Goals or Dreams? 1. How measurable are your goals? Everything you do should be aimed toward accomplishing something profitable. Clarify your goals with your team if they are confused about the current priorities. If you cant tell how a team members daily activity moves you toward your goal in some way, its suspect. Always track the results of your efforts to reach your goals with easily readable metrics. 2. What can you triage? Examine every task your team undertakes. Is it really necessary? If not, is it still productive or profitable? If it fails that test, its subject to elimination or severe streamlining. For ten years, I created a monthly newsletter that took me a full day to write and compile. I never bothered to ask my customers if they found value in it; I simply assumed the massive subscription list was obvious. But when I really started asking questions, I discovered most people found it too long and overwhelming. Now I write a short, weekly article that many more people actually read. 3. Hows your Return on Investment? Does your teams output consistently earn the organization more than it pays all of you? If not, start honing your Personal ROI (PROI). Outsource tasks that people outside your team can do more effectively and less expensively, stop doing tasks below your pay-grades, and as a leader, dont micromanage. Always look for a more productive or profitable alternative to every task. I dont know how to fix the copy machine in my office. I could figure it out, but its not worth my time, versus a trained technician who can breeze in and out in five minutes. 4. Check your meeting meter. As you rise in leadership, youll be spending more time in meetings, because they represent your work, where decisions are being made. But they can definitely steal your time if youre not careful. If a meeting doesnt come with a purpose, an agenda, and decisions to be made, skip it. Leave at the promised end time. Encourage others to be brief and to the point with their concerns and comments. 5. Is your social media helping or hurting? Maybe social media represents the wave of the future, but it can be a huge time waster. Is it even something that your team directly profits from using? Is it necessary for doing your job, such as marketing, PR, or HR? If not, skip it at work. Not everyone needs to be using Facebook pages and Twitter at work. Appoint someone to deal with it using the latest tools to maximize time use, or outsource it if you can do so less expensively. 6. Are you proactive or reactive? Do you and your team leap into action only when prodded, or do you review your strategy on a regular advance basis, so you constantly greet change with enthusiasm and aplomb? Use your meeting time for setting strategy and triggering execution, not deciding the color scheme for the companys 50th anniversary party. Leave such trivial details to others. R-E-S-U-L-T-S As my friend Randy Pennington says with his book title, RESULTS RULE. It all boils down to this: productive teams produce results. Busy teams produce more busywork. Unless you work for an organization where results arent always immediately apparent, like an international charity, it shouldnt take you more than five minutes to determine whether or not your team is productive.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 21:09:12 +0000
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