LEADER SPECIAL... Accelerate success with your clock work

Accelerate success with your clock work

Here are some ways leaders can protect precious hours while empowering their teams

We all know that controlling what we pay attention to is key to living an intentional life. As a manager, one of the biggest impediments to attention management is other people’s problems. When leaders’ time is constantly in demand from staff, they report they have too little time remaining to engage in reflective thinking. This is time that could be spent looking ahead, considering different paths, playing out different scenarios.

But constant distraction can undermine their very capacity for being reflective. How can leaders create the time and space to think and get important work done, while still being mentors and enabling the team to keep their work moving forward? 

Leaders should arm themselves with these four strategies that can help them find this balance:

Mentor in hindsight

Mentoring is an important role of leadership and helps to groom employees to advance within the organisation. However, they learn much less when advice is given on the front end than they do when they have the opportunity to experience their own successes and failures and discuss them with their boss later.

Create boundaries for decision-making

Sometimes it’s hard for employees to determine what they should handle on their own and what is outside the scope of their responsibilities. This problem is alleviated when all employees know exactly what their ultimate role in the company is and when it’s acceptable for them to make mistakes within that role.

Have regular meetings with your reports

Your team will want time with you, and you should be available to them, for mentoring and other reasons. Reliably dedicate time on your calendar every week for each of your direct reports. If they feel empowered to make decisions on their own, and they understand how far their responsibilities extend and what they need your help for, they will then be more likely to hold their questions and issues to discuss at your weekly meeting. If you’re in senior leadership, you should also dedicate time to interact with those who have one or more layers of managers in between you and them.

Be available less often

If the boss is unavailable more often, the team figures things out on their own more often. This allows them to grow in their positions, and it minimises the interruptions the leaders face.

When leaders are “too available” to the team, on the contrary, the team becomes disempowered or lazy.

For leaders to effectively manage attention, they need to be able to balance interruptions with availability. Employing these strategies is a step on the path to the ultimate goal of attention management.

— The New York Times

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