A good way to think about where to put your effort and use your time.
Ask
Is this the best use of my time?
if not, how do I do this for the last time?
Then
Replace low value activities with those of higher value
An expert model for engineers
Nine work strategies for career success.
- Taking initiative: accepting responsibility above and beyond your stated job, volunteering for additional activities, and promoting new ideas.
- Networking: getting direct and immediate access to coworkers with technical expertise and sharing your own knowledge with those who need it.
- Self-management: regulating your own work commitments, time, performance level, and career growth.
- Teamwork effectiveness: assuming joint responsibility for work activities, coordinating efforts, and accomplishing shared goals with coworkers.
- Leadership: formulating, stating, and building consensus on common goals and working to accomplish them.
- Followership: helping the leader accomplish the organisation’s goals and thinking for yourself rather than relying solely on managerial direction.
- Perspectives: seeing your job in its larger context and taking on other viewpoints like those of the customer, manager, and work team.
- Show-and-tell: presenting your ideas persuasively in written or oral form.
- Organisational savvy: navigating the competing interests in an organisation, be they individual or group, to promote cooperation, address conflicts, and gets things done.
Source: Kelley R and Caplan J (1993) How Bell labs creates star performers. Harvard Business Review, July-August, pp.128ff
A New Year
“…our fleeting lives do not simply ‘happen’ and vanish – they take place”
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Events do not slip away into the past, but carve a place in our historical or physical or present selves.
Four ways to make your job as a manager more enjoyable
Step Back from the Immediate Tasks.
Take some time to think and reflect – objectively identify the high-payoff activities. These activities should be judged based on the end result – not on the action itself. Writing emails is often a low-payoff activity, but when the email helps everyone on the team to focus on one goal, it is undoubtedly a high payoff. Write it deliberately…don’t just produce a “stream of consciousness” that blurs the message.
Delegate, delegate, delegate.
The best leaders are undoubtedly the best delegators – make sure the jobs you give people a whole and meaningful and that you do give them the jobs. Don’t get them to report unless they are in trouble. Develop the self-confidence to let them do their jobs. Delegating is a development tool. Delegating is a way to distribute the workload. Delegating is a way to help the organisation work on essential tasks. Delegation should not add to your workload, so delegate…and forget until the results roll in. You’ve cleared the decks to do other things.
Plan AND SCHEDULE daily.
Go beyond a simple “TO-DO List” or a list of priorities and also schedule your activities. Schedule time to complete a slice of an important, long-term exercise. Don’t plan to do the not urgent, or the urgent but not important and hope you will get time to do what is critical to getting results. Schedule first the high-pay-off activities, and fit the rest around those. Do everything in their power to stick to the schedule.
Get Results.
Help the entire team focus on the essential issues. Indicate that actions are judged on results, not progress reports. Outputs lead to outcomes – a report is seldom an outcome!! Make sure you and the team are clear on the outcomes wanted and the outputs needed to get there.