Productivity Archives - Nick Robinson

3 Handy Ways to Avoid Doing Great Delegation (Part 1/3)

This is the first of three short posts with some handy tips for avoiding the dangers of doing half-way decent delegation – and of being seen as vaguely competent and therefore deserving of yet more responsibility, stress and leadership burden at work!

TIP 1️⃣: Never start by describing the OUTCOME that you want to achieve.
🧭 This tip is almost too easy; starting with the Outcome is surely just a backwards way of doing things and risks having way too much clarity and direction. Better to get going with the first step that comes to mind and only then figure out where you’re going, and why, along the way. People will thank you for not overloading them with this kind of focus. 🗺

TIP 2️⃣: Always tell people HOW they should do the thing you’re delegating to them.
🔬 This is where a lot of managers go wrong, by imagining that people might have their own way of doing things. Or even, that they might come up with a better way than you had thought of. That kind of thinking is just ridiculous! It’s much safer – and offers much more scope for subsequent micro-managing – if you treat people like robots and tell them EXACTLY how you would do the thing you’re delegating to them, if only you had time to do everything. 🤖

TIP 3️⃣: Don’t offer SUPPORT or set out a process for check-ins and coaching along the way.
⛑ If they need support, what’s the point of delegating in the first place – might as well have done it yourself! If only you had the time; or the effort. Anyway, whatever, the kind of structured check-ins and coaching that supports somebody as they try a task for the first time, or learn to stretch themselves, is soooo demanding of your attention. It is boring. Please people, just go away and get on with the thing I told (sorry, asked) you to do, in the way I said to do it. Just tell me when it’s done. Whenever that is; did we agree a deadline; I forget … 🏖

If any of this strikes a chord, please check out my possibly helpful ebooklet on Amazon:

Self-Accountability not Self-Criticism

Four simple questions that easily help to develop more self-accountability and avoid falling into the trap of self-criticism instead

What do you notice about your own self-accountability? Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach

The best way to be true to your word is to be more self-accountable, and *less* self-critical. Share on X

Six Things that Great Time-Management is about NOT doing

“#1 Will Surprise You!”
(It won’t – that’s just my silly way of highlighting that #1 is about NOT getting distracted.)

I’m writing this as the world re-opens, in stops and starts, post-covid lockdown.

And I notice that a lot of people are struggling with their Time Management. That’s understandable. So much of how we’re doing things now has had to change, that it can be difficult to find our old patterns of effectiveness. Worse, nearly everyone else is in the same situation, so that when my time-management misses a beat, it can affect several other people’s timing too.

In case it helps, here’s my six things to NOT do, if you want to have great time-management. None of these are necessarily easy by themselves, but if you or the people in your teams are finding it tricky to manage their time just now, these are the things to focus on first:

Not getting Distracted
A lot of great time-management is actually about Attention-management. Give some attention to how you can block, control, ignore or manage those things that might otherwise steal your attention – and therefore your time.
Not feeling Overwhelmed
One of the key reasons why people aren’t effective and don’t work at their best is the sense of feeling overwhelmed by all that’s required; to the point where it’s either difficult to see where to start, or hard to believe it’ll ever be finished. Start anywhere and go step-by-step if that happens.
Not being Bored
Human beings are generally hard-wired to go off and look for interesting stuff. I think it helps to not fight this. A meditation teacher once described the mind-sharpening part of meditation to me as being like training a puppy to sit still. When it wanders off, you can just gently bring it back again.
Not forcing Creativity
For most people, creativity is a process that requires inputs and some system of stirring around, before it can produce an output. Nothing wastes time quite like trying to force a high-quality decision to come or to force a deep insight into a knotty problem to arise without that process happening first.
Not confusing Immediate with Important
This is often the starting point for a lot of writing about time management. And with good reason, as it’s so easy to get into fire-fighting and so much harder to justify fire-prevention. But once you’ve dealt with the immediate priorities, don’t just focus on preventing bad stuff in the longer-term. What are the long-term benefits that you could be working towards too?
Not overlooking Sequence and Task-Dependency
Some things need to be done in a certain order to be successful. Or are dependent on other things happening first, before they can take effect. If you can avoid the paralysis sometimes caused by over-planning, then a project-management approach is often also a brilliant way to have great time-management.

Let me know if you’ve noticed any of this too please – or what you’re finding out about time-management in the “new normal”?

Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach

What is your Time-Management NOT about? Share on X

Can’t Keep Up?

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Feel like you can’t keep up?
12 ways to simplify your leadership

Do you want to work as quickly and efficiently as possible, so you can finish early and still have time and energy to do other stuff? You’re not alone. More and more I’m seeing people who say they want to do more at work, enjoy more time with their family, and have more time to relax, but that their actual focus is on “keeping up.”

It may be that you’re temporarily in a really tricky situation and you just need to get out the other side of it. But if not; if that sense of not being able to keep up at work is persisting longer than it should, take a look at these short tips for breaking the pattern.

1. Identify your Top 1 – 3 priorities for the day

And once you’ve identified them, do these first thing in your day, or do them in your quality time, or scrub-out something else. Remember, you’ve either chosen to work on your own priorities, or you’ve chosen to forward somebody else’s agenda.

2. 80% is More Than Good Enough

Identify what level of %age completion/quality is right for the task you’re involved with and don’t go 1% over. Perfect is the enemy of good.

3. Delegate the ‘What’ not the ‘How’

Make sure you’re only delegating ‘outcomes’ and not telling people how to achieve those outcomes. Be prepared to live with people taking a different approach to the way you might have done it. This is the ONLY option if you don’t want to, or can’t, do everything yourself – which you don’t and cant’!

4. Don’t use your Email In-tray as a To-Do app

It doesn’t work. It DOESN’T work. Email is for communication, not task-management. Get a simple to-do app and use that instead. If your email in-tray is overflowing, make a separate folder, dump everything into there and start again with a blank in-tray, this time using a separate app to record to-do’s.

5. Manage all your Emails (and other In-boxes) using the 5-Minute RAFT Formula

Everything that arrives in your various inboxes should be dealt with using the 5-minute RAFT approach, as follows:

R is for Reading – can you read an item in 5 minutes or less – and do you really, really need to read it? If so, read it when it arrives, otherwise, bung it into a Reading File and wait ‘til it’s a priority. Or Trash it.
A is for Action – can you action item in 5 minutes or less – and do you really, really need to do it? If so, action it when it arrives, otherwise, bung it into your To-Do app and do it when it’s a priority. Or Trash it.
F is for File – can you file an item in 5 minutes or less? If so, file it now. If not, wtf is it!?
T is for Trash – this is my favourite. Trash it. Hit delete. Gone and forgotten. Should be your default setting – can I legitimately just hit delete or chuck this in the bin and not get emotionally-hooked.

6. Under-schedule and Over-deliver

Rather then over-schedule and under-deliver! This is strongly linked with Items 1 and 12. The best way to do more is to try and do less. Focus, focus, focus. How jammed is your calendar, how hectic is your travel schedule? “Less is more” people.

7. Ask people for their ideas

Not only is this a good way to get and stay engaged with people, you’ll end up with new and different solutions that you wouldn’t have thought. Takes a bit longer in the short-term, delivers better quality and takes the load off of you in the medium-term.

8. Know and Say your Leadership Mantra

All leaders should be able to say what the strategic aim for their organisation or department is. “What we need to do is X, Y and Z.” Repeat this whenever and wherever until you’re sick of hearing it. And then repeat it some more. This way of simplifying really helps others to get behind the programme and take-up more of the effort themselves. You’ll be more than pleasantly surprised when you hear people repeating your mantra unprompted.

9. Work through People and on Tasks

And the more senior you become, the less you should be working on tasks and the more you should be working through people. Check how your current balance is on this and see if you need to spend more time leading and less time doing. See also 10 below.

10. One-to-one Meetings are your Main Tool for Working through People

There isn’t a better way to get things done than to sit down with your people individually and coach them through their own priorities. I’d give at least one day a week to doing this for every four team members I have. Use this Coaching formula:

What Outcomes are they working towards?
What’s in the Current Situation that you and they need to be aware of?
What Approaches have they tried or do they want to take?
What Support do they need?
How will you know when it’s Worked?

11. Build Relationships

I bang on about this all the time. Relationships are the key to getting stuff one in organisations.

“It’s not what you know.

It’s not even who you know.

It’s how well do you know the right people?”
Nick Robinson

When was the last time you prioritised coffee with a colleague just for the sake getting to know each other better?

12. Leaders think Short, Medium AND Long-term

So often we under-estimate what can be done in the long-term and over-estimate what can be done in the short-term. The key is to plan on all three time-horizons. What’s my priority for this year, for this month, for today – and how do they link together?

I hope those help a little? Give me a shout – add a comment below if they’re still open, contact me here, or tweet me @NickRobCoach if there’s something not covered or if you’d like to add one of your own tips.

Leadership Quickies

Four leadership mistakes you probably don’t even know you’re making

1. Not giving one-to-one attention to each of your team members
Leaders should act as a mentor or coach and listen to each person’s concerns, needs and ambitions, giving empathy and support, keeping communications open and setting challenges. This fulfills a deep need for respect and celebrates the individual contribution that people can make to the team. You’ll very quickly lose the right people and bring out the worst in the wrong people if you don’t do this.

2. Being safe and boring
A steady pace is all very well, but people and organisations sometimes need a leader to challenge assumptions, take risks and ask other people for their ideas. This helps stimulate creativity and develop independent thinking. When times become hard, you’ll wish you’d fixed this particular roof when the sun was shining.

3. Not having a Vision
Being able to talk about an inspiring and attractive view of the future position of your team, department or organisation is perhaps the key factor that sets great leaders apart. It isn’t difficult and it doesn’t have to be grand or world-changing (unless it is); but you do need to do it.

4. Forgetting that You’re a 24/7 Role-model
I get that it’s a tough thing to be an always-on role-model. Everybody looking to what you say and do, all the time. It is wearing. And it also just comes with the territory. People will adopt their way of doing things from watching you. Please remember that you need to be a role model for the right behavior, so that this instills pride and gains respect and trust. You don’t need to always be perfect – that isn’t possible for anyone – but you do need to visibly put it right when you haven’t been.

Productivity and Moral Self-Licensing

One (more) reason why people don’t straight-away do what they’ve said they would – and what to do about it

If you’ve ever been in a long meeting where lots of actions where agreed, and then found yourself wondering why people haven’t followed-through on those actions – or if you’ve ever spent a fair bit of time and effort making a to-do list yourself, only to then bunk-off instead of actually getting on with it – then you might find this useful.

In simple terms, Moral Self-Licensing is when people unconsciously allow themselves to indulge after they’ve done something positive.

Research suggests that it affects individual behaviour in a variety of contexts, including: consumer purchases, political opinions, charitable giving, energy policy, job hiring, racial attitudes, health-related decision-making, risky sexual behavior, alcohol consumption and diet.

In terms of productivity, the influence of Moral Self-Licensing is likely to mean a slump in achieving things between the planning and the doing stages. My experience with individual and team clients is that the effect is particularly pronounced when:

The issues that people were agreeing upon or planning actions for were especially difficult or threatening to address. This means that they feel unusually positive about having finally got down to addressing them and are (unconsciously) more likely to give themselves moral self-license to be ‘indulgent’ afterwards;
Physical energy levels are low and/or have been lowered by the planning or to-do-listing activities (especially likely when long journeys or stodgy meals are involved I suspect). I don’t know if there’s research to support this, but I’ve often thought that low energy levels are likely to reduce the threshold for moral self-license, since our mind/body systems are designed to look after our short-term survival and to prioritise food and rest now.

So what can you do if you notice that there’s a productivity slump between the planning and the action stages?

Plan for it
Since the tendency to be indulgent after we’ve done something positive is such a widespread and unconscious phenomena, it makes sense to me to expect it to happen. When you’ve had people in meetings and you all agree on a list of actions, why not explicitly agree an ‘indulgency period’ during which nobody is required to actually do anything productive until they’ve given themselves a treat of some kind;
Actively be Rested and Healthy
If it’s true that the productivity slump caused by moral self-license is more pronounced when people are already tired, then we can prepare for that by taking active steps to be properly rested and healthy. Less coffee and more naps, perhaps?
Delegate
Have somebody who wasn’t at the meeting, and who therefore won’t be experiencing their own moral self-license indulgence (at least, not yet), be responsible for reminding about, chasing and/or kick-starting the actions;
Organise
Make sure that your meetings, your decision-making-processes and the techniques you use to organise actions are as effective and as frictionless as possible. Consider using trained facilitators to help design agendas and processes. The less this feels like an effort, the less likely people are to indulge afterwards;
Don’t Procrastinate
The longer you put-off or fail to address difficult issues and tasks, the more you’re unconsciously likely to feel that you deserve an indulgence after you finally get around to deciding to do something about them.