Misplacing your management skills

Words: 677 Reading Time: 2 minutes 15 seconds

As a speaker I recently delivered a 10 minute coaching slot at the beginning of a network meeting. I selected a topic apparently much loved by those aspiring to coach – Time Management. When I entered the phrase into Google I got:

* 64.4 million listings for time management skills;
* 258 million listings for time management tools; and
* 140 million listings for time management training sessions.

Clearly, I was on the right track.

Regretfully, those so intent on learning about time management are doomed to a degree of disappointment. While purveyors of advice on time management may be as tightly packed as snake oil sellers at a health-food convention there are some inherent attributes of time that ought to be pointed out first.

1) Time just happens. If I kick off a stopwatch and then ask someone to ‘manage’ the time as I talk I am not quite sure how they would do that. Note that I am asking that they manage the time and only the time, not my talk. With so many courses and techniques I am sure there must be a way to make time stop, start, increase, diminish, reverse, multiple and turn left at the traffic lights; I just haven’t come across it yet.

2) The predictability of time - 24 hours in a day; 7 days in a week; 52 weeks in a year – should probably make managing it easier. But that predictability is an illusion. There’s really 24hrs and 59 seconds in a day – hence the Leap Year. In 1751 there was no January, February or March in England and Wales. Under Napoleon there were 10 days in a week (a decade) and each month had 3 decades. The year ended (on the old Sept 17th) with 5 supplementary days to bring it back to 365 days in a year, or 6 supplementary days in a Leap Year.

3) Besides messing about with the calendar it is possible genuinely to bend the space/time continuum under an intense gravitational field; time will run at different speeds and in different directions.

4) The theory of relativity tells us that the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time. If one of a pair of twins rockets off through space for a period of time, he would return younger than his sibling.

Probably time is a much more slippery subject than it at first appears.

One of the things that may prompt us to attempt to ‘manage’ time is that we view it as scarce, but there is actually loads of it. About 14 billion years have elapsed since the “Big Bang” and – as far as we can tell – time stretches for an infinite distance into the future. Whatever else may be scarce, it isn’t time.

And time is a bit like air - we have all the time that there is. We all have 24 hours and 59 seconds in a day. Nobody goes short, or is in any way deprived. There is no more to be had.

Perhaps the most helpful change we can make is to stop thinking of time as a resource, like water, minerals or money. Time is not a resource, it’s a dimension like height, width and depth and like those other dimensions its gradations are just human inventions.

Time is not susceptible to management.

That leaves us with the one component in any situation that we are best placed to manage – ourselves.

Unless we are managing our own thoughts and feelings (and nobody else can) any organizational method that is superimposed will be fatally undermined. On the myriad of courses listed by Google you can learn about diaries, schedules, systems, tidying, delegating and dumping, but without first being in control of ourselves (to some degree) all the clever plans and procedures will be like dandelions parachutes in a windstorm.

There are two very simple (not easy) elements to managing ourselves:

* Clarity – knowing exactly what outcome we want.

* Desire – an overwhelming connection with that outcome.

With those two successfully addressed we can make the most of ourselves – whatever amount of time we think we may have.

What comes first - seeing or believing?

Words: 349 Reading Time: 1 minutes 10 seconds

Relatively few businesses seek any form of outside consultancy or coaching.

In 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics, the UK economy was made up of 525,000 sole proprietors, with another 1,382,000 enterprises employing between 2 and 10 people and another 20,000 enterprises with between 11 and 49 employees.

Of all businesses (2.15 million) 348,000 were under two years old and a further 316,000 were between two and four years old.

Clearly, with so many small businesses and so many new businesses there is benefit to be had from seeking professional help, especially as approximately one in fifty six businesses will have failed in the same year. So why is this assistance ignored?

Aside from issues of ignorance and concerns about cost I believe the main reason is belief.

For any personal or corporate change to take place, first there must be a change in belief. If any part of the old Henry Ford adage is true, it’s the second part, “you can’t if you think you can’t”, because if companies are convinced of their own inadequacy they are unlikely to attempt any change.

In the unlikely event that they do make an attempt, they are unlikely to persist, taking any early lack of success as proof positive of their initial doubts rather than recognizing this as almost inevitable during the first stumbling steps on the road.

Shifting belief takes work, which probably acts to deter most people. When our beliefs change, so will some of our values. And that tends to scare people. What they more easily embrace is surface pattern change rather than deeper belief work. It has the attraction of seeming to yield early results.

But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the pattern change rarely sticks. Why would it when it is unsupported by underpinning beliefs? Unfortunately this probably leaves the enterprise worse off than before.

To break through this debilitating condition what people and businesses require is a meta-shift – a shift in their belief about belief and the role it plays in their success or failure.

However, I am sure none of that applies to my readers.

Acting from a single purpose

Words: 277 Reading Time: 0 minutes 55 seconds

Recently I was surprised to see an experienced NLP Trainer remark on a lady that spent her time at a dancing class actually talking instead of listening to the music and practising.

He was struck by the fact that even though this lady had been told repeatedly that she should not talk during practice the first thing she did was talk about the not talking instruction!

And when he thought about how this lady behaved in class, he realised she seemed to be talking most of the time.

Well, of course!

The evident mistake is to assume that two people doing the same thing, at the same time, in the same place will have the same motive. That doesn’t follow at all. In fact it is highly improbable given the diversity among people.

Those running businesses often fall into the same mode of thinking.

Owners are puzzled that their waged employees do not share their dedication and whole-hearted commitment to the enterprise.

Directors are astonished that the carefully designed, highly remunerative, shiny new incentive package has not had the motivational effect they expected.

And managers are surprised that the disciplinary code ensuring that clerical staff put everything in writing has not cut the error rate one iota.

Blanket policies and uniform procedures are the bluntest of tools. To improve the probability of connecting with an individual we need to know why they are here and what interests them. Only with that information can we hope to tap into their motivationally wellsprings.

I don’t know the talkative lady at the dancing class, but there’s a good chance she was there mainly for the company, not the La Caida.