The Time Shift Mind Shift: Prioritise, Delegate, Stratigise, Create

I’m too busy. My team needs my sign off. I’m back to back with meetings. 

You’re absolutely right: your team needs you, and you need them. But, let’s shift the narrative by working out what each of you bring to the party. After all, does your team need your insight and ideas, or your exhaustion?

You want a high-performing team under your expert leadership. Key to this are trust and empowerment, and a recognition that your part in the workflow value chain is at that strategic insight and effective oversight level. Gaining time to think means your interactions with others in that value chain are as purposeful as possible.

How to do this? Start with a preparatory exercise. Our energy levels ebb and flow, and you want your thinking and creativity to be done at the highest possible energy level. Over the next few days, jot down your energy levels during the working day, noting when you feel most and least energised so you get a complete map of your energy levels throughout the working day.

Prioritise purpose

Make meetings focused on one purpose only, such as idea exploration, decision making, performance development, mentoring, project updates. Split work updates from performance discussions. Split projects from personnel issues. This gives clarity to all attendees and allows a deep and targeted conversation to take place.

Find a set of recurring meetings from your diary, one to ones with your managers, for example. Write down what you usually cover in these meetings; do you cover team updates and personal growth, for example?. If you cover more than one purpose, then split them into more than one meeting and allocate only the time you need for that.  If you’re worried about having lots of little meetings then time-block them, putting similar purpose meetings into one weekly block.

Delegate ownership

Despite being a leader, you can’t get away completely from delivering tasks. Sometimes, a task rightly requires your authority and insight. Other times, it doesn’t and it can be delegated. True delegation transfers ownership rather than control. It shows trust and builds high performance. And an additional benefit is that you don’t need to do it. 

Delegation requires honesty and an element of bravery. Try this. 

• Look through your task list with a critical eye and find one that doesn’t have to be done by you. It might be a recurring task or a one off. Be objective and honest here. This isn’t about carrying on as before because you’ve always done it. 

• Spend five minutes writing down the task’s purpose, the systems you use to complete it, its time frame and priority levels. 

• Now, delegate that task. Make clear to your chosen delegate that they own the task because you trust them to do it. Make sure to offer support, such as training on unfamiliar systems or presentation skills. Put in a ten minute feedback chat for afterwards. 

Strategise without losing control

In leadership positions, your main role is to maintain the flow of knowledge, applying this strategically to remove obstacles, manage risk, insert insights and improve efficiency. Doing this well means you need knowledge of how your team is progressing and any obstacles they face. Meeting with the manager is one way to do this, but  there are other methods that offer efficient feedback loops with an immediate impact. They are designed to share information and learning swiftly and benefit the whole team.

Different approaches will favour different circumstances. Here are some options that you could implement. 

• Set up a shared project dashboard either using a digital platform or an online document and get the project team to keep it updated. All anyone needs to do to see the latest is take a glance. 

• On a Friday, get all your managers to send you two bullet points on what their team is doing the following week. Collate into one email, add your own activities, and send it to every team on Monday morning

Create time and ideas

Go with me on this. It might take a little time to fully reap its benefits, but once you take the step you’ll see the difference. 

Get our energy maps and look for the time when you peak, or as near to it as you can get. Now, go into your calendar and block out one hour at that time. Move meetings if you need to. Give that block the following name: Thinking Hour. Maybe put it in a different colour. 

Next step: tell your colleagues, managers, your assistant if you have one, what that hour is for. It’s your time for strategic, creative, high-impact thinking. Obviously if there’s an emergency then people can contact you, but set clear (and high) thresholds for that happening.

If you’re laughing at the mere thought of doing this then remember that this hour isn’t a luxury. It’s an essential part of being an effective leader. It’s important, so stick with it. Sure, on occasions you might have to cancel or move it, but the key is general consistency. Once your colleagues and teams get used to it and start to appreciate the value it is adding, they’ll come to terms with an hour a day where they can’t generally contact you. 

Finally, keep generally consistent and motivated to retain the hour. I appreciate that having an hour to think every day might seem odd, but it won’t take long for thoughts and ideas to fill it. Make the hour productive. If you come up with three innovative ideas, use the next session to work out which one you want to deliver. If you need to do some learning or deep-research a topic, the hour is there to get started. If you're mentoring someone, use the hour to plan your next session.

You’re changing the way you lead, empowering and growing your high-performing teams,  and giving yourself time to think. Well done.