Managing People - How To Find The Time To Actually Do It
April 30, 2008 · Print This Article
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How can we find the time to actually supervise our people? There are really three parts to managers’ jobs. But two of them take up most of the time. (God forbid we should ever just let the job be about supervising people!) Here are three tips to help you find the time to help our employees do their best work for us and for the organization.
The Three Parts of a Manager’s Job
•One third of your job is about your own work. That’s work you are held accountable for and that only you can do. This might include planning, researching, doing work your own boss delegates to you. You may spend time reviewing others’ work and approving it.
•Another third is about the myriad of organizational obligations you have. These include meetings, the minutia of memos, responding to emails, filling out forms for other departments, etc, etc, etc. Some call this “administrivia”.
•The last third is about actually supervising your staff, that is training, coaching, counseling, evaluating, mentoring and helping your employees to be successful at their jobs, (which you are also responsible for!).
In an ideal world your time would be at least evenly distributed in each of the three areas.
The Problem:
Many managers and supervisors just laugh, sigh, or sometimes cry when they hear this because their own work and the many administrative duties crowd out the supervision portion. They wish it were different, but it isn’t. They spend more like 85% in the first two and 15% working with their people. Often they must stay late or take work home that involves performance evaluations and other required duties. How can you carve out time to add value to your employees, to help them to be more successful and fulfill the mission of your unit, department or organization? Here are three tips to help:
1. Learn to delegate more and more of your work to your experienced staff so you free up time to work with others who may need coaching, counseling, training, or a good swift kick!
2. Create one hour per day that is expressly devoted to open door discussion. Let the staff know that during this hour daily, you welcome their interruptions to talk about anything that is going on for them, problems they are encountering, assistance they need. It can also be a time for them to let you know what might be going on in their personal or family life that may have an affect on their work or their observations about a procedure or process that could be changed to be more effective. This allows you the time to do in-the-moment coaching, problem solving or conflict resolution. It gives you clues as to who may need more training, who is bored and ready for more complex work and a myriad of other things. But mostly it keeps the staff from complaining about the fact that the only time you have time for them is when something has gone wrong!
3. Look at your own workload. What is taking up your time? Sometimes the 80-20 rule comes into play. Often 20% of your duties take up 80% of your time. Delegate some of those! If you can’t delegate some of them, then look at which ones you can just stop doing. You know what I am talking about…those silly reports that no one looks at, those weekly meetings where nothing ever gets done, the one employee out of 10 that takes up so much time. What can you just stop doing?
Try it. Just put those projects or tasks in a bottom drawer and leave them there for three months. If no one complains you have given yourself more time to devote to supervision. Also look at your workflow. Are there processes and procedures that if redesigned could save you a lot of time? Often these have to do with duplicative work you do involving other departments or other people.
It is really rewarding to finally have time to do the thing you are actually hired to do…supervise people, help them grow, provide them with training, coaching, counseling and all the other things that create job satisfaction for them and for you as well.
I invite you to help appreciate and motivate your employees by getting a copy of ‘No Cost and
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