Do you wake up ready to develop a brilliant plan for your company or team only to realize later that the day got away from you, it is now dark outside and you have no idea what happened? And as you lay your head down on the pillow that night, do you believe that if only you had more time, you’d get to the “one thing”– you know, the “one thing” you keep moving from list to list. We think not enough time is the problem—but it’s not. The problem is not enough time, it is our inability to differentiate what is important when everything is urgent. We need to eliminate time wasters.
Time is the one resource we cannot afford to waste, and yet we waste it every day. When we take a hard look at how we spend our time, we find that we have enough time in the day to be both strategic and purposeful. After all, we have 16 hours to get things done (24 hours minus 8 hours for sleep) – so we must shift how we think about time.
How do we do that exactly? The tricky part is that many of us believe we will be more important, valuable and “loved” if we say “yes” to everything. It is why we take on more, attend more, post more, respond more and otherwise do more. Doing more just makes us frazzled.
Do we need to say “no” more? No, we need to start asking better questions, and more of them. We have become conditioned to be “doers” not “askers.”
Here is the million-dollar question: “To what do you want to say ‘yes’? “
When you ask this question, you pause the “doer button” in your brain. You immediately create space to think differently. Time then becomes a resource that is real. You can see it shape how you achieve greater things for yourself, your family, and the world.
When you ask questions, you begin to differentiate what is important when everything is urgent. Start asking better questions:
- Who is the best person on the team to attend this meeting?
- What would make this a more efficient process?
- Would a virtual meeting be better than flying and meeting in person?
- Do I really care about what Aunt Jane posted on Facebook?
To change your relationship with time, flip the script on your belief system. Get a clear view of how you spend your time including what is on your calendar, as well as the interruptions and the habits that become your time wasters. How many times do you check social media or news feeds after you start a project? How many times do you rewrite an email that was fine after the first edit? An hour or two can go by with nothing accomplished.
When you focus on time wasters, you will:
- Stop starving yourself, your family, your team, your company, and society of the value you bring.
- Start believing that you have enough time for what is strategic and purposeful.
- Start living and thriving in your career and making things happen.
- Start acting on what is important, not merely urgent.
About the Author: Kristen Stockton, ACC has over 30 years in Human Capital, Leadership Development, Talent and Diversity and Inclusion. A “get things done” leader who develops managers into leaders and helps business manage their talent.
How to Make Leadership Learning “Stick”
I wrote this in 2019, and it seems fitting to update slightly with a lens toward achieving greater sustainability in leadership learning that sticks. According to Human Capital Institute blog, they cite nine reasons why leadership programs fail. And I agree with each of them. But I will focus on one flaw that, to me, is critical.
“Unless the program becomes part of how the business operates and is looked at by all levels as integral to the future, it won’t stand the test of time and will eventually fizzle.”
When you bring organizational challenges into the learning with real-time application and results, your investment returns with dividends.
The challenge for most organizations is they want leadership development programs to retain and grow their high potential. However, they don’t integrate real organizational challenges into the approach. Often organizations will hire external companies that offer little customization. They don’t know your culture, so the content doesn’t land. You end up with a program that must be reimagined and waste more time and resources. It doesn’t have to be that way. One of the more effective ways to create leadership learning that sticks are to include coaching, either by qualified executive coaches or developing the leader’s coaching skills to serve as a peer coach. The secret sauce to long-term learning results is when peers learn how to coach each other to solve problems. Learning in an episodic structure is temporary without coaches, peers, and executives for added accountability. You want leaders to know, apply, and re-apply with their peers, teams, and others. And we do, too-it drives better business results. Often companies send individuals to externally run development programs outside the organization, which is fine for building relationships, but the talent returns without any strategy for knowledge transfer. The talent who attended is full, and the organization is empty. Why? Because they come back to a group that doesn’t “get” the new learning. It’s like they are speaking a different language. Often, they are. The learners are frustrated trying to explain their new knowledge. Don’t risk having your learners excited about what they just learned; no one on their team understands.
Today’s marketplace depends on committed, confident leaders who can adapt to change quickly, and manage and help their team and organization solve its more critical challenges with greater collaboration and speed. That’s why we are here. We are committed to helping organizations change the way they develop leaders.
Author: Kristen Stockton is the co-founder of JASKAP Consulting and Coaching, LLC, an inspirational leader, Certified Coach, and talent development expert with nearly 30 years of experience—across some of the world’s leading global brands—in learning and development, executive coaching, and helping organizations and teams thrive. As a leadership learning expert, she has successfully collaborated with and coached executives to develop and foster high-performing teams and better outcomes.
