Ask any successful manager what they found hard in their first management role and invariably time management will come fairly close to the top of the list. It is not easy trying to balance the various demands people – including your team – make on your time whilst trying to get your own work done. If you are new to the role of management and haven’t had good management training you can find yourself working longer and longer hours and getting more and more frustrated. This article, based on the experiences of Spearhead’s top management trainers and the principles taught in our management training courses, provides some guidance.
First, if you are new to your role you need to appreciate that efficiency usually improves with experience. Don’t be too hard on yourself if, in the early days, you do take a little longer to do things that other (more experienced) managers do with apparent ease. All managers attending our management training courses agree that moving into their new management role required dedicated hard work.
As you start to get to grips with your new role you need to beware of becoming the type of manager who boasts of working exceptionally long hours every day with never any time off. This type of manager is clearly demonstrating that they cannot manage themselves let alone manage anyone else! What they should do is get themselves some good time management training, but they don’t because they never have the time!
The starting point for time management is for you to assess what you need to do – and what you can delegate to the team. Never fall into the trap of thinking you have to do everything yourself – if you fail to delegate you will fail to manage.
So having delegated effectively, the next thing you need to do is to distinguishes between the urgent and the important tasks; scheduling your discretionary time to ensure those that are important are progressed in a timely manner. Good managers know how to set and stick to self-imposed, as well as other-imposed, deadlines. Failure to do this results in the self-made crisis, and is stressful for you and for your team!
A final word of warning – remember the KIS principle and don’t become such a “time management fanatic” that you end up wasting time by trying to micro-manage it.
One aspect of time management newly promoted managers can struggle with is avoiding procrastination, particularly in the area of making decisions. There are always plenty of reasons not to take a decision, reasons to wait for more information, more options, more opinions… But this type of procrastination not only wastes managerial time but also leads to missed opportunities. Successful managers display a consistent bias for action; after all, the only manager who never makes a mistake is the manager who doesn’t do anything! Get into the habit of making decisions in a timely manner; use decision making techniques to help you, and if you find yourself procrastinating be honest with yourself about your reasons why then set yourself a deadline to solve those problems and make that decision you’ve been putting off.
Tags: management training
