Episode 49: THE Leadership Japan Series: How to Work on Your Business Not Just in Your Business
Intro: Greg: Konnichiwa and welcome to Episode 49 of THE Leadership Japan podcast. I’m your host in Tokyo, Dr. Greg Story, president of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and much more importantly you are a student of leadership, highly motivated to be the best in your business field. If you would like your own access to 102 years of the accumulated wisdom of Dale Carnegie training through free white-papers, guidebooks, reports, training videos, blogs, course information plus much more, then go to japan.dalecarnegie.com. Today we are going to hear a presentation on how to work on your business, not just in your business.
Greg: My name is Greg Story. I’m the president of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and I’ll be presenting on how to work on your business, not just in your business, today. I’m very impressed that so many of you will come so early in the morning to hear about this. But it tells me that like me, we find that we are not getting enough of the quality work done that we need to get done. We tend to find our days are being taken up by rather detail oriented work. And if we can get more of that high quality work done, we’ll have a much more productive business.
I’ll start and talk a little bit about Dale Carnegie. The book on the left there was the original book which was published in 1937 and then a Japanese version in 1938, which they re-released for the hundredth anniversary. We have got some copies of that. The book on the right is an updated version of Dale Carnegie’s original book which has become one of the icon books of business. People in Japan say to me, for management theory - Peter Drucker. For human relations and people skills - Dale Carnegie. The Japanese version has just been released too, “Hito wo Ugokasu II” just came out and that sold incredibly 9 million copies in Japan. That’s a really large number and consistently comes up in the top ten of business books being sold, non-fiction business books being sold. And that’s because I think the ideas that Dale Carnegie came up with a long time ago are rather universal and they are timeless. We constantly need to know these things.
Ninety percent of the Fortune 500 companies are our clients. And in the Fortune 500 there are around about 64 Japanese companies listed, of which I discovered half of them are our direct clients. So we are doing very well on both scales. We now cover 91 countries around the world. This is a very big help to clients who have multi-country businesses. They can develop something in one country and take it to the whole world. At the moment we are doing a project for a Danish company that’s in 34 countries around the world. We are doing tranche number threenow. For Japanese companies too, we are taking them into the world with their foreign entities and training the people there as well. Which has proven very effective. We teach in over 30 languages and we see that we celebrate our 50th year here in Japan, this year. Which again is, most people know the name of Dale Carnegie but they don’t realize that we’ve been here since 1963.
I asked headquarters, back in New York. I said, you know we constantly do these surveys after the training, and what people think and we send them off to America, and they get checked. The standard in training must be kept very high. I said, I always see very high scores. I wonder what the aggregate, the total of five years of all training would be if I looked for satisfaction rates? So I said ok, give me five years, everything. All trainers, all courses, all modules, the works. Put it all in a big bucket and tell me what the satisfaction rate is. And this is what came back, 97.7%. So that tells me that the quality that we try to maintain and the standards we have, we’re ISO9001 certified, we’re the only international training company to have that. We’re the oldest training company in the world. Because we keep refreshing ourselves, the standard continues and clients are very happy with it. So we’re very proud to see that number.
Today our topic is how to work on your business not just in your business. As I said earlier, for me it’s a constant struggle to make sure I am working on my business. To find the time to work on my business as opposed to just doing the daily work that takes up so much. So one of the objectives today, I mentioned in the letters, is to try to produce ten hours of me time. Time that I can have to myself to work on the highest priority items that I want to work on as opposed to everyone else’s agenda. And also, the mindset to overcome the obstacles we find through time management. I’ve got some tools for you. Those little booklets you’ve got in front of you, there’s a little tool set there. And then how to leverage time. We don’t want to be working harder, we need to be working smarter because we don’t want to be spending all of our life at the office working. We actually want to spend time with our friends, with our family, pursuing hobbies, developing ourselves as a total person. So how do we do that? Well, putting in more hours is not the answer. The reality today is we are getting flatter, organizations, particularly in the West, than we had in the past. So that means we are doing a lot more and we are doing it higher quality. We’ve got to produce a lot faster because we’re 24/7 now with the technology that we have, carrying around little computers in our hands, called phones, which do just about everything. You cannot escape from work anymore.
So speed. People expect things to be fast, particularly in Japan. I find that if I am to get something to someone and it doesn’t happen very very fast, they ring me up. Where is it? I am originally from Australia and I probably wouldn’t get that same pressure of speed turn around that you get in Japan. And we’ve got to do it with less. We have less resources, less people to do it with. It is a very tricky combination for us. We’re in constant pressure of time versus quality. Obviously the longer time we have the higher quality but if time is under pressure, maybe quality suffers. Or if you diminish the quality, then that starts to affect your brand. Or you might find that quality and cost relationship starts to impact the wrong way. So trying to balance those things is a constant pressure. But one of the key things here is our time. Because our time impacts on the quality of the whole organization, as a leader. Our section, as a leader. Also that relates to cost. The more productive we are then the more beneficial it is for the company and we can reduce cost or we can have greater revenues.
Is this you? This is an expression in English, “I got lost in my job”. It means that one of those days where you’re so into a task or a project or something that the day just flew by. Suddenly it’s six o’clock! It’s time to go home. That type of idea that you are so much enjoying what you are doing, you are so into it, you are not interrupted, you can focus. That idea that the day just whizzes by. Is that you? Or is this you? You look at the end of the day. Aahh, I had all these projects. I got nothing done. Where did the whole day go? I feel very frustrated about that. I had things I wanted to do but none of them were happening. So this is where we have to start thinking.
One of the key questions we’ve got to keep asking ourselves is why? Why am I doing this particular task right now? Why am I doing that right now? And why am I working? Why am I working for this company? Why am I trying to do the things I am trying to do? And if you have a little look in your books here, on page five, you’ll see a list of questions there. I want you to write these down. You’re not going to share this with each other necessarily. But just to start thinking about some things for yourself around the why. What are your greatest moments of happiness and fulfillment? What makes you feel very happy? What makes you feel very satisfied? What are the activities that are of most worth in your professional life? What are the activities of most worth in my personal life? Because we very much believe in Dale Carnegie, in the balance between work time and non-work time. Particularly think about your personal life. Can’t neglect that. And then what are the talents and capacities I have? Am I using them? Am I really focusing on them? Am I using a really magnificent, highly trained machine to do something very mundane, very mediocre? Am I wasting my energy and my talent on stuff that someone else should be doing, not me. And then finally, how can I best contribute to the world? And that may be through your company. It may be through a non-profit. It may be through just influencing other people. So just take a few moments and have a think about answering all or some of those questions, to focus on you and why, why you are here. Why you are doing what you’re doing. Why you are trying to move forward in your career. So please take a few moments.
It’s a very interesting exercise to reflect on yourself. Why are you doing things? Often we are too busy concentrating on what we need to do and how we need to do it. And we need to step back and ask ourselves why are we doing this? Particularly around using our talents. And this is a really, really critical question. This is a question we must be asking ourselves all through the day. Is what I am doing now the most productive use of my time? The problem is we get into tasks, and we start doing them because it’s a routine, it’s a habit, and we don’t ask that question. But having looked at your aspirations there, looked at your talents and capabilities, when you think about that, you might think, you know what, I should not be doing this task. I should be getting someone else to do this task. Or, I should be doing less of this task. So it’s a great question to keep asking yourself all through the day. Because once you ask that question and you decide that what you are doing is not what you should be doing, then you can move onto the things that you need to be doing.
Coming back to that why. “Time is money” is an expression in English. Time is money. And your time is expensive. If we take your salary and divide it by the number of hours and we took your hourly cost, how are you spending that money? Now the other thing is, in investing, the rule is you don’t invest what’s left over at the end of the month. You set a goal. You say I am going to save X per month and you save that first. We say in English, you “pay yourself first”. You give yourself the money first by banking it or investing it, and you live off what’s left over. It’s a very similar idea for time. Think about time as money. Pay yourself first with your time usage on the key things that are the highest quality for you to be the best in your work. Leave everything else to fit into the rest of the time. Often we do it the other way around. Like we would do with investing, we get to the end of the month and we’ve got a little bit leftover and we’ll invest that. Well, we flip it around. Think of it like investing money, investing time. Same sort of idea.
There are some things that rob our time. These are external - they could be meetings or telephone calls. Something interrupts us. There are mistakes. Someone else’s boss has got a deadline. Lack of communication. All of these things come up to rob, to steal our time. They come up. They are the external ones. Then there’s the ones we force on ourselves. We’re not well organized. We put things off. We try to do too much. We have unrealistic time estimates to do a job. We think this will take half an hour. Takes an hour. We don’t listen because we are too busy.
This is a very famous diagram by Charles Hummel, developed a long time ago. It’ll apply forever. This will be one of these permanent quadrant diagrams that will last for millions of years because it will never change. And what he said was “the tyranny of the urgent - things that are urgent kill our ability to manage our time”. And he’s saying that it’s things like that, things that are important and they’re urgent, like crisis, deadlines, meetings that type of thing, we have to deal with those. But this one in number two here it’s not urgent but it’s important. This is where the value lies for us. We’re aligning our mission and vision with what we are doing every day. The most productive use of your time is to execute on the vision mission of the business, of your section. It’s planning. Getting things to happen in the right sequence. Making sure that everything is accounted for. Clarifying values. Making sure that you’retalking to your team, that what your company stands for is what you are actually doing as a leader. Working on relationships; building relationships with your colleagues, your peers, with your subordinates, with your superiors, with your clients, with your customers.
Also process improvement. Japan is extremely famous - I mean the word kaizen, which usually gets pronounce kaizan, right by English speakers. Doesn’t matter, they know what they mean. And what they mean is the Japanese idea of continuous improvement. It has now become a world standard. It’s become a global word for that whole idea. They’re the things that we need to be working on. But we get into things that are urgent but not important. The phone rings, someone comes to see you, email comes in. There’s a voice mail. There’s a report that lands on your desk. Someone just drops by your desk. Or we have this one which it they are not urgent and they’re not important so it’s you scrolling around the internet and you get lost on the internet for a while. Or you’re looking at Facebook or you’re getting just stuff that makes you busy. This number two section here, this segment by far is the most important.
In your booklets again, what you basically have here is my own time management system. This is actually an editable PDF file which you will find on our site, which you can download. I’ve just printed out the hardcopy, but you can actually edit it. You can put in content and edit it. And the first one you see on the first page is mission statement. This is not the company mission statement. This is your own mission statement. This is my personal mission statement. I wrote my own mission statement up there. This is not to tell you how to write a mission statement, it’s just to show you an example of how I see my mission statement for myself. The things that I aspire to. I break all the rules of presenting by having more than six lines on one slide, but I am putting it up there not so much for you to read it and get the detail, but to show you some of the things that are helping me to direct myself going forward. And this is coming back to the why. So in that PDF you’ll see that there is a whole section, what is your mission statement. What is your why? Get some focus around what you are trying to do.
The second one you’ll see is my values. You’ll see it listed up here, it says your values. You can have all different ways of looking at values, but I write up my own values again to give me some more of that why. Some more direction around what I am trying to achieve in my life. And as you read this, it’s not all work. It’s me as a total person in work outside of work. So having this as a guide, and I read these every day, I have it in an organizer. I go through what’s my mission statement, reminding myself of what’s my why. I am reminding myself of the things that I value. And so I get those down. And then it reminds me for example, I should be self-disciplined. I should stick with my time management system. I should be looking after my financial independence. I should be making sure that those things that I need to do as an investor or my tax return is going to be done on time. Or I am not going to sacrifice a low level task at work for something that’s a high value task in my personal life. But I have to keep reminding myself of that balance, because my work will just take all the time if I let it.
On page six it talks about your roles. Now this idea is a very clever idea. Not my idea. It’s a clever idea, someone else’s idea which I have followed is to see yourself in total. Not just as a company worker, whatever your role might be. In my case I have a number of roles. I am a husband, I am a son, I am a father. That is one critical role for me. I am also the president of the company. That’s a different role. I am the chief salesman for my company doing what in Japan you call top sales. I am doing that. I am a speaker. I am a professional speaker. I represent Dale Carnegie. I give training, I give lectures. I am a friend. I have friends that I need to keep in contact with. I am a professional. I have to keep leaning, I have to keep developing myself. And I am an investor because I need to look after my family in the future. So in my case, there are the roles. There’s no limit but generally speaking I find that seven roles is more than enough. You might have a lot but you’ll probably set them into about seven. So please take a moment on page six there and write down what would be some roles for yourself. And I’ll explain why that is important in a moment. So please take a moment and write down what are your key roles in your life. The reason this is important is that it allows us to focus on all of the things that help us have a high quality productive life. And we should not neglect certain key roles for the sake of others. And I know in Japan, when I studied Japanese politics and history when I was in university in Australia we were taught Japanese men go to the company, work 25 hours a day, never see their kids, never see their wife. Spend the weekend sleeping on the golf course. Have no life at all outside of work, right? That’s what we studied. Oh that’s how Japan works, right?
Participant: It’s changed.
Greg: That’s right, it’s changed. And it’s a good change. And you yourself have to be careful, though in that do faster and better with less that you don’t find yourself working 50, 60, 70 hours a week. So having done that, pick one of them. You’ll see on the next page it talks about each role. It goes through all seven roles. You can pick anyone of the roles you’ve got there, but think about some priorities. Now this has already got them sorted into priority order. That assumes that you’ve actually gone through the process of lifting out what some goals might be for that role and got them into priority order. It doesn’t matter at this moment that you have a priority determined. But what it asks you though is to think about each of those roles. I’m just saying pick one. It could be any one of the ones you noted there. What, what is the goal for that role? Then very importantly why is that important? And then how are you going to achieve that goal? So please just take a moment. Pick one of those roles, doesn’t matter which one. Think of a goal. Write it down-this is the goal. What I want to do. Why? Critical question. Why is that important? And then how? And so with each of those roles, as I said before, if you go through all of those roles, each of them will have different priorities. And I try to get the priorities into order. As you see here, A1, A2, A3- so they’re prioritized. Here are the goals, they are prioritized. Here’s the what of the goal. Here’s the why of the goal. Here’s the how of the goal. So I have great clarity around what I am trying to do. And again, I’ve got this for all seven of my goals there. And I update them every year. And they change as things get done and new things come on. But every day before I start work, I go back. What’s my mission statement? What are my values? What are my key roles in my life? And what are my goals? This is what I am doing before I set the goals for the day. Because if I didn’t do this, I might just set the goals for the day around work and it may be not the highest quality work goals, either. And often I’ll be going through this process and I’ll remember, oh yeah, there’s something I needed to do for my mother. Or there is something I need to do to prepare for that speaking engagement, that’s not current. Might be three or four months out. I’ve got to get that in my diary. Or there is something that I need to read to improve my professional ability or yeah, I was talking on getting on that course. I should get on that course. It reminds me, it prompts me that yeah these are the things I am trying to achieve. This is the why of who I am and how I am going to get there with my goals. So just go through that exercise. You’ll get the PDF, you can download the PDF, and then you can go through that. But I’ve put a lot of things in this book around that. You could fill it out if you wish at any time. Because I’ve got this myself in my own organizer and I find that this system works extremely well. So just try the what of it, the why and the how, just as an exercise and then we’ll keep going. Now I have to warn you that doing this every morning are the hardest decisions I make in the day. Trying to decide what I will prioritize. These are the hardest decisions that I have to make in the day. Well it’s actually the second hardest decision. The hardest decision is whether I get out of bed at 5 a.m. or not. That’s actually the hardest decision. The second hardest decision is choosing between priorities. Where will I invest my time today? Because some of these are very tough and when you go through this process, choosing priorities within each of those roles is very hard. But once you do it, it’s done. But I warn you now it is not an easy exercise. You have to really think. That’s a bit tough in the morning, usually. But it’s very very insightful when you do it. And it’s very powerful as a tool.
One other thing we’ve got to be careful of is, do we have a to-be list? Not just a to-do list. Everyone can have a to-do list. But don’t forget the to-be list. What do you want to become? What your aspirations are? Where you are going with your career? With your personal life? So we need to always be conscious that we must create a to-be list, not just a daily do list.
Now, email. Who has a lot of emails? Everybody put your hand up. There is nobody in this room who doesn’t have too many emails. All of us, right? At your tables just have a brief discussion about what are the issues you find dealing with email? What are the things that drives you nuts about email? What do you find difficult about dealing with email. We don’t have a lot of time for this, but I am sure you can get out some of the problems pretty quickly because we all face them. Let’s take a couple of minutes and discuss. Share your frustrations and problems with email. Go ahead.
(Discussion)
Well, it sounds like you are having a good discussion there. Can I get some feedback from the tables on some of the things you talked about? What did you talk about on this table?
Participant: We had pretty much the same idea - excessive CC’ing.
Greg: Excessive CC’ing. That’s a big issue isn’t it? You don’t need to see it, but everyone copies you. Wow, what else?
Participant: Long email.
Greg: Long emails. Yes. How about this table? What are some of the things that you talked about on this table?
Participant: We talked about alerts. It doesn’t really seem like much but it makes you feel like you have to react to it, but really often you don’t have to do anything.
Greg: So often you get something that looks urgent, you read it and you go, I just wasted my time opening that. But my time is now gone, right?
Participant: Right. The thing about that was that a lot of emails it’s pretty tough to read the intention or the emotion that is attached to it. Is the sender mad or is the sender just doing business? Or depending on that we have to respond accordingly and then we tend to get frustrated. Should we treat it very carefully or can we just deal with it normally.
Greg: Sometimes people don’t write very well. Sometimes a bit ambiguous about what they write. And sometimes you don’t know whether they’re angry or attacking us or we can misunderstand. How about on this table?
Participant: We talk about drowning because of too many emails. Then you know, some important ones you might forget.
Greg: Yes. So you’ve got this huge filing list called e-mail with a whole bunch of important stuff in there which just keeps getting added to all day long. Yes, exactly. That’s the point, isn’t it? If you think back, if we went back, say before the internet, go back into the 1980’s. If you had a big in-basket of paper and you dealt with that in-basket of paper from the top, what landed there last and just worked your way through the day going through that in-basket, your boss would fire you. Your boss would come in and say, you are a terrible time manager. You’ve got no prioritization in this filing list. It’s only chronological of what’s arrived most recently. You need to get that into some priority order and deal with the most important things first. That’s what would have happened if it was all physical paper in the pre-internet days. We are getting exactly the same thing now, it’s just coming digitally. And we are dealing in the same chronological fashion. So we’ve got to think about a few things to do with that. One of them is the Pareto principle - the 80/20 rule. 20% of things are vital and 80% are not, basically. Pareto’s study of Italy showed 20% of the people owned 80% of the wealth. 20% of the salespeople produce 80% of the sales. 20% of the products make up 80% of the revenue. All those sorts of things. And 20% of your staff provide 80% of your problems.
I added something to that. I call it the 80/20/80 rule. And this is the logical extension of how you apply your time usage to 80/20. We need to be spending, concentrating 80% of our time on the 20% of things that produce 80% of the results. However what can often happen to us though, is we find we are spending 80% of our time on the 80% of things that produce 20% of the results. Can you hear that? 80% of our time is going on too many things which actually don’t lead to much. This is coming back to the why. If you’ve got your mission statement, you’ve got your values, roles and goals laid out, you know where you are going. You know why you are doing this. You know where to put your time. You know where to put your concentration. So that allows you to say, right, I’m going to really focus on the 20% of the things that are going to lead to 80% of my results. Now, this is the problem - which activities create 80% of your results? This is what we have to think about. Is what I am doing now the most productive use of my time? Is what I am doing now the most productive use of my time which will create 80% of the results? Is what I am doing now where I should be spending my energy? That’s this 80/20 rule. So email-you look at that and you say like you were saying before, I’m not going to look at this email CC'd to me because that’s just a copy to me. I’m going to differentiate, prioritize here within email. What do I need to concentrate on? I’ll look at the other stuff later. You can sort it out into folders. You can have them go directly. You can do things, all manner of things to try and get around that. Another important idea is we can’t do everything. On my to-do list I normally have about 25-30 items every day. Some days I get zero done. Zero. Not a good day, that one. Other days I get one. Or I might get nine. I never get 30. I never get 25. We just can’t do everything. However, this is the critical part, you can do in every day the single most important thing you should be doing. You can do that. Even if you miss everything else, but only can achieve the most important think on that day, you’ll be very successful because you are getting the most important thing done, every day. But we get confused about what’s the most important thing and we are doing everything. Well stop trying to do everything. Work out what is the most important thing you need to do every day with a priority list and start with that one. And don’t do something else. This is the critical decision you have to make.
There are some power tools for you. The first one is this acronym T.R.A.F. Which stands for trash or toss. You pick up a paper or you look at an email on the screen and you decide I don’t need that. Delete it or toss it in the bin. Straight away. Toss it out. The second one is R for refer. Oh, I am not the person who should be doing this. So I forward it to someone and say please do this, or I physically pass it on to someone and delegate it. Please do this. So I refer it to somebody else who should be doing that, not me. A is action. It requires me to take some action so I will action it. Now you may action it on the spot. If you can do it in two minutes, do it. If it is going to take longer than two minutes put it in your diary. Time control somewhere to prioritize it and do it later. Must get done though. But if you can do it in two minutes, just knock it off. If it is going to take longer than two minutes prioritize it. And the last one is file. Now I am coming from a family where my mother has got everything she ever had. Never threw anything out. I go home and see my mother and there’s piles of stuff everywhere. She never throws anything out, and I inherited that gene I think. I am a bit of a hoarder. So I want to file everything. And six months later you go through your file and you realize most of it’s rubbish. You don’t need it and you throw it out anyway. But somehow it feels better. Oh I should really keep that. Keep it, file it. But have a good filing system.
This is how you apply to big emails, you can file them or physical paper. Now this is very critical. In your diary, if you want to get stuff done that’s really critical, you’ve got an appointment calendar. You may have appointments with people in the company or clients or whatever. So you block out time for people. Pay yourself first. Block out time for yourself first. Make an appointment in your diary for yourself. For one hour or one hour and a half. There’s an appointment with Greg Story. There it is. It’s in the diary. It’s blocked. Pay yourself first. Make an appointment with yourself, not just with everybody else. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to make time.
This is also important. Have a weekly review. Friday afternoon is a good time. Go back through all the paper that is in your in-basket and start tossing it out, filing it, referring it, or whatever you have to do. Just clean it out. Because as it builds up, it becomes frustrating and you feel guilty. Friday-in, out, in, out. Clean it up. Same thing with your email. These I am going to put in this basket to look at it next week. These I’m going to delete. These I am going to file. Just spend a couple of hours. Get rid of it because it builds up. As it builds up around you, your feeling goes downhill very rapidly. So a weekly review works very well. And the other thing is time logs. This is tracking your time. Now you’ve probably got diaries. Try and make them a little bit more detailed. Maybe every half an hour. Maybe every 15 minutes. What you are actually doing. Lawyers who get paid basically by every 15 minute block are required to do it so they can bill us for their legal services. It’s not a bad model. The beauty of time logs is you can look at what you are actually doing. What you’ll find is there’s lots of opportunity there for you to slim things down and save time. It’s like finding nuggets of gold. Little gold rocks on the road. They’re there but we are not seeing them. When you do the time log you realize yeah, I can cut that down there and I can take that out of there. And I don’t need to do that. I don’t really need to go to that meeting. That meeting is too long. You’d be surprised at how much time you can save when you actually start to put it down. Because you are too busy to keep checking what you are doing, once you check, you realize actually there is a lot of space there for me to do stuff that is more high value to me. This is block time. Make an appointment with yourself, and don’t let people interrupt you. Tell everyone, for the next hour and a half, unless there is a major earthquake and the building is on fire and we have to evacuate, nobody interrupt me. I am not taking any phone calls, I’m not looking at the monitor for email. I’m not going to be interrupted. If you can go to a space that’s outside your own workspace, because often with open space work environments it’s very hard to do that, but if you tell everybody for that period of time I’m booked with me, concentrated block time. That’s the most effective use of working on your business, for planning, for strategizing, doing certain projects that only you can do. And then batching tasks is trying to put things that are rather similar together. So the learning curve stays at the same level. It’s not going up and down all the time. Trying to get the learning curve to here and just keep going with it. It’s very efficient.
Now, to do, priority lists, I believe are very very important. And I’m astonished, constantly astonished at how many people do not have a to-do list that’s prioritized in their day. I’m not going to ask you in your case, but I know from experience when I ask this question, a lot of people do not have anything like that. I notice myself, the days that I have it and the days that I don’t have it are so different. So when you start you go through your mission, your values, your roles, all the things you know you’ve got to do, write them down. Then put them into a prioritized list. And I talk about the ABC’s. Attach say A1 to A10 to the most urgent, highest value, most important items. B1-10, average value. C1 to 10 not so high value. D1 to 10 very low value. So you actually attach a quality and a number to each of those to do list items. Once you arrive at the most high priority items, that critically is where you must begin. Do not go to B4 and start there. You start with A1. You can’t do everything. But you can do the most important thing. That’s where you start. And then delegation. We are going to deal with delegation in a moment. Get it off your desk and delegate it properly to other people so you feel comfortable about that.
This is also very important. We have a lot of projects zooming around in our heads. Write them down. Spend some time and write down all the projects that you are working on. All of them. And start to get them into some list of priority. What are my higher priority items that I need to be working on? Because we’ve got things floating around. We are doing a bit here and a bit there. We’ve not got them ordered, we’ve not got them prioritized. I say round up your projects. In Australia, where I come from, they let the cattle run free. But a couple of times a year they bring them all together again, they go and catch them, bring them together. They run wild and then you bring them together. It’s a bit like our projects. Our projects run wild-we need to bring them together. Stop free-ranging and bring them together. So we can start saying, that is a high priority project. I am going to get that into my diary. That’s a low priority project, I am not going to work on that now.
So with projects or problem solving or developing items here are four steps to help you work on that. First of all, get them prioritized and start with the highest priority item. That might be a project you are working on, there might be a problem you need to solve, might be some developing issue you need to work on. And then step two, ask the question, why is the highest priority item important to our results and keep reflecting on the why. Not just the what and the how. And then what is my vision of how it would work? If you see the problem being solved or the project being done, in your mind how would that look? Get a vision, a clear picture of success. So you know what you are looking for and how to get there. You’ve got a lot of things occupying your mind. Clarify that one. Then is there going to be any rework required or is there duplication with something we are already doing? You’ve got to make sure that that is very clear. Which part of the existing process accounts for most of the problems? You are looking for that. Probably 20% of things is 80% of the difficulty. What are they? Really concentrate on those. In step three, who are the internal and external customers or users of this process? Who might be involved? It might be clients. It might be colleagues. We try and identify who they are and then what are they expecting from this process? What are they expecting from you? What of their expectations are they not currently finding results for that you need to supply? And then finally step four, brainstorm together with the team, colleagues. Write down the action steps. Action steps have priority items and then you just do it. This is a great four-step process of dealing with projects and development items and problem solving.
I am going to talk a little about delegation now. You can’t delegate unless you’ve established trust in your team. That is clear. You just will not get the cooperation. So how do we develop trust? Identify common ground-things you share. Aspirations for the company. What’s motivating that person? Find out what is driving them. What are they interested in? How can you help them? Give them the power to make decisions instead of you being a micro-manager. And give them opportunity to provide input. You want their ideas into the project. So we support a world we help create. We need to let them help create that world. And then once you make a commitment, follow through on it. Creating a common sense of direction. In your team, how do we think about market conditions. We’ve got certain budget constraints. What are they doing for us? What are individuals wanting to do? What are the customers driving us to do? What is management driving us to do? What are the organizational challenges? Consider all of these things and then you as a team are confronting all of these things together. So you are very much focused on, this is what we are trying to achieve as a team, as a group. Senior management wants this. This is what we have to do. Now the customer wants this. This is what we have to do. And we have time and budget. Remember that triangle of time, money and quality? We have these directing how we are going to do it. So you start to get people to realize we together have of this issue or these issues to face, to solve. And then with most delegation, it fails because the way people do it. And the way they do it, they don’t delegate-they keep doing it. So no one can get a chance to receive the delegation. Or they dump it. They just come and say,“get this report done by Wednesday”. Boom. And that’s the end of it. That is highly ineffective. Because what will happen there is the person themself feels, you know what I am already busy. I don’t need your work. I’ve got my own work. I can’t even do that. I don’t even know how to do this so it’s not a high priority for them. You think it’s being worked on, but then you find out the day beforehand nothing has been done. Then it’s panic-urgent and important. Quadrant one-straight there. So the point here is, we need to be distributing the work to the team; matching the person and the work. That’s the ideal. And then we get into delegation, they do the work and then finally deputizing. You’re not even there. You go on holidays, you go on a business trip. It gets done in your absence. I’ll talk in a little more depth there.
The eight steps of delegation. The first thing is stop doing it yourself. Who has said,“it’s faster if I do it myself”? Put your hands up. You’ve all said it. Come on put your hands up – “it’s faster if I do it myself”. We all say that. Because we don’t trust the people we are delegating to. We think, well I’ll have train them. It takes time to train them. It’s faster if I do it myself. You’ll be doing everything forever. Train them. Then you can let it go. So stop doing it. First one. Now instead of looking around and seeing who doesn’t look like they are on the phone and deciding, great, you’re going to be the delegate, pick the person that’s right for the project. Think about right person, right project. Select the person. Now sell the delegation. What’s in it for them? Explain how this is going to help their career. How it is going to make them more professional, more valuable. It’s not you dumping your work on them. It’s helping them to grow in their career. Show them how to do it. Give them instruction on what needs to happen so they’re not thrashing around wondering what should I do next. Then watch what they are doing. Don’t abandon them. Don’t micro-manage them but just watch and then coach. Because it happens often. I want this to go this way. And then about five seconds before it’s due, I found out they went that way instead. Who would have thought to go that way? But that’s what happened. So you don’t want that to occur so you check. We are going in the same direction as I needed to go on the way through. Then let it loose. Don’t micromanage it. Let it loose. It’s not like pulling a plant out of the ground to see that it’s growing all the time, right? Leave it in there. Let it grow. Then give them some feedback. Follow-up on how the steps are going and then reward and celebrate. Good work. Hold people accountable. Be careful about buying it back. Oh look give it back to me, I’ll do it. Because they may not do it very well. Oh look at this. You’ve gone the wrong way. Give it to me I’ll do it. No. Instruct them in what they need to do. Don’t buy it back. Don’t bring it back onto your back. Or they come back to you - I need a decision on something. Now it’s blocked because you are busy and you don’t want to think about that decision. So you are stopping them. You’ve got to make sure. Make that decision. Hand it back to them. Because otherwise it gets lost, it gets blocked and it goes nowhere. And then accountability. When does it need to be done by? What is it the quality that needs to be done? And then for follow-up very clearly define the results. What do you expect it to look like at the end? Communicate the standards at the beginning. How will you know the standards of performance are being met? Make those very clear. Things change so you have to be flexible. If some new information comes in you might have to re-gear. That’s ok. Be flexible about it. And look for the win-win situation with the team.
So I talked about saving ten hours a week for me time. Here’s how you could possibly do that. Every day for one hour you have in your diary, schedule me time. Appointment with yourself-don’t interrupt me. If you can make it an hour and a half a day then you get seven and half hours a week, right there out of the ten. Come to work 12 minutes earlier and that will give you an extra hour in the week. If you come 30 minutes earlier, that will give you an extra two and a half hours. For some people with long commutes, that may not be possible. Shorten your lunch by twelve minutes. And that is going to give you an extra hour a week. If you shorten your lunch by 30 minutes, which is basically I find about how long it takes me to eat lunch. To get an order and get it eaten and get back to the office usually takes about 30 minutes, you are gaining an extra two and a half hours per week. Or slightly shorten each and every meeting. If you just chop five minutes off here, three minutes off there, you can get up to 30 minutes a day, which is two and a half hours a week of extra time. For you. And most meetings are way too long. And often you shouldn’t even be at that meeting. If you can delete the meeting even better. And then if you can actually get out 60 minutes a day from all those meetings that you are in, might be six meetings a day, you take 10 minutes off each, make them shorter by ten minutes, you just picked up an extra five hours a week. So there are some ideas on how to find time for you. And you have your manuals there. You’ll see in the back of your manuals there is an article we published - probably in the American Chamber journal in the next couple of months, on how to work on your business and not in your business.
Let me take any questions you might have in the remaining time we have. About anything we’ve covered or anything else we have not covered. So who has the first question? Yes please.
Participant: Let’s say you have a mission statement and your values. Do you ever change those in your life?
Greg: The question is that with values or mission statement, how regularly do we change those? Yes, I update mine. I find though with the mission statement, it tends to stick. Over the last 20 years I’ve been refining it. I finally got it to a point where it basically covers. The values too, they generally tend to be consistent. Slight changes over time. It’s probably around the goals in my different roles that have changed because the goals get done. Or the goal drops out because the situation has changed. Or I’ve got a more pressing goal that I need to work on. I bring that in. So that’s where I find the variation is more in the goals and roles-the what, why and how part changes for me. Who has the next question?
Participant: What would be the tips from you to keep reminding myself to do the most urgent and important thing?
Greg: So the question is, what is a tip on how to remind myself to make sure that I am doing the most productive thing every moment with my time? I think the tip I would give you is before you start it, before you get into it, like the email comes and oh I’ve got to answer it, before you go to that point say, is answering this email the most productive use of my time? You might think, I can probably do that later, and you skip it. Go back to your priority list for that day and look and see if there’s a higher priority that I need to get done first? If that email is a priority then you can probably add it to the list. Or it can go on the next day’s list. So I think it’s, before you actually get started, because once we get into the item, the time is gone. You’ve already started. It’s too late then. So before you start, is what I am about to do the most productive use of my time at this moment? Is this part of my list of priorities for today that I need to achieve? If it is important, capture it and then maybe assign a lower priority to it that day or a higher priority the next day. Because it may not be something that you have to do on that day. And for my to-do list I am constantly transferring things across. So if they don’t get done on this day I pick them up on the next day. And then I just write them down again, add the new priorities and I re-prioritize the whole thing. Because a priority say on a Wednesday may change. There may be a more urgent priority on the Thursday. So it will still be there. It doesn’t get lost-that’s the key. But the priority issuance will change. Who has the next question?
Participant: You talked about making a to-do list every day and you try to update your goals every day. How many minutes or how many hours are you putting in a day just for the priority list?
Greg: The question is how many minutes a day do I spend working on or going through the mission, the values and working up the priority list? I would probably spend ten to fifteen minutes a day on that. Because I try to read through everything. Remind myself of my why. Get down all my priorities. Transfer the priorities from the previous day that didn’t get completed into today’s priority list. Add the new things. I’ll scan e-mail and if anything comes up, I’ll put that down. But don’t do it. Sometimes with time difference, because we have our headquarters in New York, I might have to do something straight away because there’s the time difference. If there is a zone where I overlap, I’ll say well I’m going to make that the priority. If I can get it done in two minutes-boom. Get it done. So basically about ten to fifteen minutes. But its uninterrupted time. And I find, oh it’s sad, it’s really sad. The difference between the days when I prioritize and the days I don’t prioritize. It’s sad. The difference is so huge. I am so much less effective on those days where the prioritization didn’t get done. And it happens sometimes. Something happens like today. I haven’t done it today. I have to go back to my desk and do it. But I might get sucked into a whole bunch of things and not do it. And today will be a disaster compared to if I did do it. I am telling you now, that simple act, it’s very tough to make a choice. Is this one of a higher priority than that one? Don’t fret over that too much. Get the most important things done. You’ll be doing very very well.
Participant: I wanted to ask you about the to-do and to-be list. Sometimes the to-do list could be going on and on from A10 to C10. You don’t get to cover everything a day and still you go back every morning and go through your to-do list to use. How do you re-shuffle, re-prioritize the leftover priority?
Greg: The question is about the to-be list and the to-do list, and with the to-do list how do you re-shuffle the priorities? The to-be list is a long-term thing. In the back of that little success focus book, you’ve got long-term goals. Your to-be list is usually long-term goals. The reshuffling is, as I transfer them and add to them, I just go through the list and I decide that was a higher priority yesterday but something’s happened in the day that trumps that and just overtakes that. By time urgency or value and I just re-write it because I am always writing in pencil and I often have to readjust the numbers to say that that was an A7 is now going to become an A3 because something’s happened. Although really I don’t actually bother doing that I just move it up mentally and then just keep going. But I must come back to A4. I shouldn’t go to B5. The trick is the highest priority items must get my time. Last question over here.
Participant: To me, to put away ten hours for me time is quite long. So just wondering, me time? What is the clear definition of me time? Is that something not only professional, maybe personal? Just thinking about me?
Greg: The question is about me time and thinking that ten hours a week seems a lot for me time. The me time that I am talking about there is professional. It is in your job, working on your business. That means planning, direction, thinking about the critical items of your business rather than just doing the routine daily work of your business. And so what we are asking you to do here is step back. Look at the tasks and say, which ones will advance the business more than others and I should concentrate my time there as opposed to I’m doing routine work or I am doing detailed work or I am doing something that takes time but doesn’t help me directionally. That’s why I said before the key question is why. Why are you doing this? Why are you working in this section of the business? Why are you trying to achieve these things? If you are refreshing those in your mind then you will make the me time. The me time could be a project you are working on and you say I am going to give an hour every day to that particular project or projects. And I am just going to concentrate on that one thing. Or I’ve got a particular report. I’m going to spend an hour every day putting that report together. I’m not going to be interrupted by anything else because this is a very high priority for me. That’s what me time means. It’s not me time in that I am going to go to Starbucks and have a cup of coffee for an hour. That’s not what I am talking about. I’m talking about work related, it’s specific, it’s high-value. It is something usually only you should be doing. Because if someone else can do it, delegate it. It’s something only you can do that’s really going to make a difference to the direction of the business. We are at time, so let me say thank you very much for coming out this morning. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope to see you again. Thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed today. Thank you very much. (Applause)
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