Where does the time go? In this episode, we dissect the intricacies of how to dedicate your time based on your position. With a spotlight on the balance of delegation and the dangers of clinging to the comfort zones of past roles, we lay bare the transformative path from being overwhelmed to in control. This week's narrative is further enriched as we delve into the subtle art of clarifying your role as a leader and aligning your daily grind with the heart of the organization's objectives.
Would you like to make sure your time is being used effectively?
Join us to explore crafting a work environment where clear role definition and adept time management are not just ideals, but the everyday norm.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Where does the time go? In this episode, we dissect the intricacies of how to dedicate your time based on your position. With a spotlight on the balance of delegation and the dangers of clinging to the comfort zones of past roles, we lay bare the transformative path from being overwhelmed to in control. This week's narrative is further enriched as we delve into the subtle art of clarifying your role as a leader and aligning your daily grind with the heart of the organization's objectives.
Would you like to make sure your time is being used effectively?
Join us to explore crafting a work environment where clear role definition and adept time management are not just ideals, but the everyday norm.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Speaker 1:
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:
Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Today we are having a discussion about one of the most important, valuable and sometimes rare resources that we all have to face in our day to day life, but especially as leaders, and that is time. How often have you felt like you just don't have enough time in the day to get things done? Maybe you felt like you wasted a bunch of time on a project, or maybe you wondered if you were even the right person to be doing that work. These all come down to both your organizational choices and structure, but also you as a leader and your choices of what you've spent time dedicated to. So let's jump right into the story.
Speaker 2:
Amc Rodin. I am the COO of an organization with about 150 employees. We've been restructuring our C-suite and have some newer executives in those roles. A couple of them seem to have a really hard time with time management. They're reporting feeling overwhelmed and like they have no time to take on new responsibilities. They also use that they have no time as a reason for any poor quality of work or missed work. It's hard for me to hold them accountable when they're obviously so stressed. I think one of the problems they're having is in prioritizing what work they should be doing versus what they should be delegating in these roles. I think the roles are quite clearly written out, but I always hear about them stepping into tasks that aren't part of their position. How do I help them organize their time? This is a great question and thank you so much for sharing AMC.
Speaker 2:
This is a classic challenge of leadership and this affects all levels of leadership in an organization, and, of course, it can be really hard for leaders to figure out what to do at their time and make sure they're staying true to what's going to work best, even when they have a clearly written out role, like it sounds like you guys have. So why is that? Of course, there's going to be a variety of reasons that play into this, and I'm going to suggest that a lot of them are more based on our beliefs, our experience, our comfort level than just about what's written out for a role on a piece of paper. We've discussed personal values on this show. That would be a great example of where this is relevant. For example, if you really value relationship as a leader, the parts of a leadership role that are more relational based have probably been a lot easier for you, it's probably easy to go to those staff meetings and interact with people, so you might find yourself naturally gravitating towards that more. On the other hand, maybe you're a really organized person and the easiest part of your role was always putting together structures and schedules and scheduling people, and so you naturally gravitated a bit towards that. Now, once again, there's nothing wrong with this. Of course, as leaders, we want to be relying on our strength, but, as we've gone through in some of our other episodes, you want to be really conscious of some of these patterns that might affect what, as a leader, you're drawn towards and therefore putting your time towards Another piece that's often so comfortable and I would say this is one of the spaces I really see leaders sometimes getting caught in is just their knowledge of their previous role.
Speaker 2:
Many leaders are promoted from a previous level that was lower down the organizational hierarchy and they were often promoted because of how long they'd been in that position or their skill with the previous position. Now, when you've been in a position for a long time and you're very knowledgeable and skillful in it, you're probably pretty comfortable there. And now you're in a new leadership position, like AMC staff, and you're trying to figure things out. There's new pieces that might feel a little bit scarier, a little bit less comfortable. Well, of course, it might be natural to also want to go a little bit back towards the comfort of your previous position. On top of that, new leaders can often feel accountable to the outcomes of their team, because when they were on that team previously, they knew what the outcomes were, they knew the work they did, they felt it was good work, and now they've been promoted, so they're seeing the outcome of their team, the output of their team, as their personal responsibility and might also feel inclined to jump in to do that or to micromanage in order to get that done correctly or as they see it being done correctly. And, amc, when I've talked to a lot of leaders, when I've seen this happen before, this is often what's happened.
Speaker 2:
One of the biggest challenges leaders taking on too many responsibilities from their previous role, supporting the staff that used to be in their position and then not having the time to take on some of the pieces of their new role. And, to be honest, I struggled with this before in a role when I was closer to a frontline supervisor and we were understaffed and a part of me, knew that I should be focused on some of these different responsibilities, but I also felt this need, this draw, to make sure that the client responsibilities, that there's continuity with that work, and so I found myself often stepping into more of this frontline role and trying to help staff out. Now, looking back on it, of course I wish I'd spent more time. You know, maybe mentoring those staff and shifting that piece Can't do anything about the past, but hopefully hearing this episode today will help you figure out how you're going to be prioritizing your role and your time in the long run.
Speaker 2:
I do want to talk really quickly too. If your team is not properly staffed, this might be more of a systems issue than a challenge, with individual leaders not prioritizing their time, and sadly, I hear about this so much. So many employees right now are being asked to do tasks way beyond the scope of their job or way beyond the hours that their role technically encompasses. That's because organizations might not want to spend money to fill roles when someone leaves. Whatever the reason is, if you are seeing this consistently with all your leaders you've had these discussions with them and you determine that it's not just an individual lack of skill from a leader in their time management that they are having to step in to support clients or to support that your products get out on time.
Speaker 2:
You really need to look at your staffing.
Speaker 2:
You need to look at the system that your staff and your leaders are in and question if they can be successful, because if leaders have to step into those roles, you're not having leaders doing the roles they're supposed to do, your organization is not going to grow and thrive, you're going to have poor outcomes and you're going to have poor staff retention. So I really want you to look at that systems piece first. But of course, assuming this is more about an individual leader, let's take a look and discuss some different roles that might be present within these different positions so you can think of the kind of entry level or the beginning people as experts and an expert are probably your staff who are either working directly with clients or directly making products, so they obviously have an expertise in their field. They can provide information to others about what's happening, they're probably part of a team, they're reporting supervisors and they're probably not having a big impact on the big picture and the vision of the organization even though that's part of their role is to carry that out.
Speaker 2:
One step beyond that, you have mentors, and they're the ones who are starting to now look at how individuals and teams are contributing, how they're working together to create outcomes. At this point, they're probably providing some feedback. They're helping guide the team through any issues. They're doing some training with people. They're really responsible for connecting their team with the culture of the organization, connecting them with the vision and supporting them with how that all works together within their role. Moving on, we have our people who are doing systems operations. They're responsible for looking at all the structures, the processes, the systems that create this working environment and lead to our organizational outcomes. They are developing plans that guide procedure and decision making. They're resolving issues. They're figuring out ways of working for the bigger organization and they're probably looking at the efficiency of different systems and how to improve them. They're really the ones that are taking the visions and the strategic plan of the organization and translating it into the day-to-day operations. And finally, you have your visionaries. Now those are the leaders that are creating a vision. They're looking at all of the big picture pieces of the organization and they're building the objections. They're building the strategic direction. They'll be looking also at what's happening outside of the organization and the impact that that's having on the business and of course, they're creating this culture on this visionary level that will hopefully guide their organization's decision making, their direction and their actions.
Speaker 2:
So, thinking just even about those four roles, you can ask yourself and think about your staff. Where are they spending time? Or where are you spending time as a leader? Of course you might want to spend various amounts of time in different parts of these roles. You might be more comfortable, but your position should really dictate what percentage of your time you might be spending doing each of those things. So, for example, a frontline supervisor is probably spending most of their time in that expert and mentor role. They know the role very well. They know the technical pieces. They're able to mentor and train the people around them. They're starting to look into some of those feedback and training systems. So really they're mostly in those roles and they might touch a little, of course, on the systems, operation and the visionary side, because they are looking at some of those big picture pieces and how they're applying them to their team.
Speaker 2:
But that's a smaller percentage. They're really working in those spaces as you go up through different hierarchical levels of the organization, you're moving away. You're probably becoming less in that space of expert, less in that space of mentoring as you go higher and higher and more into those spaces of system operations and that visionary space. So by the time you get up to, say, a CEO, they're probably spending most of their time in that visionary role and then next, probably a systems operators, they'll still probably have a little bit of time as mentors and a little bit of time as experts, but they really don't want to get bogged down in that because that's going to decrease their efficiency. This is why we have different roles within an organization, so different people can take on these tasks and also decide what to delegate.
Speaker 2:
So when we think about it and you think back to your earlier example, amc, of your staff feeling overwhelmed, I would suggest and suspect that your staff are probably spending more time in that expert and maybe that mentor role than their position dictates, which means that they can't spend some of their time dedicated to those big picture pieces or the systems operations that your C-suite teams probably discussing. That's what you want them to be focused on, because you have other staff who are in those expert roles and in those mentor roles. If they're trapped in those mentor roles, they're trapped in that expert role they're going to feel overwhelmed. There is literally not time built into their role to do that. So what can you do as a leader to be supporting them?
Speaker 2:
I would say a great place to start is having a conversation with each of your staff members. A great question to begin with asking them is what do you see as the priority of your role? I've gotten some really interesting answers from different leaders as I ask that, and what they see is really the most important thing they should be focusing on. This answer could give you a lot of information about maybe what they're holding onto. That's helping them feel overwhelmed gives you some space to work with that. As they align with that priority of the position or they don't, you could see what roles they're stepping more into or less into. You could also ask them even to lay out the week of what their different tasks look like. What are they spending their time on, and do those align with these different roles of leadership, or are they feeling misaligned? So it's a great place to just start breaking this down and looking at where you're spending your time and where that might be out of sync with what your role is asking you to do, as we spoke about in the last episode as well. Amc, you are supervising these people, you're supporting them in some manner, and so you also want to look at what, as a leader, you can do to resource them properly. If you are asking them to step into their role fully, are there any resources that they need structures, supports If you listened to our last episode, we went a little bit more into this and those are the things they might need to increase their understanding and their confidence in order to switch from some of that time they might not be using as effectively to feel confident in that, and probably one of the big pieces that they will need to feel confident and they might not have had as much support in is also in the leadership skill development.
Speaker 2:
I don't know what amount of skill training they've had or leadership development they've had, but this is a really big piece that most leaders don't get enough support in until they're, say, at the C-suite. But there are so many pieces around communication, around understanding values, like we've talked about before, and also just in how you actually create trust within your team as a leader and not just trust that your staff team trust you which is very important we've talked about before but also how you learn to trust your staff team, to let go of that piece of micromanaging or that sense that you might need to step in and do your previous role in order to get the outcomes you want, and that can be done with leadership skill development so they're able to do that confidently and comfortably. I'm gonna add one last piece here which is a bit different than AMC's example, but I do see a lot of people struggle in this area is with entrepreneurs that have started their own business, which obviously they are in that expert level in An accountant, starts a business in accounting because they're very good at accounting. Now they're growing and they have a staff team and suddenly they have to make this shift or having a really hard time making this shift from that expert space to more of a mentor, more of a systems operator, more of a visionary. And so I'd really encourage, if you're an entrepreneur and you have a business that you've been growing and still that smaller stage, you're feeling yourself very overwhelmed and bogged down in that piece of being an expert doing the work directly with the client or feeling like you have to create the products. Really take a moment to look at your structure as you grow. Who else can step into those roles? So you can be doing more of that visionary work to keep growing the business, keep making it more successful.
Speaker 2:
I hope this has been a great reflection for you on how you are spending your time as a leader and if you're looking at it and going, I'm a little frustrated because I don't feel my time is spent very well. I want a little bit of help with it. Please do feel free to reach out, have that conversation. We'll figure some things out that might help you. Of course, amc, I'll be following up with you as a thank you, because this was a really, really great example and as a reminder to anyone, if you want to share your story with us or your questions, we would love to have them.
Speaker 2:
The link for that is in the description below, so you can leave that and then I will follow up with you as a thank you, making sure that you get all your questions answered. And if you want to join us live so you can comment and ask your questions, we would love to have you. The link for that is in the description below. I want to thank you so much for listening and learning with me, and hopefully you're thinking yourself and your other leaders and teammates will be thanking you for sorting out how to get this time thing figured out so everyone's working a bit more efficiently instead of overlapping roles that we don't need stepping on each other's toes. So thank you for listening. Have a great week.
Speaker 1:
We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.