7 minutes
Every manager is trying to get themselves and their team to be more productive. It’s one of the Great Measures of our corporate lives, isn’t it?
The slippery slope is that it’s easy to muddle up “productive” with “busy” or “efficient,” as if busy were some sort of useful marker and as if efficiency was all that matters.
I know you know that intellectually, but let me give you a little test:
You walk past one cubicle and you see someone looking intently at their computer and typing with purpose.
You walk past another, and the person is sitting back, feet on desk and staring up at the ceiling.
What are the judgments you make about that situation?
I know EXACTLY where I go. One’s working hard. And one’s slacking off.
But productivity is all about working smartly on the right stuff. And as you well know, our organizations are too full of people working inefficiently on the wrong stuff. Or to put it differently, how do you work on the perfect mix of Good Work and Great Work?
So let me suggest some approaches that might increase your productivity as a manager.
Escape the Routine
1. Dodge busy
Every morning you hear it, don’t you? The call of your inbox.
“Come here…”
“Answer me…”
“Of course doing email is priority work…”
And before you know it, you’re sucked into the vortex. It’s all too easy to be chained to your laptop, tied to your desk, locked into meetings and imprisoned within your business unit.
These are comfortable handcuffs we put on ourselves – what William Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles.”
Productivity is doing some things regularly and efficiently, that much is absolutely true. But productivity also requires you to see where busy-work has snuck in and taken the place of your Good Work and your Great Work.
Routine can serve you and it can crush you. If you were to do one thing differently, I’d suggest you stop checking email as your first action. Not only does it lock you into Good Work mode, but it uses up precious neo-cortex brain energy that you could and should be using on different things.
Spend the first hour of your work doing 10 minutes planning of the day ahead and 50 minutes thinking-work time, whatever that might be for you. (And I promise you, it’s not ripping through email.
The question that will help you: “Of all the things I could do right now, what would best move me towards my goal?”
2. Infect others
Managers are used to thinking up (“What do my bosses want?”) and down (“What does my team need?”).
Those are useful questions to ask, but at times it can feel like those are the only two places to look. But try moving horizontally rather than vertically.
- Go visit your colleagues and peers.
- Go see what’s happening in the less obvious places.
- Build relationships with some of the unusual suspects.
Cool stuff happens when you start heading off at a different angle. You get to build influence, uncover new resources, see in advance political traps and find out the cool stuff that’s happening in all the nooks and crannies.
Go with the intention of cross-fertilizing, sharing not just what you know about you, but what you know about what others have to offer. You’re like this awesome dating service, just without the cheesy ads.
The question that will help you: “Hey X – what’s the coolest thing you’re working on right now?”
Get Strategic
3. Get inside your boss’s head.
“Would it be useful,” he asks rhetorically, “if you really knew what you boss cared about?”
That’s not to say you have to necessarily do exactly what you think matters to your boss. After all, a healthy percentage of them are insane.
But you do at least want to be mindful as to what they’re thinking about, so you can be clear on the choices you’re making.
And I would suggest that most of us are basing a lot of what we do on misinformation and assumption:
Sometimes you’re running “old tapes” and what you think matters is out of date.
Sommetimes you’re doing CSI badly, and creating poor hypotheses based on limited evidence.
Sometimes you believe that what they say matters is actually the thing that matters.
Sometimes you think (and they think) that a list of 100 things is a prioritized list.
Sometimes they don’t have a clue what matters to them, so you’re operating in a vacuum.
In short, it’s a tricky business to get to what some call “The vital few rather than the trivial many.”
The question that will help you: “Can I just check—is this the most valuable thing I can be working on right now?”
4. Fire bullets
Jim Collins, the author of the fabulous book Great by Choice, is a master at metaphor—and attaching common sense to hard data.
One of the things he uncovers about his “10x-ers” (those business leader who create extraordinary results) is that they’re LESS innovative than their competitors. Not they’re not innovative, far from it. But that they have a different approach to innovating.
Rather than seeing what they think is the big opportunity and going “all in,” they “fire bullets”— they prototype rapidly and try out small experiments to figure out what might actually work, before they commit fully to the idea.
- Do some smart dabbling.
- Tell as few people about it as possible.
- Don’t do an official launch.
- Spin some plates, knowing that you’re going to let a few break.
Until you commit. And then, commit.
The question that will help you: “What would a pilot look like?”
Find Time
5. Skip meetings
Life-sucking, time-crushing, energy-depleting vampires.
And these are just the meetings you run.
Meetings are so often the default answer to whatever the question is.
And am I right in thinking that your calendar is set to accept every meeting invitation you’re offered?
What if your default answer to any meeting request was No instead of Yes?
And as a bridge to No…
- Can you do it by email?
- Can you send someone else?
- Can you get the minutes?
- Can you attend just part of it?
The question that will help you: “What’s the better alternative to holding this meeting?”
But sometimes, you’ve just got to go, and if you do…
6. Make meetings awesome.
As a manager, you can’t skip every meeting. And not all meetings are bad. So which meetings must you go to? And how do you make them AWESOME?
Start by figuring out which meetings you actually look forward to. Who does good meeting that you know of? And what do you think the secret of their success might be?
Then get to the heart of what’s essential for this meeting. What’s the non-negotiable in terms of outcomes you need? (Might be worth checking you still need a meeting at this point.)
Finally, rock the basics.
- Have to have an agenda.
- Have to show up prepared.
- Have to have a good reason for being there.
- Insist on decisions.
- Record the actions agreed.
Make the call when any of the above isn’t happening.
The question that will help you: “What drains the energy in this meeting?”
Michael Bungay Stanier is the senior partner and founder of Box of Crayons, a company that gives busy managers the tools to coach in 10 minutes or less.
He is also the author of a number of books, and the one he is best known for, with 90,000 copies sold, is Do More Great Work. His latest book, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, is a Wall Street Journal best seller and has been endorsed by people such as Dan Pink, Brené Brown and David Allen.
This content appeared first on the Box of Crayons blog. It is reused with permission.
