The Reality of Business

Team Leaders Part 2: Managing Time & Managing Work

• Bob Morrell and Jeremy Blake • Season 6 • Episode 19

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If you’re always busy but nothing really seems to move forward, this episode is for you.

In part two of our Team Leaders series, we take a closer look at what gets in the way of consistent leadership and how to get back on track. It’s a practical conversation about replacing firefighting with focus and giving your team (and yourself) a clearer sense of direction.

From endless meetings to shifting priorities, we explore what’s actually worth your time and how to make it count.

We cover:

  • Spotting the difference between busy and making progress
  • Using 3 daily non-negotiables to take control of your day
  • Building a 90-day plan and creating a proper leader’s playbook
  • Making sure your metrics match your values and culture
  • Letting your calendar speak for your leadership
  • Quietly fixing one small thing each week
  • Seeing why remote accompaniment matters more than ever

Whether you’re new to leading a team or you’ve been doing it for years, this episode offers honest, realistic ways to manage your time, your work and your team.

Haven’t listened to Part 1 yet? That one’s all about managing people – worth going back for.

For more info, free resources, useful content & our blog posts, please visit realitytraining.com.

Reality Training - Selling Certainty

Jeremy Blake:

You're listening to The Reality of Business with Bob Morell and me, Jeremy Blake. Good day to you, Bobby.

Bob Morrell:

Hello, hello, hello.

Jeremy Blake:

How are you?

Bob Morrell:

Very well indeed. It's a lovely day down here in Sussex, although a very chilly.

Jeremy Blake:

Yeah, we are in the chilly season, and as we find you today, we're recording part two of a well, it's a hot topic, not chilly at all. It's all about team leadership. And the first part we did, which you can find on the reality of business, is all about managing people. Today in part two, we come to two aspects managing time, the time you have available to do the work, but also managing the work. What is the work? How are you going to do that? And we're particularly looking at the role that team leaders have in this. And the way the format's going to work is I'm going to fire some questions at Bob and he's going to come back and we can have a discussion. Right, are you ready to rock?

Bob Morrell:

Oh, yeah, let's do it.

Jeremy Blake:

So one of the things that we often start any project with is this concept from leaders themselves talking about lack of consistency in sales, in service, and of course, operations, delivery could be anything that a company is struggling to have a consistency in. But what about the leadership door? Why don't most organizations have consistent leadership?

Bob Morrell:

Well, it's an excellent question, and it's a massive question. And there's lots of historical reasons why. And it could be something as simple as they only ever think about consistency in terms of customer interaction, and then just make an assumption that their leadership is by its very nature consistent if it's relatively successful. But the truth is this if you have um a load of leaders who are constantly firefighting, then that becomes addictive. And the organization becomes an organization that is always firefighting and always always having crises. And that's something that you get into, and if you don't recognize it, you can stay like that for years and years.

Jeremy Blake:

Oh, yes.

Bob Morrell:

Um, because being in a crisis of some kind actually feels productive. Whereas if you are actually organizing what you're doing, that takes a bit of work, but you know what? So does managing those crises and the chaos that you're managing all the time. And so you're better off being less lazy and saying, right, what is our consistent approach to leadership? How are we going to do this moving forward? How are we going to stop this firefighting so that we are actually being productive and effective?

Jeremy Blake:

And I don't think I think the only thing that's changed is the channel of this busyness in that now people are pulling people onto Teams and Zoom meetings, whereas previously they're pulling them into rooms to disfunction busyness.

Bob Morrell:

Um I saw a really good thing the other day actually about meetings. It said you can easily spot a company that is dysfunctional, and it's because they are having loads and loads of meetings. You know, the the big question is when does the actual work get done?

Jeremy Blake:

Well, I think some people think meetings is work now.

Bob Morrell:

Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Blake:

They go, I've got meetings today, I've got work. Well, you're having discussions, but you're not actually doing any work. I mean, you might be doing some elements of work, but if you're debating, just debating, you're not executing or strategizing or whatever else. Yeah, very addictive. Um, now, this next one is my favorite, and you and I have a favorite expression that we love when people share it with us. They tell us they've been dueling. You know, how's your day going? I've I've been back to back. Oh, did you win that duel? Um back to back.

Bob Morrell:

Um back to back meetings. Um, okay, so this comes back to this thing about meetings. So anyone who says that they're really, really busy, here's the question. Um, is that motion without impact? Because if it is, then it has no value. Okay, if you're just doing stuff that doesn't move things forward, then you're just literally mouthing in meetings all the time. And there's a massive question here, and that's a really good one, I think, and I've been asking myself this question recently. What has moved forward this week? Yeah. What has moved forward this week? Um, if you've had another week and things are more or less the same and there hasn't been any particular progress, um, and if everyone's sitting around going, well, things are okay, aren't they? No, they're not, because you're not progressing, you're not moving forward. You're just getting comfortable with just being okay. And that isn't what the world of business is about. It's about moving forward.

Jeremy Blake:

Well, that leads us beautifully on to the next problem because people are busy or think they're busy, they're discussing things, and they say they're so flat out they they don't know where to start. It's funny, I knocked on a neighbour's door last night to give her some of my daughter's clothing that she no longer wears, and I go, How are you? And she looked absolutely flustered, and she says, I'm going from room to room trying to tidy this mess. Um, she's got three children, her husband's away with the army doing all sorts, and I said she said, I just can't seem to prioritize. I'm going from one room to the next and I'm not getting anything done. And I said, Okay, which is the single biggest room that you'd like to be tidy? She said, The kitchen. I said, forget the rest. And she went, Thanks. Um, now what about prioritization? People can't prioritize, can they?

Bob Morrell:

Well, the other point is that um we you and I meet people all the time who have massive to-do lists, okay? And I think people forget that that the way you work is is a choice. You can choose the things that you need to focus on, and so if you choose fewer things to do, but do them with more depth and consistency, that will have the greatest effect on the team that you're working with. And in fact, it goes the same, it's the same for your teams as well. The fact is that simple activity is not progress, okay, it just isn't. And um, we talked about this on our time management um uh segment, and it was we talked about the success six. Um, I think for team leaders, what you should do is anchor your day around three clear priorities that are planned and blocked in, and those are your non-negotiables for the day, and then have three other activities which could change or shift. Yeah, but I think if you don't do that, you'll spend a whole day firefighting and responding to things, and you'll then think that you're oh, I'm drowning in the noise and it's too much, and I can't do anything else. No, you decide what deserves your energy. And we had this this week actually. We were working with some with some team leaders who are saying, Oh, I I never get time to to sit with my team members and um and watch what they do. And that's because they're not being asked to do things that are more important, they've just decided that those things are more important. They need to decide that sitting with their team members deserves their energy and they need to focus on that. So I think a nice little way to think about it is that simplicity is a strategy. You know, the simpler you have a little plan, the more progress you're gonna make. And if you've got loads of stuff complicating what it is you're doing, that might feel good. Oh, I'm so busy, but it masks the focus of the really important stuff. And I think if people could identify that, it'd be amazing.

Jeremy Blake:

I will add one thing to that. I think there's a tremendous relief in deciding what you're not going to do.

Bob Morrell:

Absolutely.

Jeremy Blake:

And you take it off your list. Uh, you know, we managed to do that in our spare time. You know, this weekend I was gonna do this. No, I'm not gonna do that. I'm just not gonna do that this weekend. Um, I need the break. Why can't you do that in work and say I'm not it's not important? Put it off for two days or even a week. I don't need to get to that till X date. So let's now come to a team leader. They've got a team, and let's just say, taking your power of three, there's three priorities for the week that they've got to, you know, it's it's climbing to Christmas, they've got to do the do a certain thing with a with a customer group, they've got to make it very clear that this is the tech that that is working, and they've got to do some sort of updates on I don't know, processes or whatever. Uh, but yet the team will go, well, that's all well and good, but I've got all these other things to do. How do you marshal a team to just do less and focus on the real priorities that will move the business forward, keep customers happy in spending, etc., etc.?

Bob Morrell:

Well, I think one of the big issues that we have with inconsistent leadership is that the priorities are changing every week. Okay, now you could argue, well, that comes from above, you know, they go, Oh, we now need you to do this this week, so focus on that. I think leadership is about not changing priorities on a whim. Okay, if you do that, people think you're very fragmented and not very not very focused, as we've just been talking about. So I think it's really important to uh if you look at what what your what you want your team to do, again, it's about anchoring your energy with a single priority that you perhaps score or measure every week and hold on to it to forge stability. So there might be other things that change, but you say uh, you know, the uh the the higher ups have asked for this, but that doesn't mean we're gonna lose our focus on this thing, which is a constant. So there's always something which means that you are maintaining a standard, maintaining a really good level of um of a requirement, and then other things might might be imposed upon that. But that is really good for a team to know that our main focus is this. And we talked a bit about that in the last one about your team should know instinctively what your goals are as a team. If they don't, you're not you're not conveying that clearly or repeatedly enough.

Jeremy Blake:

Well, you you can't fix and repair everything at once. And I'll use a sporting analogy. Last night I was very lucky to get some amazing squash coaching. And uh this guy came on court and I said, I've got to fix this, this, this, and he said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're just gonna work on this thing I've identified, which is your serve. So when you have the ball, you're in control, you're more likely to win points when you're serving. All I want you to focus on till I see you again is your serve. And I thought, wow, makes perfect sense because that's my control area. Whereas if you are trying to fix everything, then you're firefighting all over the place. Um well, just come back to the time and work aspect for a leader. You start your day, you hopefully a lot of what we've said already is helping and building up to this, but a a really good tip for just managing time and work um as you start your day.

Bob Morrell:

So I think um a really great tip, and as we know, many large businesses will work in quarterly, um quarterly focuses, which uh I have varied, varied feelings about, but I understand why they do it, and we've talked about this in other podcasts. I think all leaders should have a 90-day planner that uh has set out all the kind of key focuses for that that 90-day period. It's actually quite a tight window of activity because if you take out weekends, you know, that's far fewer days that you're actually um working on. This gives you a really big idea of focus for that 90 days, and then what you can do is take a big goal that you may have and then break it down into a series of action steps through that 90 days, and over time that delivers growth. Now, to be clear, this isn't just a notebook with a series of dates in and and uh check-ins. What it should be, and this is what all leaders should have, is a playbook of how you do what you do. So, as a leader, and lots of the things we covered in the last edition about managing people, um lots of lots of that can be in here because there's the playbook of how you deal with negative people, the playbook of how you deal with sub-performers, the playbook of how you're doing coaching. So this isn't an optional thing that you come back to at the end of the 90 days. This 90 days plan is how the team prioritises what the team is doing, and that gives you clarity for leading the system and how you plan because it's war down in the playbook.

Jeremy Blake:

Otherwise, you're dragged into the day, you're dragged into firefighting, you haven't got a little vision. And I think three months is reasonable, it's your 90-day, which actually, as you say, when you take out weekends about 70 days, something like that, even less, probably late 60s.

Bob Morrell:

Sure, sure. Um and all and also what what I like about it is that what you're trying to do is get into a rhythm.

Jeremy Blake:

Yeah.

Bob Morrell:

You know, if you've got a if you've got a good rhythm, it's not about all those different tasks you have, it's about doing the right actions on repeat, steady, consistent, predictable, on the purpose of what you're trying to achieve. Yeah, that's your focus, and that planner makes sure that you do those things, and that then absolutely cascades onto the team.

Jeremy Blake:

Well, I'll tell you uh a person who does that particularly well is Mrs. Blake. You see, one thing that teachers have as an advantage is they divide their year into these 90-day frameworks. True. So this term it's revision, next term it's mocks, next term it's it's exams for real. And so we've got to cover a certain amount of syllabus in the time. So she has a 90-day rolling plan of what must be covered in the classroom and what the kids will have learned. Then she knows she can move on to the next stage of revision. So brilliantly organised. And um, I kind of run my life in terms, not just by having children who've been at school, because most of them are out of it now, only one left. But being married to a teacher, that kind of termally, what are we going to get done over this 90-day period? It's actually very, very helpful. Now, here's one of our favorites. Um doing some research for an upcoming episode we're going to do on standards. I've had a good look at metrics. So you can measure all sorts of things. Um it wasn't Drucker who talked about what gets measured, gets managed, it was somebody else, and it comes from a book, and I can't remember their name. But a lot of people are obsessed with various measures and they use other letters like KPIs. In fact, we have done an entire episode on measures and metrics. But if you were to really simplify it back again to this leader we're talking about, team leaders, what are the really important metrics for team leaders?

Bob Morrell:

Well, I think we need to accept that most team leaders don't choose the metrics they're forced to look at. So that's the first thing. But I think there's a the the key thing about metrics is whatever it is you're you're measuring, don't choose those metrics and then completely ignore the culture. Because that's going to create much bigger problems than you can give an example.

Jeremy Blake:

Give an example of that.

Bob Morrell:

Well, you know, for example, you could have um a sales target, okay, that's one of your KPIs. Um but if you don't link that to the right behaviors, yeah, as we know, you could have people using underhand methods to achieve that target, which could cost the company deer further on down the line. That makes the metric absolutely cost anyway. So so I think if you have a result that is forced, that can create a toxic culture. And I think that's what we all need to avoid. So if whatever your whatever your metric you choose, have that metric linked to a cultural shift, yeah, and then think, okay, if we were to hit that that target, hit that metric, hit that KPI, what is the human price of that? Am I going to have people working late, starting early? Am I going to be expecting too much from my people to do that? Yeah. And can I adjust that expectation earlier, which is better leadership and makes it more um more achievable for everyone? But also it acknowledges your um your understanding of what is possible. And lots of people will know about smart objectives, you know. Um, you know, specific, measurable, you know, that's really important and achievable. If something just isn't achievable, leadership is about saying, no, I think a better, more achievable thing would be this. We need to make sure we keep the culture at a good level as well. This won't be toxic, this won't be too much of a human price for us to achieve it. And I think that will then um you know be a better achievement. So that's I think is a is a nice way of thinking about metrics.

Jeremy Blake:

At reality training, we spend a lot of time working with team leaders. Team leaders are a really important part of modern businesses. And if they're skilled at leadership, they can really create a high-performing, motivated and productive team. If they lack skills and knowledge, then that's where we can come in. We know what it is to be a successful team leader, and we've got a series of modules on areas like presentation skills, time management, running meetings, performance coaching, delegation, and how to manage remote teams and many more. These make a really big difference to your team leaders' effectiveness and the results they can produce with their people. We know that team leaders are essential these days, probably more than ever, and we also know how to make them really good at what they do. For more information on how we can help your team leaders transform your business, contact reality training at selling. To throw in potentially a curveball, but also spell out the challenge of metrics we have in today, and probably all uh in a number of European countries, we have a thing called Black Friday, where the metrics of the last 360 whatever days have been different. The metrics today are very simply how many new people can we sign up, how many new sales can we make, what can we get through of new customers? You know, metrics go right out the window. There are sort of Black Friday metrics that actually might throw out an entire amount of your behaviours. Interestingly, um I've seen a couple of companies not doing it this year that I expected would, and they just don't have anything Black Friday related at all. But I've seen some other major companies that are hedging their bets on retention and new and saying wherever you are with us, we've got something for you, which is really challenging, especially in the work that Bob and I do with the reality team, which is all about integrity and selling and and leading and not discounting and so on and so on. So let's not go down that hole anymore. Um personal measure how does a team leader actually sort of know they're doing all right?

Bob Morrell:

Well, I've got a fantastic thing with. I think all of us should think about. Let's imagine you were going for a job, and that job is to run a team or a sales team or a a group of people, and they'd say something like how can you um how can you demonstrate the way that you manage people or the your talent for managing people? What you should be able to do is look at your calendar um from five years ago, and that calendar will show a number of things. It'll show purpose of what it is you were doing then. Okay, not distraction, it shows purpose. So in your calendar, it's blocked out with purposeful activities and focus that you were working on. It also demonstrates that you know that success is about your small, repeatable choices. So there will be lots of notes in that calendar of things that you're doing again and again with your people. There will also be chunks of you coaching and mentoring people in that calendar. Um, there will also be chunks of time when you're listening to what your people are doing and uh getting feedback from them on how they're finding their work. And also, as we mentioned earlier, that daily intention in your calendar, saying, Today I'm going to achieve this, which is going to move things forward. Now imagine you're sitting in front of a potential employer and you can demonstrate how you manage yourself as a leader. Okay. You'd be straight in. You'll be straight in. You know, absolutely.

Jeremy Blake:

It's not about um what you've done today or this week, you know. So often people say, I've done I'm an amazing leader, I've achieved this right now.

unknown:

Yeah.

Jeremy Blake:

What we're saying is you know in your heart of hearts how well you've been progressing, committing to committing to the right behaviours of leadership and so on. So let's finish with an absolute favourite. Um, what's quite interesting is when you start work, and I and I know that this is always interesting for me when I think of the young people entering the workplace, and I played squash with a guy last night just on a graduate scheme with Mars, and and you think, gosh, you're gonna suddenly have team leaders who are you know getting you to do things. You don't know when you first start working whether your leader's good or not, and then you start to have a hunch, you go on intuition, you start chatting to people. Um how many people in this team? Is there a lot of turnover? You start to sort of feel your way. But if you weren't relying on gut intuition, how might you as an individual spot a poor leader? And we could actually open this up saying a team leader spotting a poor leader leading them, but also a poor individual in a team who thinks their team leader isn't any good and more senior. What's a good way of spotting bad leadership?

Bob Morrell:

Well, the first thing to do is to watch loads of films, because um if you think if you look at lots of films, they are full of terrible leaders.

Jeremy Blake:

Because they're interesting to watch.

Bob Morrell:

They're interesting to watch. So bad leaders are quite exciting, bizarrely. Um whereas whereas if you if you went and if you go into a good, well-led organization, a lot of the time it's not too exciting because people know what they're doing, they're focused on what they're doing, there's kind of like a unity of purpose because they're well-led. Whereas if you go into a place that's going mental, it's probably and having loads of meetings, that's an indication of poor leadership. But there's there's a couple of other things which I think is quite good to note. So uh clearly a good leader is somebody who, to use that odd expression, is leaning in and getting curious and wanting to understand as much as they can about what's happening, okay? Whereas a bad leader stiffens up, okay, and so doesn't so by that they don't say very much. When they do speak, their tone changes because they their ego feels threatened because they don't have all the answers, because they're not close enough to what's going on, as a good leader would be. They tend to panic a bit too easily. I remember one guy I used to work with, he used to bang his head repeatedly against the uh the desk when things went wrong. Uh, and what they do is they hide behind their position, they hide behind policy, so they have no flexibility, and they will be justifying all the time what's going on rather than working with their team to improve things. And that is a really good, I think that's a great example of bad leadership. And I imagine we could all think of people we've worked for who you think, oh dear, you know, I I I I can imagine that person who telling uh the policy one's very interesting.

Jeremy Blake:

Telling somebody there's a policy about that, and you must do that.

Bob Morrell:

Yeah.

Jeremy Blake:

When they didn't write the policy, the policy's out of date. That doesn't necessarily inspire me. Oh god, thank you so much. Now you've told me we've got a policy on it. I'm I'm fine now, I'll go off and crack on. That that isn't leadership, that isn't explaining our role and how customers fit in and what we're all doing here and our purpose. That one is really quite common, you know. You can't do that, why not? Because I have a clipboard. Okay.

Bob Morrell:

Um, I think a lot of team leaders feel in some ways subjugated by their teams. If they've been appointed in particular, and the the teams are more experienced than them, that can cause, you know, friction. Now there's nothing wrong with friction, as we said in the previous episode. You need that to overcome it to demonstrate leadership. I think that's a really big takeaway I want people to take from from these episodes. But I think the other point is this as a new team leader, you may not be able to change everything that your team needs, but it probably is within your power to fix maybe one thing a week and do it quietly. Just quietly fix something that hasn't been so good. And that's not a bad strategy to think, you know, nothing's perfect. Lots of organizations have huge uh issues which take a long time to overcome. But if you can gently chip away and make things better for your team in one way every week, just a small thing that makes a difference, that is noticed. Okay, that is effective work, that is actually moving forward. Um, and that's not a bad, not a bad way of thinking about it.

Jeremy Blake:

I think one more thing I'd say that's coming out of a new project I've started uh very recently is that when we used to manage time and and work and be in the same building as people, we could see what they were doing. We had an indication of the behaviors and the work they were doing, to the quality, to the effect, whether they're talking to customers. One of the challenges with remote working is you can't see that or witness that. So if you have if you have meetings about what someone's doing, it's actually nearly all hypothetical. Yeah, this is what I'm doing at the moment. Oh, right, okay, good, let's talk about what you're doing. But you're not ever witnessing it. So, one of the things I would say for team leaders, even if you're spread geographically, you need to see somebody working. You need to actually see what they're doing. And so in some other projects we're running, we're we're really trying to bring back accompaniment and spending time with people and seeing them in action because otherwise you're having a wonderful hypothetical question about the work they're doing, but you don't know about the work they're doing.

Bob Morrell:

Well, that brings us that brings us on to uh what we'll be doing in our next episode, which I think you should all um make sure you tune in for because we are going to be looking at standards. Yeah, and I think one great thing a team leader can do is to enforce a standard because that's essential. And uh we'll be looking at that, as I say, in more detail on the next episode. But for now, we've covered work, we've covered time, and in the previous episode, we've covered managing people. I think there's a load of really good tips there for team leaders, whether they're new or experienced, and I hope you can utilize uh this podcast to give you some inspiration to manage your teams far more effectively going forward.

Jeremy Blake:

Great, thank you, Bobby. We will see you and hear you, and you'll hear us on another episode soon. Do review us, like us, or share this episode with someone who you think could be a better leader. Thanks.

Bob Morrell:

Hi,