, oh, I need to send this email or I send this message and we may not consider what the effect is on the people receiving it. So I need to be clear on how urgent is it, if it can wait and if I can schedule the emails. It doesn’t arrive at 10:00 p.m.

0:23:52 Ramona Shaw: when I’m working on it, but it arrives at 08:00 in the morning. Do those things. And then anytime there’s multiple people looking at your email, just be aware of the side effect. Meetings is another obvious one. Meeting management gathering feedback on meetings is really important. I do recommend on a recurring basis, every three to six months, doing a meeting evaluation with your team to look at which meetings are green, we’re good to go. Keep them marking up meetings that are okay, but maybe too long or wrong. Audience mark them as orange.

0:24:24 Ramona Shaw: And then meetings that should not have been meetings should not be meetings. Put them on red. And every single person does that for a week or two. And then you come back and you reevaluate and you look at ways to optimize your meeting strategy, so to speak, and that will demonstrate that you really care about the people’s productivity and want it to be as good as possible. Another common one is the frequent changes of strategy.

0:24:48 Ramona Shaw: And that happens when you have a manager or a CEO or someone who is a visionary and who has a lot of great ideas and they have an idea. They had a conversation on a weekend with a buddy, a friend, a colleague, a peer, and they find that really inspiring. And they come back and on Monday they say, hey, I want to do this. And so immediately you’re pivoting from your priorities to whatever they were saying and changing course.

0:25:17 Ramona Shaw: And that may be justified every once in a while, but it can get really frustrating and turn into huge time sucks for employees who work with a leader who does this all the time. So be mindful how often you change strategy. And then another one is making offhand comments that you think are either totally irrelevant. You made a joke about something, or you observed something, or you made a suggestion or brought up an idea, but it’s not vetted. It was just meant to like add to the conversation.

0:25:46 Ramona Shaw: But because you are in a role or a position of authority, that now gets taken a lot more seriously and people will start to act on it. So if you’re not clear that this is an idea, no one should be acting on it. Your suggestions turn into directions. Your offhand comments turn into some serious comments that people will pay attention to going forward. There’s this famous story, and I forget which CEO this was, who made an offhand comment about the baked goods that the office team would bring into meetings. And they made a comment about blueberry muffins. And from then on out, in every meeting, there were always a ton of blueberry muffins.

0:26:24 Ramona Shaw: And this CEO didn’t register this for years until years later, they noticed this and called it out or said something and realized that that single comment that they made a few years prior was then leading to the office team constantly being concerned with making sure that there are blueberry muffins in the office, even if it was hard to get. So being really mindful of what you say, just noticing that that has more authority than you might give it to, and people will get off the meeting and run into different directions that you had no intention to.

0:26:54 Ramona Shaw: So those are some key ways that leaders waste employees times. But the main topic of this podcast episode was about how you can ensure that you’re spending your time on the right things. And I hope by pointing out some of the ways that we’re not misdirecting our time, that we’re misdirecting our attention, and how quickly that can happen, as well as the main questions to ask yourself to get clarity on your core priorities, that that was helpful.

0:27:24 Ramona Shaw: If you found this helpful and you have colleagues or friends that would benefit from hearing this as well, please share this along. And if you are enjoying the podcast and would be so kind to leave a review on any of your podcast platforms, that’s amazing. Algorithms love it. And that would help us reach more people in leadership roles and provide them with this weekly inspiration and food for thought.

0:27:47 Ramona Shaw: Thank you so much and I will be back with another episode of the manager track podcast next week. Bye for now.0:27:54 Ramona Shaw:  If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes my best selling book, the Confident, incompetent new manager, which you can find on Amazon or amonashaw.com book, and a free training on how to successfully lead as a new manager. You can check it out@ramonashaw.com masterclass these resources and a couple more youll find in the show notes down below.