If you want to increase productivity at work, maintain a relentless focus on what matters most in four areas. First, ensure your team understands their big strategic priorities – the outcomes that matter most for the organization. Next, get clear about the specific initiatives and projects that support the strategic priorities. Follow up with an ongoing review of the specific, observable activities that will make those initiatives happen. And finally, build a foundation for success by helping your team understand and master the daily habits that create results. 

When There’s Just Not Enough Time: Beyond Time Management

“I just don’t have time. There is so much to do that some days I just want to give up!” – Halisee, Software Engineer

Halisee called us looking for help with the overwhelm.  Between her own important tasks, the needs of her team members, and her supervisor’s expectations, she’d been working 60-hour weeks, and she felt sick and strung out.

“My calendar is wall-to-wall meetings, often with two or three appointments competing for the same window of time. And it’s only gotten worse now that I’m working from home. We have MORE meetings, not less!”

Have you been there? If you’re like many leaders we work with, you face an unending stream of information, problems to solve, decisions to make, fires to put out, interruptions from email, texts, phone calls, messaging apps — and that’s not to mention the strategic projects you want to work on to build a better future. It can seem like you’ll never get ahead. Productive leaders focus their time and energy on the activities that produce results and build relationships despite the crush of activity – or perhaps it’s not “despite” the demands for their attention, but because they embrace the challenge.

To Increase Productivity at Work, Embrace Your Limits

There will always be more you could do than you possibly can do. To stop feeling overwhelmed, start by accepting that frustrating fact. We call this approach to time “infinite need, finite me.” At any moment in time, there are literally thousands of things you could do, but you get to do only one. That’s it. One. Before you can focus your time and energy on results, reach an understanding with yourself that you can do only one thing at any given moment.

Don’t talk yourself into thinking you can really make a difference on that muted conference call while you also try to help the employee who needs real advice—all while responding to a text escalation on your phone. You won’t give any of those situations the attention they deserve.

Of course, you understand these limitations intellectually, but when you truly internalize and make peace with the fact that there’s always another thing, it frees you from the overwhelm. You can’t do it all and you never will. So, stop trying. This is the freedom to focus on what matters most.

To Lead Highly Productive Teams: Cultivate an M.I.T. Mindset

As you free yourself from the demands of doing everything, the natural next question is, where will you focus? One hallmark of productive leaders is that they focus on what matters most. We call this commitment to do what matters most “Mind the M.I.T.” – that is, Mind the Most Important Thing.

Infinite need, finite me. Mind the M.I.T.

There are four levels of M.I.T. to consider:

1. M.I.T.s (Strategic Outcomes)
2. Initiatives
3. Activities
4. Habits

1. M.I.T. Strategic Outcomes

When you look up and view the horizon, where are you going? What is the most important outcome your organization or team will achieve in the coming years? Typically, you’ll have no more than three answers to that question. These are the big objectives with time frames measured in years. If you’re leading a team within an organization, your strategic M.I.T.s often come straight from the organization’s strategic plan. Strategic M.I.T.s are the North Star that helps you navigate the complexities of day-to-day business.

2. M.I.T. Initiatives

Every strategic objective will have one more initiative or project that helps the organization achieve that strategic M.I.T. There may be several of these initiatives and projects for every strategic objective. These initiatives are usually shorter-term and there is a moment when it will be completed.

For example, if your company wants to improve customer retention, there may be several initiatives including implementing a new customer management software, improving customer support quality, and a “plus one” strategy to deliver an unexpected bonus service or product to existing customers. Each of these initiatives is time-bound – it has an end date. Once the new software is implemented, everyone is trained, and it becomes the default way of doing business, it no longer requires focus as an intiative.

Your strategic outcomes might take a year or two to achieve. The initiatives that support them will often have timeframes of a few weeks to several months.

Productive leaders maintain a relentless focus on the initiatives and projects that are their responsibility, ensuring that they make regular progress toward them. If you have a clear project plan, you may clearly know your short-term objectives. If not, to identify your short-term M.I.T., choose a unit of time and ask, “In this week/month/quarter, what is the most important thing we can do to move us closer to our Strategic M.I.T.?”

3. M.I.T. Activities

Activities are the one-time actions you or your team must take in order to move initiatives forward. These are often specific steps in a project plan.

Back to the customer retention example. One of the initiatives is to implement new software. So you may have several activities related to this initiative:

• Schedule training for your team
• Demonstrate and model the new software during three team meetings
• Schedule observations to support your team in working through questions, bugs, and how-tos.
• Acknowledge early adopters and celebrate their results

All these activities will help your team successfully implement the new software. And, they are one-time activities. You don’t need to schedule training repeatedly, but you do need to make sure you get that done sometime in the next month.

What are the M.I.T. activities that you are your team are responsible for in the next 4-6 weeks?

4. M.I.T. Habits

At the heart of productive leaders and their teams is a clear focus on the day-to-day observable habits that directly lead to results. These are three or four specific, visible actions that repeat weekly, daily, or even many times each day. When you establish a consistent cadence of these 3 to 4 critical habits, you build a foundation for success. Then you can incorporate the one-off M.I.T. Activities without losing focus on the core behaviors that allow your team to be great.

What are the three or four observable habits that get you where you need to go? They may repeat weekly, daily, or even many times each day, but a clear understanding of the day-to-day behaviors that drive success is critical.

M.I.T. Mindset Example

To get a sense of how the M.I.T. Mindset works in practice, let’s look at another example outside of work. Let’s say you want to improve your connection with your mother. Your strategic outcome is a “more connected relationship with Mom.”

Moving down to the foundational fourth level of M.I.T. Habits, you might determine that calling your mom is a weekly success habit. So you schedule that weekly call. When confronted with a busy weekend, you ensure that you find time for that call because it’s an M.I.T. habit.

Then you move to level two and choose some initiatives. For example, you might choose to: schedule a vacation trip with Mom, celebrate her birthday with the extended family, and work with her to create a family history book that will be a gift for the holidays.

Each of these initiatives will have specific activities that go with it (as well as a clear finish line by when you want to complete it). For example, “Call your brother and sister to schedule time for the birthday celebration.” Or, “Get everyone on a call to choose the dates and destination for the vacation.” And “talk with Mom about various eras of family history.” This final activity you might be able to combine with your weekly habit of a phone call. There would be several more activities for each of these initiatives, but these get you started.

The habits are your foundation. The activities make the initiatives happen. And the initiatives lead to your strategic MITs.

Your Turn To Increase Productivity at Work

Managers who’ve been through our leadership training tell us this shift in focus and prioritization of behaviors has changed the game for them and significantly upped their productivity at work. The M.I.T. becomes part of their daily vocabulary. Consistent reinforcement like “Our M.I.T. this quarter is …” or “What’s your M.I.T. today?” keeps everyone focused on what matters most.

We’re curious. When you think of improving productivity at work, what’s your M.I.T.? What are the most important behaviors that will help you get there? What daily behaviors will help your team be more productive?

See Also:

• Mind the M.I.T. is One of the 6 Leadership Competencies You Can’t Lead Without
• Get Your Team Back on Track: Leading Through Distractions
• 5 Ways Leaders Can Focus When Everything Is Important
• 4 Questions to Ask Yourself and Your Team to Stay Focused on the Most Important Thing
• Download a FREE first chapter of Winning Well here.

The post Productivity at Work: How to Lead Highly Productive Teams appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Your team won’t become a high-functioning powerhouse after one offsite. You can’t be a trusted, influential leader after one week on the job. There are no leadership hacks or shortcuts that will transform your organization or results. But there is a way to do all these things that’s available to you and every leader: the power of small habits.

A Riddle and a Dream

Let’s kick things off with a quick riddle: What tips the scales at over a hundred million tons, floats, and can inspire daydreams or cause destruction?

Keep thinking about it as we travel back to 1845.

In the mid-19th century, no suspension bridge designed for trains existed. The idea was deemed far too risky, and most engineers wrote it off as an unsafe proposal. Fast forward ten years, the world was introduced to its first railway suspension bridge, connecting the US and Canada over the Niagara River. The story of this engineering marvel begins with a simple picnic and a letter.

While Canadian entrepreneur William Merritt was enjoying a picnic with his wife, they received a letter from their children touring Europe. In this letter, the kids described an impressive suspension bridge they’d seen in Switzerland. This sparked a dream in Merritt – he envisioned a similar bridge across the Niagara River, capable of facilitating rail travel and enhancing trade with the rapidly growing US network.

Merritt obtained the government’s permission, formed a company, and hired the right talent – in this case, Charles Elliot Jr., a dynamic engineer with a knack for promotion.

A Small Solution to a Big Problem

The initial challenge was how to get a line across the gorge. The simplest approach, one Leonardo da Vinci had suggested centuries earlier, was to use a kite. Elliot saw an opportunity for publicity and staged a competition: a $5 prize to the boy who could first fly a kite across the Niagara Gorge.

The winner, a young boy named Homan Walsh, succeeded on his second attempt. Elliot tied a thicker string to the kite string and pulled it across the gorge. Gradually, thicker ropes were tied and pulled across until eventually, a cable could be drawn across the river. This was the starting point of the bridge that took another seven years and a different engineer to complete.

Monumental projects often start with a simple act. An inconsequential kite string laid the foundation for a groundbreaking bridge. When you’re overwhelmed with massive projects, look for your “kite string”—the smallest action that gets the ball rolling.

A Small Answer to a Big Riddle

This brings me back to the riddle. What weighs over a hundred million tons and can both float and stir up a multitude of emotions?

Clouds.

Clouds are millions of small, almost negligible droplets. Despite their massive cumulative weight, these droplets are less dense than the air around them, which allows them to float. What an incredible metaphor for the power of small activity to make a big difference.

Vincent van Gogh once said, “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” He probably wasn’t contemplating clouds, avalanches, or railway bridges, but his words ring true for leadership. Small habits, repeated consistently, bring transformative results.

The Leadership Power of Small Habits

Whether it’s a small act of defiance against an unjust system, a brief moment to reinforce a value, or a celebration of progress, each seemingly insignificant step contributes to a larger outcome over time.

In nearly every core leadership development program we lead, we start with six foundational skills you can build on for greater influence and transformational results:

• Show up with confidence and humility
• Focus on results and relationships
• Mind the M.I.T. (know what matters most and the specific initiatives, activities, and small habits that lead to success)
• Communicate Consistently (Communicate key messages at least five times, in five different ways)
• Check for Understanding (Ensure communication happened)
• Schedule the Finish (Discuss priorities and create mutually agreed moments for completion)

These activities are critical examples of small habits with a big payoff. Checking for understanding avoids misunderstandings and wasted time. Scheduling the finish increases accountability and energizes your team. Consistent 5 x 5 communication keeps everyone aligned and aware of what matters most.

But maintaining this consistency is easier said than done. Some days you’re in a hurry. Tired. Feel overwhelmed. And it’s easy to forget to check for understanding, schedule the finish, repeat your team’s purpose, or follow up when someone doesn’t follow through.

And for that one day, it may not make a big difference. That’s the problem with small habits – missing it once doesn’t feel consequential. But miss the habit too often and soon you have a problem.

One skipped “check for understanding” leads to days or weeks of wasted time and frustration. Forget to “schedule the finish” and you waste time you don’t have chasing down projects and frustrating team members who are working on other time-sensitive tasks.

What’s Your Small?

It’s easy to get discouraged when the big wins seem far away. Your struggle today may not feel all that glamorous but know that every small step matters, especially when it’s a step you’ve taken before.

Each moment of encouragement, each clarification of purpose, goals, and success habits, each kind word, every moment of accountability or clarification with your team has an accumulative effect. Like threads in a towel, each small action weaves into a larger tapestry of leadership, influence, and meaningful outcomes.

So, what’s your kite string? Where can you get small today?

Where can you take that micro step that will make a macro difference?

Small habits are mighty, and incremental changes lead to monumental outcomes.

The post How Leaders Use Small Habits for Big Results appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

You’ve got more to do than time to do it. Your plan is going to get interrupted, and your interruptions are going to get interrupted. If you don’t have an intentional, focused way to finish what you start, it won’t happen. Effective leaders consistently achieve meaningful results and build a healthy culture–but they don’t leave it to chance or a heroic act of willpower. They schedule the finish.

Why Is This So Difficult?

Imagine I asked you for a report and told you, “I need this information soon.”

What does soon mean?

For fun, go ask your team this same question. In any group of five or more people, you’ll hear answers ranging from “right now” to “next week.” And for some people, when they hear soon, it means “this isn’t really important.”

These different interpretations of just one word can cause massive headaches and frustrations. One mistake that many leaders make is they rely on people’s good intentions, willpower, or even dumb luck to ensure that things get done. But, when you leave the definition of a word like “soon” up to chance, chaos ensues.

If you’re talking to someone who has a high internal sense of urgency, they might get it done right away. They might even neglect something that was actually more important than what you asked them to do. But if they interpret it as “when I have time to get to it,” you might wait for weeks.

The solution to these challenges is called Schedule the Finish.

Scheduling the finish means you create a specific mutual moment where you will follow up, follow through or finish the task. This isn’t a vague intention. It’s an appointment on the calendar of everyone involved.

Schedule the Finish to Remove Ambiguity

For example, let’s say you have that team discussion. And each person’s going to call their three largest clients and ask them how they’re responding to a recent change.

You’ll collect their answers and send them to Joe. Joe and his team will take that data and build a new client intake process. That’s good, but so far, it’s only an intention.

Schedule the finish with clear times and agreements. It would look like this:

We will each call our three largest clients, ask them that question and send the answers to Joe. By Friday at 5:00 PM, Eastern Joe and his team will give us the new intake process by the following Thursday at noon Eastern, everyone can put those two times on their calendars.

Now there’s no question of when the team will finish the task.

Scheduling the finish applies to many daily leadership and management conversations. Here are a few more examples:

• When you have a performance conversation using the INSPIRE method, the final step (E) is the Enforce step. Schedule a brief meeting to review their desired behavior. Eg: “Sounds good. Let’s meet at 10 next Tuesday to see how this is going and if you have any questions.”
• When you delegate, schedule a time where the other person will meet with you in person or by video to return the project to you, answer questions, and discuss next steps.
• When you lead a meeting, conclude the meeting by asking who will do what, by when, and “How will we know?” The final “How will we know?” is a scheduled commitment to the team. Eg: “We will all have our data to Linda by Friday at 4 pm. Linda will send us the new process by Wednesday at 3 pm.” Everyone puts the times on their calendar. If Friday 4:00 pm comes and Linda doesn’t have data from Bob, she calls him. If 3 pm Wednesday comes and they don’t have the process, they call Linda.

Schedule the Finish to Prioritize What Matters Most

In addition to eliminating misunderstandings around vague words like “soon” or “when you have time,” scheduling the finish forces everyone to think about the workload and whether they can do it. When you discuss delivering that data to Joe by Friday at five, everyone must think about whether they can actually do that.

And if they can’t, then you can have a conversation about priorities, what matters most, and adjust as needed.

Your Turn

Good intentions and talented, capable people will only take you so far. High-performing leaders and teams that build performance cultures schedule the finish to ensure they know what done looks like and how this priority fits with others.

We’d love to hear from you: how do you and your team ensure good intentions translate to activity and results?

The post High ROI Leadership – Schedule the Finish appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Long Term Thinking – Insights from Dorie Clark and The Long Game

The books I mention in this episode are:

• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
• Sacred Earth Sacred Soul by John Philip Newell

4:08 – How do you pick your favorite drawing of a President?

7:00 – Defining the Long Game: the surest path to meaningful and lasting success in a world that so often prioritizes what’s easy, quick, and shallow

9:24 – The passion and experience that led Dorie to write The Long Game

11:40 – How long-term thinking and leading yourself first make you a better leader

13:31 – The need for white space and how our calendars are often prisons of our own making

15:53 – Why we tend to over-schedule

17:36 – One of the most simple ways to reclaim some white space and build margin for long-term thinking

20:05 – Responding to meeting requests and limiting your time in unproductive meetings

21:04 – The question to ask instead of “Can I do this?”

23:28 – Another question to ask yourself to determine if something is of long-term value to you

25:40 – Optimize for interesting – an awesome decision-making strategy to play the long game

29:52 – The power of leverage and how to make something count twice

33:42 – Why recognizing your constraints is a vital driver of creativity and better decision-making

36:07 – Small changes you can make to start reclaiming your time and long-term thinking

38:21 – The danger of baseline syndrome and how to overcome it

42:04 – Keeping the faith: staying motivated through obstacles, discouragement, and heartbreak

51:54 – Quiet, silence, and reflection.

Connect with Dorie

Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram
YouTube

Get Dorie’s Book

The post The Long Game with Dorie Clark appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

It’s a common leadership frustration that we’ve experienced and hear from leaders regularly: “My people lack a sense of urgency. I must follow up on everything or we miss deadlines. I’m tired of babysitting! How can I ensure things get done on time?” Paradoxically, leaders with a high internal sense of urgency can struggle with this the most. The good news is that with a few straightforward tools, you can help everyone work effectively and meet those timelines.

5 Steps to Get Things Done with a Common Sense of Urgency

1. Respond with Proportion
2. Identify Routine Tasks to Schedule the Finish
3. Schedule the Finish for Delegated Assignments
4. Check for Understanding
5. Close the Loop with Celebration and Accountability

You probably won’t have success by telling people “We need to have a sense of urgency.” Urgency means different things to different folks. People naturally have different perspectives on what matters and why. Some value thoroughness above timeliness, others may have a sense of timeliness that differs from your own. (If you need proof, ask three people to define the word “soon.”)

You can help your team be most effective and lower your stress by creating a common understanding and shared commitments through these five steps.

1. Respond with proportion.

As with so much of leadership, the first step is to examine yourself. Your team pays attention to how you respond to tasks, opportunities, and problems.

If you treat every problem or task with the same passion and intensity, your team won’t know what’s truly important. They filter out the extreme responses as “That’s just the way he is.” Or, if you’re very reserved, you’ll have the same problem. Your team won’t know what’s important.

So be you, but with some range. Use passion and intensity for what matters most. (And by using the tools that follow, you’ll find you need less emotional energy to get things done.)

2. Identify routine tasks to schedule the finish.

This is a two-step process.

First, look at the different types of tasks your team members do regularly. There are routine tasks that are part of one’s work. Then there are occasional delegated, assigned tasks, or projects. Begin with routine tasks. Group them into similar categories. For example, in a particular role, you might have categories such as document accounts, respond to inquiries, and complete research for proposals.

Next, “schedule the finish” for these routine tasks.

Schedule the finish means that you clearly define what “done” looks like, with a specific, scheduled time that something will be finished. You don’t leave that sense of urgency to chance or interpretation. Here’s a specific example: in our business, we have a category of “responding to prospects and customers.”

Our schedule-the-finish for this category is that everyone receives a response within 24 hours. For specific categories, they’ll hear from us within four hours.

These routine tasks often cause frustration for leaders. If you’ve ever thought “This is just part of your job, why can’t you do it with urgency?” Then bucketing these routine tasks and creating shared scheduled finishes will help.

Here is the critical question: With no other conversation between you and your employees, if I were to talk to them and ask “What’s your manager’s expectation for when these items should be done?” Would they give me the same answer you would?

(Unsure how they’ll respond? Ask them yourself and see what they say.)

If they’re on the same page about what success looks like, you’re good to go. If they would respond differently than you or would be unsure, then it’s time to establish clear expectations about what success looks like for the individual buckets or categories of work.

For ongoing tasks, you can do the same thing. But the goal might be something like “complete weekly.” For instance, if an employee’s doing customer contact and they need to document the account with conversations and activities taken, perhaps they catch up to 100% completion by end-of-ay every Wednesday and Friday.

3. Schedule the finish for delegated assignments.

The second category of tasks includes items that aren’t routine. Delegated assignments, project work, or multi-part tasks.

For high-urgency leaders, these tasks usually needed to be completed “yesterday.” But these leaders don’t set a timeline. So the other person puts it on their list but works on other items first. In the meantime, the high-urgency leader is frustrated at the other person’s perceived lack of urgency.

This is where scheduling the finish is vital. Even the most dedicated team members have to decide about what work they’ll do next. The timeframe is critical to that decision. If you don’t share it, you’re setting yourself up for frustration.

It may feel like babysitting, but tasks with finish lines get done. But people generally push tasks without finish lines to the end of the line until they become critically urgent. That’s not a lack of urgency—it’s a rational approach to managing multiple priorities.

When you create a finish line, that establishes a common vocabulary and shared sense of urgency. For multi-step projects, there are milestones dates that need to be met and can be established upfront.

4. Check for understanding.

As you wrap up conversations, check with the other person or team to make sure you have a shared understanding of what a sense of urgency means. (This is not asking “Do you understand?” At best, a “yes” to that question means they think they understand.)

A good check for understanding ensures that all parties share the same interpretation. For example, “Great discussion. I want to make sure we’re on the same page going forward. What’s your understanding of the timeframes?” For more on the check for understanding and how it works together with scheduling the finish, check out these six competencies you can’t lead without.

Ensure that you both have a mutual, shared understanding of the words you exchanged.

5. Close the loop with celebration and accountability.

Once you and your team have that shared understanding of what success looks like, it’s time to reinforce it. When the team succeeds, celebrate it. You get more of what you celebrate and encourage, less of what you criticize or ignore. So reinforce what’s working. For the routine items, you don’t need to reinforce them every time, but periodically call attention and celebrate excellence.

When it doesn’t happen, it’s time for a performance conversation. When you first establish new timeframes, you may have to reinforce them with a couple of performance conversations. After that, if someone continues to struggle, you might need to reinforce with an escalated conversation about the pattern of issues with timeliness.

Your Turn

I’d love to hear from you. How do you schedule the finish and ensure your teams have shared commitments to timeliness?

The post How to Lead When Your Team Lacks a Sense of Urgency appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

If you feel like you’re constantly reacting and don’t have a moment to think about what you’re doing, much less why you’re doing it, this episode is for you. Juliet Funt gives you practical suggestions (as well as the permission) to regain control of your workday, create the space you need in order to do your best work and lead your team well. It’s time to reclaim your energy, creativity, and brilliance – it all starts by finding your minute to think.

A Minute to Think

3:55 – The importance of self-awareness and progress in your leadership development.

5:20 – The permission to have time that doesn’t have a specific assignment. It’s like oxygen for a fire – without that sort of time, the fire of your productivity and creativity will go out.

7:52 – The challenges and negative side-effects of all the productivity short-cuts you might take.

8:50 – Why mindless busyness is counterproductive and illogical.

10:03 – Next, we look at the pervasive “culture of insatiability” and how it precludes us from doing the work that actually makes a difference.

12:18 – What is white space and why it is a competitive advantage for leaders who ensure it exists for themselves and their teams.

13:10 – Four ways that giving yourself unscheduled time will benefit your leadership, your team, your health, and your productivity.

16:38 – A practical example of an innovative team member who was innovative because he regularly had a minute to think. But he lost his creativity when he joined the innovation team. Why?

18:32 – Next, we look at how you can get started with a tool called “the wedge.”

22:29 – Then we look at meetings and how to ensure they are a good use of time for you and your team.

26:56 – Next you get another practical tip to avoid sucking away people’s time in meetings.

32:49 – Then, we take a look at the four most common thiefs of time. These are positive attributes of most leaders that have a shadow side. They’ll derail you if you’re not careful.

47:09 – Finally, we discuss how to say “no” elegantly – in ways that serve your leadership, your team, and even your boss.

Connect with Juliet

Website

LInkedIn

Twitter

Get Juliet’s Book

The post A Minute to Think with Juliet Funt appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

How do you “land in the and” to support your team without burning out

7 Ways to Maintain Productivity as I Return to the Office #AskingForaFriend

7 Tips for staying productive as you return to the office (or move to hybrid work.)

In today’s episode of Asking For a Friend, I offer 7 tips for keeping productive while supporting your team.

1. Inventory what made your work from home time so productive.
2. Talk with your team and make a plan to support one another.
3. Leverage your commute.
4. Be deliberate about what work you do where.
5. Consider quiet hours for focused work.
6. Invest in strategic relationships.
7. Learn, iterate and adjust.

For a deeper dive, on this topic, you won’t want to miss our feature articles:

How to Stay Productive as You Return to the Office,

Productivity at Work: How to Lead Highly Productive Teams

The post How Do I Maintain Productivity as I Return to the Office? (Video) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

You’ve learned a lot about how you work and what makes you most productive over the last year. You had more choices on how to structure your day, when (and with whom) to engage. You figured out what worked best for you. The return to the office can feel as overwhelming as that initial, emergency pivot to working from home.

7 Tips for staying productive as you return to the office (or move to hybrid work.)

1. 1. Inventory what made your work from home time so productive.
   2. Talk with your team and make a plan to support one another.
   3. Leverage your commute.
   4. Be deliberate about what work you do where.
   5. Consider quiet hours for focused work.
   6. Invest in strategic relationships.
   7. Learn, iterate and adjust.

How to Build Your Return to the Office Plan

1. Inventory what made your work from home time so productive.

Our guess is you weren’t radically more productive the first few weeks you suddenly had to work from home. But you figured it out. The trick here is to learn from your learning. How did you structure your day? How did you communicate with your team during the pandemic?  Did you get up earlier? Take more frequent breaks? Did you take time out for a walk at lunchtime to just refresh and think?

A return to the office does not necessarily mean you need to go back to all your old patterns and habits. Figure out what works best for you and your team, and then determine how you can incorporate some of that into your new routine.

2. Talk with your team and make a plan to support one another.

Here’s the good news. Everyone is thinking about how they can return to the office without adding hours to their day. No one on your team wants to be less productive.

This is the perfect time to communicate with your team (even if you’re not the boss) about what is working and how to work even more effectively and efficiently with one another.

We’ve built a FREE hybrid and virtual teams assessment to help you get the conversation going.

3. Leverage your commute.

When the pandemic first started, many managers we spoke with shared how much they missed the “time to think” or listen to a podcast.

Yes, commute time can be a huge time suck, but it can also be focused time to invest well. Consider how you might leverage your commute through value-added activities to work on your personal development, make a few calls (safely) to catch up with colleagues or friends, or even just have the white space to think quietly about the day and week ahead.

4. Be deliberate about what work you do where.

If you’re spending some time in the office, and other days at home, work to be deliberate in your time blocking. The news is full of examples of frustrating employees talking about quitting their jobs because a return to the office mandate feels like a frustrating waste of time.

Of course, your return to in-person work will be frustrating if you head to your cube and join a Zoom call with the people sitting in the cube next door.

Talk with your manager and co-workers about how you can best leverage the time you do have in the office for deeper collaboration and innovation. Then, do what you can to plan your deeper thinking or individual project work for the time you have at home.

5. Consider quiet hours (or open-office hours) to focus your work.

A best practice we are seeing with our clients planning their return to the office strategy is carving out “quiet hours” with no meetings and/or open-office hours where employees can “drop by” virtually or in-person to share ideas, brainstorm, or even get a quick response to a problem.

This time use of time blocking can help overcome the biggest fear we’re hearing from so many managers who are contemplating a return to the office: the fear of perpetual drop-by disruptions on non-urgent matters.

6. Invest in strategic relationships.

Even with a focused, deliberate effort to build trust and establish strategic relationships, most managers tell us they really miss the deeper conversations and spontaneous relationship-building that comes from in-person work.

Leverage your in-person time to work on a few key relationships. This is a great time to find (or become a mentor). Or to work on your relationship with a challenging boss.

And, of course, if you’ve ever taken one of our leadership training programs, you know how passionate we are about building strong, collaborative peer relationships. Consider how you might leverage your in-person time, to invest in your relationship with others as you build your return to the office strategy.

7. Learn, iterate and adjust.

Just like it took a minute to figure out how to be productive working from home, with the kids playing the ukelele in the next room with their virtual school on mute, your return to the office plan will take time to get right.

Talk with your manager and your human resources partners about what is working and what support you most need.

Try some of these suggestions. Figure out what works best for you and your team. Keep the conversation going. Iterate, and adjust.

Your turn.

We would love to hear from you. What best practices are you finding work well as you return to the office?

Note: If you prefer a video version of this article to share with your team check out this Asking For a Friend on Staying Productive. 

The post How to Stay Productive as You Return to the Office appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

If your team ever says something like “We can talk about this, but nothing is going to change” (or worse, YOU feel that way), then this episode is for you. In this episode, David shares one critical skill to help you get results and make things happen. It’s not hard – and with this one small shift, you’ll gain credibility, energize your team, and achieve results you’d only talked about. 

The post The Missing Leadership Skill to Get Results appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

The August Frontline Festival will be about leading remote or non-traditional teams.  We’ve expanded the Frontline Festival to include other formats such as podcasts and artwork and are always looking for new thought leaders to join the party. We’re always on the lookout for new ideas and best practices, Won’t you join us?  Send us your submissions here!

Best Practices in Leadership

Julie Winkle Giulioni of DesignArounds asks, What’s Your Disposition Toward Development? The ultimate leadership hack involves developing your people. Cultivating the mindset and skillset to make that happen supports individuals growth and organizational results. Follow Julie.

S. Chris Edmonds of Driving Results through Culture provides us The Leader’s Most Powerful Tool, a three-minute video on the most powerful tool a leader has – expressing gratitude!  Follow Chris.

Robyn McLeod of Thoughtful Leaders Blog provides, Change May Be Good, but is Your Organization Ready for it? Change readiness is the prelude to change management and it can spell the difference between successful change and failed change. Adopting best practices such as devoting time and resources to establishing a clear vision and strategies, opening and prioritizing robust communication channels, employing change management tools and principles, and aligning leaders around a shared commitment and messaging will get your organization ready to successfully plan and implement change. Follow Robyn.

John Stoker of DialogueWORKS gives us Six Questions You Should Never Ask.  (a contribution to Careers In Government.) Leaders have a real opportunity to make a difference through the questions they ask. Taking the time to be deliberate with their questions can pay huge dividends. Here are some tips to help you do just that. Follow Jon.

Paul LaRue of The UPwards Leader provides Easy Ways for Everyone to be a Better Leader. No matter how long you’ve been a leader, certain basic principles can help you improve. Here they are and how to implement them.  Follow Paul.

John Hunter of Curious Cat Management Improvement gives us How to Successfully Lead Change Efforts.  Leading change efforts requires paying attention to the existing conditions: the culture, the motivation to adopt this change and/or the motivation to resist it, the history of change where the change is being attempted and the reasons the change is desired (by at least you and hopefully others.) Then you will need to build a case for the change and manage the process. Follow John.

David Grossman of The Grossman Group shares Leaders: Stop the “Slide Shuffle” and “Overdone Outlines” for Your Next Presentation. You have another presentation and you begin preparing by pulling slides together from various presentations you’ve given. If they worked before, they can work again, you think. A scrambled or rambling presentation is often the result. Here’s a strategic approach to creating an effective presentation.  Follow David.

Karin interviews Charles Fred, Author of the 24 Hour Rule and 2019 ATD chair, on how leader’s stress impacts productivity in organizations and what to do about it.

There’s a great conversation happening on LinkedIn about this. We’d love to have you join us and offer your perspective,  Click here to add your thoughts 

Best Practices in Productivity

Maria Tanski of Patriot Software gives us 8 Ultimate Time-Saving Tips for Small Businesses. To help boost productivity in your business, you need to learn how to cut down on time suckers. Use these eight time-saving strategies to save time and get back to your business. Follow Maria.

Wally Bock of Three Star Leadership gives us Productivity and Me, what he’s learned from a half-century of trying to be more productive.  Follow Wally.

Shelley Row of Shelley Row Associates gives us Four Tips for Vacationing without Worry.  Do you worry about leaving town for vacation or a conference? These tips from Shelley’s two-week trip without a computer or checking email show how you can lead and be productive even when you take some extended time away from your business. Follow Shelley.

Beth Beutler of H.O.P.E. Unlimited asks, What Can You Unsubscribe From? Some Questions to Help You Target the Emails to Ditch.  Most leaders have a never-ending flow of email which can become a diversion and distraction from the important work at hand. Use this simple method to declutter that inbox for the more important messages. Follow Beth.

And additional time-saving tips …

Julie Winkle Giulioni suggests we start with a sloppy copy! It’s easy to procrastinate on the important tasks out of a desire for perfection. So, short-circuit that by setting out to do an 80% job. It takes the pressure off, establishes some momentum, and frequently yields something that’s pretty darn good in the process.

Chris Edmonds saves time by tracking commitments & to-dos with Nozbe.  It is a simple, clear, and available system that saves countless hours (and worry)!

John Stoker finds it helpful to take more time to plan before he executes.

Wally Bock finds it helpful to set up his work for the next day, before quitting for the day.

Beth Beutler keeps her to-do lists consolidated into two main apps, depending on their environment-of-use. Outlook is used for recurring tasks that are mostly completed at her home office, and Asana handles tasks and projects that she can work on in any location.

Want to Play?

Do you have a topic you would like to see covered in a future Frontline Festival? Please leave a comment with your ideas,

Are you a blogger, vlogger or podcaster? We would love to have you join us. Click here to learn more about submitting to the next Frontline Festival,

The post Best Practices in Leadership and Productivity: A Frontline Festival appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.