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ILLUSTRATION BY BRYANT FUKUTOMI / BFUKUTOMI@STARBULLETIN.COM
The February 2002 issue of the Harvard Business Review reported a startling research finding that warns of danger: "Fully 90 percent of managers squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities. In other words, a mere 10 percent of managers spend their time in a committed, purposeful and reflective manner."
Since managers are responsible for ensuring that the organization is getting a maximum return on investment on its most important asset -- its human resources -- these findings are particularly worrisome.
They suggest that instead of leveraging their actions by spending their own time in ways that make the largest difference for the most people, managers may have lost their focus. While each manager will need to do his or her own cost/benefit assessment, here are a few managerial traps to consider that I've seen in my own experience.
The first has to do with the difference between "doing" and "managing." Many technical people, for example, have been promoted to managerial positions because they were very good at solving complex impersonal (i.e., non-human) problems. Add to this ability their genuine love for solving such problems, and the newly lean structures of most organizations these days, and you have the ingredients for why many managers spend long hours behind closed doors putting out the fires that others should be handling. Yes, these managers are committed and hard working, but are they effectively making the bigger differences expected of them?
The bigger differences I'm talking about have to do with managerial accountabilities like coaching and succession planning. Successful coaches spend lots of time observing, making themselves visible, and developing the kinds of open relationships that allow people to seek help from them and receive feedback. Management by walking around is not being nosy: It has nothing to do with being untrusting of your people, but everything to do with successful coaching. And successful coaching is itself a prerequisite to growing successors for your own position.
Having said that, there is one vitally important reason not to be out walking around all the time. In the research results quoted above, it is noted that very few managers spend any time in a reflective manner. In other words, because we often don't distinguish activity from impact, or busy-ness from productivity, we also seriously endanger one of our most valuable human resources, which is the ability to learn from our experiences.
When was the last time you scheduled a few hours time to sit back and do some quiet reflection on where you and your team have been lately? Or when did you and your entire team last take such time together? Not very recently, if at all. And, even though you know that reflection is the key to learning, if you did take the time, it's highly likely you still felt twinges of guilt, as if you weren't "really working," weren't really earning your pay.
Furthermore, when it does take place, such learning time is focused solely on diagnosing the underlying causes of mistakes. And rightfully so, as repeating mistakes are most assuredly an example of squandering time.
But it's equally important to be able to learn from your successes. In all my years of teaching in management graduate schools, I saw hundreds of courses on the management skill of problem solving, but not one that focused on the management of success. It's my contention that a greatly overlooked source of squandered time is this lost opportunity to diagnose the exact causes of successes and therefore the knowledge of how to best replicate and expand on them.
Maybe it's about time to do a managerial time-utilization inventory. If 90 percent of [your] managers are squandering their time in all sorts of ineffective activities, you can be certain that the people who are reporting to them are doing no better.
Irwin Rubin is a Honolulu-based author and president of Temenos Inc., which specializes in executive leadership development and behavioral coaching, communication skill building training, and large system culture change. His column appears twice a month in the Honolulu Star Bulletin. Send questions and column suggestions to temenos@lava.net or visit temenosinc.com.
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