We just finished our Quarterly Management Meeting for our own Strategic Plan. As practitioners of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People we impose a culture of Celebrated Discontent as part of Agency Consulting Group, Inc.’s business strategy. We are never satisfied with our success and are always seeking better ways of running our lives and our business that will stretch us a little more and make us a little better.
As a result, our meetings are excruciating as we nit-pic each other and our Objectives and Action Plans. We congratulate each other on our successes and immediately ask, “What can we do to be even better?”
The rousing answer from each and all of us came in two key phrases, “Manage Our Time – Don’t Let Time Manage Us” and we can never “Over-Communicate With Each Other”.
Managing Our Time
How many of us end the day thinking that we just arrived at work five minutes ago? We were so busy we forgot to eat — yet we leave unsatisfied, both hungry on the inside and unfulfilled on the outside. Where did the day go? Why didn’t we accomplish any of the tasks we set out to accomplish?
The answer is that we let Time Manage Us instead of Us Managing Our Time.
Do you manage your employees and customers or do they manage you?
If you’re like me, you get to work ‘bright eyed and bushy tailed’ with a few or several priorities and goals for the day. Then you start to look at e-mail, the phone rings and your staff begins to interrupt you with “necessary” questions. In fact, you have yielded your time and your day to the whims of others and other priorities that need attention.
I am so envious of the TRUE managers who can compartmentalize their days into groupings and both accomplish their own goals AND attend to the needs of those they manage as well as to the needs of their customers. I strive to be like them.
To that end I ask my staff to guard my time and to fill in sections of time with specific needs of customers and of staff members around blocked-out time for the projects that are Quadrant One (both important and urgent) and/or Quadrant Two (Important, but not urgent) for our business.
I may get less done in a day, but I get the highest priorities accomplished and I feel a strong strength of success. If something has to wait, that’s because it is lower on the priority list. If a client or employee needs me there is always some time set aside each day and they are asked to fit their needs into my schedule instead of forcing my schedule awry because they have an urgent need of their own.
As owners and managers we must decide whether we prepared to manage our employees and our own time or whether we will be the Will-O-The-Wisp and bend to whatever wind blows at the moment. Remember, those plants move all the time – but they never get anywhere.
Over-Communicate, rather than Under Communicate.
This, admittedly, is one of my weaknesses. But I’m relatively certain I’m in good company in the insurance agency realm. I have met brilliant agents and agency owners who frustrate themselves and their employees by thinking that they communicate sufficiently. Not until the results are reflective of the lack of understanding of our staff do we realize that the problem is likely not them, but us.
When you give instructions, have the staff member repeat it to you in different words. You will be astonished by how different their interpretation is to your intent. By stating something without that form of repetition you “ass-u-me” that everyone understands exactly what you were trying to communicate. In reality most of our employees are trying to understand us and want to do the best job possible. In reality we are probably not the ‘Great Communicators’ that we think we are.
Over communication is actually one of the biggest time-savers we can imagine. For instance, a client gave his assistant a relatively straight-forward task involving the creation of a client database. She worked diligently on it and the result was a beautiful effort reflecting many hours of work – but in no way what the agency owner had in mind. Was it the fault of the Administrative Assistant or of the agency owner? I contend that it was purely the owner’s fault because he assigned the task without being certain of her understanding and neither monitored the progress (to shortcut the departure from my intent) nor did he interrupt her, seeing, as he did, how busy she was applying herself to the task at hand.
Now, she is frustrated that she spent all that time on a product that needs to be re-worked and the owner is as frustrated that the project is being delayed while being reworked. You can bet that the owner will be taking progress reports during the work effort and that he is asking his assistant to reflect the goal back to him to make sure that what she understands is the same as his intent for the objective.
I can’t promise you Valhalla or never being frustrated and always accomplishing what you set out to do every day if you adhere to these two simple tenets. But I promise that you will accomplish more in less time if you segment your time and insist on appointments for interruptions around your priorities. And you will accomplish more in less time if you delegate authority but not responsibility for projects with a level of communication that assures that your goals is understood by the person carrying out the project. They will have the authority to accomplish their task but you never give up your responsibility for the results and communicate and manage throughout the process to assure adherence to both time constraints and effective execution of your directives.
Give us a call at 800-779-2430 if you’d like help instituting Time Management and Communications and Management processes within your agency.