September 2020 Newsletter Manage Your Time…Organize Your Brain

Since many of us are no longer commuting, I have noticed that many of our work day schedules are now back to back meetings. Our individual work tasks are focused upon whenever we have “time.” And we have other priorities as we work virtually— attending to children and their needs…and myriad other distractions throughout our day. Please check out Julie Morgenstern’s wonderful tips from her book, Never Check Your Email in the Morning. It may save your brain from burnout and overload! And you might be able to create some team agreements about when you have meetings and when you don’t!

Julie Morgenstern Tips on Time Management

Grouping Similar Tasks

Every day, you face a myriad of choices about your daily to-dos. There are things you have to do, things you want to do, and things other people ask you to do. Tasks for work, family, self, and friends. Tasks that require mental concentration, physical strength, charm, creativity, or diplomacy. When looking at a long list of to-dos, it can be tempting to dive right in, starting at the top and knocking them out as they come at you. But don’t. Take a moment to sort through them to ensure you approach your day efficiently.

In an organized closet, you stretch space by grouping similar items. The same is true of your to-dos. Grouping similar tasks (i.e., batching calls, errands, paperwork, creative activities, interaction with others) helps you get more time out of your day because you gain efficiency and momentum as you repeat each action. For example, when paying bills, it makes sense to balance your checkbook at the same time, because you already have the “financial” part of your brain open. Batching phone calls saves time too. With your sales or social “hat” on, you get more clear and concise with each call. If you have several letters to write, it’s more efficient to blast through them sequentially than switch to financial activities in between.

Beware Multitasking

Studies have shown that it takes your brain four times longer to recognize and process each thing you’re working on when you switch back and forth among tasks. This means that if your day is a random free-for-all in which you hop from task to task, your work will literally take much longer because of the real time you lose switching gears.

Think about it: If it takes you 10 minutes to get oriented to a new task every time you switch gears, and you switch gears 10 times a day, that’s over 1.5 hours of wasted time. Not only does multitasking have a quantitative impact on your day, it can also damage the quality of your work. Science journals have determined that managing two mental tasks at the same time significantly reduces the brainpower available to concentrate on either one, ultimately damaging the quality of your final product. Severe multitaskers experience a variety of symptoms, including short-term memory loss, gaps in their attentiveness, and a general inability to concentrate.

Start in the middle. If it’s hard to get started on a project at the beginning, try jumping to the second or third step to ease into the water. For example, when writing a letter, the opening paragraph may be the most difficult. If you’re stuck, try jumping to the body of the letter, outlining the bullets you want to cover first. Get that out of the way, and the introduction may come easier. Focus on the payoff. By taking your eye off the particular task and focusing on the happiness and success you’ll gain from completion, you can often keep yourself moving forward. For example, when filling out expense forms, think about what you will buy with the reimbursement.

Set time limits on difficult tasks. Setting aside either too much time-or not enough time-can make you procrastinate. Setting aside an hour to do expense reports? Minimize the torture by shrinking it down to 30 minutes and get as far as you can. Trying to plan a holiday event in 30 minutes and can’t get started? Try giving yourself an hour and see if that does the trick.

Conquer Interruptions

Studies show that when you are interrupted, it takes 20 minutes to regain the level of concentration you had reached before the disruption. Furthermore, in nearly 50 percent of the cases, a person never even returns to the original task.

Track yourself for a week or two. Use the Tracker section of your daily pages to learn who is likely to interrupt you and why. Understand your own proclivity to be railroaded by someone who bursts into your office begging for help or that tendency to reach for the phone every time it rings. Each time you are interrupted, note the time, who it was, what they needed from you, and how long it took. Then, grade the importance and urgency of the interruption: A = critical and urgent; B = important but not urgent; C = unnecessary and not worth the time. At the end of the week, study your log to determine the average time lost to interruptions each day, giving special focus to A- and B-level interruptions. If the average time totals up to two hours of important and necessary interruptions a day, you need to start planning for them. In this case, you’d reserve two hours of open time in your daily schedule and use the rest of the day for planned tasks.

A powerful way to minimize the time lost to switching gears all day long is the grouping of similar kinds of tasks. The pattern can be as simple as paperwork in the morning and calls in the afternoon or quiet work in the morning and interactive activities in the afternoon. Or, you could organize your day around your core responsibilities, setting aside two hours for creative work, one hour for financial tasks, and five hours for people management every day. If you were in business for yourself and had complete control over your schedule, you could devote one day to administrative tasks, one day to marketing, and three days to client service.

Use the following strategies to prevent unnecessary interruptions:

· Choose two or three people who can interrupt you at any time. Make a short list of key people whose interruptions you will always take, no matter what you are doing. Defer everyone else to a better time.

· Always ask how long it will take. Every time you’re interrupted, ask how long the person needs (15 minutes? 45?). Tell them you want to know so that you can provide the focus and attention they really deserve. Holding people accountable to the time they ask for helps them be more efficient too.

· Begin the conversation with “What can I do for you?” not “How are you?” “How are you?” is an open invitation to chat. “What can I do for you?” immediately focuses your interrupter on getting straight to the point.

All the shifts a functional leader must make when first becoming an executive involve learning new skills and cultivating new mind-sets.

Shifting from Left Brained to Right Brained Mind Sets

For the most part, the seven shifts below involve switching from left-brain, analytical thinking to right-brain conceptual mind-sets. But that doesn’t mean you never spend time on tactics or on functional concerns. It’s just that you spend far, far less time on those responsibilities than you used to in your previous roles. In fact, it’s often helpful for you to engage someone else—a chief of staff, a chief operating officer, or a project manager—to focus on execution, as a way to free up time for your new role.

Here are the shifts and what each requires you to do to transform from a functional leader to an executive:

 Specialist to Generalist

You will need to understand the mental models, tools, and terms used in key business functions and develop templates for evaluating the leaders of those functions.

How to do this: The immediate challenge will be shifting from leading a single function to overseeing the full set of business functions. At first, you may feel disoriented and less confident in your ability to make good judgments. You may fall into a classic trap—over managing the function you know well and undermanaging the others. You may have a tendency to stay in your functional comfort zone as an understandable reaction to the stresses of moving up to a much broader role. It would be wonderful if newly appointed executives were world-class experts in all business functions, but of course they never are. In some instances they have gained experience by rotating through various functions or working on cross-functional projects, which certainly helps. But the reality is that the move to executive leadership always requires executives who’ve been specialists to quickly turn into generalists who know enough about all the functions to run their businesses.

How to Develop Strong Enterprise Leaders

Analyst to Integrator

You will integrate the collective knowledge of cross-functional teams and make appropriate trade-offs to solve complex organizational problems.

How to do this: The primary responsibility of functional leaders is to recruit, develop, and manage people who focus in analytical depth on specific business activities. An executive leader’s job is to manage and integrate the collective knowledge of those functional teams to solve important organizational problems. This is tough at first as you seek to address the many competing demands of the business. You will be expected to balance the needs of the supply side of the business (operations) with those of its demand side (sales and marketing), to know when to focus on the quarterly business results (finance) and when to invest in the future (R&D), to decide how much attention to devote to execution and how much to innovation, and to make many other such calls. Once again, executives need general knowledge of the various functions to resolve such competing issues, but that isn’t enough. The skills required have less to do with analysis and more to do with understanding how to make trade-offs and explain the rationale for those decisions. Here, too, previous experience with cross-functional or new-product development teams would stand newly minted executive leaders in good stead, as would a previous apprenticeship as a chief of staff to a senior executive.

Tactician to Strategist

You will need to shift fluidly between the details and the larger picture, perceive important patterns in complex environments, and anticipate and influence the reactions of key external players.

How do tactically strong leaders learn to develop a strategic mind-set? By cultivating three skills: level shifting, pattern recognition, and mental simulation. Level shifting is the ability to move fluidly among levels of analysis—to know when to focus on the details, when to focus on the big picture, and how the two relate. Pattern recognition is the ability to discern important causal relationships and other significant patterns in a complex business and its environment—that is, to separate the signal from the noise. Mental simulation is the ability to anticipate how outside parties (competitors, regulators, the media, key members of the public) will respond to what you do, to predict their actions and reactions in order to define the best course to take. Are strategic thinkers born or made? The answer is both. There’s no doubt that strategic thinking, like any other skill, can be improved with training. But the ability to shift through different levels of analysis, recognize patterns, and construct mental models requires some natural propensity. One of the paradoxes of leadership development is that people earn promotions to senior functional levels predominantly by being good at blocking and tackling, but employees with strategic talent may struggle at lower levels because they focus less on the details. Darwinian forces can winnow strategic thinkers out of the developmental pipeline too soon if companies don’t adopt explicit policies to identify and to some degree protect them in their early careers.

Bricklayer to Architect

You must understand how to analyze and design organizational systems so that strategy, structure, operating models, and skill bases fit together effectively and efficiently, and harness this understanding to make needed organizational changes.

How to do this: Too often, senior executives dabble in the profession of organizational design without a license—and end up committing malpractice. They come into their first business unit-level role itching to make their mark and then target elements of the organization that seem relatively easy to change, like strategy or structure, without completely understanding the effect their moves will have on the organization as a whole. As you move up to the business unit level, you become responsible for designing and altering the architecture of their organization—its strategy, structure, processes, and skill bases. To be effective organizational architects, you need to think in terms of systems. You must understand how the key elements of the organization fit together and not naively believe that you can alter one element without thinking through the implications for all the others. You need to know the principles of organizational change and change management, including the mechanics of organizational design, business process improvement, and transition management. Yet few rising executives get any formal training in these domains, leaving most of them ill equipped to be the architects of their organizations—or even to be educated consumers of the work of organizational development professionals. If companies have invested in sending them to executive education programs that teach organizational change, they’ll be better prepared for this shift.

You need to evaluate the work of all your functional executives, not just those in the same area you came from. A simple template that systematically lists the most important metrics to track for a particular function, as well as which ones indicate trouble is brewing, will help you get up to speed. Here is an example of a template to use:

Core Performance Metrics

Execution against business plan commitments

People Management Metrics

Turnover rate

Rate of internal promotions and strength of internal succession pipeline

Number of regrettable employee losses and the reasons for them

Success in recruiting and selection

Customer Metrics

Customer satisfaction and retention rates

Warning Signs

Regrettable losses of personnel

Flattening or declining sales

Lack of internal development for future leaders

Internal promotions with poor results

Inability to communicate product advantages and disadvantages

Poor assessment of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses

Lack of time in the field or interactions with customers

Lack of partnering skills with other key functions

Problem Solver to Agenda Setter

You will need to be able to define the problems the organization should focus on, and spot issues that don’t fall neatly into any one function but are still important.

How to do this: Many managers are promoted to senior levels on the strength of their ability to fix problems. When you become an executive however, you must focus less on solving problems and more on defining which problems the organization should be tackling. You need to perceive the full range of opportunities and threats facing the business, and focus the attention of the team on only the most important ones. You need to identify the “white spaces”—issues that don’t fall neatly into any one function but are still important to the business. The number of concerns can be head-spinning by the scope and complexity of some of the problems at this higher level of the business. It is tough to know how to allocate time and immediately not feel overloaded. The skills you hone as a functional leader—for example, mastery of sales and marketing tools and techniques, organizational know-how, and even the ability to mobilize talent and promote teamwork—are not enough. To work out which problems the team should focus on—that is, to set the agenda—you have to learn to navigate a far more uncertain and ambiguous environment than you are used to. You also need to learn to communicate priorities in ways the organization can respond to.

 Warrior to Diplomat

You will proactively shape the environment in which the business operates by influencing key external constituencies, including the public domain, NGOs, the media, and investors.

How to do this: Executives devote a surprising amount of time to influencing a host of external constituencies, including regulators, the media, investors, and NGOs. Your support staff will be bombarded with requests for your time: public forums sponsored by the public affairs departments? Interviewing with an editor from a leading business publication? Meeting with a key group of institutional investors? Some of this you may be familiar with; others not so much. What will be new is the responsibility not just to interact with various stakeholders but also to proactively address their concerns in ways that mesh with the organization’s interests. What will you do as an effective corporate diplomat? You will use the tools of diplomacy—negotiation, persuasion, conflict management, and alliance building—to shape the external business environment to support their strategic objectives. In the process you will often find yourself collaborating with people with whom you compete aggressively in the market every day. To do this well, you will need to embrace a new mind-set—to look for ways that interests can or do align, understand how decisions are made in different kinds of organizations, and develop effective strategies for influencing others. You must also understand how to recruit and manage employees of a kind that you have probably never supervised before: such as professionals in key supporting functions such as government relations and corporate communications. And you must recognize that these employees’ initiatives have longer horizons than the ongoing business, with its focus on quarterly or even annual results, does.

Supporting Cast Member to Lead Role

You must the right behaviors as a role model for the organization and learn to communicate with and inspire large groups of people both directly and, increasingly, indirectly.

How to do this: Becoming an executive means moving to center stage under the bright lights. The intensity of the attention and the almost constant need to keep up your guard can catch you by surprise. You will be shocked to discover how much stock people place in what you say or do. In part, this shift is about having a much greater impact as a role model. Managers at all levels are role models to some degree. But at the executive level, your influence is magnified, as everyone looks to you for vision, inspiration, and cues about the “right” behaviors and attitudes. For good or ill, the personal styles and quirks of senior leaders are infectious, whether they are observed directly by employees or indirectly transmitted from their reports to the level below and on down through the organization. This effect can’t really be avoided, but you can make it less inadvertent by cultivating more self-awareness and taking the time to develop empathy with subordinates’ viewpoints. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that you were the subordinate, drawing these kinds of inferences from your own bosses’ behavior! Then there is the question of what it means, practically speaking, to lead large groups of people—how to define a compelling vision and share it in an inspiring way. Instead of you communicating the vision to the organization, you will have to work more through your direct reports and find other channels, such as video, for spreading the word. And after touring most of your business unit’s facilities, you may be worried that you will never really be able to figure out what is happening on the front lines. So rather than meet just with leaders when you make site visits, you might instituted brown-bag lunches with small groups of frontline employees and tune in to online discussion groups in which employees comment on the company.

Hi there

You know those “negative voices” in your head? The ones that tell you that you “aren’t good enough, that you will mess this up, and on and on and on?” Well, according to Michael Singer from this book The Untethered Soul, you are the listener of those voices…those voices are not you!

A way for you to notice and name those voices in your head is to take the Positive Intelligence and Saboteur Assessments. I have included the link for you to access them at the end of this post. I was fortunate enough to take part in this program recently, and I highly recommend the book Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine.  Here are excerpts from the book:

High positive Intelligence means your mind acts as your friend far more than as your enemy. Low positive intelligence is the reverse. Positive Intelligence is therefore an indication of the control you have over your own mind and how well your minds acts in your best interest.

By taking the assessments, you will learn about your saboteurs that get in the way of your mind working in your best interest. Here are the top “negative voices in your head” you will learn about:

Judge: the master saboteur that everyone suffers from. You constantly find fault with yourself and others and everything.

Avoider: You avoid difficult and unpleasant tasks.

Controller: You need to take charge of everything and experience high anxiety and impatience when you cannot.

Hyper-Achiever: You depend on constant high performance and achievement for self-respect and self-validation.

Hyper-Rational: You may focus so much on the rational that you become impatient with people’s emotions.

Hyper-Vigilant: You may feel intense and continuous anxiety about all of the dangers surrounding you and what could go wrong.

Pleaser: You are compelled to gain acceptance by helping, pleasing, recuing, or flattering others constantly.

Restless: You are constantly in search of greater excitement in the next activity or through perpetual business.

Stickler: You have a need for perfection, order, and organization taken too far.

Victim: You feel emotional and temperamental in order to gain attention and affection.

To rid yourself of these voices, you instead need to learn to listen to your sage: the deepest and wisest part of you. It is this part of you that can rise above the fray and resist getting carried away by the drama and the tension of the moment or the saboteurs’ voices in your head.

The top five sage powers are:

Explore with great curiosity and an open mind. (My favorite).

Empathize with yourself and others, bringing compassion and understanding to any situation.

Innovating and creating new perspectives.

Navigating and choosing a path that best aligns with your values and mission

Activating by taking decisive actions without the chatter of your negative voice or the saboteurs.

And my own: sense of humor and not taking yourself so seriously

Finally, reconfigure your brain through somatic PQ activities like wiggling your toes, or rubbing your index and thumb fingers together to feel the fingerprint ridges, or deep breathing for ten seconds. I know it sounds odd, but by doing these simple hacks, you are rewiring your brain to not listen to those negative voices and instead intentionally call upon your sage voices to be your best self.

Here is the link to take the PQ Assessment as well as the Saboteur Assessment. And here is my shameless marketing: let me know if you want to do a PQ Team Building Process virtually…it is a total blast.

www.positiveintelligence.com

When despair grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting for their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Wendell Berry

 

May your holiday be peaceful and may you rest in the grace of the world.

 

Lynne Brown

Many clients are challenged in how best to communicate with their team members now. Many team members are also challenged because they feel “out of touch” with their leaders. Here are some excellent communication ideas for you from Kim Scott’s Radical Candor.  Remember: one of your most important roles as a leader is to communicate…especially during your current virtual working environment. In order to do this, you need to schedule time to do so…through meetings, 1:1’s, virtually “walking around” …so that you also have time to think and execute.

Schedule 1:1 Conversations

(25 minutes/week for direct reports and 25 minutes/month for all team members).

Note: If you have many team members, schedule these 1:1 Conversations quarterly. Team members will be more candid in 1:1’s than in “coffees” or “breakfasts.”

• Have team members create their own agenda on what they want to talk to you about. It is not your meeting. It is theirs.
• You as a leader listen. Team members should do most of the talking in these meetings.
• You ask them what is working and what is not, seek to understand the direction they are going in and what is blocking them from getting there.
• You ask them, “Is there anything I could do or stop doing to make your work easier?
• Do not cancel these 1:1’s. These need to be a “sacred” part of the work you do as a leader. You will lose trust with your team if you schedule and then cancel.
• Do not use these meetings to give them criticism. (If you need to criticize them, do it in real time in a separate, brief, timely interaction.)
• You are failing as a leader if team members do not have an agenda to talk to you about, or only give you updates, or only give you good news, or give you no criticism.

Weekly Staff Meetings (60 minutes)

• Review how things have gone the previous week.
• Share important updates with one another.
• Clarify most important decision discussions or debate discussions that need to occur that week

Agenda is as follows:

• Learn:(20 minutes)
• Review key metrics on a Dashboard Where Key Metrics are delineated and updated. if you do not have one…create one…” we treasure what we measure”.
• Ask what went well and why; what did not and why?
• Listen:(15 minutes)
• Have each team member write 3 to 5 snippets (brief updates) from what they did last week on a piece of paper. (5-7 minutes).
• Make sure everyone has a chance to read everyone else’s updates (8 minutes)
• Note: right now you are probably having virtual meetings: have team members send their snippets out ahead of time to all team members for their review.
• Ask if there are any questions for clarity…otherwise do not discuss the snippets at the meeting.
• Clarify:(30 minutes)
• Decisions: What topics do you need decisions on as a team?
• Who should be in that decision meeting and when should you have it?
• Who will own it? (Leaders should delegate this to their team members.)
• Debates: What topics do you need to debate on?
• Who should be in that debate meeting and when will you have it?
• Who will own it? (Leaders should delegate this to their team members.)

Debate Meetings

• These slow down decision-making and lower tension by making it okay to argue. The goal for the debate is to check your ego at the door and come up with the best answer for the organization. Halfway through the Debate Meeting, people switch sides.

Decision Meetings

• These are to make the final decision. But decide how you are going to decide…consensus, consultative, majority, delegative.

Have All Hands Meetings regularly (be sure to take Qs and As).

Have KANBAN Boards

• Each department should have one: visible boards that show work in progress for a team: There should be three columns on the boards: To Do/In Progress/Done. This can be displayed virtually also.

Walk Around (Virtually)

• Schedule one hour per week to “zoom around” in our virtual environment…drop into meetings…

Hello! I have just been reminded by LinkedIn that I have had my leadership coaching and team development business for 24 years. Honestly this surprised me and is a miracle. I have deep gratitude for all of you who have allowed me to help you get “every voice heard” within your organizations. I have learned so much through the years from each of you. Thank you for giving me the honor of doing the work I do—with you.

Conflict means that two parties have different needs. That’s it. So why isn’t it possible for people to ask to get their needs met? Dealing with conflict depends! It depends on what is at stake for you, what you stand for, the results you want, who it is with…I could go on and on.

And that is why conflict is so icky, complex, confusing, and juicy! There are many choices in dealing with conflict. Most of our conflict behaviors were learned at an early age and have become habits.

It may be in our nature to choose competition (I win you lose) because that is what we learn in school, in society, in the workplace, and many times in our families. Another autopilot response for some is Avoiding (I lose you lose). We may learn this choice from our family of origin, from a painful experience that has become implanted in our brain that protects us from further pain, or simply because we have learned that it just takes too much energy to take on the conflict. Those who choose Accommodating (I lose you win) think that it is better to acquiesce getting their needs met instead of getting into a conflict with anyone about it. Many choose Collaboration (I win you win). They have discovered that this choice builds trust with others. People often ask me what the difference is between Collaborating and Compromising. Collaborators always end up creating something better together than separately, and Compromisers end up with less than what they wanted.

The dilemma that occurs is that we may have a “go to” conflict style that has labeled us with others. If we compete all of the time, others will avoid us; if we avoid all of the time, others will ignore us; if we accommodate all of the time, we will get a reputation as a doormat; and if we collaborate all of the time we may get a reputation for never being able to make a decision.

So my message is to realize that you have a choice. Between whatever lands on you and how you deal with it is this expansive space full of freedom to choose. Be intentional in your choice.

Here are my ingredients for a successful conflict opportunity:

Courage:

You must have a strong heart and fearlessness to enter into conflict. You need to ask to get your needs met, your values met, whatever you stand for.

Curiosity:

This curiosity will free you from getting caught in “I am right and you are wrong.” It will keep you out of judgment and defensiveness. It will open up your mind and your heart to places you have never learned or felt before.

Consideration:

It is not all about you. There is another party involved in the conflict that has a different perspective and need than you. 

Collaboration:

You do not know what someone else’s needs are unless you ask. In order to ask, you need to listen. Check out Katie Owens as she reminds you how to listen by clicking on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WER63AY8zB8.