Great Leaders Prioritize These 3 Things
How do you prioritize your time as a leader?
There are dozens of things that can always capture our attention. Many of them important, few of them urgent, yet we move from thing to thing and can get caught in the whirlwind of any given day. Then there are the things that we know we should be concentrating more efforts on to ensure a smooth long-term running of the business. The hardest, yet most important, thing to do is be deliberate and purposeful in how you spend your time as a leader.
Three key areas to invest your time:
1. Hiring the right people
Finding the right people for the right roles is a key piece of successful leadership. I am not talking about making job offers or even the interview itself. It is the strategic portion of hiring to know when you need new talent, what that talent will need to bring to the table, and how they will fit into the team and culture.
Unfortunately, we have made hiring the right people, at the right time, in the right place more of a cliché than something we deliver on consistently. And, for good reason. It is really hard to do this and do it well. Anyone can hire bodies. There are even occasions when that is the right action to take. But, more often, figuring out the puzzle pieces that will all fit together to allow for a complex set of process to happen repeatedly is a very challenging task. I believe it is one reason that many leaders do not invest the time into it. It can feel impossible. Especially in the very challenging hiring markets that we are seeing right now.
However, investing time into the interview and discussion process will save countless hours in the future if you discover a poor fit for your situation. Getting to know candidates and who they are is even more important than asking questions to understand what they’ve done. Make time to plan for future people needs, begin your searches well in advance, and then take the time to find the solution to your real problems and not band-aids to what is only in front of you right now. That is the real time requirements that come with hiring the right people.
2. Training those you’ve hired.
This does not mean you, personally, will do all the training of newly hired associates. It does mean staying involved and engaged during the training process is imperative. This ensures they are getting the information and support they need to build a strong foundation to build from as they get into their roles.
You invested a lot in finding the right person for the role you have available, or a future role, now you must ensure that this new addition is set up for success. The time investment of hiring must be complimented with an even bigger time and money investment into training and development. Onboarding is only a portion of the equation. Once they settle in and understand the core components of the new role, you’ll want to continue to help them grow into the potential you saw when you hired them.
While you may not be completing the hands-on training each day, having a routine for following up and spending time throughout the onboarding process is critical to ensuring your new team member is getting the support and information you need. Beyond that, it is more about time spent one on one for developmental purposes.
3. Role model and supporting your culture vision
You must demonstrate the behaviors that you wish to see in other people. Perhaps the most important element of role modeling is to recognize your team for the behaviors you want to see more of. Leaders allow or foster cultures to happen. That can be a positive culture or not. Culture is the collective output of the behaviors of your team. The activity of role modeling will establish the culture you are hoping for.
As leaders, we live in glass houses. Our teams look to us for guidance, for what is acceptable, and for what is expected. Our words mean a lot to these players, but our actions will always speak louder. In all that you do, know that others are watching for clues as to how they should behave as well.
These three priorities can and should be where you spend a disproportionate amount of your time as a leader. It can be hard. Often we find ourselves working on seemingly important and urgent items like emails or other tasks that fall to you. When those pull you away from having enough time to spend with your team, especially your direct reports, it may be time to evaluate your workflow, your routines, and how you are spending your time.
In a previous article, Where Did the Time Go? Some Simple Ways to Track your Time, I shared some ideas on how you can track your time to evaluate how much of it you are spending in different areas. This can be an eye-opening experience and identify ways to free up more of your precious time to support any of these leadership priorities.
Looking at these three areas, it is less about each of them being a priority and more about prioritizing the team for each of these areas. Intuitively, we acknowledge that hiring right, training, and role modeling are critical for any leader. What is easy to overlook, and difficult to execute, is to always build in the time to do each of them effectively.
How will you dedicate the right amount of time to lead through each of the priorities?
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