Time Leadership and Your Bottom Line

How can your leadership impact the bottom-line? Take a look at the clock and see how “time leadership” can work for you…

Olivia entered her office, sat down at her desk and looked at her calendar. Then her eyes darted from to folder to folder as she wondered where to start. With three projects due and an update meeting with her manager right after lunch, she fumbled through papers and clicked through computer files looking for missing information.

She felt a tinge of a familiar “worry” headache and hoped it would not turn into a migraine. Finally in exasperation, she walked to the break room for her favorite Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, trying to calm her nerves and focus her mind. The distress of half-finished projects with eminent and foreboding deadlines was immobilizing Olivia. She was stifled and her productivity evaporated.

How much productive work time do you think Olivia lost that morning thanks to anxiety and poor organization? One hour?

Some Quick Math

If Olivia earned $20.00 an hour, the company just lost $20.00. That amount does not have immediate negative effects on costs, but if Olivia loses one hour every working day, the organization will lose over $6,000.00 in profits in one year.

Multiply this by the number of employees in the company who struggle with Olivia’s problems. When you see the numbers, compelling reasons emerge to examine the connection between individual distress and time management, organizational productivity, and employee well-being.

The best antidote for Olivia would be to don a Superman suit and reverse time to the beginning of each project.

Olivia would then invest the necessary time to plan each assignment, break it into each component, place mini-deadlines for each step on the calendar with pop-up reminders, and build in a time-cushion so that the project is easily finished by the due-date. She would then only feel the positive stress fueled by the excitement of accomplishment.

But this planning scenario exists only in a fantasy world, right?

Rivals

Time management and distress are familiar rivals for your psyche. If your mind represented a busy mother, time management and distress would be siblings fighting for your attention. When individuals have good planning and time management skills, they have less distress.

And when employees have the emotional skills to calm distress, they will be able to organize their work and accomplish more.

Stress vs. Distress

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s separate distress from stress.

• Stress is positive and is the mind and body mobilized for coping with change and challenge.
• Distress is negative and is the perceived inability to respond adequately to demands.

Humorist Mark Twain said, “I have experienced many horrible things in my lifetime, a few of which actually happened.”

The Work of Worrying

In the example above, time was rushing upon Olivia at a pace too fast for her to handle and it made her perceive that she would not finish on time. In reality, this may be a false assumption. To be ready for the accountability meeting with her manager, Olivia could slow time down and turn distress into positive stress by doing the work of worrying; which is planning.

Contrary to popular practices of multi-tasking, your mind can only do one thing at a time. To turn from distress that immobilizes to stress that energizes, stop your mind from flitting from idea to idea. Make your problems line up one by one.

Prioritize and choose the assignment with the most urgency, then work accordingly.

Bottom of the Ninth

If you were up to bat in the bottom of the 9th with the count 3 and 2, one person standing on second, and your team down by one run, what would you be thinking? Would you be worrying whether or not you would hit the ball?

The champion player would be saying, “I was made for this moment.”

Total focus on the task at hand – hitting the ball – would greatly increase the odds of getting the person on second home.

In the same fashion, when it is the bottom of the 9th for your assignment and you are behind in the score, calm your distress by quieting the inner voice of self-doubt and fear.

Then do the work of worrying: break the task into action steps, prioritize the steps, and move into action.

The mind filled with distress believes this process is a waste of time and prefers immediate action, even if that is shuffling papers or running in circles. However, the seasoned producer knows the work of worrying, or planning, is the only way to release positive stress (energy) to finish the project on time. Being proactive with problems replaces the immobilizing feeling of victimhood with personal power, thus increasing personal well being.

The Producer’s Mindset

After the past stressful year, which we are all glad to have almost behind us, contemplate what could happen in 2011 if every employee in your organization had the producer’s mindset and did the work of worrying instead of giving into immobilizing distress.

I once asked a group of employees for a personal injury law firm to contemplate the benefits to their firm and their personal job stability if, through the producer’s mindset and their personal efforts to be effective and efficient, their firm could close just one more case a year. The face of the partner who hired me lit up with hope.

If you are serious about improving your bottom line, encourage employees to eliminate ruminating around their offices unproductively, pay attention to the individual attitudes and work to build a producer’s mindset in your entire organization.

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Karla Brandau is President of Karla Brandau & Associates
She is an expert at infusing time management principles with Microsoft Outlook
Email | LinkedIn | Facebook | Web | 770-923-0883

Image Sources: organizestation.com, tqn.com/d/stayathomemoms,tony-wilson.com.au, stltoday.com