Chronic problem of managers: lack of time. What to do?

I don’t have time! Do I need time management?

Robert (name changed) I met him in 2018. By then, as a 38-year-old, he had already gone quite high. He is not sure why he was promoted so quickly and why the competition later attracted him, giving him 20% more earnings. However, the changes that began to take place in the company and the responsibility that was thrown on him made him sit back after hours. He has so many things on his head that he doesn’t know what to do. From 9:00 am the meeting is chasing the meeting and every few minutes there are more e-mails.

You probably know it very well. Every day new tasks are added to your “TO-TO” list, and the list from the previous day does not decrease at all. And you should already turn the calendar page over to the next page, but you still have to go back to the one from three days ago to check the overdue tasks.

Children have been asking for weeks for you to go to the movies, not to mention overdue vacation, which you haven’t been on for a long time. In September, the company will ask you to finally use your days off.

Don’t you remember when you had time for yourself? Hobbies, gym, going out with a wife, husband, partner or partner, a friend for a beer? Forget it. You always have something more important to do.

Many of my daily management clients are either managers, board members, or business owners, struggling with a chronic shortage of time. They are so overloaded with work, number of tasks, threads, topics, cases, projects that they often don’t know what their problem is.

When there is a moment of breath during calls, Robert glances at his cell phone, clicks the Gmail app, and sees 77 new messages. A thought appears: when will I do it ?! Another evening killed again. Suddenly a band member bursts in and asks for a while, apologizes for disturbing you, but there’s a small fire. The system crashed and they don’t know what to do. Robert asks if they have contacted IT. The answer is that no, they came to him first. The volcano of emotions inside is more and more buzzing. -Why are you coming to me with this? Take care of it yourself! The employee said they wanted him to know about it. Robert doesn’t need to, and he’ll be damned if he has any more topics to deal with.

At 2 p.m. meeting with the management. Information appears that two projects have been suspended. Important projects that Robert’s people have been working on for 2 months. -What am I going to tell them? Change again. After all, I will completely demotivate them now.

It’s not time management. It’s not about motivating the team. It’s change management

Robert came to me for a consultation, looking for a quick answer: How to motivate the team, if the arrangements change all the time, and how to manage time, because everything is too much and not overwhelming.

However, as a result of the first minutes of the conversation, it turned out that the problem is not really the lack of time or the lack of motivation of the team. It’s just a symptom.

For Robert, the source of all this was the lack of emphasis on topics. What does it mean? He and the team did a lot. But he rarely took the time to analyze it:

• what is really important?
• what really works?
• what should I really participate in – what meetings and projects?
• what really is the problem – the essential one?
• how to operate in volatility, chaos in VUCA

For two consecutive sessions, until I asked Robert these questions about 40 times, no solution was found. Robert was too much on himself, he was involved in too many projects. He verified too little. Someone may say: This can be done if you are the owner of the business, but not an employee, manager or director. If the mountain says something has to be done then it has to be done.

I agree and disagree. Such a reality is a fact, but we will not change anything if we do not start asking ourselves strategic, critical questions: what is really important? What really works? What should I really participate in?

I work with directors and management boards and I see with my own eyes how people at the highest levels are struggling, they themselves are often not sure about goals and decisions. Nobody is. Chaos and excess result from the fact that there are no critical questions. It’s the kind of question that verifies, calls reality in a point.

Robert had to find answers to critical questions. Get them out of the chaos of his reality. Without putting these thoughts in order, nothing will change. When we created the so-called a managerial map of responsibility, i.e. we wrote down the areas for which he is responsible, which are important, critical and when we created critical values ​​that allowed us to create boundaries preventing certain people and topics from entering our heads, then the reality slowly began to change. Order in the head and order in the strategy of actions gave breath, clarity of mind and finally a little more time.

The art of asking yourself such questions is one of the elements of change management, strategic leadership and strategic psychology, i.e. working on your thoughts, beliefs and perceptions that affects the effects, effectiveness of what you do, and at the same time allows you not to go crazy, allows keep the balance. In the past, topics were also reserved for management boards of large companies. Now entrepreneurs, managers and some employees who want to be effective and have control over their work have to learn it.

Normally, for better time management you need

• make and update a to-do list
• schedule tasks or have a project plan maker app

But if we have a variable reality, only by asking critical questions you are able to verify what to focus on on an ongoing basis. It is not a question of making an annual or semi-annual arrangement. What is needed here is mapping, that is, the continuous ordering of action strategies.

Therefore, to sum up, to manage your time better

1. Don’t just prioritize, but make clear decisions which REALLY IS IMPORTANT
2. Don’t look at what needs to be done, but be clear of what REALLY GIVES AN EFFECT
3. Do not complain that you have too much on your mind, but verify seriously IN WHICH MEETINGS AND PROJECTS I REALLY HAVE TO PARTICIPATE
4. Don’t complain that a lot changes, but be precise WHAT REALLY IS THIS PARTICULAR PROBLEM that needs to be solved
5. Don’t slide over the surface of general conclusions, BUT BIG into the heart of the problem
6. Do not lament or be surprised that there are changes, changes, changes, but constantly WORK ALONE AND WITH A TEAM ON AGILE MANAGEMENT.

It’s not a lack of time. It is a lack of courage, self-confidence and overcoming resistance

One thing is to know them – it’s behind us. The second is having the courage to ask them and having the communication skills to ask them to others. This is what my client, 43-year-old director – Marek (name changed). He gets up at 6:30 every day, although he feels guilty because he thinks he should be at 5:30. His only free time is when he drives home to the city and drives 20-30 minutes through a forest with no coverage. Then no text message will get him, no phone will ring. But the problem is that the head is working. Thoughts analyze the day and plan what else, after 9:30 p.m. when the children fall asleep, will have to be done. He tells me that there is no time for such meetings, counseling with me, because things are piling up and he has to embrace them. But after a while, he himself admits that it is a magic circle, because something has to change.

Both Robert and Marek suffer from a lack of time. But after we penetrated deeper into the essence of what their reality looks like, the sources turned out to be different. Each of them, after 2-hour meetings with me, said: -And that’s what you mean in this strategic psychology. Well, you were actually right that I wouldn’t go too far without it. So let’s act.

One of the tenets of strategic psychology is that the business effect starts in our head. There are many variables that influence the result, but the result itself starts in the leader’s head. It is in the head that thoughts arise that affect our decisions or the lack of them.

Marek was able to quickly answer these strategic and critical questions. Which surprised me, so I asked him: -If you know what needs to be changed, why don’t you do it? Since you can see things more broadly, what’s the problem? The answer was: – Honestly? I’m not brave. I am not sure to ask such questions to the team and management board. I don’t have the courage to talk about the solutions I have created.

I do not want to ask employees because I do not want them to feel verified, assessed. Such questions and my suggestions for changes would demotivate them. As for the management board, I cannot confront me. You know how it is.

With Marek, you had to work on courage, and then on the art of business diplomacy in order to be able to ask difficult questions and communicate difficult propositions to employees and the management board without causing conflict and resistance. Courage began to emerge when I asked the question: -What’s the worst thing that can happen if you ask about it or propose solutions? When we wrote it down and then created answers to the questions: what will you do about it? when there is resistance when there is criticism when there is whining? It was not easy, it does not come immediately, but it turns out that in 70% of the topics the devil was not so scary.

The most interesting was the confrontation with the management – when Marek went to them, the management said (apart from one person who is always stagnant and mentally tetricism): -It’s great that Marek, you say it. We missed that one of the directors noticed this problem so clearly and proposed a solution. The idea was that the company was so silent in the departments that the communication flow was increasingly failing.

This resulted in the need for a very large number of meetings that were time consuming. Marek proposed his own solutions plus recommended (thanks for that) me to support the company in this process. On my side, there were various types of workshops that were to build trust, respect, openness between departments, while Marek gathered leaders, directors and began to boldly name this problem and set the direction of changes.

It was not easy, because while out of 5 board members only one was a whim, 5 out of 12 directors had such resistance that the size of the wall they created exceeded the Chinese wall. But as Marek said: – This is why, Adam, the CVP Question Circle, which you described in the book Wall, to deal with it. In fact, everyday change management is asking questions, listening, proposing solutions, asking questions, listening , proposing solutions. It is a constant mix of mediation, negotiation, selling, persuasion with elements of therapy based on careful listening, in this case not to the patient, but to colleagues and superiors. This is art.

To sum up, inspired by Mark’s story to manage change:

1. Often the solution to the lack of time is to strengthen inner courage, confidence to raise topics that are not easy and will arouse resistance. Only touching and working through the topics that have been hidden so far can make a difference. Otherwise no time management techniques will work. You need to change the way your team, department and company operate. To make this possible, you need to increase your courage! Change starts in the minds of leaders.
2. Even if we have the courage, nothing will change unless we develop the skills of change management that gives us the ability to work with resistance. It is, in other words, the art of business diplomacy. The key is here:
   1. Knowledge and the ability to ask such questions that can reduce resistance, aversion.
   2. The ability to relieve tension , frustration on the other side.
   3. Listening carefully , but really – mindful – of the other side. I often test the clients I work with – 75% of them cannot repeat what I said and re-interpret the words I used. The task is simple. I say 10 sentences and the manager is to repeat them and refer to them. 75% of people change the content, context and meaning of my words.
   4. Ability to present your ideas so that they can be understood by different people with different personalities. The point is not that everyone understands us after 10 minutes. Presenting an idea is a process! This is not one speech, but several conversations that result in an agreement after a few days or weeks.

In conclusion: What determines success, effect, effectiveness?

Asking critical questions, being more courageous, working with resistance, and listening carefully are elements of change management that I call strategic factors. You can download the complete list of 48 factors in PDF format below (navy blue frame). Some of them are not obvious. This is called invisible competences that determine whether we are good leaders. These are the components of strategic psychology.

How was this list created?
Over the years I have been observing the successes and failures of my projects, companies, and also my clients, for whom I work in consulting, training and coaching. Since the beginning of my career in 2006 as an adviser, trainer, psychologist I have been asking myself the following question: What does it depend on if one person or a company goes out and another doesn’t.

Unfortunately or fortunately, there is no definite answer. Everyone has their own way. But there are universal factors that influence the likelihood of success or failure. Here are the 48 components that contribute to that.

From 2014, I collected all observations and conclusions in one file, based on literature, theories, observations and business experiences. Here is the result of my work. This list is open. There were 12 factors in the beginning. Later 26. Now 48.

On the following pages you will find a list of 48 factors that, according to strategic psychology, affect the effectiveness and efficiency of actions, achieving goals.

It is a combination of the mental communication and strategic aspects.

See pages 4-6 for a complete list.
Factors and questions to them and the consequences of their low level are listed for the next ones.
Please feel free to do so.