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THE LEADER’S TIME

SECTION B- READING REPORT
MANAGING YOUR TIME AS A LEADER

Many leaders feel starved for time. Working under the assumption that longer hours lead to
improved productivity, they drive themselves and others to increase effectiveness—then try to
“squeeze in” good, quality time with loved ones. Working people are expected to run at a fast
pace and be highly productive; yet at the same time, there is a chronic sense of individual and
collective slippage, less than optimal work performance, and impending burnout.

The ability of leaders to manage the increase in both workload and burnout more effectively is
essential because their behavior has significant impact on others. Recent studies confirm that
under stress, people act more defensively, make poorer decisions, and literally lose the
“executive” function of their minds. This is especially costly for leaders because they set the tone
for their organizations. Their moods affect how others think and behave, so that people around
them also tend to react in confused, defensive, and otherwise unproductive ways.

When we ask our clients what they know about how to manage time, they list many familiar
approaches: set goals, plan ahead, delegate, track commitments to ensure work is completed, and
create manageable “to do” lists. When we ask if they use these tools, we get one of two answers:

1. We do all these things, and they are not sufficient for us to stay on top of the demands we face,
or
2. We know we should do these things, but we don’t have time to do them.

Conventional approaches to time management are useful in organizing to get work done.
However, increasing personal efficiency alone is inadequate for helping leaders resolve this key
strategic issue: how to achieve high levels of sustainable, long-term performance while meeting
the challenge of doing more with less. Powerful workplace dynamics lead people, individually
and collectively, to spend large amounts of their work time pursuing non-productive activities.
Leaders must understand the nature of these dynamics and what they can do to change individual
and collective habits of action.

The purpose of this article is to help leaders at all levels update their approach to time
management to better address the challenges of today’s work world. The key elements of this
new approach are:

1. A focus on sustainable productivity

2. Identification and reduction of “phantom workload”—the work people unwittingly create for
themselves by taking short cuts around or trying to avoid essential, difficult tasks
3. Tools for managing time more effectively in four leadership domains
4. A behavioral change model that enables people to reliably put good time management ideas—
both traditional and innovative—into sustainable practice.
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Increasing Sustainable Productivity

Perhaps the most important assumption for leaders to question is that working harder—longer
hours and more days in a year—increases productivity. It’s a seductive proposition, because
working harder works up to a point—and beyond that point the personal consequences include
reduced brain functioning, increased stress and health problems, decreased effectiveness, and
strained or failed relationships. The impact on teams and units is also great: Overwork tends to
lead to mistakes that result in poor quality and rework; misunderstandings and unnecessary
conflict; lack of innovation; and extensive, unproductive meetings. The impact of overwork is
sometimes clear and sometimes subtle—but it is insidious, leading to a long-term decline in
quality of life.

Leaders need to think in terms of increasing not simply levels of work and productivity, but
primarily the level of sustainable productivity. By sustainable productivity we mean:

 Getting the right things done, well, in a timely way, and

 Preserving and restoring resources including oneself, one’s good standings with colleagues and
customers, and one’s relationships with family, community, and the natural environment

Experience shows that time is not something that can be saved; it can only be spent more or less
wisely. One way to approach this is to clarify what really matters to us, live life in accordance
with our deepest values, and serve others’ best interests as well as our own. From a leader’s point
of view, time management needs to be about helping oneself and others make wise and often
courageous choices rather than doing more with less.

Reducing Phantom Workload

One of the best ways to increase sustainable productivity is to reduce what we call “phantom
workload.” Phantom workload is the unintentional work created when people either take
expedient but ineffective short cuts or avoid taking on such essential, difficult tasks as:

 Clarifying mission, vision, and values

 Asking questions that challenge what is ambiguous or unrealistic
 Identifying and resolving conflicts
 Clarifying and streamlining decision-making processes
 Providing candid, constructive feedback
 Differentiating people with sanctions and rewards
 Launching innovative projects
 Making decisions that require disinvestment in programs or projects

The consequences of phantom workload include rework, upset customers, chronic organizational
conflict, lengthy unproductive meetings, time wasted solving the same problem over and over
again, and extensive signoffs. Phantom workload looks and feels real and unavoidable, yet it can
add hours to daily workload without significant benefit. Leaders unwittingly create a vicious
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cycle where the workload produced by solving these additional problems leads to increased
pressure, which in turn leads to greater stress and a further reluctance or inability to engage in
difficult tasks (see “Phantom Workload”).

In one case, the sponsor of a new project in a major oil company decided not to attend the
project’s two-hour kickoff meeting. He had other tasks to attend to, and he wanted to empower
his project manager to take charge from the very beginning. However, the meeting did not go
well because the project team members from different parts of the company could not agree on
the project’s goals, decision-making processes, and accountabilities. The sponsor subsequently
spent 120 hours working with different departments and individuals to resolve the ambiguities
and conflicts—60 times longer than the original meeting!

PHANTOM WORKLOAD

In another example, the clinical informatics group of a major healthcare company found itself
caught in a dynamic of over-promising and under-delivering to its internal customers. The
group’s management recognized that it had two ways of dealing with this performance pressure:
set realistic expectations with customers or make commitments it was not sure the group could
deliver on. Setting realistic expectations was difficult because customers themselves experienced
intense pressure to improve short-term business results, the company was highly decentralized,
and the innovative work the group did was difficult to scope. By contrast, promising a lot was
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easier, created customer excitement, and gave group members inspiring goals. Moreover, every
once in a while, with a huge push, the group did in fact “pull a rabbit out of the hat.”

Avoiding the difficult task of setting realistic expectations, which required ruthless portfolio as
well as project planning, resulted in unintended consequences that increased performance
pressure even further.

First, the group was under continuous stress to meet generally unrealistic expectations. Since
they often hurried to complete projects, they created numerous bugs in their product releases that
had to be fixed. This led to even less time for planning and making accurate time estimates. They
also had to negotiate customer pressures as delays mounted. When customer frustration
increased, the group’s credibility decreased, further undermining its ability to recalibrate its
customers’ unrealistic expectations. Moreover fatigue and discouragement increased along with
stress, decreasing the group’s creativity and overall work effectiveness even further (see
“OverPromising and Under-Delivering”).

OVER-PROMISING AND UNDER-DELIVERING

The important tasks that leaders avoid tend to be difficult, unpleasant, or anxiety-provoking.
Therefore, addressing phantom workload as a way to manage time calls upon people to confront
what is difficult. It requires leaders to go beyond doing current tasks differently to address what
they are not doing. Whether they call the tendency “avoidance,”, “procrastination,” or simply
“not getting around to it,” leaders need to take a hard look at the tasks they leave unattended
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before deciding that the benefits of not doing them exceed the costs. Thus, “time management”
becomes leadership development. As we face the tasks we typically avoid, we strengthen
ourselves to make hard decisions, face difficult people and situations with more grace, and stop
ducking what needs to be addressed.
Managing Time in Four Domains

It is helpful to think of time management in four domains. These domains represent the spiritual,
mental, emotional, and physical realms, which correspond to four key functions of leadership:
mobilizing commitment, thinking strategically, building relationships and community, and
organizing for action. The table “Managing Time in Four Domains” describes these functions
and their related time management tasks.

Effective leaders must deliver in all four areas, personally or indirectly through people they
support. We often generate phantom workload in the areas in which we are weakest, since these
are where we tend to avoid the tasks that need to be done. Developing or even getting support for
weaknesses does not always come naturally to people who achieve on the basis of one or two
strengths.

MANAGING TIME IN FOUR DOMAINS

Mobilizing Commitment

According to researchers Heike Bruch and Sumatra Ghoshal, high performing managers
demonstrate high degrees of both focus and energy. Their resulting strong sense of purpose
enables them to apply their limited time to greatest advantage (in “Beware the Busy Manager,”
Harvard Business Review, February 2002). They draw on their purposefulness to sort through
the multiple demands on their time and target a few key contributions they want to make.
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By contrast, people who don’t have enough time to get things done often find themselves in a
reactive mode. Disconnected from their sense of purpose and values, they are more easily driven
by what others want from them than by their own innate sense of direction. In a world where
there is always too much to do, their lack of clear personal purpose leaves them vulnerable to
trying to do it all. As a result, they are often unfocused and confused.

Bruch and Ghoshal’s research provides support for managers who long to live life directed by an
inner compass rather than holding their finger to the wind. Knowing what one deeply cares about
is different from knowing what one likes to do; indeed, being true to one’s purpose often
provides the motivation to take essential but difficult actions. Engaging our sense of purpose is a
practice, not a one-time event. We may have to keep asking the questions, “What do I really care
about? What do I stand for? What matters most to me?”

Having done the hard and rewarding work of tapping into their own sense of purpose, effective
leaders both intuit and shape a shared purpose that unites their organizations. As leaders guide
people in their organizations to articulate shared values, mission, and vision, they “save” time
later by clarifying the guiding ideas that underpin decision-making throughout the organization.

Knowing your purpose and the goals of your organization enables you to identify the unique
contributions you can make. These contributions leverage your passion and talents in the few
places where you can have the greatest impact given the needs and direction of the organization.
It becomes your navigational system, helping you respond to the excessive demands, tantalizing
opportunities, inevitable crises, and frequent interruptions that can so easily distract you from
your path.

Thinking Strategically

Clarifying the unique contribution you want to make enables you to set a limited number of
goals. Purposeful managers tend to work toward one to three goals at a time and discipline their
direct reports to do the same. Limiting goals can seem risky for leaders concerned about missing
opportunities or pursuing the wrong direction. However, proliferating goals often substitute for
sound strategic thinking, conflict resolution, and tough decision-making. The resulting
ambiguity, confusion, and chronic conflicts are costly. Overwork, resentment, mistrust, and
burnout are among the highest costs.

Leaders who know the few goals they want to pursue are better prepared to manage tough
tradeoffs, for example between:

 Short-term vs. long-term

 Urgent vs. important
 Easy vs. difficult
 Comfortable vs. unpleasant

These tradeoffs are tough because we often prefer the left-hand column. Ironically, many
managers report that they never have time to do what they believe they should focus on—
whether planning, supporting others, or evaluating performance. From this vantage point,
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sticking with priorities often becomes an act of courage and pattern breaking, even character
building. Stephen Covey’s time management book, First Things First, makes much of addressing
the long-term important versus the short-term urgent. To develop the skills to address the
righthand column, we ask slightly different questions as we decide where to focus:

 What am I avoiding?
 What feels most urgent and compelling, yet might not actually be so very important?
 What essential tasks have I “not gotten around to” for the past several days, or weeks, or
months?
 Who am I blaming for their part in not getting something important done? What is my role in
that?

Raising awareness of the righthand column can lead to additional questions that help people
focus on what they have been avoiding that is truly important:

1. What specifically are you avoiding? Why?

2. What are the consequences of avoiding this? How important is it really?
3. What is your goal for addressing it?
4. What is the first step you intend to take? By when?
5. What is the second step you intend to take? By when?
6. Who will you ask for support?

Since accurate time estimates can be pivotal in not only the success of a project but also the
satisfaction of those involved, making them is an essential part of setting priorities and planning.
To do so, we build on prior experience; learn how to include such hidden factors as collaboration
time, transition time, and dealing with unforeseen obstacles; and create a buffer for “surprises.”
These guidelines can help:

 Surface and challenge internal and external pressures to underestimate how long things will take.
 Include time for preparation, collaboration, transition, and completion in your estimates.
 Allow for unforeseen circumstances—set personal deadlines well in advance of actual ones to
ensure sufficient buffer time.
 Use backcasting as a planning tool.

Often people say that it is not culturally acceptable to tell the truth about how long a project
takes. However, identifying the costs of underestimating time can bolster the courage to develop
better estimates up front. One manager said, “In our company we never have time to do it right,
but we always have time to do it over.” That is the essence of phantom workload, and good time
estimates can reduce it substantially.

Building Relationships

Trust and respect are the coin of the realm in today’s increasingly networked organizations.
Establishing clear priorities, managing difficult tradeoffs, and effectively predicting how long
things take all help build trust. The ability to make reliable commitments reduces the domino
effect produced by missed deadlines, where one person’s failure to deliver on time undermines
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others’ abilities to do the same. It also eliminates the need for people to take time away from
their own commitments to help complete someone else’s work, which is a time-waster and
relationship-killer all in one.

No matter how important reliability is, in some organizations it is hard for people to keep their
word. Requests to do additional work come frequently and in many forms: as demands,
interruptions, crises, and opportunities.

Being true to yourself and your word requires the willingness and courage to resist saying “Yes”
when a request takes you away from your chosen goals, or you are not sure you can deliver.
Saying “No” is not perceived as an option in many organizations. Moreover, to please others,
people often accept ambiguous or unrealistic requests. Clarifying the nature of the request can be
construed as not being cooperative or a team player. For example, several members of the
clinical informatics group believed:

 , “I am not allowed to push back. We know programmers don’t code six hours per day, but that’s
what we budget for.”
 , “Client expectations are totally out of our control.”

Furthermore, in organizations that value busyness over effectiveness, challenging others to keep
their word can be equally unpopular. How do we hold people accountable for being late on a
project or to a meeting when we know how stretched we all are?

Despite the temptations to say “Yes” to requests, it helps to buy time first to consider the
following:

1. Is meeting the request congruent with your personal intentions, skills, and resources?
2. If the requested work does not directly support your goals, does it build sufficient social capital
that enables you to be successful in the ways you choose?
3. Is this a SMART request? (This framework is based on the work of Fernando Flores.)

 S Specific: the details are clear

 M Measurable: one understands the requester’s standards
 A Attainable: the request is achievable
 R Realistic: one can meet the request
 T Time-limited: there are clear dates for completion and mid-course correction

The following questions further support the hard work of making effective agreements:

 When and with whom do you feel that you cannot take the time to clarify the nature of the
request?
 When and with whom do you overcommit (clients, colleagues, bosses)?
 What beliefs and thinking patterns lead you to take on ambiguous work that you are not sure you
can deliver on?
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Finally, it is important to note that there are options between responding to a request with an
unqualified “Yes” or “No.” Sometimes, the most responsible answer—one that best honors the
other person’s needs as well as your capacity—might be to:

 Ask for clarification; ensure you receive a SMART request.

 Offer to check your resources and get back to the requester in a specified amount of time.
 Make a counter-offer that you believe can still meet the requester’s needs.
 Clarify the tradeoffs you see and jointly problem-solve an alternative.

The flip side of making reliable commitments is ensuring that others keep their agreements with
you. Managers often avoid delegating because they feel that they can do the work better or faster
themselves. This might be true, but it means that the manager is not creating conditions for
others to be successful. Moreover, if the job being delegated is repetitive, the benefits gained
over time by not doing it oneself should outweigh the upfront work involved in coaching
someone else to do it.

The following guidelines can help you make others’ word good:

 Remember that getting others’ support requires clear and regular twoway communication—both
at the outset and over the course of the commitment.
 Ensure that your own requests are SMART ones.
 Give people the opportunity to question or modify the request.
 Take time to monitor progress, provide support when asked, and encourage learning from
failures as well as successes along the way.

Meetings also consume an enormous amount of time. As organizations become flatter and more
networked, many meetings across units seem to be required in addition to the more traditional
internal ones. Between endless meetings and e-mails, many are concerned that they have
precious little time for productive work.

Improving the productivity of meetings, including evaluating the need to have them at all, is an
important part of time management. At the same time, we think the proliferation of meetings in
today’s organizations requires a second and more comprehensive response as well. There is so
much flux in organizations that in some cases meetings have become a substitute for
organizational structure and organizational norms. An organization-wide task force can be
charged with assessing the way the organization uses meetings overall, gauging their
effectiveness, training line and network leaders to better use this essential resource, and
simultaneously determining what meetings can be eliminated entirely or replaced with
alternative forms of communication. One partial solution, used by some companies to reduce
meeting gridlock in today’s networked structures, is to segment types of meetings and schedule
all meetings of a similar type on the same days or weeks.

Finally, as we look at how relationships affect people’s ability to manage time, we want to call
attention to that most essential relationship—the one we each have with ourself. Our experience
of vitality is our key “time management” resource. When we feel awake and alive, we can meet
our work with strength and energy. When we are dragging ourselves around, our best hope is to
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get through the day. One colleague says, “When I am well rested and in good shape, I can do in
four hours what otherwise takes me eight.”

It is easy to neglect self-care in the name of productivity, but working harder and longer is not
more productive beyond a certain point. Taking care of ourselves is essential for sustaining joy
and commitment to work. Claiming the value of self-care challenges our mental models. For
example, one leader who participates in the daytime yoga class offered at his bank tells his
colleague, “I’m off to increase my productivity.” Other companies force their employees to take
vacation by limiting e-mail access during certain periods of the year.

Organizing for Action

Taking action inevitably leads to natural disorder: papers and books are placed on surfaces, e-
folders and files are opened, notes are written down, etc. The critical point in keeping track of
information and “stuff” is what we do after we create the disorder. Do we put things away in
places where we can easily retrieve them, or do we allow the temporary chaos to expand
indefinitely? Do we clean up our creative messes or create toxic ones? Honestly answering these
questions can be especially difficult for leaders who see the big picture and don’t want be
bothered with details.

It can be helpful to remember that effective leadership involves implementation as well as ideas,
and that implementation is in the details. People can accomplish great things without taking care
of some of the basics, but there may come a time when addressing fundamental organizing skills
is necessary.

Organizing for action means creating useful, workable systems and habits for accessing
information quickly, tracking commitments, and managing e-mail effectively. The objective of a
good filing system is retrieval, not storage. After you set up meaningful categories and locate
items where you can quickly find them again, it is important to develop a practice of sorting
through files regularly. Though this can seem like a waste of time, looking for lost items wastes
more.

The initial backlog is daunting. Beginning to sort through piles of accumulated paper can create
anxiety because they are often the build-up of unmade decisions, projects to let go of, or
confusion about tasks. The piles are there because we don’t want to deal with them. Remember
your purpose and vision for managing time. Enlist the support of an executive assistant or
professional organizing coach. Repeated short efforts (e.g. 10–30 minutes per day) can eliminate
unwieldy piles. Building in the habit of regular filing—once per day, week, or month—prevents
the piles from coming back.

A second organizing challenge is tracking the commitments you make to others and others make
to you. Leaders establish commitments in many places throughout the day. We recommend
putting them in writing immediately and then, at least once a day, compiling them in one
location. However the list is developed, it is important to select a manageable number of items
for each day before the rush descends—ideally the night before or before opening one’s e-mail in
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the morning. Finally, we recommend that leaders conduct a weekly review to update their
commitments and ensure that others are keeping their commitments to them.

E-mail has become the boon and bane of many people’s organizational lives. It is a timesaving
device, which, along with cell phones and Blackberries, has ironically left us with less
discretionary time than ever before. One recent client labeled it “a faceless way of delegating
thoughtlessly.” We have found that some people can make best use of e-mail when they follow
certain guidelines, such as those in “Managing E-Mail.” Leaders also have a responsibility to
help their teams and organizations create effective e-mail protocols.

Changing Behavior

Time management practices are habits of thought and action, and thus require time and effort to
change. The challenge is to alter some very personal ways of being in the world. While personal
change is by definition individual, we suggest that the following seven steps may help the
process (see “Changing Behavior”).

CHANGING BEHAVIOR

Summary

In today’s 24/7 world, leaders need to focus on ensuring the sustainable productivity of
themselves and the people in their organizations. They need to think of time management as a
discipline of making wise and sometimes difficult choices—not an exercise in doing more with
less. They can do this by identifying and reducing phantom workload, drawing on numerous
strategies to manage time more effectively, tapping resources other than time to increase
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productivity and effectiveness, and engaging themselves and others in a process of changing
behavior. Their lives and the lives of others depend on their ability to manage this precious
resource.

References

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Alimo-Metcalfe, B.; Alban-Metcalfe, J. (2005). Leadership: Time for a New Direction?

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Avery, G. C. (2005). Understanding Leadership. London: Sage Publications

Bass, B.M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. New York: Free
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Bennis, W. (1994). On becoming a leader. (Rev. ed). Reading, MA: Perseus Books.

Bryman, A. (1996). Leadership in organizations. In Clegg S. R., Hardy, C. and Nord, W.

R. (Eds). Handbook of Organization Studies, pp.276-292. London: Sage.

Conger, J.A. (1989). The charismatic leader: Behind the mystique of exceptional
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