Your Job Includes Teaching Professionalism - Chapter 1 - Timeliness - Part 2

0:00Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Sarah. And I'm Mark. Today's podcast, your job includes teaching professionalism. Chapter one, timeliness, part two of two.

0:12Michael Auzenne: As always, our content has been crafted by humans, and we're now certified by Proudly Human. The questions this cast answers are, do I really have to teach basic professional skills? Why should I teach basic professional skills? Shouldn't employees know the basics? If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening.

0:59Michael Auzenne: for a remote environment with specific guidance on what changes and what stays the same. Three hours live. Register for our session starting September 10th. For more information, please visit manager-tools.com forward slash E-R-M. All right, which now takes us then into timeliness is a top 10 principle of professionalism. Folks, If you're going to teach professionalism, surely none of us would argue that timeliness in all its forms must be taught, learned, internalized, and made a shrine unto as part of that. I mean, timeliness is just number one in everyone's book. Yeah. Why is that? Obviously, because time is the ultimate resource.

1:52Michael Auzenne: It is the ultimate resource because it cannot be made. It cannot be extended. It can't be saved. It can't be banked. You know, money can be made, money can be extended, money can be saved, money can be banked. Money can be managed and can be changed into other currencies and so on and turned into labor or equipment or whatever. Capital can be turned into labor-saving devices and so on. But time cannot be in any other way managed or changed. We can make more money. We can hire more people. We can cut more expenses. We can come up with more ideas. is. It is only time that is immutable and unmanageable.

2:30Michael Auzenne: I think we just talked about this in a cast recently, Sarah, about how people say, I'm going to manage my time. I'm going to do time management. No, you're not going to do time management. Time's been around for a long time. It'll be around long after you. You ain't going to manage it. Time is immutable. Yeah, that's in our career tools, guidance. You can manage your priorities. priority exactly time yeah brackets i think it's time brackets priority management yes exactly yeah folks you can't call yourself a professional and be cavalier about time now that may not be the way you felt about yourself in junior high school or high school or in your first job you're a more relaxed person and so on but if you're going to join a large organization or you're going to join a small one that is growing fast, time is going to become perhaps the most important determinant of your success.

3:29Michael Auzenne: And it treats everybody equally. And it's a harsh mistress. It's not easy to be good at it, but it requires our best efforts. Yeah, exactly. Folks, even if a company meets its profitability goals, but does so after the date by which it was expected to achieve those goals, that company's reputation will be degraded. There are organizations which are famous for bringing future revenue forward into a given quarter because timeliness matters more than revenue. Yeah, because money, you can move. Time, you can't. So we tell a rep that's going to close something the first week of April, no, move that close forward to the end of March because we need to meet our number for this quarter.

4:20Michael Auzenne: That's not a money discussion. That's a time discussion, right? Nevertheless, unfortunately for both managers and directs, most of our understanding of timeliness is incomplete. Most employees, and I would argue managers too, and even executives, although less so as you go up the chain, because timeliness becomes increasingly a very harsh master. They think of timeliness as meaning being on time, being where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be there, meaning not late for items on their calendar. But folks, clocks tick, not just on ourselves, but on our work, on our projects, on our commitments, on our deliverables, our goals a goal without a deadline isn't there a famous like cheesy quote a goal without a deadline is just a dream i think i've read that i don't know but there should be i'm sorry you just coined it yeah clocks tick on our budgets and also interestingly on our customers and our competitors if a customer is saying you need to hurry up they have their own clock they do yeah and by the way if our competitor and us both come out with the same product but we come out with it six months in advance, we make money for six months before they do.

5:36Yeah, exactly. We corner the market, brand, loyalty, all of the things associated with time. Exactly. So folks, to be competitive, we need to respect the ultimate measure. And the ultimate measure is time. Okay.

5:51Michael Auzenne: So now let's talk about teaching, teaching timeliness. And again, you don't have to have any classes. We're going to tell you how to make timeliness part of your day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter, year-to-year behaviors as a manager. Teaching timeliness as a part of professionalism means making time part of everything you do, okay? So, the first thing you can do is follow our guidance. By the way, this guidance is linked to in these show notes, and it's on the podcast webpage. In your first meeting with a new direct, this is a series of podcasts, which is chapter nine, be timely.

6:32And folks, in today's podcast, we have got an excerpt from that guidance. We do encourage you to go back and listen to the full thing, but we have a little bit here of what you might say in that meeting when new team members join. Yeah.

6:48Michael Auzenne: And for the record, if you don't know what we mean, we recommend a series of first meetings. We call them first meetings, even though the first one is technically the first one, but a series of meetings when somebody's going through onboarding, once they come on board, a series of meetings where you talk about things that are important, like be ethical, engage in ethical behavior and communicate and build relationships and get your work done and so on. And one part of it is time in this. Yeah. So go ahead. Okay. So this is what you might say, folks. And I encourage you, if you are a licensee, There are show notes for this.

7:22I mean, print them out and literally read them to your direct. Yeah.

7:28Michael Auzenne: And hand them to them. Yeah, exactly. License allows you to share. Yeah, this is important to me. I want you to know it. I don't want you to be surprised when I talk about how important timeliness is. Yeah, when I hold you accountable for timeliness. Yes, exactly. All right. So be a timely professional. Time matters. We behave as if it does. Every day we delay a product release is a day of lost revenue and increased costs. Every day we don't respond to a customer, gives our competitors a chance to talk to them when they're disappointed with us. Every missed deadline without a sense of failure is accepting less of ourselves than we ought.

8:10Be punctual. Being late to a meeting isn't cool. It isn't a sign that you're busy or busier than everyone else. Everywhere I go, people are busy. everyone's busy. People who are late aren't, in my experience, more busy than people who are on time. They're just more poorly managing their schedules and commitments than the others. It's funny how people who are late to meetings repeatedly never seem to miss an airplane flight. They don't miss the flight because they know there's a consequence. That plane is not going to wait for them. But what they say by being late to a meeting is that they themselves are unwilling to deliver consequences to themselves in the form of embarrassment and regret.

8:55It's not a professional way to go through life to have external forces be the only way to motivate oneself. There are plenty of incredibly busy people who are always on time. It's because they see schedules and meetings and deadlines as personal commitments. You schedule it. You accept the meeting. You agree to the deadline. You've made a commitment.

9:19Michael Auzenne: Yes. People don't realize that, but that's so true. Yeah. There's no room here for people who don't keep their commitments. Meet your deadlines. Like I said, deadlines are commitments. You agree to it or you're assigned it. It's yours. You're now committed. If you miss, you failed. And look, it's okay to fail. We fail a lot around here, but we don't act as if we didn't or as if failure doesn't matter. A professional hangs her head a bit at a missed deadline. So it's fine to miss deadlines every once in a while. What professionals do is communicate in advance when they're going to miss a deadline.

10:02I don't think I can imagine a deadline that I knew about that I suddenly missed. Don't try and hide. Be respectful and let others know. Others rely on your work being done. And help others meet theirs too. If we want to be a team, that means helping when we can. And finally, take less time. Your dry cleaner takes two or three days to return your clothes, but it only takes something like 12 minutes to add value to that suit or blouse. That's an awful lot of wasted time, a lot of non-value-added time. Look at what you do and eliminate actions that don't add value. Experiment with new ways. Don't assume the way we do it is the right way or the only way.

10:54Combine my earlier guidance about asking questions and your fresh set of eyes and take time out of our already existing processes.

11:03Michael Auzenne: And there's more you can do in your day-to-day work. Again, not teaching, but essentially helping others learn by how you behave in your managerial role. There's more you can do to teach the value of timeliness. For instance, don't assign tasks, folks. Assign deliverables. A task is just something to do. A deliverable includes a deadline and the reporting of the status of the work along with it. If you've ever had to find someone who owed you something you needed for your own deadline, you know what we mean. Also, don't assign delivery dates. Assign delivery times. It's not due on Tuesday. It's due on Tuesday at 2 o 'clock, okay?

11:48Michael Auzenne: If something's due on Tuesday, what does that mean? The end of the day? Whose day? Yours or theirs? If you go home without checking that something that is owed to you got delivered, does the deadline shift to when your direct goes home? Or is it now just before you get to work the next morning? We've had hundreds, if not thousands of instances in our careers where a deadline missed of just a day robbed us of working on our directs input that night at home. Or on the plane. Endangering our next day schedule. Yeah, I didn't have it by the plane. and I flew for many years before there was Wi-Fi on planes.

12:27Michael Auzenne: And, you know, we were not able to meet our deadline because we were sloppy and we said, I need it Tuesday. And we didn't say two o 'clock because we're leaving the office at three to catch a red eye. Yeah, moreover, we didn't say two o 'clock Eastern time. I mean, as someone, and I mean, more and more people are virtual and remote now. As someone who works with people on all different time zones here in the US, not assigning an actual time zone to my deadlines is the the the thing i always forget and the thing that's worst forgetting because then it might as well you might as well not even set a deadline because there's a room for error of three hours here which is never helpful yeah i would add something that's not in the show notes here i think you have to wear a watch now i know people look at their phone and folks your phone is incredibly accurate uh even a rolex a very expensive watch a mechanical watch doesn't keep as good a time as your iphone okay but generally speaking that level of precision is really sort of unnecessary um but there are times when you don't have your phone or you can't pull your phone out in a meeting but you can look at your watch.

13:46Michael Auzenne: Next, ask your directs in your one-on-ones about their upcoming deadlines, right? They're thinking about the stuff that's due today. Ask them about the things that are coming up in the next week. Timeliness doesn't just mean meeting your deadlines. It means knowing what work you have that is due in the future and doing appropriate scheduling of your own time so you can meet those deadlines. Okay. This next one happens to be one of my favorites. Create public project and status reporting tools. I think Ruth Butlin at Humber College in Toronto told me the phrase, I had heard it before, but Ruth really made it clear to me.

14:28Michael Auzenne: They like having information radiators, which is live status reporting on a digital board or something that people have to update, but you can walk by the board and you can see what the status is of any given sprint they're in, any given project, the budget, and so on. Teach your team that work is not done until it is reported as done. Okay. I'll never forget the joke. This is maybe one of my favorite sort of deadpan jokes, which is when you say, hey, look, I need you to comment your code. And the direct says, well, what do you want me to do? Do you want to write the code? Or do you want me to comment the code?

15:07Michael Auzenne: And the answer is yes. Meaning you're not the only one who's going to touch that code. In fact, it was very popular 25 years ago to have what is known as around the world development. And it's still true today where there was a team in the US, there was a team in India, there was a team further East in Asia Pacific, and all three groups worked on important code all the time. It was being worked on 24 hours a day by people who were, there were three teams of eight hours a day working on it. And so it was being worked on constantly. It was a competitive advantage until everybody started doing it.

15:44Michael Auzenne: And look, if others who rely on your work don't know it's done, they can't incorporate your work into theirs. They have to wait. And And just waiting is waste. In the world of time, waiting is waste. So use digital tools to show everyone's status. Don't say to yourself, well, I don't want to shame anybody. We're not trying to shame anyone. It's okay if you're yellow. It actually can be okay if you're red. It can't be okay if your status is unknowable. And people owe that. It's not a team of one. It's a team of more than one. Otherwise, it's not a team. It's just you. And so you have to hold people accountable for that.

16:26Michael Auzenne: And you should be reviewing everybody's status every week. Yeah, and folks, that once a week, that five business days, if you will, cadence is really important. Don't assign tasks that are longer than a week. Any project or work stream is in danger of being overdue by the length of its longest deliverable. Work happens in weeks, not in months. We call it the weekly drumbeat. Deadlines a month away are going to be shelved until the last week before the deadline. So there's no reason to set a deadline that late. No one's going to do it imminently anyway. And deadlines drive behavior. So having those weekly measurables, that weekly cadence allows for us to act on those deliverables in a better, more consumable way.

17:25And Mark mentioned this a minute ago when we're talking about those radiators and the fact that people who might be yellow or might be red, that's not a problem necessarily as long as it's reported upon. So we actually have a podcast for what we call Celebrate Yellow because there are risks associated with missing deadlines. And we want you to teach your directs to be honest and forthcoming about their risks of missing upcoming deadlines. Don't shoot the messenger and be like, oh, how really you're going to be late on that thing? Oh, yeah.

17:57Michael Auzenne: Really yellow? You're red? Right. Yeah, exactly. And then that just causes people to not want to let others know, hey, this thing's at risk when it's in your best interest to know what's at risk before it actually misses. So instead, say thank you or good for their candor. And they're going to be much more forthcoming about letting you know, knowing they won't be punished in advance just for letting you know something might be at risk. Your best people have options. They stay because of the relationship they have with their manager, and that relationship is built through consistent, deliberate behaviors that most managers were never taught.

18:37Michael Auzenne: The effective manager conference teaches you exactly those behaviors, one-on-ones, feedback, coaching, and delegation. Learn how to action these tools to get your results and retention. Visit manager-tools.com forward slash EMC. Next, agendas, meetings. Folks, mandate agendas for your meetings because the agenda is a form of time management or priority management in your meetings. And expect that your meetings have agendas and that they're adhered to. This will probably mean delegating your staff and project meetings to your directs. You can certainly run them anytime you want so they can learn how to create an agenda and facilitate a meeting that follows it.

19:27Michael Auzenne: We've talked about delegating your staff meeting to one and then another and another of your directs so that all of your team knows how to run a meeting. So everybody has skin in the game about the meeting being run successfully. The guy who says or the gal who says, well, I don't want to run a meeting. Look, if you don't want to run this meeting, you shouldn't be here. Okay. I want you to learn how to run the meeting because I want everybody looking at the clock. I want everybody thinking about how timely we are. We had 15 minutes. We thought it would be 15 minutes to make this decision. Let's make the decision in 15 minutes.

20:00Michael Auzenne: It's not that big a deal. It's a$500 spend. We can make that decision. We don't have to please everybody. We don't have to, and yes, everybody might get a chance to speak up. But this is not a democracy. This is not a consensus environment. At some point, somebody needs to make a decision and move on. And time matters. Yeah. And what I would say, Mark, is that in my experience, people who are given an active role in a meeting like that, like chairing a meeting, become better consumers of other people's meetings. Oh, yeah. Because you understand the importance of being brief and staying on topic and staying on task because you had to be the person that is the police of that.

20:40And it just makes for better meetings for everyone when we all have a chance.

20:45Michael Auzenne: Something else too, don't be afraid to walk out of meetings that have reached their end time so you can make your next meeting, even a couple minutes before. And look, shoot, make a meeting 45 minutes long. If you can do it in an hour, I promise you, I can do it in 45 minutes. You just have to be willing to hurry people along. Guys, we've got to move on to the next item. What are we going to do here? What's the action? Who's got the deliverable? When it's going to do? Who's going to do what by when? Horstman's Law Project Management. If you walk out on time, it will help your team start learning to avoid the problem of important decisions being forced into the last five minutes of your meetings when people are having to leave.

21:22Michael Auzenne: And again, schedule your meetings for 45 minutes, have an agenda for 45 minutes. That gives them a chance to go to the men's room, the ladies room, to check their email, to check their text messages, to do something really quickly before their next meeting. that teaches the saving of time, even though that's a misnomer, the saving of time. It teaches, let's put it this way. It teaches the appreciation and the respect for time, which is what this is all about anyway. Absolutely. Absolutely. And folks, make feedback about timeliness a core part of your performance communications. And I've said feedback so many times today.

21:56Right. Right. Exactly.

21:58Michael Auzenne: They had to know this was coming. If you do nothing other than this and just talk about timeliness and meeting deadlines and being on time in your feedback, you're going to change people's behavior. And when they come to you and say, you're always talking about being timely. Yeah, not going away. You want to get on my good side? Just be on time with your work and yourself. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, folks don't realize, managers don't realize that if they feel like something's important and they never talk about it, they are through their lack of talking about a topic, proving to their direct it's not important.

22:33Yeah, they say timeliness is important, but she never asks about it. So I'm pretty sure it's not. It's just another thing. And there's so many priorities at work. There are so many things that are important. If it's an important thing that you never ask about, we're not going to worry about it. And if you want your organization to meet their deadlines, you got to give positive feedback when they meet their deadlines. Too many of us only focus on the misses, which damages trust. So study their deliverables in your public reporting before you're one-on-one with them and then give feedback for where they're doing well.

23:11What are their wins? If they're good at notifying you in advance of a potential miss, celebrate yellow and give them feedback for that too. All of that applies to being on time to meetings too, and all the other timely functions they're responsible for. Yeah. Finally, please folks, set an example for timeliness yourself.

23:34Michael Auzenne: I'm working with an organization right now where the underlying joke is the person who's in charge of the entire organization is never on time. Oh, you can't. Yeah. People are not going to be on time if you're not on time. Why should they? Yeah, why should they be? One of the things we've seen in highly effective managers is being on time to meetings, which again, often going back to our previous point, often means leaving the previous meeting to be on time to the next one. One of the benefits of that, it'll cause your team to avoid what we mentioned earlier, cramming big decisions in the last five minutes.

24:07Michael Auzenne: And yeah, sure, give negative feedback for their misses, but I'd be willing to bet a lot of your deadlines, the majority of your deadlines, are met. And when they are, give positive feedback. Yeah. Yeah. Mark, I once, I don't know if you even remember this, I was presenting in Silicon Valley and the person responsible for the meeting, the sponsor, if you will, was an hour and 45 minutes late. And I was told to wait for that person to arrive. Oh, I remember this. Cupertino. Yes. And the reason he was late was to prove a point to the people in his organization that activity was more important than timeliness.

24:51So it wasn't just that he was a late person. It was he was late on purpose in an effort to teach people that importance of tasks is more valuable than timeliness of tasks. My. And I got to tell you, all the people that were in the room waiting for him while he was being important were very angry. Because one of them had to be there an hour early to help me set up. She was literally sitting in that room with me for three hours before we even started. Everyone was so frustrated. So he proved a point. The point was, everyone hates working for you, I think was the point.

25:35Michael Auzenne: Yeah. All right. So let me summarize. Managers need to set an example of timeliness if we want to have our team deliver on time. And for many of us, we have to teach it. And we say teach in air quotes, through the way we run our team. Time is the ultimate resource. Using it well is a blessing and wasting it is a curse on your productivity. Make time part of your performance communications and your team will get faster, which in today's world matters. absolutely have a culture of timeliness. Thanks, folks. We hope this one helped you. Now, help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow, rate, and review our podcast.

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