Next Level Leaders – Managing Time and Priorities, 1

You’re newly promoted into your new managerial role. Frankly, everything is new, from your overall responsibilities to a new boss to people reporting to you. You knew how to balance tasks in the old job, but now there are many different moving parts.

How you manage time and balance priorities is one of the biggest initial challenges. Part of this is because your time isn’t your own anymore. Your direct reports want and need your attention, and, in many situations, these are different people than your previous colleagues.

Next Level Leaders

Executives often promote their best “doers” (e.g., accountant, technician, designer, etc.) into management roles with high and eager expectations. The challenge with this is that what makes people great in their doer roles rarely make them competent for management jobs.

At a minimum, to make a promotion successful, the newly minted managers need to learn about the roles that they’re stepping into and what skills are necessary to be effective in management.

Recognition vs. Favoritism

Leaders who overtly exercise favoritism make the “chosen” people feel good but often at the expense of diminishing others. Of course, it is appropriate to recognize people who do excellent work, but that recognition should not be at the expense of making other employees feel “less than”.

Our employees are human and are pleased or flattered to receive recognition, whether private or public. When public acknowledgement primarily focuses on favored employees, however, resentment can ensue.

Prepare By Documenting

No matter how prepared you think you are, it’s essential to be ready for staff changes that can disrupt your organization’s operational flow. People resign suddenly. They develop a debilitating illness. They have family emergencies that take priority.

Are you and your management team prepared for such occurrences? Do you know how to jump in and do the various functions that these people have done well and consistently until they aren’t there to do them?

Making More Sense of the Hybrid Workforce

Despite their best efforts, many leaders still struggle to “get it right” in terms of managing a hybrid workforce. A recent Harvard Business Review article points out five key trends for leaders to consider.

Leaders are adopting different mindsets to be successful managing a hybrid environment based on these trends. Some of the key points from the article are highlighted below.

Leading Managers

Many leaders become frustrated with mid-level managers because of the perception they’re not doing their jobs adequately. When you really dig into this observation, it’s often because new mid-level managers don’t fully understand what is expected of them.

The leader is responsible for outlining the core elements of what is expected from managers. Here are some guidelines to consider:

Meeting Madness

Do you have too many meetings in a typical week? It happens a lot, and you can suffer from “meeting madness” as a result. This is an affliction caused by too many meetings that aren’t focused, take too long, and accomplish a tenth of what you expect. Here are some tips to consider.

Start and end on time. The obvious breach is when people are late. That isn’t fair to those who are on time, especially if it means that you won’t complete what you expected to accomplish. As important, however, is having a firm end time. Stay true to the end time even if you haven’t completed the agenda. It will help build the discipline to end on time in the future.

Prioritize to Organize

In many respects, leaders need to be more organized than their team members. A disorganized leader sends a message that isn’t flattering and reinforces disorganization, rather than efficiency and being on top of things.

Being able to prioritize effectively is an essential key to successful organizing. In this fast-moving environment that we work in, however, leaders need to be nimble enough to switch gears and reprioritize when things change.

Workplace Drama

How often does your staff create distractions with an avalanche of finger-pointing and accusations? You may find yourself at a loss of words contemplating the right way to approach the situation. Or worse, you may blow up adding fuel to the fire.

It’s up to the leader to cut off this behavior as it ramps up, because frequent incidences are bad for your organization’s health. Often, the right hand doesn’t know what the left is saying or doing; and that is where the problems begin.

Jump In or Hold Back?

When is the best time for a manager to jump in and redirect an employee’s actions? If there was an easy answer, we’d be able to magically click an app that could predict the perfect moment. Nice idea, but not happening!

Managers often struggle with this timing. If they start too soon, they become micromanagers. If they wait too long, they may be too late, and the employee may have made a big mistake. As each situation is different, you need to decide based on the actual circumstances.

Leadership is a Mindset

Tag: Managing People