Making you more effective at work to reach the next rung.
“Team” has become a pervasive concept when talking about a manager and his directs. It is a useful metaphor, but it is incomplete by itself. Teams function differently in different sports. The late, great management thinker Peter F. Drucker calls out three types of teams in his opus Management. They are the baseball team, the football team, and the tennis doubles team.
Operational measurements fall into two categories: measures of performance and measure of effectiveness. The first is measuring the things you do. The second is measure the results you get. People often measure the former because measuring activity is easy. How many hours did you work this week? Measuring the latter is harder. Did you achieve what you set out to achieve? Results is what we, as professionals, are accountable for. It matters more how effective we are than how busy we are.
How well are you using your time? Most people have a gut feeling about how well they make use of what time they have. You probably have an idea of your answer. How do you know that it is the right answer? The only way you can be sure is to do a time study. More precisely, I am talking about a Drucker Time Study.
Being busy seems to be in fashion as evidenced by how proudly many people proclaim they are too busy to get everything done. News Flash: Just because you have a lot to do, you are not too busy for more work. Got it: you can’t do everything, but you can do the right things. You have to prioritize your work. Being busy is not good in and of itself. If you are performing manual labor, being busy is good; it means that there is work to be done and you will have more hours you can charge. In the realm of knowledge work being busy does not mean you are being productive. You likely have become an unwitting victim of Parkinson’s Law.
Meetings are the bane of many working professionals. This is because they often don’t accomplish anything useful. This does not need to be the case. Your meetings can be different. You can have meetings that people look forward to attending, or at the very least, that they don’t mind attending. To do this, there are many things you need to get right. The first and foremost is that your meetings must serve to accomplish something. Your meeting needs to have a reason for being.