Estimated Reading Time is 4 Minutes
Takeaway: Taking the time to list out the activities that are the most important for you and your people to achieve their objectives leads to more focused effort and improved results.
Distractions are Everywhere
Social Media, mobile devices, the ease of constant communication, and the unprecedented level of knowledge and information at our fingertips, all create noise around us 24/7. Marketers have become so savvy that they can lure you into their world with highly effective invitations and notifications.
On the one hand, this can all be viewed as an advantage to those of us engaged in management and leadership. Never has it been so easy to tap into the knowledge and experience of successful people. We have a constant supply of “free” quality reading material and podcasts we can devour. We simply have no excuse today as managers and leaders for not participating in on-going education and discovery of our craft.
On the other hand, we must be intentional about how we spend our time and not become victims of distractions around us.
List Those Activities
One of the strategies I’ve come to rely on as a manager, is putting down in writing a list of the most important activities that most impact, in a positive way, the achievement of my objectives and those of my direct reports. I suggest you start with your direct reports first since you likely did that job before you were promoted, and it’s probable you were one of the best at doing it, or you wouldn’t have been promoted. In fact, go ahead and consider yourself somewhat of an expert because I suspect your people respect that you once did their job and you did it well.
It’s helpful to do this as a brainstorming session where you just start writing down the specific, measurable, activities that come to mind and not worry about limiting to just the most important for now. Notice I said specific and measurable. Make sure the activity is written in language that would allow you to be able to “check off” if it was done each day. For example, if you manage salespeople, chances are one of the key activities is to contact new prospects each day. Instead of writing this down as “contacting new prospects each day”, it’s better to make it more specific and measurable. Maybe you want to write it as “contact 15 new prospects each day.” At the end of each day, I can answer “yes” or “no” to the question of whether I accomplished that activity.
Once you have a list, give yourself a day or two to think about it and shrink it down to just five. Ask yourself two questions to help validate this list;
1. Do all my people do all five of these things every day?
2. If my people did do these five things every day, would we likely accomplish more?
You need to be able to respond to the first question with a “no” and the second with a “yes”.
Now it’s your turn. What do you need to do as the manager of this team each day? Don’t forget to ask the same two questions about yourself.
Keep Your List Visible and Obvious
This list is what I refer to as “sticking to the fundamentals”. You need this list to be visible and obvious. Visible means that you and your people need to review it regularly. Visible means you post it around the office. Visible means you email it to them on occasion.
Obvious means that you commit to referring to this list whenever you are discussing how to achieve objectives. Rather than get distracted, keep yourself and your people “grounded” with this list. If you have written it correctly, it’s what makes the difference.
Conclusion: The more time you spend doing those activities that will have the most impact on your results, the better your results will be.
Transformational Exercise: Write down a list of 15-20 activities that you do and the same for your direct reports. Now process through the list to get it to just 5 activities.
