Bosses and Teams - Working Smarter!

Mind Tools Newsletter 48 - 9 May 2006 This newsletter is published by Mind Tools Ltd, of 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY, United Kingdom. To contact us, please email us from this page. You have received this newsletter because you have subscribed to our double opt-in newsletter. To unsubscribe, just click the link at the bottom of the email se sent you. If you are not already a member and you would like to subscribe, please visit http://mindtools.com/subscribe.htm.

Contents: In This Issue... Tools & Tips for Bosses Mind Tools Store Managing Interruptions A Final Note

Some of the time, most of us wish our bosses would work just a bit smarter. Even the greatest managers have their little weaknesses and foibles that can drive other people crazy! Day to day, these can add up to a lot of unnecessary frustration and extra effort.

As a boss or team leader, aren't you a little curious to know what your team members would like you to do better?

Well, in this issue of the Mind Tools newsletter, we have some answers!

In our survey last month, we asked Mind Tools readers to recommend the "mind tool" that would most help their boss, and how it would help.

The results were very much about wanting to improve team effectiveness. And so, based on the recommendations of Mind Tools readers, this issue of our newsletter is dedicated to helping bosses and their teams work smarter together!

Our first article this issue features an overview of the most recommended mind tools for bosses. We also think these make a great set of tools for any team to use. And we suggest how you and your team can learn from them and use them, and so work smarter together.

Our second article features the number one tool recommended by Mind Tools readers for their bosses: "Managing Interruptions". It also featured highly in the overall list of top tools: Interestingly, readers were as concerned about their bosses allowing interruptions as they were about bosses causing them! So this tool is definitely one for the whole team or department. By clarifying how you work, allocating blocks of work, agreeing time for discussion and so on, team members and bosses alike will be better able to organize and focus their efforts. Try it today!

Thanks to the great response from our readers, this newsletter is packed with tips and tools that are sure to make your team more effective. So, enjoy the newsletter, share it with your team and colleagues, and enjoy working smarter too!

James & Kellie

Tools Overview:
Tools and Tips for Bosses
By James Manktelow, CEO, MindTools.com

Last month, we surveyed Mind Tools’ readers to recommend their top “mind tools”, including the one they would most like to recommend to their boss. The response was amazing and very insightful. In reading some of your many comments, I recognized some of my own quirks (okay, bad habits), so I’ve promised the team here at Mind Tools that I’ll be making even greater day-to-day use of our “mind tools” from now on!

Now the interesting thing we learned from our survey is that bosses are pretty much like everyone else. When it comes to managing time, clarifying priorities, setting goals and so on, bosses can benefit as much as, if not more than, everyone else from tools and techniques at Mind Tools. So read on, for tools and tips that are good for the boss are great for the rest of the team too!

Five themes stood out as the most important in our survey:

• Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize
• Be clear and stay focused
• Manage meetings
• Hear the facts!
• Motivate, motivate, motivate

See what readers have to say and learn about some of the tools and techniques that can help in the sections below.

Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize
If there’s one thing that causes frustration among our readers, it’s unclear priorities: Sometimes priorities change without people being informed, and sometimes priorities have simply never been communicated at all. Only when team priorities are clear can team members’ set their own priorities clearly too.

There was such a huge emphasis on the benefits of prioritization that we’ve written a full article bringing together many of the tools and techniques that help with it.

Go to http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_92.htm to find our prioritization toolkit. We hope you enjoy it!

And a final tip on prioritization from readers: Remember the importance of two-way communication! If you’re the boss, clearly people need to know your priorities and work within them. As a team member, it’s important to validate your own priorities with your boss: This helps avoid the misunderstandings and false assumptions that cost time and effort further down the line.

Be clear and stay focused
Does everyone in your team know the teams goals and objectives? Just as people are frustrated by prioritization issues, so people get frustrated when goals and objectives are unclear or constantly changing. Many readers mentioned goal-setting as the tool they would most recommend for their boss.

And I’d add that goal-setting also makes a great team tool: What better way to ensure the team’s goals are clear than to involve team members in refining these and breaking them down into sub-goals? More on goal-setting at http://www.mindtools.com/page6.html.

Manage meetings
It’s no surprise to hear that everyone gets frustrated by meetings that run over, or that achieve very little or that keep getting re-scheduled. And guess what? Everyone blames the one who organized the meeting – often the boss.

Now my personal view is that everyone who attends a meeting shares in making it a success. If you don’t know why you are there and what the aim is, ask the organizer! But of course as a meeting organizer, you can try to make sure no one ever needs to ask those questions! Our “mind tool” on effective meetings helps you do this. Read this (even if only for a refresher) by visiting http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/RunningMeetings.htm.

Hear the facts!
Can you imagine: A boss who jumps to conclusions without considering all the facts? Well apparently there are a few of them about!

Maybe it’s because they feel they should know the answers, or maybe it’s because they are under such enormous time pressure each day. Whatever the reasons, Mind Tools Readers say “Stop, hear the facts”! (And they get especially frustrated if they are the ones presenting the facts that are being ignored!)

If you consider that certain facts are not relevant, or you have some other basis for your conclusions, it can be helpful to share these with your people. This helps them learn the appropriate level of detail, and refine their own decision making for the future.

A recent favorite tool here is the Ladder of Inference, which you can read about at http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_91.htm. We'll also remind you about our "Mind Tools on Active Listening" guide, which you can download from http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/Mind%20Tools%20Listening.pdf.

Motivate, motivate, motivate
Last but not least on the list of readers recommendations for bosses is motivation. Bosses need to motivate their teams – no surprise there! But the message for bosses is not “Go learn to motivate us!”, it’s “Be motivated yourself – it rubs off on the team!” The flip side is that a demotivated boss can easily and seriously infect his or her team with their negativity.

Recent newsletter subscribers will have received the mini e-book "Mind Tools on Motivation". If you haven’t received this and you interested to read more on motivation, you can download "Mind Tools on Motivation" [Link removed] for the next 7 days only. Again, enjoy it!

Finally, thank you again to all the readers who participated in our survey, and who helped us compile this list of tools and tips for bosses (and their teams) everywhere!

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The Mind Tools Store:

• Make Time for Success: Learn 39 essential personal effectiveness techniques that help you bring your workload under control and maximize your productivity, so that you can make the most of the opportunities open to you. More >>
  
  
• The Mind Tools E-book:All of the tools on the Mind Tools toolbars in one convenient, easily-downloadable, easily-printable PDF file. We have excluded advertising to enhance clarity and have formatted sections to be easy to read, print and use. More >>
  
  
• How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You: Learn the 48 simple but essential skills you need to become a top leader in your industry. More >>
  
  
• Design Your Life Design the life you want to live. Set the clear, vivid, powerful goals you need to live it to the full. More >>
  
  
• Personal Coaching from Career Excellence Professionals:Find career and life direction, bring your job under control, build self-confidence and put yourself on the path to long term success with a Mind Tools coach. Our coaches give you the focused personal coaching you need to make the very most of your career and life. More >>

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Winning Tools:
Managing Interruptions
Maintain focus. Keep control of your time.

This recent article was the number one tool recommended by readers for their bosses in our survey. We "reprint" it as a refresher!

Everyday interruptions at work can be a key barrier to managing your time effectively and, ultimately, a barrier to your success.

Think back to your workday yesterday and consider for a minute the many interruptions that occurred. They may have been phone calls, emails, hallway conversations, colleagues stopping by your office, or anything else that unexpectedly demanded your attention and, in doing so, distracted you from the task at-hand.

Because your day only has so many hours in it, a handful of even the smallest interruptions can rob you of the time you need to achieve your goals and be successful in your work and life.

More than this, they can break your focus, meaning that you have to spend time re-engaging with the thought processes needed to successfully complete complex work.

The key to managing interruptions is to know what they are and whether they are necessary, and to plan for them in your daily schedule when they truly need your attention. The tips that follow will help you do that and so prevent interruptions from frustrating you and jeopardizing your success.

Using The Tool

Use the following tips to understand and manage interruptions:

(a) 1. Keep An Interrupters Log

If interruptions consistently rob you of time and energy, or if they frequently push you off schedule and cause delays, it’s time to keep an Interrupters Log. This is a simple record of the interruptions you experience in the course of a day.

Click here to download our free Interrupters Log Worksheet (you'll need to have Adobe Acrobat installed on your PC to open this - click here to go to Adobe for this.) And figure 1 shows an example of it.

Figure 1: The Interrupters Log

Person	Date and Time	Description of Interruption	Valid?	Urgent?

Keep your Interrupters Log with you every day for at least a week, recording every interruption you experience, and marking down the person interrupting you; the date and time it occurs; what the interruption is; whether it was valid; and whether it was urgent (or whether someone could have waited until a better time.)

This allows you to more accurately identify the interruptions that are causing you to fall behind or to experience time crunches and delays.

Once you have recorded the interruptions for a week, sit down with your log and analyze the information.

Which interruptions are valid and which are not?

You need to deal with the valid interruptions. We'll show you below how you can schedule them into your day so that they get the attention they need, while you still have the time you need to adequately address these and complete your daily work.

As for the interruptions that are not valid, you must find a way to block these out in the future or the productivity that will suffer is your own!

2. Analyze and Conquer Interruptions

To analyze and conquer the interruptions you find in your Interrupters Log, firstly look at whether the interruption is valid or not.

Could someone have avoided interrupting you by waited for a routine meeting? Or was it something they should have asked you about at all?

If not, deal with this politely but assertively.

Next, look at how urgent the interruptions were, and whether they could have been pre-empted. You can pre-empt many interruptions by holding routine meetings with people: If they're confident that they'll have access to you at a defined point in the near future, they'll learn to save up non-urgent issues until this meeting.

However, some interruptions are both urgent and valid. You need to be interrupted, and you need to deal with the situation.

From your Interrupters Log, you'll see how much time is taken up by these urgent, valid interruptions. Block this time into your schedule as "contingency time", and only take on as much other work as you can fit into the remaining time. You'll have to juggle this other work around the interruptions, but at least you won't be overloaded and stressed by the things that you haven't done because they've been displaced by emergencies.

(b) Put Your Phone to Work for You (…Not Against You)

A little bit of planning can go a long way in working to control telephone interruptions, which most people experience all day long. If you are on a deadline or your focus needs to be intense (and not interrupted), use your voice mail to screen calls or have an assistant deal with messages for you. This way, you can deal with calls by priority at times that suit you. In fact, this telephone time can be planned into your schedule, and so become a normal part of your working pattern.

(c) Catch Your Breath

When interrupted, it’s easy to get caught up in the “rush” of the person who is interrupting, for they undoubtedly feel their request is urgent. In reality, however, most interruptions are not a crisis and it can serve everyone best to take a little time before taking action.

Take a few minutes to consider the situation. Catch your breath and clear your head. A small delay, even one of just a few minutes, goes a long way in assessing the situation accurately and reacting appropriately.

(d) Learn to Say “No”

It’s often acceptable to say “no” to requests or tasks if you are busy when someone else can handle it, if it is not an important task, or if it can be done later.

When this is the case, saying “no” in a courteous and sincere way, followed by a short explanation is the best course of action to take: “I am working against a very tight deadline on an important project right now so, I am sorry, but I can not jump in and help”.

(e) “Available” and “Unavailable” Time

Simple yet effective: Let people know when you are available… and when you are not. Make sure that people know that during your "unavailable time", they should only interrupt you if they have to.

You and your co-workers can also agree on a signal that everyone in the office can use when tied up and unavailable, like turning the nameplate on the door around, or simply closing the door. This alleviates interruptions and can avoid hurt feelings.

Tip: Be careful here. If you're a manager, an important part of your job is to be available to people, to handle urgent issues which arise, and to coach your team so that people are as effective as possible. If you put up barriers that are too high, you won't be able to do these jobs. By all means, use "unavailable time", but don't over-use it, and make sure people know they can interrupt you if there is a genuine crisis.

(f) “Invitation Only” Time

Schedule regular check-in times for the individuals you talk to most often. Ask these people to keep a running list of things that they need to discuss, so you can cover all the points at one time. And, force yourself to do the same.

An open-door policy is good, but you should limit the number of people you invite to your work area. For instance, if you're scheduling a meeting, offer to meet your co-worker in his or her office or a conference room. This way, you can excuse yourself after you accomplish your purpose. Additionally, it's much easier to get up and leave than it is to get people to leave your office once seated and comfortable there.

(h) Uncontrollable Interruptions

There are interruptions that, no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot control.

Most people are happy to schedule a more convenient time, but when this does not work, quickly set the parameters by saying something like, “I only have five minutes to talk about this right now,” and stick to it.

Do not ask the interrupter to sit down and do not engage in small talk. Encourage the interrupter to get right to the point and if a solution cannot be reached before the allotted time runs out, set a time for getting back to them and, again, stick to it.

The Interrupters Log is just one of 39 essential personal effectiveness tools in ‘Make Time for Success!’, our self-study time management course. To take control of your time, and so focus on the things that really matter, click here to find out more.

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A Final Note From James

Whether you’re the boss, or whether you’re keen to give your boss a few gentle tips and hints, there has been something for everyone in this issue. Thanks again to readers for all the great insights and tips!

The next issue of the newsletter is a very special one, as Mind Tools celebrates an important milestone. I'll say no more than that until then!

We’ll also have some great new tools, and we announce a special challenge…

Until then, have a great couple of weeks!

James & Kellie

James Manktelow & Kellie Fowler

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