Manager Productivity: A Stepping Stone to Team Productivity
We’re all doing more with less. Work seems to be expanding exponentially, yet we have fewer employees to do that work. We often talk about getting more productivity from our employees, but what about the people managing those employees? Managers are swamped with multiple projects, tasked with coaching and growing their often overworked employees, and responsible for maintaining high morale on their teams. The more productivity you get from a manager, the more effectively they can manage the productivity of their employees.
Here are some ways you can grow as a manager and improve your daily productivity:
- Delegate when and where you can. One of the hardest things about switching from an individual contributor role to management is learning to delegate. If you’re used to being mired in the details of a project, removing yourself from the day-to-day ins and outs of the project can be a challenge. For a while, you might be able to stay in the details of a project and still do the higher-level strategic thinking and activities required of a manager. But multiply that by the number of projects you’re overseeing, and you’ll quickly see how dealing with details for all those projects becomes a huge time suck.
- Hire people you trust and can rely on. Micromanaging takes a lot of time. If you hire the right people for your team, you won’t need to spend a lot of time hand-holding on a daily basis since they have the skill set and ability to work on the details of projects. Allowing your team to make decisions for their projects and providing room for them to grow gives you more time to focus on other tasks.
- Have organization systems that work. Make sure your email system lets you find an email from 3 months ago about Project X being delayed due to reduced team member capacity. Make sure your action item system is easy to access and understand. The less time you spend digging around for a vital email or set of meeting notes, the more time you have to get other high-priority things done. And it’s going to be hard to complete action items if you can’t even find them.
- Pare down your meetings. Managers tend to get invited to any and every meeting for all projects for which they are responsible. Take a hard look at which meetings you really need to attend, and ensure your team members are covering the others. I’d venture to say you’re probably not needed at most project meetings where you’ll have a team member attending with a couple of exceptions: the project is in trouble, or the team member is struggling and needs your help.
How do you improve your productivity? What tools and processes do you use to keep yourself as efficient as possible, and to help your team?
Trust photo by notsogoodphotography. Licensed under CC.
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Re: learning to delegate — perhaps in a future article you could break this down for us. If learning to delegate is hard to do, then advice from someone who has done it is probably a good idea, no?
Love the advice to pare down meetings… they are a killer. Suggestion – use stand-ups…. only have meetings standing up. They get much shorter!
These are all good tips. Here's another: Find a discipline for organizing your time, and stick to it. My day is filled with so many distractions that, if I'm not careful, I get to the end of the day without having devoted more than a few minutes of concentrated thought to any one thing. Sometimes I have to unplug (turn off email, Twitter, etc.) to minimize the distractions. Or I carve out a chunk of time by scheduling a one-person “meeting” in Outlook.
Delegating also helps improve team morale and helps team members gain valuable experience in making decisions and learning when to escalate issues. It's a big win-win for managers who delegate well.
This is timely advice, for me, Alyssa, since I've recently taken on the team leader role. One important thing I've learned is that delegating to an outside contractor is NOT the same as delegating to in-house staff. If an outside contractor does the work, I still get stuck with the project management. So I'm learning that I need to delegate it to someone in-house and let them work with the contractor!