Issue No. 388 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting notes that you don’t need to read a thick book on time management—just read this article: “How CEOs Manage Time” (only 19 pages) in this month’s Harvard Business Review. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for more summer reading list nominees.
How CEOs Manage Time
Even U.S. presidents have much to learn on how they manage their time. In The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity (read my 2012 review here), the authors note this:
“Clinton would call Nixon and describe his schedule—when he got up, when he exercised, how long he worked, in order to hear if that was normal for a president. After Nixon died, Clinton said it felt like the loss of his mother.”
The co-authors comment: “The most precious commodity of the United States of America is neither the gold bullion in Fort Knox nor the launch codes in its ballistic missiles. It is the time of the commander in chief: there is only so much of it, and how it is spent shapes pretty much everything else.”
According to The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, when Erskine Bowles served as President Bill Clinton’s second chief of staff, he “carried around a card with the president’s top priorities written on it [just three or four big projects]—and rebelled when Clinton tried to go off script.”
So how do you manage your time? Are your team members effectively investing their time with the right balance of doing, thinking, meeting, influencing, and reflecting? Here’s help!
Not every topic needs a War and Peace-length treatment (over 1,400 pages!). Harvard Business Review’s bi-monthly magazine (July-August 2018) features 19 practical pages in their spotlight on “The Leader’s Calendar,” including:
• “How CEOs Manage Time,” by Harvard Business School prof Michael E. Porter and Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria (11 pages)
• “What Do CEOs Actually Do?" (a 2-page color-coded chart)
• “One CEO’s Approach to Managing His Calendar,” by Daniel McGinn and Sarah Higgins (6 pages)
Fascinating stuff! The authors agree with U.S. presidents: “Time is the scarcest resources leaders have.” They add, “The way CEOs allocate their time and their presence—where they choose to personally participate—is crucial, not only to their own effectiveness but also to the performance of their companies. Where and how CEOs are involved determines what gets done and signals priorities for others. It also affects their legitimacy.
“A CEO who doesn’t spend enough time with colleagues will seem insular and out of touch, whereas one who spends too much time in direct decision making will risk being seen as a micromanager and erode employees’ initiatives. A CEO’s schedule (indeed any leader’s schedule), then, is a manifestation of how the leader leads and sends powerful messages to the rest of the organization.”
The highly readable format of HBR articles—distilling data into bite-size chunks—is brilliant. One “In Brief” sidebar summarizes three points: The Problem, The Study, and The Findings. Under the latter:
“Leaders must learn to simultaneously manage seemingly contradictory dualities:
• integrating direct decision making with indirect levers like strategy and culture,
• balancing internal and external constituencies,
• proactively driving an agenda while responding to unfolding events,
• exercising leverage while being mindful of constraints,
• focusing on tangible decisions and the symbolic significance of every action,
• and combining formal power and legitimacy.”
With warnings like “avoiding the lure of e-mail,” and “making time for personal well-being,” the authors tracked CEO time in 25 key areas, such as meeting time, face-to-face interactions, one-on-one meetings, strategy time, time with customers, and “two-hour-plus blocks of alone time.” The article lists the degree of variation between the CEOs.
This study—unique in CEO research says HBR—tracked the activities of CEOs at 27 large companies 24/7 for 13 weeks and then conducted deep dive debriefs with each leader. The color-coded two-page chart summarizes nine key areas (where they work, work vs. personal time, lengths of meetings, etc.). Example: the 27 CEOs reported that 75% of their time was scheduled and just 25% of their time was spontaneous (on a 24/7 basis over 13 weeks).
Page 46, “Four Behaviors of Great Executive Assistants,” is PowerPoint-worthy. One insight: EAs can help CEOs by including all the relevant players in meetings—resisting the temptation to keep meetings small. “…good CEOs delegate well, and to do so they need their direct reports and affected managers to be present. Otherwise, extra rounds of communication and follow-up will be needed after the meetings. Good EAs avoid that problem by getting the right people in the room to begin with.”
You’ll also appreciate the over-the-shoulder look at a week-at-a-glance schedule of Tom Gentile, CEO for Spirit AeroSystems. The Monday to Sunday grid (also color-coded) clocks every 24 hours over seven days in 15-minute increments. “Attended his company’s board meeting on less than three hours of sleep and then had dinner with his wife.” Yikes!
Speaking of boards, “All our CEOs understood the importance of spending time with their boards. In our study, interacting with directors accounted for 5% of CEO’s total work time, or 41 hours per quarter, on average. But…we saw significant variation: One CEO spent six hours with directors; another spent 165.” They emphasize the importance of CEOs “managing up” to the board and finding time “to build meaningful one-on-one relationships with individual directors.”
Trust me—this is worth the read.
ORDERING OPTIONS:
[ ] Option 1: Subscribe to the Amazon Kindle version of Harvard Business Review Magazine (30 days free) and read the July-August 2018 version online. Click here.
[ ] Option 2: Purchase at many newsstands, airports, and bookstores.
[ ] Option 3: Visit Harvard Business Review here and subscribe (six issues per year) or just download the “Leader’s Calendar” collection of three articles (19 pages). Click here.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) One CEO, Tom Gentile, who tracked his 24/7 time for 13 weeks was surprised to learn he spent less time one-on-one with his direct reports than the average CEO does. My counsel to clients: keep one-on-one meetings on the front burner with the “Weekly Update to My Supervisor” form from Mastering the Management Buckets. Download here.
2) One of Gentile’s “big take-aways” in his debrief with Professor Porter and Dean Nohria was that he spent too much time on email. Take a guess: how much time does your CEO spend on email in the average week? Too much, or too little?
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The CEO's Job Description
Insights from Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance
Try this. After reading the HBR article, “How CEOs Manage Time,” review the CEO do-it-yourself job description tool in Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance. Of the 10 basic responsibilities of nonprofit CEOs listed, ask your board and staff to weigh in on the Top-3 priorities—based on your current situation and environment.
The workbook includes access to 16 downloadable templates including: the “Prime Responsibility Chart” (a one-page division of responsibilities between the board, the CEO, and the senior team), the “CEO Monthly Dashboard Report,” and the "Rolling 3-Year Strategic Plan Placemat" and more. For additional governance resources, visit the Board Bucket webpage.
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Tools and Templates for Effective Board Governance: Time-Saving Solutions for the Nonprofit Board, by John Pearson.
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Need a Branding/Strategy Do-Over?
Many times poor branding is the result of an inappropriate or ineffective (or tired out) strategy. Read my review of Harvard prof Michael Porter’s classic HBR article, “What Is Strategy?” Click here.
Porter preaches that “around this core of uniqueness are encrustations added incrementally over time. Like barnacles, they must be removed to reveal the underlying strategic positioning.”
For more help on branding and strategy, check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod. Click here.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, frequent flyer miles, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As a board member and raving fan of Christian Community Credit Union (a non-profit), we proudly list the credit union as our top pick for serving your financial services needs.
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