Category: Gleaner Jamaica

What if the key to having a productive day has less to do with how hard you work during the average work hour, but everything to do with a focused activity that takes no more than 30-minutes? In this article I describe the power of a daily technique used by the most productive people.

If you ask these people what they do to be effective, you’d find it’s not the kind of question you can pose directly. I liken it to querying a centurion – “What’s the secret to a long life?” Oftentimes the answers you receive are just as confusing as those given by the most productive. To find the truth behind their anecdotes, you must turn to research involving large numbers of people.

In my book, I share a key finding: a person performs better when they make a detailed, daily plan. In these modern times, what is the nature of this plan and how is it made?

To explain, let’s start with the definition of a “time demand.” It’s something you create each day in your mind – a commitment to complete an action in the future. At some point in your adolescent or teen years, you quietly discovered that reaching your goals meant keeping time demands alive. Seeing one slip through the cracks was awful, especially if it was part of an important plan.

Yet, that is exactly what happens when we enter college. Or get married. Or get a promotion. All of a sudden, the number of time demands increases and we can’t keep up. Some get “forgotten” in the rush and we suffer the consequences.

A small number of people adjust their methods quickly. A few never do. Failed exams, divorces, firings – they happen when we don’t keep up. Even your children’s GSAT performance isn’t immune: wise heads tell us their performance is correlated with quality time spent with them. They don’t pass or fail, you do.

Add to this not-so-subtle pressure is the increased data that flows at you. You see more information in a day than your grandparents saw in a month. Is that a blessing or a curse? It depends on what you do in that 30-minute time-slot I mentioned before.

This time-slot should be used for setting the stage for your day in what I call “Emptying.” It’s the critical opportunity to consider all the inflows of information in which you decide which time demands to execute, and when.

Early in your career, you got by with haphazard Emptying skills. In these modern times, doing your Emptying casually is an impediment. Now, it’s a battleground where you juggle priorities, urgencies, time limits, expectations, personal goals and more. The output should be an optimized schedule that meets your specific needs today and for the future.

Given the importance of this short slice of time, how can we make the most of it?

1. “Emptying” means leaving things empty

The term “Emptying” implies that all decisions regarding incoming information have been made. When you are done, you leave behind completely vacant Inboxes, whether they be digital, voice or paper-based. Their pristine state gives you the peace of mind knowing that you don’t need to return to them until tomorrow to repeat the act.

2. Schedule Emptying for the start of the day

It’s a grand mistake to jump into the first task of the day without conducting your daily session of Emptying. As you do so, check your email Inbox, voicemail, text messages, Instant Messages, notes or any other possible source of triggers for new time demands. Even if the number you currently face is small, prepare yourself now for the inevitable: a potentially crippling, spike in communication.

3. When you Empty, do it at a time when you won’t be interrupted

Employees wonder why the best executives often come in early. Sometimes, it’s to beat traffic, but often it’s because they crave the uninterrupted time it takes to do high-volume, high-stakes Emptying. They realize that their entire day depends on how well they do this intense activity, so closing off their world to interruptions is a requirement. This is far easier to implement at 6:00 AM than at 10:00 AM, long before others have arrived. To enhance the effect, they turn off all devices and notifications on all platforms, the better to focus the activity.

In today’s world in which you must process a lot of inbound information, your skills at Emptying must improve if you are interested in climbing the corporate ladder. There is simply no escape from a job that is yours and yours alone to complete and no excuse if you fail to make the necessary, ongoing improvements.

Blaming your environment, as some do, is not an option. Instead, it’s a sign of incompetence in one area of corporate life where personal mastery is essential to your success.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To receive a free summary of links to his past articles, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20160327/how-protect-your-daily-productivity-peace-mind

It’s a dilemma common to executives. What should they do when they realize their company is staffed with mediocre performers? The immediate instinct is to go out and recruit superstars, but there’s new research indicating that there’s a better approach: remove or transform your toxic employees.

If you recently joined a new company or just received a new promotion you may have discovered that your staff isn’t effective. Whether by grand epiphany or slow discovery, you see the problem clearly and desperately want to solve it. You envy departments filled with high potentials brimming with vibrant energy, wishing you had the kind of people whose work ethic and intelligence you could admire.

Your secret wish is to somehow attract a few good ones, who would, in turn, bring in others, but there is new evidence to show that you should focus your efforts elsewhere.

In a recent working paper from the Harvard Business School, Michael Housman, and Dylan Minor start by sharing the obvious: toxic employees are costly. In addition, their study of over 50,000 employees shows that they also detract from the performance of others. They take a toll on morale, customer service, and turnover. They note that an employee who is surrounded by toxic colleagues is likely to fall into similar behaviors. In other words, toxicity is contagious.

Furthermore, the study also showed that it’s better to replace a toxic employee than hire a great one. Doing so has twice the impact.

But even with these facts in hand, the typical company often can’t take action. If you are an executive, consider the following reasons why your organization is unable to easily remove these employees.

Reason 1 – Toxic workers often appear productive
They know what to do to generate a lot of activity. But in the end, their presence is a negative one. For example, the rogue trader who cost Grace Kennedy some US$20m in profits in 2010 was, from all prior appearances, a high performer. Earlier removal would have made a gigantic difference.

Reason 2 – Toxic workers are confident, plus they follow the rules
Their outward personality makes it difficult to see them as anything other than strong people who never do much wrong, according to written company policy. Furthermore, they are bold in asserting their high productivity, doing a good job of those things that can easily be measured. It’s harder to document the damage they do in other areas.

Reason 3 – Companies keep bad records
Jack Welch is a huge proponent of forced ranking. While its overall benefit is disputed, the system does make it clear where weaknesses lie. Most companies in the Caribbean possess no such clarity. Instead, one manager after another dodges the bullet, giving toxic employees passing grades simply because it’s the path of least resistance. Over time, reality becomes separated from the written record. The executive who finally decides to do the right thing finds that the laws in the Caribbean are quite strict: no employee who has a record of adequate performance can be summarily dismissed.

The researchers didn’t specifically go into the effect toxic employees have on high performers but we can imagine. A high potential who believes she’s being rewarded exactly the same as a toxic colleague is likely to depart for a saner environment. She may say it’s “for more money”, but that’s sometimes a cover-up. The truth is, she’s gotten to the point where the company’s lunacy has become unbearable.

What then should your company do to prevent itself from filling the ranks with toxic employees?

Step 1 – Analyze your human resource records to see whether there is a separation between high and low performers. Compare your company’s performance with the story told by these records.

Step 2 – If there’s a mismatch, move to identify toxic employees. Work to remedy the skills of their managers in giving feedback and hold them to account so that the separation becomes clear.

Step 3 – Monitor the gap between high and low performers over time, using company performance as a guide. It’s better to do this long before there’s a crunch so that the right adjustments can be made.

Think of a top football club. There is universal recognition that players come and go: it’s a requirement of their system which is different from a family with its life-long blood relationships. Instead, a club is actually a temporary coalition of high performers striving towards the same goal. So is your company.

Attracting star performers may be a more sexy solution than dealing with toxic workers, but you have a higher obligation to keep your company healthy. It’s not the easy path to take, but it’s the one that pays off in the long-term.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To receive a free summary of links to his past articles, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

 

The original article on the Gleaner website can be found here.

https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20160228/francis-wade-why-you-arent-able-motivate-your-workershttps://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20160228/francis-wade-why-you-arent-able-motivate-your-workers

 

Here’s the link to the article in the Gleaner.

 

Why “Acceptance” is an Essential First Step in Transforming Your Company

Most organizations are led by executives who see the world differently from their employees. They can envision a particular future, anxiously acting to grasp hold of it. How can companies make sure that executive impatience doesn’t produce a reckless rush to failure?

We live in a world in which changing one’s computer, smart-phone or automobile is as easy as completing an online order. The hard work to ensure technical interoperability has been done elsewhere, by someone else. It’s so easy; it seduces corporate leaders into thinking that all changes are simple.

However, the most complex corporate transformations involve far more: behaviour changes implemented by lots of people, sustained over time. These are by far the most difficult transitions to implement.

The proof can be found in what we see at the individual level. We know how hard it is to change a personal habit, even when we are motivated. Case in point: more than 25% of cardiac patients are unable to implement an exercise program after their heart attack.

Getting employees to change their behaviour is just as difficult. One reason is that new practices suggested to them are disconnected from their needs. To remedy this problem, many executives try these two tactics.

– Using Force – Some attempt to scare employees with threats of losses or layoffs that are intended to make them afraid. For example, they may put in place a new Jack Welchian performance management system that annually rids the company of its lowest performers. Predictably, people resist these efforts.

– Using Deception – Some companies try to slip changes in when employees aren’t paying attention. For example, a new system is announced, but the need to make difficult behaviour changes is downplayed. This approach ultimately fails when employees must get involved to make the system work.

These techniques militate against the end-result the company needs – a sustainable solution. Fortunately, the best practice is simple. Instead of trying to sell, motivate or convince employees they need to change, engage them honestly in solving the problem at hand.

One way is to include them in conducting a ruthless inventory of current reality. It may sound paradoxical, but leaders who resist or deny the status quo generate suspicion. They put themselves in an unnecessary war with “what is” which saps and blinds them, giving employees good reason to doubt their competence and trustworthiness.

Embracing reality, in examples of Business Process Improvements (BPI), is a more enduring strategy. Here are three steps to take that rely on engaging knowledgeable employees working in cross-functional teams.

1. Accept What Is Not Working
Oftentimes, I run into corporate clients who are in a rush to change. They dismiss the way things are, already picturing  the perfect solution. As they fixate on the future, they fail to understand the precise causes of the problems they have today.

Unfortunately, these reasons usually aren’t simplistic. They are hidden from the executive suite, where complexity is often understated in favour of a bombastic “Get on with it!” It also helps bypass the embarrassment of poor performance.

Solution: Engage day-to-day, expert employees in understanding the root causes of problems.

2. Accept What Is Working
Many employees who perform steps in a corporate process quickly learn how to become “unconsciously competent”. That is, they develop critical skills which become so matter of fact they don’t think about them overtly.

When asked, they fail to mention these habits because they no longer remember learning and using them. As a result, without help, they aren’t surfaced. They get lost.

Solution: Use a skilled facilitator and team members to reveal obscure elements of the process.

3. Accept that “Solutions” Cause New Problems
In complex systems, solutions often cause unforeseen difficulties. For example, as wonderful as smart-phones are, everyone who possesses a device has the challenge of keeping the battery charged. This particular habit is rarely anticipated by new users who cannot foresee why they need to own multiple chargers.

Solution: Bring a critical eye to proposed solutions, especially if they originate from outside the company.

At one level, acceptance implies commonsense corrections in judgement. However, these three points reflect tactics that engage essential employees who are often excluded. They are the ones who will actually be executing the improved process, so companies must win their hearts and mind up front.

When leaders fail to accept reality they lose the followership of their employees who sometimes even question their sanity. By contrast, actively involving employees at all stages turns them into advocates. It’s one way to incorporate different points of view that must be included to tap into the best information possible. Also, it’s good change management.

Companies who accept the need to build on the wisdom and involvement of their employees are doing more than being nice. They are ensuring the success of their transformation efforts.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To receive a free summary of links to his past articles, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20160214/francis-wade-acceptance-essential-first-step-transforming-company

How to Stop People From Grabbing Your Valuable Time Away – Part 2

Have you ever been in a meeting when, after only a few minutes, you realize that your precious time is about to be wasted? Social pressure may keep you rooted to your chair until it’s safe to leave, but how should your organization prevent valuable hours from being lost from the outset?

In my last column, I addressed the problem of email abuse in organizations while offering immediate solutions, plus a few from the future. In this article, I turn to another problem that’s similar. Meetings have the potential to waste thousands of hours but the average company does little to prevent the loss. Here are three suggestions.

1. Use technology to focus meetings
You may know what it’s like to see a meeting start off on the right foot before veering off into a vast, random wasteland. To help keep your team on track, download an app that displays the running, total meeting cost. Most apps measure it by multiplying the average cost of an attendee by the total number attending. The results are shown in real time on a laptop or mobile device.

Try Meeting Cost Meter, available via the Android platform. It’s simple, but it amplifies the thoughts everyone has at these moments: “How much are we wasting?” and “What else could I be doing?”

2. Use technology to assess meetings
After the meeting ends, most people shy away from giving the facilitator direct feedback. This website, accessible via smartphone, takes away the social challenge – http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/625708/f29cbacc0c28

It offers a straightforward opportunity. At the meeting’s end, attendees fill out a form, then the program tabulates the facilitator’s results. The fact that the feedback is anonymous and the app is easy to use should make it an irresistible tool. However, few organizations demonstrate the will needed to implement it. “Too controversial” they may say as they continue to flush precious time down the drain.

3. Use future technology to preventing wasted meetings
Steve Jobs was famous for keeping meetings as small as possible.  According to Ken Segall, author of Insanely Simple – The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success, Jobs openly (and sometimes abruptly) dismissed people who weren’t needed. Today, in most organizations, anyone can call a meeting without ever declaring its purpose with clarity. Furthermore, anyone is allowed to attend, even if their added value is questionable.

In the future, to keep meetings tight, I imagine that each employee will receive a meeting budget, measured by time units. Whoever sets up a meeting would see a subtraction from their annual budget, modified by the meeting’s duration and the number/level of the invitees.

Also, a meeting called without defining its purpose, agenda and logistics would incur a greater deduction. At year end, employees would review their budget vs. actual expenditures with managers, in order to make adjustments and receive direct coaching.

These technologies may work because they reverse some of the same problems companies have with email usage. Here is a shortened list:
– Once you are invited, it is hard to ignore or dismiss the meeting without incurring a social cost. Politically, it’s often easier to go along with a bad meeting that serves no purpose than it is to put up a fight.
– The cost of bad meetings is hidden and shared, so no single person is ever held accountable. Imagine if there were a public scorecard showing your performance as a meeting convenor.
– People who hold bad meetings are never coached to become better. They suffer along, never knowing that it’s a skill that can be dramatically improved.

But you don’t have to wait for all these technologies to be ready. Start by implementing these three suggestions right away.

1. Include meeting management as a component of performance review. Implement the after-meeting app/feedback tool, using it as a measure of individual performance.

2. Make it clear that meetings have a cost. Encourage employees to download the meeting cost app and help them use it every time. Periodically, advertise the total time spent in meetings to promote a new level of vigilance.

3. Train all employees in the best practices for leading meetings, including top executives. (They are guilty of calling some of the worst meetings I have ever attended.) Never assume that successfully managing meetings is just common sense.

In my November 22nd article on the Japanese post-War turnaround, I explained that the country’s factories succeeded by cutting operational waste. It was a novel technique  that helped Japan became a world leader, partly because the approach could be used in so many ways, in so many industries. Jamaican companies use meetings and email inefficiently, but we can adopt available technologies to make them better. Perhaps it would lead to other improvements that are hard to imagine, such as a renaissance in productivity plus an impact on GDP. Let’s find out by paying attention to a cost that’s fully within our control.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To receive a free summary of links to his past articles, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

Click here to access the original article from the Gleaner website – http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20160103/how-stop-people-grabbing-your-valuable-time-away-part-2

How to Stop People From Grabbing Your Valuable Time Away – Part 1

Email and meetings have become two of the biggest productivity killers in Jamaican corporate life. In this first article in a two-part series, we will focus on the cost of bad email.

You are in your office after 6 PM with the door closed. Unfortunately, you are struggling to catch up while, at that moment, the Time Grabbers who wasted your attention all day are at home, relaxing. Even if happen to be the rare person who can’t stand to leave with important work unfinished, you probably still think it’s not fair. How did you reach this point?

Fact: earlier that day, Time Grabbers cc’d and bcc’d you on unproductive email threads. Sometimes, you were only peripherally involved. But most of the time you were included in order to help achieve some unspoken political purpose.

What the offenders don’t know (or don’t care to know) is the amount of time it takes others to process their messages. It only takes a few of these emails bouncing from one department to another to decimate an hour of your best time. It’s the reason you are still there after hours and why you may be one of the 74% of workers who report that they are more productive outside the office.

How can this problem be overcome?

The challenge is that Time Grabbers are unaware of the social chaos they are causing, having never received factual, quality, feedback. While it’s true “they know not what they do,” they shouldn’t be forgiven too readily. Instead, here is an idea for a software app that would help everyone connect the cause (ineffective email) with its effect (wasted time/costs).

In companies that share the same email system, an “Email Budget Allocator” is a programme that could be used to make a difference. As a plug-in designed for use inside your current system, (such as Outlook) it would automatically display the cost of an email even as you are drafting it. How would this be calculated?

It’s easy. The app would compute the cost by taking into account the amount of words, plus the number and level of the recipients. Furthermore, this sum could be modified by a programme like Hemingway, which instantly reports the complexity of an article. For example, this column registers at a reading level of “Grade 9.”

But that would be just the beginning. To help change actual behaviour, you and your colleagues would receive an internal email budget depending on your respective roles. Each message you send would debit your budget, much in the same way that a prepaid call debits a mobile phone’s credit. At the end of the quarter, your manager would review your expenditure and together you’d make the necessary adjustments.

The final feature I can imagine would be a private feedback mechanism for individual messages. Once an email is sent, the system would take note of the number of times it is deleted without being read. Also, a recipient would be able to anonymously indicate when an email is a waste of time by forwarding it to a special address. There, the programme would aggregate all wasted email, compute the total cost, and further debit the sender’s account.

This app might work because it brings a hidden, pernicious cost out in the open. By contrast, we are acutely aware of our expenditure on cell-phone calls because each one reduces our hard-earned credit. While this system does not involve any loss of dollars and cents, it would raise the profile of wasted attention. As it is, the average professional spends 1-2 hours per day on email; an ever-increasing number. Even then, most companies don’t offer any training on email productivity, resulting in not only lost time but frayed nerves.

But here’s the good news. You don’t need to wait for this app to be invented to use these ideas in your organization.

For the most part, your colleagues have no idea of the cost related to clicking the <SEND> button. You can remedy this by actually determining a dollar value and sharing it widely. Compute the time it takes people to process email of different kinds, depending on their level in the hierarchy. Use estimates to teach them how much the average email costs the organization. For the first time, Time Grabbers could understand the impact of their behaviour on other people. Their behavioural changes, according to my calculations, would more than pay for the price of the training.

Most organizations are far too willing to let their employees work long hours for reasons they can control. Cutting the expense of wasted email could free them from having to do unnecessary work that keeps them from their families.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To receive a free summary of links to his past articles, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

 

How to Stop People from Grabbing Away Your Valuable Time Part 1

How Leaders Save Followers From Being Professional Victims

Many executives are relatively strong at taking responsibility, especially in areas where others don’t. They stand up to be counted, assuming risks that others won’t.  However, they are often baffled when their followers show an excessive and inexplicable fear of victimization. What should leaders do to eradicate this bad habit that makes good people slip into dependency and turns potential future leaders into weaklings?

Case: A corporate leader who I work with scratches his head in dismay. His followers, who he hopes to grow into a new cadre of leaders have devolved into victims-in-waiting. That is, they have learned an infantile, super-sensitivity to perceived slights and imagined disrespect. He has discovered that even his best attempts to make a difference are taken as personal attacks. They have become professional victims.

According to the Urban Dictionary “professional victims” claim victimization when things don’t go their way. They continually believe someone is taking advantage of them. In his case, workers have taken to attend meetings in a silent boycott, refusing to contribute anything more than a minimum.

Truth be told, there is a certain kind of power to be gained from convincing your (perceived) oppressors that you are their victim. At best, it invites them to take responsibility in a new way as a result of seeing the truth for the first time. When this happens, transformation can result as it did in countries like the USA, India and South Africa.

However, at worst, being a victim can be just a form of hostage-taking. Then, it becomes a nasty blame-game where the self-described weak gain a scrap of leverage, usually by bullying those in power into feeling guilty.

Unfortunately, in some companies there are a frighteningly large number of staff members who act as professional victims. In your company, you may know exactly who I am talking about. If you do, then go a step further and ask yourself: “Is the diseased thinking spreading or shrinking?”

Use your answer to gauge how effectively your people are being led. Ineffective leaders merely join the pity party, engaging in their own version of professional victimhood. They may, for example, compare their current job against prior roles they held in better companies, with better colleagues who served better customers. This just makes the situation worse.

Effective leaders respond quite differently by taking the following three steps.

1. Demonstrate By Example
Real leaders take responsibility at extraordinary levels, far beyond the boundaries of space and time. For example, they may even take ownership for what people do to each other. Or, they may assume responsibility for what has happened in the past, under prior leadership, as if they were in charge when it happened.

While others may think this is crazy behavior, it is actually self-empowerment at its finest.

Leaders who are powerfully self-aware are not blind to what they are doing and they don’t do it in secret. They actively create a context in which they locate themselves as the cause of important results, positive or negative. As they do so, one public step at a time, it’s noticeable that something is different. This magic ingredient may be hard for others to articulate, but leaders seize vacuums of responsibility to inspire others to act.

2. Educate Followers
A few top leaders don’t just act differently, they teach this exceptional behaviour to others at every opportunity. Sometimes, they have developed their own language for what they do, using homegrown phrases such as “taking one for the team.” Developing responsibility in others is a critical part of their job and the key to a cultural transformation.

3. Share the struggle
A tiny handful go even further than teaching others. They take the risk of sharing their personal struggle with new areas of responsibility. By doing so, they show that it’s OK to be imperfect, giving staff real-time insight behind the scenes of a leader’s transformation.

Unfortunately, most top executives are clueless about these three steps. With low awareness, they are stunned when people avoid interacting with them for fear of being victimized. They witness employees acting as responsible adults in other areas of their lives (family, church and community) and can’t understand why the workplace is so different. Professional victims are perfectly capable of this dualism.

They can also be quite effective at converting others to their cause: misery loves company. This means that leaders cannot just sit back and wait for people’s mindsets to change – they won’t.

The solution is to be aware and active. If you are a leader, work on the three skills listed above and make them part of your everyday way of being. Leaders are only called forth when the stakes are high and success will be impossible if you avoid this particular duty. It is hard, but necessary.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To receive a free summary of links to his past articles, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

Japan’s economic recovery from World War II was nothing short of miraculous. Is there something that Jamaica could learn from their focus on removing waste from a narrow area of high importance? If we also could find a single point of improvement that could be applied in a wide number of areas could we see the same results?

Three New Habits That Can Save Jamaica’s Economy

Most Jamaicans are wondering “Where will the spark come from that will ignite our economy?” Instead of hoping for foreigners to bail us out, maybe we should be looking at what we are already wasting: individual time.

It may not be the path advocated by the IMF, but it’s one that post World War II Japan would readily recognize. In their recovery, they made unprecedented monumental improvements in their manufacturing operations. They leaped from being a producer of laughable products to being world leaders. Unfortunately, the cost of energy prevents us from taking that particular path, but there is something we can borrow from their approach.

We need to do so urgently. Jamaica’s productivity has been sailing in reverse ever since independence, making us one of the least productive countries in the hemisphere.

Japan had bigger problems. Due to high costs, their customers could not afford their own country’s products. In response, their companies launched an all-out effort to cut waste in order to make products more affordable.

At Toyota, the quality revolution was led by Taiichi Ohno. He declared that there are seven forms of waste which permeate factories: overproduction, motion, inventory, transportation, waiting, defects and over-processing. (Later, others added one more that may apply to us: under-utilized people.)

We also have an opportunity to cut waste, but not in factories. Instead, it resides in the way we waste time as individuals, at every level. Daily experience tells us that something is wrong – our people are under-utilized. But what would it be like to become the country with the most productive employees in the world?

We’d have to think quite differently. The latest research reveals that time itself cannot be managed, and instead we must focus on what is called a “time demand.” It’s defined as an internal, individual commitment to complete an action in the future. An inescapable element of adult life, we all create, manage and complete time demands every single day.

However, my empirical data shows our performance in this area is well below global averages. Here are three wasteful habits that challenge us in the workplace.

1. Tracking Time Demands Using Memory
Early in our teens we learn that once a time demand is created, it forms an essential link between our goals and actions. Keeping each one alive in our memory is a habit we try to teach ourselves and when the number of items is small, it appears to work. However, as we get older the stakes rise. Life becomes more complex and our teenager-taught, memory-based system fails.

Case: A colleague has a habit of making strong, confident promises in meetings, but he never records them.  You notice that once the meeting is over, he disappears along with his promises. Over time, you end up becoming his personal reminder system in order to get what you want.

Recommended: Wean yourself and others off the use of memory for this purpose. See it as a reckless practice. Instead, record all time demands in writing or on a digital device.

2. Recording Time Demands Without Processing Them
Once someone unlearns the habit of using memory and starts capturing time demands safely, a new problem arises. He/she needs to set time aside to process them all, preferably on a daily basis.

Case: If you are someone who arrives at meetings with four notepads filled with an unprocessed backlog of time demands, you are still using memory to decide which ones to execute and when.

Recommended: Go through the backlog of time demands in your notepads, Inboxes and other places of capture and delete obsolete ones. Be aggressive. Move the ones to be saved for later to a long-term home in either your To-Do List or calendar. Once the backlog is gone, develop a regular habit of emptying time demands from these places of capture.

3. Sticking with Paper
Even though you have abundant, inexpensive access to digital resources, you have not upgraded from the use of a paper calendar or To-Do list. This approach is risky.

Case: You create a commitment on behalf of a customer by adding a new task to your paper To-Do list. Later that evening, at bath time, it becomes the raw material for your child’s boat. Surprise! You scramble the next morning to repeat the conversation with your customer, dealing a blow to your reputation.

Recommended: Become as comfortable with digital devices and redundant storage as you are with paper. With the right tools and proper backups to the cloud, you will never, ever lose anything.

Today, these wasteful behaviours are common but they are not insurmountable. If the island archipelago of Japan can reverse its fortunes with focused effort on cutting waste, then maybe we can also. The time is right for each of us to undertake a personal productivity revolution.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To receive a free summary of links to all his past articles, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Click here to read the article on the Gleaner’s website.

Many Caribbean executives simply don’t ask enough of their direct reports. Instead, they try to protect them from harsh realities, often before it’s too late to call for an “all hands on deck” approach.

Here’s what they should do instead: Why Executives Need to Challenge Their Direct Reports.

The full text is provided below.

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Why Executives Now Need to Challenge Their Direct Reports

While top executives are known for their unearthly ability to push themselves, it often isn’t enough. They also need to demand high performance from their direct reports to prevent their organizations from drifting into sorry mediocrity. Why, at this time, has their ability to direct their subordinates become so important?

In some ways, this recession has been good for Jamaicans. It is pushing us to work longer, harder and smarter in our need to do more with less. When there’s less revenue available, our companies (like our individuals) are learning to operate in a leaner fashion in order to do things they have never done before.

This may sound good in theory but how does this translate into actual, on-the-ground behaviours? If you are an executive, how should you relate to your direct reports?

1. Never Allow Coasting

In the local corporate setup, even if you found yourself in a job with a steep learning curve, there was always a point at the top where you could stop pushing yourself. You could relax and enjoy the fruits of your initial hard work. However, in today’s recessionary environment, savvy executives realize that there is no such place. That is, no-one should expect that there will ever again (in our lifetime) be a time to coast along, with spare time to smell the roses.

Today, it’s all curve. At the “top,” you should expect another curve. And then another.

As an executive, it’s your job to create challenges (i.e. new curves) for your people – much in the same way that a coach motivates a team. Good sales executives are expert at this task, but now every other manager must do the same with their direct reports.

They may hate you for it, but it’s not personal. The recession is hitting every business in Jamaica hard, especially those who earn no foreign exchange and have no overseas customers. All you are doing by asking for more is aligning your subordinates with reality. It’s a difficult task to accomplish, but you cannot wait. Your company must stretch itself to achieve the seemingly impossible long before things start to break.

2. Removing Protection

Entrepreneurs face the relentless pressure of bi-weekly payroll, monthly tax obligations, and daily cash-flow crunches. By contrast, your company’s employees are traditionally protected from these stresses if they work for medium to large enterprises. It’s been clear.  In exchange for a long-term, regular salary, they have gotten by with few responsibilities, standard hours of work and only vague requests to learn new skills.

In times past, this was the accepted status quo. In response to a global recession, your direct reports need to strip this protection away so that your company can compete.

Case in point: A Florida-based contractor explained to me that “He stopped hiring fellow Jamaicans long ago.” According to him, his new Mexican employees work all day taking only a single, ten-minute break for lunch. He couldn’t find enough Jamaicans with that work ethic to employ them.

In like manner, the recession has brought global pressures on local companies that none can avoid. Top managers must expose employees to these outside factors which demand greater individual production. The fact that these improvements must take place without the benefit of additional tools, training or remuneration is not unfair – it’s just life.

3. On-boarding People Who Demand More of Themselves

Usain Bolt has set a good example in publicly asking more of himself. In his commitment to break the 200-meter world record, he admits that he’s now older and more injury-prone.

Unfortunately, most employees aren’t like Usain – they don’t set such difficult goals for themselves. It’s up to your direct reports to recruit the rare people who have this mindset. One shortcut is to borrow the HR best-practice used to weed out the ones who aren’t up to the challenge.

It’s easy – just walk them through the worst possible day they could have if they accept the new role. This simulation provides them with a reality check that tells you, by their reaction, if they have what it takes.

If you believe that you are already hiring the right people, here’s one way to see if they are being challenged appropriately. Form an internal focus group of your most recent hires from full-time tertiary institutions. Ask them to be honest: “In order to fit in, have you scaled back your initial drive and effort since joining the company?” Allow them to share their shock at how little actual work gets done.

A company which creates the right culture must energize newcomers and employees alike to increase productivity. As a top executive, the only way to get that done is through your direct reports who must translate a continuous pressure for high performance into practical action. It’s the only way to assure your company’s survival.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To receive a free summary of links to his past articles, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com