Leadership - Prioritise
Prioritise
Action and direction
As a leader (or anyone else) being busy is not the same as being effective.
Just working hard is often the failing of the workaholic.
Everyone needs to put the most effort where the rewards are likely to be the highest.
This is reflected in the Pareto rule, a problem solving tool which states that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort.
Or putting this another way, if should put 80% of your effort into the 20% of areas most likely to give the best results.
Importance v urgent
If you have a list of tasks you will need to sort them into some kind of order in which you tackle them.
Of course, this assumes that these tasks are not delegated.
Urgent
Urgent tasks are deadline based. This is usually independent of yourself and is often driven by others. The sooner the task needs completion the more urgent it is. This has no relation to importance. It is a simple matter to rank any jobs that you have in terms of their deadlines.
Important
The importance of a job drives how much ‘time’ you want to spend on it. Notice that this is independent of ‘urgency’ and is what you want to do not what you actually spend on it. For any task the quality of your output will often relate to the time you spend on it. Again, it is a simple matter to rank the importance of the same tasks, for example, ‘high’ ‘medium’ or ‘low’ or a simple numerical ranking.
A leader never becomes so good that he or she never needs to prioritise.
Review
From a personal view there is the prioritisation of tasks and the prioritisation of your time.
Naturally, the former has a strong link to the latter but Time Management covers many more areas than just the prioritisation of tasks.
The key is to review the way you currently spend your time using a time log.
Once you understand where your time is going currently you can do something about managing it better.
You will probably realise that your time is wasted in all sorts of ways.
In terms of leadership, as an extreme case, you may even move your business if, for example, the centrality of travel becomes an issue.
For a leader the allocation of their time could be reviewed in a more strategic manner covering areas such as, leadership, communication, idea development etc.
Don’t just do this exercise once make a habit of doing it at least once a year.
Leadership development
The best leaders will develop their staff to produce the next group of leaders.
There are only two ways to obtain good leaders:
- Train them internally.
- Recruit externally.
Following the Pareto rule you should spend 80% of your time on 20% of your potential leaders.
In other words you should assess the best of the group and put the majority of your input into them.
Naturally, you must be confident that the people you have can be developed to the right level of leadership, if not, you will need to replace them.
Delegation
We touched on delegation earlier [see Leadership functions, Influence - leadership styles for learning, Empowerment and Winner mentality].
People often do not delegate because they feel they can do it better and faster etc.
If you take this attitude others will get no experience and hence will not develop.
Even if someone else is only 80% competent to do the job delegate it and encourage personal development.
If you have no one at this level of competence then develop them so that you will be able to delegate.
Summary
A review of priorities will focus time and energy in the right places, freeing time to think strategically.
After all, your aim is to achieve your vision.