Bishop House Consulting, Inc.

13 Minutes a Day to Better Productivity

Productivity increases significantly when we make conscious decisions about what to work on and for how long. Planning allows us to be proactive rather than reactive and work for results rather than filling time fighting fires or just busy with activities.  Invest 13 minutes in planning and re-planning your day to stay focused and increase your and your team’s productivity.

7 Minutes to Start Your Day

Start your day investing 7 minutes of your budget to think about the following:

• What should I be working on today to get the results I and my team need?
• Where am I investing my valuable time?
• What work will best model behaviors I expect in others?

Two, 2 Minute Time Outs 

As the day progresses continually ask the question “what is the best use of my time right now?”  Establish two time outs which you’ll use to review your plan and adjust your focus to meet your goals for the day.

A 2 Minute End of Day Recap

At the end of each day, recap your current status, confirm your focus and think about the next day.

Teach this to your employees and improve their productivity as well.  Encourage them to stop and ask the same question:  What is the best use of my time right now?  Create a reminder to help trigger the question for you and your employees.  Maybe a small, brightly colored Post It note strategically posted in your office.  Consider establishing set times during the day such as 11:11 am and 1:11 pm for the timeouts.  Or setup a task reminder in Outlook to remind you 3 times a day to re-evaluate your time.

Give it a try for the next 5 work days.  Your investment of 65 minutes might just pay off!

Why You Make So Much Money

Question to Ponder:  Why have organizations invested such large sums of money to fund supervisors, team leaders, managers, project managers, regional managers, associate directors, directors, senior directors, VPs, senior VPs, CFOs, CAOs, CIOs, COOs, and CEOs?

A very intriguing theme from the book Smart Swarm was the ability of mere insects – ants, bees, termites – to architect amazingly complex homes/factories without the need of a leader.  Locating, constructing, operating, fixing, protecting their factories was all accomplished without the need to have a hierarchy of leadership and dutiful managers.  An important key to the success of these insects turns out to be the unique methods of communication that have been adapted over time.

Companies invest those large sums of money in people like you in the hope that you will enable effective communication within, among – and at times in spite of – the team or organization.  The ideal result is motivated and productive dynamic humans who together can accomplish goals to increase corporate, societal and/or cultural wealth.  You are the short term solution until we evolve our unique methods of communication.

By the way, the insects have been evolving for over 100 million years so your professional leadership role isn’t going away soon assuming of course that your ROI is trending well.

DiSC Tip:  What a “D” Fears

Our high “D” friends tend to fear loss of control, being taken advantage of and vulnerability.

Priming Your Team

You’ve just finished a tough business call with a very rude, obnoxious person.  Now you are off to attend your team meeting.  Any guess as to the climate you’ll help create for that meeting?  Well social psychologists know very well what will likely happen.

A team, like an individual, will follow the environmental cues found in the room.  As living organisms a team reacts to the environment.  Social psychologists have studied how adjusting the major stimulus in the room – the team members themselves – impacts team performance.  The stimuli is adjusted using a method/concept called priming.  There’s a lot of psychobabble that can define priming but an easy example is to watch someone’s face as you mention the following words/phrases:  sunshine, sand, smell of salt water, calm breeze.  Most people will immediately think about a nice time at the beach, feel the warmth of the sunshine and crack a small smile.

To prime your team discussion – and get you out of your funk from the bad phone call – start your team meeting with a short exercise.  In a lightening round, ask everyone for the best thing that has happened to them so far today.  The energy in the room will increase and more importantly, the latent cognitive capacity of each team member will be awakened enabling discussions to be more insightful.

Be sure to play around with the question to match up to your team’s functional work (customer service, finance, technology, ion implantation, etc.)

Team Morphing: Tasting the Success

The dynamic nature of teams tends to be underestimated by most leaders and team members.   A stagnant team wallows in low performance and disengaged personalities while a thriving team excels with high achievement and an abundance of team loyalty.   We often forget that the team itself is a living breathing organism which needs to be feed and nurtured.

There is a beautiful moment in time when a team morphs from stagnant to thriving.  It’s an amazing sight to see the team members physically open up to engage each other and to hear the increase conversational tone and expectation.  Even more amazing is to feel the energy boost that emanates from the collective escalation of belief in each other and the team as a whole.

I’ve had the great fortune to be on some teams during this morphing and I’ve had the opportunity to watch teams move through the morphing.   As I work with teams I fully anticipate and yearn for that feeling, that moment when the team changes momentum and allows itself to grow.   And yet, there are some teams whose team members just won’t allow themselves the full glory of unencumbered freedom from stagnation.

When did you last taste the sweetness of a highly functional, thriving team?

GROW

Ken Blanchard has a new book out. You might remember Blanchard who wrote the now classic, The One Minute Manager, which was extremely impactful given it’s easy to read format and 3 practical management techniques.  The new book, Great Leaders GROW, is an easy read business fable.  I like the simplicity he approaches the complex world of leadership by challenging that leadership isn’t something you learn in a day.  Great leaders become great because they are on a long journey to learn and increase their wisdom.   Here’s a quick summary of his model.

• G = Gain Knowledge
• R = Reach Out to Others
• O = Open Your World
• W = Walk Towards Wisdom

I’ve come to the conclusion that a journey for leadership wisdom is like being a successful parent:  you can fake caring but you can’t fake showing up.  Being labeled as the parent of a kid is substantially different than actively engaging in creating a sustainable relationship, exacting measured counseling versus discipline, and committing to showing up every day.

If you are going through the motions as a leader then you aren’t creating leadership wisdom nor are you being as effective as you could be.  And if this is the case and you are really a stand-up guy or gal, you would ask the company to reduce your compensation package to more appropriately match your value to the organization.

Death by Team Meeting

Explain why you are meeting with your team.  Really, take 20 seconds and explain the value proposition for the hours upon hours you and your team spend in meetings during a month.

Teams do need to communicate and make decisions so coming together in meetings to communicate is an effective methodology.  It’s just such a shame that so much time is involved and how lousy people feel about the effectiveness of the meetings.  Meetings are boring and they are ineffective because they lack contextual structure.  And meetings often lack purpose.  They should uncover, provoke real drama seek out the ideological conflict that will incite passionate discussion and keep people engaged.

A great movie can keep you entertained for 2 hours.  The plot, the internal struggle of the main character to overcome adversity, the conflict of decisions and potential outcomes all help create engagement.   What if your meetings had the same feel?

Invest a couple of hours to read Patrick Lencioni’s not so recent book, Death by Meeting.  This easy to read business fable will ignite your creativity to make your meetings more effective.

Letting Employees Know You Know

Employees want to know that you, as their leader, are in tune with their progress against their goals.  Their innate desire is to receive attention, but the attention must be in forms they prefer whenever possible.  As you look at your team of direct reports, think about how each one prefers to receive attention and adjust your information flow and tracking to match those styles.

• The domineering employee will likely want you to be able to rattle off 2 to 3 highlights of what she is working on.
• The conscientious employee will want you to know the due dates and specific themes of his primary tasks or work load.
• The social butterfly will want you to convey how well he is collaborating with his teammates.
• The consistent, consensus employee will want you to understand how her workload is impacting her in comparison to others.

Use your instincts or formal assessment tools to gather intelligence regarding how your employees like to interact with their environment.  Then find ways to adjust your style to better match theirs.

Own Your Week

There’s a point in time when you have to decide if you will take ownership of your time or allow the beast (the company, the boss, the customer, the colleague, the employees, the family) to own you and your time.    Awhile back I adjusted me perspective from seeing time is a critical asset depleting away every second to a perspective of time being a tremendous investment opportunity awaiting my direction.

A great blog post last year helped me to take a new look at how to “theme out” the week akin to time blocking but with more substance.   The concept is to create broad themes for large blocks of time in the day and themes for each day of the week.  Here are the writer’s broad themes.  (Click here to link to his post and see a visual and/or download an Excel copy of his template.)

• Broad Themes for the Waking Hours
• Self – 5:00 am to 8:00 am
• Work – 8:30 am to 6:00 pm
• Family & Other – 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm
• Broad Themes by the Day
• Monday – Team meetings; individual direct reports and team huddle
• Tuesday & Wednesday – Extended meetings and travel themed out further by weeks of the month.  So Week 1 is travel for these days while Week 4 is for ad hoc meetings.
• Thursday – Ad hoc and lunch meetings
• Friday – Planning and lunch meetings
• Saturday – Personal
• Sunday – Church

Rehire Yourself

Remember those feelings of the first days and weeks in a new job.  The thrill of learning a new environment, the freedom from office politics and gossip, the flood of ideas, the intrigue with meeting your employees for the first time, the adrenaline rush of opportunity to make an impact, and the unwavering belief of your boss and peers in your ability to have great success.

Re-create it!  Rehire yourself into your position.

Today is your first day of your first week of your first month in the job.  Clear your calendar and GTD list (Getting Things Done).   Let the fog roll into your memories of relationships.

Start everything anew. . .

• Review your job description
• Re-introduce yourself to your employees
• Craft a vision and align your resources around the vision
• Draw a stakeholder chart of key peers and teams with whom you’ll need to establish relationships
• Champion and enable the execution of your plans
• Start a new GTD list

Create the opportunity to allow yourself to be fully motivated for your leadership role.  Rehiring yourself will allow your mind to discard old baggage that weighs you down and explore/establish boundaries that enable you to be more effective.

DiSC Tip:  Adjust Your Face

Cultural Storytelling

My friend Jerry can tell a heck of a story.  He pulls in that southern charm, teases you with just enough data to paint the picture in your head and then delivers the guts of the story.  In a matter of 3 to 4 minutes he has conveyed a full set of moral values usually with a laugh that can bring you to tears.

For your organization a good story can reveal so much about the culture of the organization.  The blending of experiences, people, events, success, challenge, tragedy, and life converge within the organization over time to create the existing culture.  Great leaders work hard to build a culture they believe will allow the organization to survive and excel over time.  These leaders know that culture – good and bad – evolves over time and well told stories reveal the threads of people and events that created desired aspects of the culture.  The leaders use the stories and history to paint the picture of the desired cultural state.

As you daydream in one of your back-to-back meetings today, meditate on the phrase “cultural storytelling.”  What messages, morals, history, and behaviors would you like to convey to employees the next time you tell a story from the old or not so old days?

Our Next Management Training Program Starts March 22nd! 

Over 500 local leaders have grown their expertise through Bishop House management training programs.  Our 8 week dynamic program focuses on:

• Increasing leadership impact
• Leading change
• Improving communications
• Managing employee performance
• Motivating staff

Are you looking to build your management skills?  Are you dreading difficult conversations?  Are you struggling as a manager?  Do you know a struggling manager?

Learn more about our Building New & Maturing Leaders Training Program.