Leaders: 4 Simple Ways You Can Manage Your Time And Engage Your Team
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Time management is invaluable to being a highly effective leader. The biggest challenge new leaders often face is knowing how to manage their day-to-day while showing up for their team. In an effort to prove themselves, new leaders will take on more than they can handle and assume their team is capable of fully functioning without them.
Not only does this hurt the morale of the team, but it also creates a poor client experience due to misaligned communication and growing resentment from neglected employees. Most leaders struggle to find a delicate balance between their daily demands and their team. Aaron Schmookler, cofounder and trainer at The Yes Works, said “if you’re trying to balance one against the other, you’ll always feel spread thin, and you’ll likely feel that you’re doing a poor job at both.”
It’s no secret that employees are an organization’s greatest asset. Disgruntled, neglected and unhappy employees ultimately contribute to poor client experiences. When clients don’t get the results they deserve, businesses begin to crumble.
Here are four simple ways new leaders can better manage their time and keep their team engaged.
Nurture Your Team With Time Blocking
Highly effective leaders understand the importance of making time for their team. When leaders aren’t proactive in scheduling time for their employees, they allow other things, such as emails, busy work or meeting requests to consume their day. Subsequently, they become inconsistently available to their team making them appear unreliable and disconnected. When employees feel neglected, they lose motivation, lack direction and disengage from the team. In turn, their productivity decreases and they lose loyalty and trust in their leader.
Andrew Cabasso, cofounder of Offsprout and Postaga said “the best thing you can do for your team is to block off time for them.” The more a leader shows up for their team and remains dedicated to their employee and team commitments, the more employees will feel motivated to do their best work. Consistency is key. Karl Sakas, agency consultant of Sakas & Company, emphasized the importance of not “skipping or rescheduling one-on-one meetings. If you do that regularly, you're telling your employees that they aren't important to you.”
The age-old mantra of “the customer comes first” is often misconstrued to mean clients are more important than employees. What’s often forgotten is, the employee experience dictates the client experience. Sacha Ferrandi, founder and principal of Texas Hard Money, shared “client communication is important but internal communication is what makes your team stronger and facilitates productivity.”
Maximize Productivity With An Intentional Mindset
Failing to plan for the week ahead creates time-poor leaders who lose their week to too many priorities, wasted time and a lack of self-discipline. The most productive and successful leaders in business start the week by reviewing their calendar and making a strategic plan for the week ahead.
Contrary to popular belief, ending a meeting early does not mean the meeting wasn’t productive. Too often, leaders will drag meetings out until their scheduled ending so they appear busy. However, research published in Sage Journals revealed ineffective meetings in the U.S. cost organizations $213 billion per year. Additional research found a third of meetings aren’t productive. This is due to tardiness, a lack of an agenda, the conversation straying from the topic and dragging meetings out longer than necessary.
To get the most out of meetings, leaders should prepare an agenda and send it to the team in advance so employees will know what’s expected of them. Otherwise, they’ll spend their time during the meeting trying to figure out what they should contribute. As such, distracted employees leave meetings without knowing what’s required of them.
Build Healthy Habits And Set Firm Boundaries
According to a McKinsey analysis, on average, professionals spend an estimated 28% of their workweek managing email. Harvard Business Review broke this down further by revealing “professionals check their email 15 times per day or every 37 minutes.” Research found when interrupted, such as a break to check email, it takes workers up to 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully recover and be productive again.
Emails aren’t the only things people lose their time to. Many also become distracted by the notifications from Slack, social media or text alerts. As a result, they’re unable to devote their full attention to the task at hand. Leaders can start by blocking off 20-30 minutes first thing in the morning to check and respond to emails that can be answered quickly and flagging those that require a more thorough follow-up. Kent Lewis, president and founder of Anvil Media, Inc., shared “the secret is responding quickly even if it’s only to acknowledge receipt.”
To break the habit of over-checking email and losing time to distractions, leaders can set parameters around how often they check their email, Slack or other applications. The key is setting an expectation and communicating to employees what a typical response time will be as well as how to reach them if something requires immediate attention.
Commit To Your Employee’s Development By Delegating
Productive leaders delegate the tasks that keep them from focusing on their priorities. Dr. Bina Patel, CEO of Conflict Resolution Centers, said “every manager should understand the talent and capacity of each individual on their team.” She explained “by knowing an individual’s strengths, managers can assign tasks accordingly.”
Will Craig, founder and director of LeaseFetcher, said “sharing the load means that I have the time and energy to make sure my team has everything they need from me, and it helps my team learn how to effectively deal with clients, and make sure they’re happy.” A common mistake most leaders unintentionally make is they’ll end up micromanaging instead of trusting the employee to carry out the tasks themselves.
Alternatively, sometimes leaders avoid delegating because the amount of time it would take to explain and train an employee on a task takes longer than if they just did it themselves. However, team members are then deprived of gaining new skills and taking ownership of tasks. To prevent this, leaders should keep communication ongoing so they’re aware of the employees progress and challenges and can offer them support where they sit fit. Likewise, should similar situations arise, employees are already comfortable and confident in handling them. The dual benefit of delegating is employees are challenged with increased responsibility while leaders then have more time for their team.