By AMA Staff
For years we’ve heard that time management is about quadrants, action items, and prioritizing tasks. In fact, go to just about any time management seminar, and the trainer will spend lots of time showing you how to analyze your calendar, log your time spent in various activities, plan your work week, and so on. At some time during that seminar you’ll do doubt realize that you do indeed spend too much time on e-mail, phone calls, and “putting out fires.” You’ll vow to plan your calendar more efficiently, organize your activities into quadrants, and prioritize your workload. But within a week you’ll most likely find yourself right back where you started.
Why does this happen? Because no matter what your job, you tend to do the things that you think your boss expects you to do. So even though you may have a page-long “to-do” list, you know that your boss also expects you to answer her e-mails within 15 minutes or to be available on Instant Messenger. Your boss expects you to pick up the phone when needed and to help senior management deal with any last minute emergencies. Very often, these expectations take precedence over the important tasks you need to do. And while communication and helping senior management are important, if you’re truly going to have the time to spend on tasks that move yourself and the company forward, you’ll have to gain more power over your schedule.
In short, you need to have a conversation with your boss about the various activities you are expected to do. The two of you must reach an agreement on what it means for you to do your job successfully. Then, you must constantly manage his or her expectations.
Manage Your Manager, Not Your Time
In order to take back your time, your career, and your life, you need to step into the realm of managing your manager. The goal is to achieve complete alignment between what your boss wants you to do and what you believe you really should do. Here’s how you do it:
1. Analyze your boss's needs. You need to know what your boss expects of himself and what your boss’s boss expects of him. What can you do to help your boss be more successful? A lot of people in business assume that “meeting the boss’s needs” means doing exactly what the boss wants them to do—accepting the boss’s vision and direction wholesale. Wrong! This assumption is a little to simplistic and dangerous.
Real “managing upward” demands a more serious and subtle analysis of human needs, which starts with the realization that needs come in two forms—explicit needs and implicit needs.
“Explicit needs” are fairly simple. They may be stated in the organization’s strategic plan, or they may be announced by your boss whenever the team gets together for a strategy session. They generally sound something like this:
- “We need to expand our business internationally.”
- “We need to create a shipping policy that will save us some money.”
- “We need to commerce-enable our Website.”
“Implicit needs” are more subtle. People don’t talk about them. Sometimes they’re not even aware of them. Most of the time they are things that people would deny if confronted with them. They sound like this:
- “Make me look good in front of my boss so that when he gets kicked upstairs he’ll recommend me for his job.”
- “Help me demonstrate my creativity by coming up with some ideas for next year’s marketing campaign that I can tweak a little and take on as my own.”
- “Help me feel more like a leader and less like the kid who was always picked last for schoolyard games.”
While explicit needs tend to run a linear path, implicit needs tend be random, triggered by emotion and circumstance. And although you will never actually talk to your boss about his or her implicit needs, it’s a fun exercise to sit down with a sheet of paper and try to list your boss’s implicit needs. Paying attention to implicit needs is serious, as these often drive the issues that’ll keep us up at night. From the first day you meet your new boss through the last day you work together, devote enough of your time to really figuring out your boss’s implicit needs. Then spend time on the needs that you can feel good about supporting to further your company’s interest as well as your boss’s career.
2. Adopt a Management Value Added Mindset. The concept of Management Value Added (MVA) is based on a simple question that you should ask whenever you’re making a decision about how to invest your time and energy: “What value does management add?”
One way to start using MVA is to sit down with your boss to discuss his or her explicit needs (the ones written down as part of the company’s strategy or the division’s official mandate). It shouldn’t take long for the two of you to agree on what they are and to prioritize them appropriately. Then ask your boss, “How do you feel I can add the most value?” If your boss responds, “Huh?” you can flesh out the question with additional questions like these:
- “What are the activities I am engaged in when I am contributing the most?”
- “What are the activities that you and the company most need me to do?”
- “What do you consider to be the best and most productive use of my time?”
- “What do you think is the special contribution that I am best positioned to offer to you and the company?”
- “Of all the things that I’m engaged in on behalf of this company, what are the three areas where you believe that I can contribute the most?”
Listen carefully to your boss’s answers. Using them as a guide, you can begin to understand exactly how your boss views your contributions. It’s quite likely that the way he or she measures your value differs from the way you measure it.
3. Implement what you learn. Use the information your boss shares with you to determine how to spend your time, which projects to support, and which meetings to attend. For example, if your boss tells you that your most important areas of contribution are your ability to hire, nurture, and guide talent; build capacity; and stay close to customers, then before committing to any new activity, you can ask yourself, “Will this activity help me achieve my priorities? Will it help me put the right people in the right jobs? Will it help me build capability? Will it help me know and connect with our customers?” If the answer is no, avoid the activity—even if it sounds otherwise interesting, appealing, or fun.
Implementing the MVA concept helps you maintain a focus on the things that matter while earning the support of those you serve. Then, when your boss or someone else in the organization asks you to commit time or energy to an area that falls outside of the MVA priorities you’ve established, you can talk to your boss about how the new commitment may affect your main goals and reach a joint decision as to whether a shift in priorities is warranted. Each time you and your boss are out of alignment, you have an opportunity to further understand your boss’s needs and goals. Expect this approach to help you remove many useless meetings from your agenda, but also realize that sometimes, often as a result of implicit needs, you’ll be required to go along for the ride.
Manage Your Future for Success
When you follow the process outlined here you’ll have a clearer understanding of where your focus should be each day. Along with this clarity you’ll acquire a renewed sense of purpose because you’re now spending your time on what really matters—both to you and to your boss. And when everyone’s needs are being met in a way that supports the company’s vision, the result is a more productive, happier work environment.
About The Author
American Management Association is a world leader in professional development, advancing the skills of individuals to drive business success. AMA’s approach to improving performance combines experiential learning—“learning through doing”—with opportunities for ongoing professional growth at every step of one’s career journey. AMA supports the goals of individuals and organizations through a complete range of products and services, including seminars, Webcasts and podcasts, conferences, corporate and government solutions, business books and research.