Time Management and Delegation

Time Management and Delegation is the number one personal effectiveness issue facing business leaders every day. Do you find that you never have time to focus on the things that will really make a difference in growing your company? At the recent meeting of my MDs group we were delighted to have the Vistage Speaker Malcolm Smith conduct a workshop on this and we had some superb takeaways such as:

1. Do you still get it? Are you still really motivated to focus on the big picture or are you submerged in day-today fire fighting and dealing with the unimportant? Great leaders keep their eye on the big picture.
2. Does your next level get it? Taking on talented people better then you is the best investment you can make. Attitude trumps skills. Delegate and trust your competent people. As we say in Vistage, having the right people on the bus in the right seats makes a huge difference.
3. Clients buy your belief system – Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’ is so powerful, choose the people and clients who get it. Clients that have different objectives to you are unlikely to be long-term partners, so choose wisely.
4. Interruptions take 65% of your time – close the door, buy some white noise earphones and wear them when you don’t want to be disturbed. Go offsite and spend a day thinking about your business. One of my members went out and bought some immediately, others put a yellow flag up on their workstations.
5. Get some discipline into email – Allocate 3 times a day for it. Set rules in the business like ‘if it’s sent to me I have to read it, if it’s cc’d me don’t expect me to read it’. Malcolm talked about one firm where they had turned off all internal emails and talked to each other instead.
6. Have you digested Stephen Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’? – focus on the Important/Urgent box like client calls and do this well. Allocate quality time to think through the Important/Non-Urgent things. Make a list of and stop doing the Unimportant/Urgent and Non-Urgent things, delete or systematise them. To quote Malcolm, ‘Get off the Hamster Wheel of Despair!’
7. Meetings – standing up, questions and issues not updates, record actions not minutes. Keep the meetings focused on key issues and opportunities, not updates.
8. Talk with your staff as adults – don’t lapse into parent/child relationships otherwise you will never motivate and build trust. Create a sense of Society (a place where people really want to be every day), build Self-Esteem and enable Self-Actualisation. Check yourself - do you talk down to your staff instead of helping them to share your load and grow to give you more headroom.

Recognise any of those things? If you are an SME MD or owner, at times feel lonely in your role and would like to learn new ways of doing things to grow your business, then please contact me! 

See Malcolm Smith video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70UV22pB790

Frank Esson

Vistage Chair London

[email protected]