Being a Slave to My Calendar Changed My Life
Managing your time and being able to execute effectively are critical skills for any manager or executive. So many people struggle with this and my clients often ask for advice on organizing their day and getting things done.
I used to struggle with this myself. However, I spent a lot of time studying productivity and efficiency through books and trial and error and one key takeaway from all this is the calendar. The calendar is the centerpiece of your productive day. If you are not constantly feeding and maintaining your calendar then you are missing out on the freedom it provides.
Freedom? How can having a strict calendar that you have to follow every day lead to freedom you ask? The answer is simple. If you are maintaining and controlling what activities occupy your day then you are exercising the freedom to choose what is important to you. Since you are creating the items in your calendar you are the one controlling what you do from day to day rather than someone else.
Here is how this works. Imagine for a moment that you do not actively maintain a calendar. And many of you may not have to imagine this at all. Monday morning comes around and you have four requests for meetings that day. You have nothing on your calendar so you feel like saying no would be hard to justify even though you really don’t need to go to two of them. They are scattered throughout the morning so you don’t get any significant block of time for any focused or deep work. So that new product idea you were researching and writing a proposal for will now have to wait another day. In between meetings your direct hires come to you with problems and questions for which they need your input and before you know it you are already past lunch and you have gotten nothing done that could be considered important to your own success or goals. Your email alerts are going off all morning and you are pulled into multiple discussions which again suck even more of your time in the morning away until you are sitting mid afternoon with a lower energy level because you skipped lunch and you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything.
Your boss comes to you in the afternoon because the meeting where you will be making the big presentation about your new product proposal has been pushed up to tomorrow. You have not had time to work on it this morning but you reassure your boss that it will be ready. You have a hard time focusing because you don’t do your best creative work in the afternoon and you are crashing from the snack you grabbed to keep your stomach from growling like a hungry grizzly. You are still being bombarded with emails that constantly pull your attention away from your work. Now you have to let your spouse know that you will not be home in time to see your daughter’s first dance recital and you are going to miss the family dinner where you get to reconnect after a long day at work.
Now imagine this alternative. The night before you sit down and spend about 15 minutes mapping out your next day. You block off 3 1/2 hours in the morning to complete your product proposal and mark your calendar as busy. As a result, when others are looking to create the meetings that day you show up as busy and they either move forward with the meetings you really didn’t need to be involved in or attempt to schedule the meetings later in the week when you are available. You create 30 minutes after that to review and respond to the morning’s emails and another two hours of open office time to direct your. employees with questions or problems that need your attention after lunch. You actually get a real lunch today since you blocked off an hour specifically to eat lunch and disconnect and recharge briefly. Your boss advises you of the presentation time change and you are completely prepared and confident about making your presentation earlier than expected. You created another block of 30 minutes towards the end of the day to again check emails and respond to anything that requires immediate attention, shut off your computer and you are out of there on time to see your daughter’s dance recital.
Freedom means you chose how to spend your day. With just a little planning you can double and triple your level of productivity and make sure you have time for what you really consider important.
How do you use your calendar? Post a reply with how your calendar helps you stay organized or if you have a different method I would love to hear about it.
Does Bad Language Make You a Better Leader
It always surprises me how often in board rooms, 1 on 1 discussions, trade shows and any other professional environment how much colorful language is thrown around as comfortably as if you were talking to your grandmother. Does using profanity in a professional environment help to drive home an emotional point or create a more tightly bonded team? Or does it make you look ignorant and aggressive as a leader?
Naturally there are two camps on this topic. Apparently there is research supporting controlled use of profanity and bad language to create a more cohesive team that better relates to itself. This does not necessarily mean constant foul language as this could lead to charges of a hostile work environment. Instead, allowing profanity to be part of an employee’s right of emotional expression. This camp also believes that forcing employees to “censor” themselves restricts free speech and creative energy since employees spend more energy “being careful” about what they say rather than just letting whatever creative energy exists flow freely.
The other camp regarding this thinks foul language is simply a filler, no different than the excessive use of “um” or “so”. It conveys a lack of fluidity in the english language and lowers an individual’s perceived maturity level. . It creates a hostile work environment and has no real place in a professional environment.
I feel like reality is somewhere in the middle for most of us. I tend towards the latter because I think profanity is simply wasted air. It conveys nothing additional that your other chosen words and energy level could not convey on their own. It adds nothing to the actual content you are expressing and does come across like filler words. And because these are “bad” words it is difficult to know how others you interact with will process them. Some may not care about the language used while others may find it offensive or find that it makes them uncomfortable. As a result you are automatically placing your position at a disadvantage depending on who is on the receiving end.
Don’t get me wrong…it is not that I never use bad language. I think the difference for me is that is far more of an exception than the norm. I often wince when I hear certain words when thrown around in casual conversation but have used those same words in an expression of pain or extreme frustration—usually with technology. The real question to answer is as a leader with people who look up to you and follow your lead, does profanity add value to your team as part of your leadership style?
What do you think? Leave a comment on how you think bad language either helps or hurts leaders and their teams.
3 Reasons Team Engagement Could Be Down and What You Can Do About It
Executives I work with often struggle with team engagement as one of their biggest yet most illusive problems. Often they view engagement as the responsibility of the employee and push for solutions that are centered around the employee. But in almost all cases of low employee engagement the cause can be linked directly to management style and practices.
This is not to say that those managers who struggle with employee engagement are bad managers. Often times they are not aware that some of their behaviors and stylistic approaches to solving problems create mixed signals or confusion to heir employees which can lead to disengagement. The fix can be as simple as understanding and observing these behaviors and replacing them with behaviors that encourage and inspire employee engagement. Here are three things that could be causing employee disengagement and some ideas to fix them.
- Inconsistency
This is probably one of the most frustrating engagement killers out there and it is so easy sometimes to get caught up in this because it has so many ways it can manifest. This can range from favoring certain employees whom you like over that problem employee who just always rubs you the wrong way to frequently changing the expectations, scope or deadlines of that project you have everyone working on diligently. This can also stem from excessive moodiness where employeees may not know how you will respond to problems from day to day or even inconsistency with constructive criticism and praise.
The solution to this is pretty simple, but not easy. Consistency is an important trait for any leader to have. It is what allows the people who report to you to know and understand your expectations and how they can succeed. Not knowing what is expected from your manager, seeing inconsistent attitudes towards others in the team as well as yourself and constantly changing projects, deadlines and work loads will keep an employee from fully engaging in their job.
- Micromanagement
I see this a lot with new managers or executives that were superior as a technology master but struggle when tasked to lead other technology employees. The thought of being more hands off on the actual completion of tasks and more in the business of directing and delegating is often unnatural to these brilliant technologists. They have spent their entire career improving their craft in order to move up and now everything they knew almost works against them. Often this leads to a certain level of insecurity and a desire to want to control outcomes of their direct reports. It is sometimes difficult to change from relying on yourself to succeed vs. your success being based around how well you can drive others to succeed. In my executive coaching practice I focus very heavily on this mental and professional shift in new executives and how to make this transition.
The solution here is to build and strengthen trust of your employees. Understand that everyone does things differently and that does not make it right or wrong. Be more focused on results rather than methods and provide guidance with the intent to have them succeed in their own way. There are many different paths that lead to success and you have only walked one of them.
- Distractions and burnout
I have included these two together because they can exist individually but usually one leads to and feeds the other.These particular issues have become more evident through the recent pandemic where many businesses were not only forced to downsize but also convert to a remote working environment. Now you have people working from home who may not have a private office area who are surrounded by an incredible amount of distractions and those same people are now having to pick up the slack for a smaller team size. Depression, alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide all increased during the pandemic and all this playing together pushed team engagement to a staggering low.
The solution here is for you to engage more with your employees. You need to take time to really get to know the people that work for you. Weekly 1 on 1 discussions to discuss problems, aspirations and goals helps to bring you a little closer to your employees so they feel like you are genuinely concerned about their well-being and success. Take the time to talk about hobbies, family, etc. if they are willing to open up to attempt to relate to them on a more personal level. Professional does not have to be completely devoid of personal. Understanding your employees more will help you to be a better leader and also a better professional advocate for them.
How is your team engagement? Do you feel you have a fully engaged team, or are you frustrated with their level of engagement. Post a reply in the comments and let us know.
Being Your Boss’s Bulldog
Trying to climb that proverbial corporate ladder can sometimes be tricky and full of unexpected surprises. One of the main allies you have in that journey can be your current boss. But what if your boss is a bully?
A coaching client was on the fast track to success and reached the position directly beneath the CEO and was even poised to step into that coveted CEO slot someday. But his boss the CEO was a bully and a tyrant. So now what?
In order to gain favor and avoid the wrath himself, he took to being his boss’s bulldog—in other words, he now became the bully and tyrant for his CEO. This worked beautifully for him for a while, until it all fell apart.
He was finally promoted to the CEO position after several years of being the bulldog and now he was absolutely hated. Even though he changed his attitude and dropped the bulldog mentality the damage had already been done. No one trusted him and his entire executive team had adopted the same kind of aggressive tendencies to their direct reports. In an effort to get to the top he had almost single-handedly destroyed the company.
I wanted to share two points regarding this client’s story. First, He was not inherently a bully but thought that would support his boss and therefore support his bid for the CEO chair—and it did. However, in the process he lost the support of everyone he would have needed in order to be successful in his new role.
Second, it takes a long time to repair the type of damage that was done in the company based on his attitude and behaviors. Even after a concerted outreach attempt to make nice with the other executives he was still not trusted and not much changed. It took him becoming vulnerable about his behavior and attitude and really opening up to some hard criticism and months of keeping ALL of his promises no matter how hard in order for his team to begin trusting him again.
Have you had a boss like this, or even been a boss like this? Share in the comments.
The monolithic team
How often do you use “them”, “they” or “my team” when referring to your team regarding a problem or concern, or even in praise? Is your team, for good or bad, a single entity or monolith?
In the very beginning of my leadership journey I used to refer to my direct hires this way—as a single unit. Even praise was considered “to the team”. This idea of collectivism I found very quickly was not only damaging to the overall morale of the team but often robbed the company of great and creative ideas.
Most people like the idea of being part of a team—belonging to something that allows them personal interactions at some level and the ability to accomplish more than what they could on their own. But people also want to feel they contribute a part of themselves to the team dynamic. Promoting “group think” or the idea that everyone needs to come together to the same conclusion to move ideas forward can leave your team members feeling unappreciated and unimportant, but can also squash the flow of creative ideas and innovation.
Some of this may sound like common sense, but it manifests itself in several subtle ways that you might not be aware of. For example, do you consider not only an employee’s skillset when handing out an assignment, but also their work preferences? From my own engineering perspective, I have developers who hate doing user interface and graphics work and others who enjoy it. By knowing the type of work your employees like to do you are able to provide them with more rewarding projects and assignments. And while we are on this topic of knowing your employees, have you ever even asked them what they enjoy most and what they enjoy the least? Have you taken the time to understand their motivations and how you can best relate to them?
The same is true when recognizing accomplishments and praising your direct reports. As a new leader I never took credit for any of my team’s successes but I also never gave it to them as individuals. In a way this was like I was taking the credit myself as “my team’s” success. Once I realized that this was actually a selfish and spotlight stealing attitude, I started shifting recognition to individuals who made the difference. If someone really made the extra effort and drove a project over the finish line ahead of schedule or under budget then they were always specifically named in the executive meetings to ensure not only the proper credit was given but also so the leadership team started to hear the names of the superstars over and over. Not only did the individual team members appreciate the recognition but it also set them up for professional growth and advancement.
In conclusion, it can sometimes be easy to think of those who report to you as a monolithic group to which a one size fits all solution can be applied to any aspect of the team dynamic. There is a fine line between recognizing each team member individually and losing the overall corporate vision and collective strategy, but it is a line that is worth scrutinizing. Often some of the best creativity, innovation and team development exists on
this line
What are your thoughts? Do you sometimes catch yourself doing this? Post a reply in the comments and let us know your team story.
The Magic Mute Button
Every now and then I go on a rant about something that just drives me crazy. Before I got into management and leadership I used to look up to management like a bunch of people who were really successful because they displayed the qualities of maturity, organization and emotional control. When I actually made it to the executive suite myself I began to realize that a lot of these people were successful DESPITE having none of these qualities.
This fact is on full display in conference calls. It amazes me to this day what people will do during a conference call when everyone can hear them but not see them. All it takes is a quick tap of the mute button and all this background goes away.Instead I hear some of the following insanity. Tell me if any of these sound familiar:
- The classic “peeing” sound while using the bathroom
- Washing dishes while the CEO is trying to hear department status updates
- Chewing and burping while providing your status update
- Background sounds that sounded like pornography playing on the TV
- Loud radios and constant turn signals
- Loud background talking and constant arrival and departure updates from an airport
- Screaming kids or barking dogs
I have personally experienced every item on this list. It is one thing You may not always be able to hit mute before a screaming child or dog bark or a loud background noise, but awareness of your own surroundings should tell you you are bringing a lot of noise into a meeting and the mute button might be a good idea.
This has gotten worse with COVID and people who are not used to having telephone conferences are now in them all the time. Even in video conferences when people should realize they are being watched they are not paying attention to the speaker, spinning in their chairs and doing otherwise distracting things in a professional meeting.
In. my opinion, executives SHOULD demonstrate qualities of maturity , organization and emotional control as true leaders. Every one of your direct hires and coworkers watches you for cues on how to behave. What example are you setting?
What are some of the craziest things you have heard or seen in a conference call? Leave a reply and share.
Did the Pandemic Change How We Sleep
The concept of napping has actually began to gain momentum as a legitimate practice for highly effective and productive people. It wasn’t long ago that it was considered a practice for elderly retired people and some highly progressive tech companies like Google. However, with the pandemic changing the way we think of our work day the practice of napping, either power napping or even what is referred to as poly-phasic sleeping has garnered more attention.
There are numerous studies that reinforce the importance of good healthy sleep. I was surprised to see however, the number of studies that support some form of regenerative napping during the day. The famous “power nap” is one practice wherein someone rests just long enough NOT to enter REM sleep—usually 20 minutes or so. I have heard of the “key method” of power napping where executives would lay on their office couch with their arm extended off the side with their keys in their hand. When they got to the point of entering REM sleep and the body begins to twitch slightly they drop the keys on the ground and the noise wakes them from sleep. However you manage to wake up, this type of short nap has been shown to increase awareness and reduce signs of fatigue.
A different concept I have recently been exposed to is the concept of phasic sleeping. A normal 8 hours of sleep in one session is called monophasic—a single sleep phase that encompasses all the sleep you will get for a 24 hour period. Bi-phasic sleep sessions are split into two periods. One type of bi-phasic sleep essentially models the siesta concept in many latin countries—the idea that you get a large block of sleep at night for about 4 to 6 hours and then an additional 90 minutes during the afternoon when chemicals in the brain tend to trigger more fatigue. Another form of bi-phasic sleeping is going to bed earlier at around 10pm and sleeping until about 2am. You would then wake up for about 2 to 3 hours and then return to sleep for another 2 to 3 hours. The latter is geared towards those people who tend to wake at around 1am to 2am and are always restless for a time but then fall into deep sleep again around 5am.
A more unique practice is the poly-phasic sleep schedules. These usually include a larger block of sleep at night for around 4 hours and then numerous 20 to 30 minute naps throughout the day and possibly one more larger block for 1 to 2 hours. There are multiple ways to schedule poly-phasic sleeping depending on your work and home schedule and many other personal factors.
Researchers point out in many of these studies that the bi-phasic and poly-phasic sleep models more naturally coincide with physiological patterns that have been in our DNA since we were hunter/gatherers. The introduction of artificial light began to move people towards the monophasic style of sleep. For those who actually have sleep disorders these types of phasic alternatives could help with treatment.
Why am I so fascinated with sleep? When any executive has productivity or efficiency issues one of the things I would discuss with them is how they are sleeping. A lack of good quality sleep is an absolute productivity killer and the majority of the population cannot function on 4 hours of sleep every night. But for those who can factor in one of these alternative phasic sleep schedules they may be able to counteract some of the damage they are doing by only getting 4 hours of sleep every night.
What is your sleeping schedule like? Have you ever tried one of these alternative poly-phasic sleep patterns? Leave a reply in the comments and let us know how your sleep schedule works for you and if you would be willing to try one of these alternatives.