Make Time for the Work That Matters

To identify the tasks you need to drop or outsource, take this interactive assessment.

More hours in the day. It’s one thing everyone wants, and yet it’s impossible to attain. But what if you could free up significant time—maybe as much as 20% of your workday—to focus on the responsibilities that really matter?

We’ve spent the past three years studying how knowledge workers can become more productive and found that the answer is simple: Eliminate or delegate unimportant tasks and replace them with value-added ones. Our research indicates that knowledge workers spend a great deal of their time—an average of 41%—on discretionary activities that offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled competently by others. So why do they keep doing them? Because ridding oneself of work is easier said than done. We instinctively cling to tasks that make us feel busy and thus important, while our bosses, constantly striving to do more with less, pile on as many responsibilities as we’re willing to accept.

We believe there’s a way forward, however. Knowledge workers can make themselves more productive by thinking consciously about how they spend their time; deciding which tasks matter most to them and their organizations; and dropping or creatively outsourcing the rest. We tried this intervention with 15 executives at different companies, and they were able to dramatically reduce their involvement in low-value tasks: They cut desk work by an average of six hours a week and meeting time by an average of two hours a week. And the benefits were clear. For example, when Lotta Laitinen, a manager at If, a Scandinavian insurance company, jettisoned meetings and administrative tasks in order to spend more time supporting her team, it led to a 5% increase in sales by her unit over a three-week period.

While not everyone in our study was quite that successful, the results still astounded us. By simply asking knowledge workers to rethink and shift the balance of their work, we were able to help them free up nearly a fifth of their time—an average of one full day a week—and focus on more worthwhile tasks with the hours they saved.

Why It’s So Hard 
Knowledge workers present a real challenge to managers. The work they do is difficult to observe (since a lot of it happens inside their heads), and the quality of it is frequently subjective. A manager may suspect that an employee is spending her time inefficiently but be hard-pressed to diagnose the problem, let alone come up with a solution.

We interviewed 45 knowledge workers in 39 companies across eight industries in the United States and Europe to see how they spent their days. We found that even the most dedicated and impressive performers devoted large amounts of time to tedious, non-value-added activities such as desk work and “managing across” the organization (for example, meetings with people in other departments). These are tasks that the knowledge workers themselves rated as offering little personal utility and low value to the company. 

The Work That Knowledge Workers Do 
There are many reasons why this happens. Most of us feel entangled in a web of commitments from which it can be painful to extricate ourselves: We worry that we’re letting our colleagues or employers down if we stop doing certain tasks. “I want to appear busy and productive—the company values team players,” one participant observed. Also, those less important items on our to-do lists are not entirely without benefit. Making progress on any task—even an inessential one—increases our feelings of engagement and satisfaction, research has shown. And although meetings are widely derided as a waste of time, they offer opportunities to socialize and connect with coworkers. “I actually quite look forward to face-to-face meetings,” one respondent told us. “A call is more efficient, but it’s a cold, lifeless medium.”

Organizations share some of the blame for less-than-optimal productivity. Cost-cutting has been prevalent over the past decade, and knowledge workers, like most employees, have had to take on some low-value tasks—such as making travel arrangements—that distract them from more important work. Even though business confidence is rebounding, many companies are hesitant to add back resources, particularly administrative ones. What’s more, increasingly complicated regulatory environments and tighter control systems in many industries have contributed to risk-averse corporate cultures that discourage senior people from ceding work to less seasoned colleagues. The consequences are predictable: “My team is understaffed and underskilled, so my calendar is a nightmare and I get pulled into many more meetings than I should,” one study subject reported. Another commented, “I face the constraint of the working capacity of the people I delegate to.” 

Some companies do try to help their knowledge workers focus on the value-added parts of their job. For example, one of us (Jordan Cohen) helped Pfizer create a service called pfizerWorks, which allows employees to outsource less important tasks. We’ve also seen corporate initiatives that ban e-mail on Fridays, put time limits on meetings, and forbid internal PowerPoint presentations. But it’s very difficult to change institutional norms, and when knowledge workers don’t buy in to such top-down directives, they find creative ways to resist or game the system, which only makes matters worse. We propose a sensible middle ground: judicious, self-directed interventions supported by management that help knowledge workers help themselves.
 
What Workers Can Do Our process, a variant of the classic Start/Stop/Continue exercise, is designed to help you make small but significant changes to your day-to-day work schedule. We facilitated this exercise with the 15 executives mentioned above, and they achieved some remarkable results. 

Identify low-value tasks. Using this self-assessment, look at all your daily activities and decide which ones are (a) not that important to either you or your firm and (b) relatively easy to drop, delegate, or outsource. Our research suggests that at least one-quarter of a typical knowledge worker’s activities fall into both categories, so you should aim to find up to 10 hours of time per week. The participants in our study pinpointed a range of expendable tasks. Lotta Laitinen, the manager at If, quickly identified several meetings and routine administrative tasks she could dispense with. Shantanu Kumar, CEO of a small technology company in London, realized he was too involved in project planning details, while Vincent Bryant, a manager at GDF SUEZ Energy Services, was surprised to see how much time he was wasting in sorting documents. 

Decide whether to drop, delegate, or redesign. Sort the low-value tasks into three categories: quick kills (things you can stop doing now with no negative effects), off-load opportunities (tasks that can be delegated with minimal effort), and long-term redesign (work that needs to be restructured or overhauled). Our study participants found that this step forced them to reflect carefully on their real contributions to their respective organizations. “I took a step back and asked myself, ‘Should I be doing this in the first place? Can my subordinate do it? Is he up to it?’” recalls Johann Barchechath, a manager at BNP Paribas. “This helped me figure out what was valuable for the bank versus what was valuable for me—and what we simply shouldn’t have been doing at all.” Another participant noted, “I realized that the big change I should make is to say no up-front to low-value tasks and not commit myself in the first place.” 

Off-load tasks. We heard from many participants that delegation was initially the most challenging part—but ultimately very rewarding. One participant said he couldn’t stop worrying about the tasks he had reassigned, while another told us he had trouble remembering “to push, prod, and chase.” Barchechath observed, “I learned about the importance of timing in delegating something—it is possible to delegate too early.”

Most participants eventually overcame those stumbling blocks. They delegated from 2% to 20% of their work with no decline in their productivity or their team’s. “I overestimated my subordinate’s capability at first, but it got easier after a while, and even having a partially done piece of work created energy for me,” Barchechath said. A bonus was that junior employees benefited from getting more involved. “[She] told me several times that she really appreciated it,” he added. Vincent Bryant decided to off-load tasks to a virtual personal assistant and says that although he was concerned about getting up to speed with the service, “it was seamless.” 

Allocate freed-up time. The goal, of course, is to be not just efficient but effective. So the next step is to determine how to best make use of the time you’ve saved. Write down two or three things you should be doing but aren’t, and then keep a log to assess whether you’re using your time more effectively. Some of our study participants were able to go home a bit earlier to enjoy their families (which probably made them happier and more productive the next day). Some unfortunately reported that their time was immediately swallowed up by unforeseen events: “I cleared my in-box and found myself firefighting.”

But more than half reclaimed the extra hours to do better work. “For me the most useful part was identifying the important things I don’t get time for usually,” Kumar said. “I stopped spending time with my project planning tool and instead focused on strategic activities, such as the product road map.” Laitinen used her freed-up schedule to listen in on client calls, observe her top salespeople, and coach her employees one-on-one. The result was that stunning three-week sales jump of 5%, with the biggest increases coming from below-average performers. A questionnaire showed that employee responses to the experiment were positive, and Laitinen found that she missed nothing by dropping some of her work. “The first week was really stressful, because I had to do so much planning, but by the middle of the test period, I was more relaxed, and I was satisfied when I went home every day.” 

Commit to your plan. Although this process is entirely self-directed, it’s crucial to share your plan with a boss, colleague, or mentor. Explain which activities you are getting out of and why. And agree to discuss what you’ve achieved in a few weeks’ time. Without this step, it’s all too easy to slide back into bad habits. Many of our participants found that their managers were helpful and supportive. Laitinen’s boss, Sven Kärnekull suggested people to whom she could delegate her work. Other participants discovered that simply voicing the commitment to another person helped them follow through. 

With relatively little effort and no management directive, the small intervention we propose can significantly boost productivity among knowledge workers. Such shifts are not always easy, of course. “It’s hard to make these changes without the discipline of someone standing over you,” one of our study participants remarked. But all agreed that the exercise was a useful “forcing mechanism” to help them become more efficient, effective, and engaged employees and managers. To do the same, you don’t have to redesign any parts of an organization, reengineer a work process, or transform a business model. All you have to do is ask the right questions and act on the answers. After all, if you’re a knowledge worker, isn’t using your judgment what you were hired for?

Julian Birkinshaw is a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School and the author of Becoming a Better Boss. Jordan Cohen is a productivity expert at PA Consulting Group and the recipient of the 2010 grand prize from the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) for his previous work at Pfizer.

How to Give Your Team Claws

How will you enable greatness today? That’s the question posed in this LinkedIn article by Tomasz Tunguz – a venture capitalist at Redpoint. It’s a short read, but it makes an excellent point all of us need to understand, internalize and apply to our management approach.

Consider the following excerpt:

Creativity blossoms in environments of mercilessly small teams, honest/direct/brutal feedback, and “no compromises” attitudes. Practically speaking this means deploying small teams on projects and constraining meeting sizes; empowering/trusting these small teams to make bold strides; hiring well; providing clear direction and honest feedback – ultimately enabling faster iteration cycles for better results.

In other words, when you’re leading a team, it’s not hocus-pocus magical thinking or happy coincidence that breeds success. It’s a very specific combination of responsible and directed management practices. Look closely at the words Tunguz uses. Brutal feedback. No compromises. Bold strides. Clear direction. Hiring well. These are leadership imperatives.

Think these imperatives don’t apply to you, your team or your organization? Still think that traditional employee engagement methods will keep employees motivated and productive? Think again.  The lessons are absolutely relevant for any size team, in any industry, tackling any kind of problem – whether it’s software development or patient care.  The old thinking about how to engage employees to get results (by making them happy and fulfilling all their needs) is wrong.
 Period.

If your employees are failing to deliver results, the onus is on you.  As a leader, you have to run a tighter ship! Here’s how:

Set clear expectations. Every team member should know what you expect – not only their job descriptions but also (especially!) the results you want them to deliver. They should know exactly what their contribution should be to a set of measurable outcomes.

Regularly provide brutally honest feedback. When it comes to success, failure or somewhere in between, it is your responsibility to call a spade a spade. You get to celebrate successes, but you cannot sugarcoat failures or poor performance. Sorry, but there is no award for doing their best.

Encourage personal accountability. Every team member plays an important role in achieving success. They must play their parts and then some. And this is true despite the circumstances. No excuses.

Delegate. You must allow employees to own their work and that work must get richer and more involved as time passes.  Delegation offers one of the best developmental opportunities.  The sense of responsibility and empowerment that result, fuel an inner drive and passion that cannot be imposed through a system of bribes and rewards.

Work with the willing. This is where I give you permission to play favorites. In fact, if you aren’t playing favorites, you’re probably spending too much time coddling your low performers. Find your top employees and bring them to the top with you.

 
  

Cy Wakeman, Contributor

The Imperatives of an Organization Built for Speed

by Vijay Govindarajan and Manish Tangri

In Greek mythology, Hydra, an ancient water-serpent had many heads. If one head was cut off, two rapidly grew in its place before another head could be cut off — an energy-sapping disappointment for any opponent trying to overcome it. Regenerative speed made the Hydra formidable. Even Hercules, the legendary Greco-Roman hero, needed his nephew's assistance to win. To sustain a competitive edge, your company's new business development engines must similarly fire on all cylinders at supersonic speed.

As a CEO or a leader of a business, how do you build this competency? Measure, motivate and model. 

Measure: Measure your company's "heart rate" and optimize for speed
Every team, business unit and/or company as a whole, has an underlying execution rhythm. At the most basic level this may be an individual's task completion rate (TCR). Setting a TCR of 2 weeks would mean any task you give to another or take from another needs to be done in 2 weeks. Imagine every employee, putting a red sticky on a company-wide virtual whiteboard, when an assigned task isn't completed in the allotted two weeks. With an explosion of stickies, you know that either the task allocator (a project manager) is not breaking down the task into a meaningful two-week chunk, or the doer (a low rung employee or a high rung decision maker etc) is not able to complete the task, or perhaps there are other dependencies, etc. While this is a crude example, it illustrates the importance of tracking, doer-allocator transparency and an implicit service level agreement across team members, which encourages "good enough" instead of perfect, thus optimizing for speed.

Just as agile product development methods, such as Scrum, use process and tracking tools to set and track execution rhythm, so must the organization's leader measure and monitor to ensure useful output. After all, you can't improve what you can't measure.

Motivate: Instill the sense of urgency
The best way is to expose employees to "the jungle." Too often, front-line sales people, but not necessarily the engineer or financial analyst deep in the organization, can "feel" the competition.

Simple steps such as sending them to a conference dominated by a competitor, or having them listen to a tough sales/customer service call can get their emotional investment. Some may be motivated by threats, others by solutions and the impact they can have on the world. In case of the latter, define competition as the worsening of a current problem statement. Regardless, one needs to "feel the jungle" to adopt a sense of urgency.

Model: Lead the way
You must role model to lead the way. First, don't be the bottleneck. Empower and delegate decisions so people aren't waiting for your decisions or resource allocation requests, any longer than the desired TCR. When the stakes are high and you need to decide, lead, even when in doubt. Innovation by nature is uncertain and your job is to realize what is knowable, what is not, and how to move forward to eliminate critical unknowns. So, stop looking for data that doesn't add to your decision and stop using the lack of data to procrastinate on hard decisions. Speed must be a factor in your consideration.

Finally, as this I Love Lucy video illustrates very aptly, you can't speed up the belt forever. When moving faster would result in over-utilization or amplifying skill gaps, find new ways. Can you buy instead of build? Form partnerships and alliances for mutual benefit? Fail-fast to enter a white space with a higher probability of success?

Ultimately, every organization — whether a nimble start-up or a large, established firm — needs to find ways to speed up or be left behind. These three simple rules can help you move faster.

Vijay Govindarajan and Manish Tangri

Vijay Govindarajan is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He is coauthor of Reverse Innovation (HBR Press, 2012). Manish Tangri is Associate Director of New Business Development at Intel Corporation.

6 Ways To Be A More Courageous Leader

Progress requires courage--but unfortunately, many leaders lack it. Here are simple tips that will help you make tough decisions with confidence.

 

By: Brad Lomenick 

 

I have great respect for professional baseball players; they are anything but wimpy. To stand in front of home plate with a ball heading toward your head at 95 miles per hour with nothing but a piece of wood to bat it away takes guts.

Life and leadership are a lot like baseball. Even the best batters strike out sometimes. But a true athlete, and courageous leaders, can never run away from the pitch.

I may not play baseball, but I do snow ski, and the analogy is much the same. The first time I faced the challenge of a mogul run on a black diamond slope that was steep and overwhelming, it was tough for me to muster the energy to get down the mountain. While gazing over the steep side from the top of the run, my friend’s advice was, “Point your skis down the hill and keep your nose over your tips. You have to lean forward and over your ski tips. Even when you are overcome with fright, maintain a posture of nose over tips, rather than leaning back.” In other words: Lean back and you fall.

This is not only great advice for skiing steep slopes but also good advice for leadership. As a leader, you sit atop the mountain. You have no choice but to face the slopes. You can lean back, coast, and play it safe, snowplowing your way painfully back and forth across the mountain, or you can point your skis down the hill, nose over the tips, and dominate the run. Being a courageous leader requires you to push beyond the norm, be willing to take risks and quit being a wimp.

Courage is not an individual trait but an organizational one. It’s a natural instinct that all leaders confront fear of failure and fear of the unknown. But living in that fear is destructive for a team and will kill momentum.

Courage is not waiting for your fear to go away; it is confronting your fear head-on.
Through working with young leaders around the nation, I have found six essentials that can help build a culture of courage in an organization:

1. Set scary standards. Your level of excellence and expectation for your product, service, or experience should be something that is nearly unattainable. Safe goals are set by safe leaders with safe visions. Give your people a goal that scares them, and you’ll produce leaders who know what it means to overcome fear.

2. Allow for failure. The road to success is many times paved through multiple failures. Allow for and even encourage your team to fail as they attempt to succeed.

3. Make decisions. Don’t let ideas, strategy, communication, and important organizational markers sit idly by on the side without saying yes or no. Leaders are decision makers, and must do it constantly.

4. Reward innovation. Innovation requires taking risks. And bold risks create bold team members. Rewarding innovation will challenge your team to grow in their roles.

5. Pursue the right opportunities. Not every risk is a good one. Be disciplined. Aggressively pursue a few things that make sense. Say no to things that don't--even if it means saying no more often than you're comfortable.

6. Learn to delegate. This is one of the most courageous things a leader can do. Entrusting others with important tasks requires letting go and relinquishing control. Liberally pass responsibility and authority to your team. If you want your team to be courageous, give them the chance to lead. Early and often.

These elements aren’t easy to nurture in a corporate setting. You and your colleagues will likely resist it at every turn. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live, taking the form of readiness to die.” Courage mingles our desire to rush forward with a willingness to accept the possibility of being stopped in our tracks.

Yet if you desire to be a leader who changes the world, you have no choice but to exhibit courage on a constant basis.

The good news is that unlike some leadership traits, courage is not inborn; it’s learned. The natural response is to run from what frightens us, but life’s greatest leaps occur when we resist this impulse.

Remember when you were completely fearless as a kid? Children often demonstrate courage naturally. Most of us can think back to times as a child when we stepped out in courage. Whether riding a bike without training wheels, jumping into the deep end of the pool, or letting go of the rails to ice-skate without assistance, life teaches us that progress requires courage. We have to be willing to get out to the edge, look at what is in the front of us, summon up the fortitude, and jump.

The jump may be risky, but the decision to stay where you are is even more so.

--Brad Lomenick is president of Catalyst, one of America’s most influential leadership movements, and author of The Catalyst Leader: 8 Essentials to Becoming a Change Maker. Follow him at @BradLomenick or www.bradlomenick.com.