by Kevin Kruse
HOW ONE CEO INSTANTLY INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY
“Wait, what?” I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly.
“It’s true,” Hiren Doshi told me. “Your article was a pivotal point for me. I freed up six hours a day…over thirty hours per week.”
Doshi is the cofounder and president of OmniActive Health Technologies, a leading supplier of nutritional ingredients with offices in India and the United States. For someone at his level of experience and success to make such a leap in productivity was shocking. The key, of course, was Doshi’s epiphany around meetings.
Six months ago I used to have crazy days, where I would do six to eight hours of meetings in a day, and also at night. But I brought it down to two hours a day of meetings, max. I suddenly realized that it was my need to be present; it was not my employees’ need to have me there. So I told them I’m going to take a step back out of all these activities. Don’t consider it disinterest from my side. Consider it my confidence in you. Everybody can step up and do a fine job. Very often they do better than I did, and very often they didn’t do as good a job as me. But guess what? The work got done and I scaled myself (Doshi 2017).
Doshi went on to say that he believes CEOs and other leaders are the ones calling for unnecessary meetings with their employees, partly because they have the wrong perception of their own importance. If you hired the right people, why do they need you in all their meetings (or sales calls, or presentations)?
So what did Doshi do when he suddenly had six free hours each day? “Creative thinking without interruption,” he explained. With his time to think, and time to focus on new opportunities, Doshi began to execute on an acquisition strategy that could lead to exponential growth for the company. In fact, just months after I interviewed Doshi, OmniActive acquired the botanical extracts company Indfrag, in a deal worth $35 million.
THE TAKEAWAY
Great leaders understand the true value of time. You can never get a minute back once it’s wasted. Whether you’re a sports coach getting ready for the season, or an entrepreneur trying to ship your new product, or a manager who has to meet a deadline, using time more effectively is how you beat the competition. While traditional time-management systems teach us that our calendar is for meetings and phone calls, those who achieve extreme productivity put everything on their calendar and then live by that calendar.
HOW MIGHT YOU APPLY THIS IF YOU’RE A:
MANAGER: Becoming a “schedule don’t list” kind of leader doesn’t happen overnight. Begin by time-blocking everything that is important that tends to get blocked out by the urgent. Create recurring appointments with yourself to work on your most important task, schedule your team huddles and weekly one-on-ones, seize blocks of time only to “THINK!”
SALES PROFESSIONAL: Salespeople have to juggle prospecting and selling to new clients with servicing existing clients and tackling all that administrative work. For many that means clients come first, paperwork is submitted late, and prospecting doesn’t happen at all. Consider time-blocking Friday afternoons for admin time, and the first hour of each day for prospecting.
SPORTS COACH: Whether you are a volunteer youth coach also managing your “real” job or you’re facing endless demands as a professional coach, you are acutely aware that there is never enough time. Take a page from the playbook of Coach K, Wooden, and Coughlin and plan your team practices in advance and run them with a stopwatch. Carefully consider your priorities and schedule them onto your daily calendar. Your smartphone calendar suddenly becomes your “to do” list.
MILITARY OFFICER: When you’re deployed, work-life balance isn’t an issue, because there is no hope for balance. But even back home the time demands on military personnel are extraordinary. There is no getting around the fact that the day has only so many hours, which must be divided between your leadership duties, your family, and your own personal health and welfare. Get clear on your personal values and translate those values into an allocation of your time, and then map those hours onto your calendar. Remember, schedule don’t list.
PARENT: They say you can tell what someone truly values by how they spend their time. I know you love your kids more than anything—you probably value them above all else. But do you spend more time with them, or dusting the house? Do you stay late in the office only when times truly demand it, or most of the time? Consider scheduling a stop working time; put on your calendar “Go home now.” As former Intel CEO Andy Grove said, “There will always be more to do, and more than can be done.” If you live from your to-do list, there will always be more to do. Live from your calendar, time-block family dinners or homework or reading at bedtime, and ensure that your time matches your values.
INDIVIDUAL: Leadership begins by leading yourself first. Too often we let others lead us…lead us to responding to their crises, solving their problems, putting out their fires. But remember, if you aren’t working on your goals, you’re working on someone else’s goals. What do you truly value? What are your goals in each of these areas? Now time-block daily or weekly chunks of time to pursue these life goals. Whether it’s a daily workout in the gym, or a weekly review of your financials, or a monthly day away with your spouse, protect that time at all costs.
7
PLAY FAVORITES
I was leading a team of about 250 people and one of my direct reports, Shawn, let me know that he had a tough conversation with one of his direct reports.
“She had a long list of grievances but basically she accused me of playing favorites,” he began.
Shawn was one of my best team members and totally committed to the company. He was in the office working by six or seven in the morning and was still there when most people were heading home at night. He was also known for having a bit of a temper and for joking and teasing team members. I immediately cringed, thinking this was going to turn into an HR headache that I just didn’t have the time or stomach for.
“So what did you say?” I was hoping he had a good defense.
“I told her she was right,” he said with a chuckle. “I do play favorites.”
“What?”
Up until that time I had a simplistic view of fairness. Managers shouldn’t be biased or attached to some team members more than others; they should treat everyone on their teams the same. In fact, I probably thought it was unethical to play favorites.
Shawn, in what could be seen as a case of “mentoring up,” proceeded to explain his leadership style.
“I told her I do play favorites. I spend more time with my high performers than my low performers. I give more opportunities to those who show potential. I even handle mistakes differently for those who rarely make them than those who make them all the time.”
This idea intrigued me, and I was still worried about his upset employee. I asked, “So what was her response to that?”
“She said, ‘OK, so tell me what I need to do to become a favorite.’ ”
FAVORITISM ISN’T CRONYISM
Many managers were like I was before Shawn showed me the light. Without really thinking it through, we take at face value the idea that treating everyone the same is what’s fair. Treating people equally seems fair or even ethical. Here in the US perhaps it’s our deep-rooted attachment to the view that, “all men are created equal.” Perhaps it’s a stretch of our moral foundation in which we would never want to treat anyone differently based on their gender, age, race, religion, or sexual orientation. And let me be clear, playing favorites based on any of that would be wrong! Favoritism doesn’t mean discrimination.
It could also be that we confuse favoritism with cronyism, the practice of giving preferential treatment or jobs based on friendship or some special affiliation and not because of merit. Favoritism doesn’t mean changing the rules or performance standards. The rules apply to everybody; it’s just that the consequences are different.
Of course, while all people might be create
d equal, by the time they’re employees on your team they have very different:
Talents
Experiences
Attitudes
Skills
Communication styles
Learning styles
Career goals
Needs
Engagement
People are different, so treating everyone the same doesn’t mean we’re treating them fairly. In fact, that would be very unfair.
I wish I had understood this earlier in my career. It would have saved me from a lot of stress and time-consuming conversations:
No, we can’t buy a $1,000 ergonomic chair for Sam even though his doctor says he has a bad back because then we’ll have to buy a $1,000 chair for everyone.
No, we can’t let Andrea leave work at 4:00 every day just because she has bad night vision, because then we’ll have to let everyone go home at 4:00.
No, we can’t let two junior people move into the offices with windows even though they are empty right now, because the rule is only director-level people get offices.
It wasn’t just individual requests that I didn’t know how to deal with, it was issues related to the standards and culture of an entire company. I remember one of my team leaders, Karla, who was having a great year bringing in revenue and profits at a much higher level than the other teams. She was literally making me millions of dollars. Karla was charismatic, and slowly her team began to form its own identity. They created their own mission statement and values to supplement the ones we already had. I would hold town hall meetings and quarterly retreats, and Karla began to do her own team-level events right after mine. It didn’t take long for several people to come to me to ask why Karla’s team was allowed to have their own subculture. Why are they special? Doesn’t it go against the spirit of “one team”? It’s not fair!
Because I didn’t understand that it’s okay to treat people differently, I struggled with the issue myself. I probably mumbled something like, “As long as what she is doing doesn’t outright conflict with our values and culture I’m okay with it.” But basically I let the issue linger forever. Karla knew people were grumbling about her and it didn’t seem like I had her back. The grumblers themselves felt slighted because I was playing favorites and it seemed unfair.
What I later learned, and what you’ll read below, is, yes, teamwork is important. But sometimes when you have a star player—someone who is outperforming the others by a lot—they deserve to be treated differently.
FIRM BUT FLEXIBLE; LATITUDE TO LEAD
In 1992, Chicago Tribune writer Sam Smith wrote a tell-all book about the Chicago Bull’s 1990–1991 championship season in the NBA. The book was called The Jordan Rules, which was originally a reference to a rival team’s strategy for dealing with the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan (Smith 1993). But it took on a second meaning as Jordan was treated differently by the Bulls’ coaches, team owners, and even referees. While Jordan’s Rules caused a bit of a stir when it was released, the fact that star athletes are treated differently would surprise no one who has ever coached at any level.
The greatest basketball coach of all time, John Wooden, described how he evolved on this very issue in his book Wooden on Leadership (Wooden 2005). When he first started coaching, he would tell his players that he would treat them all the same because that was what was fair, and he was trying to be impartial. He goes on to write:
Gradually I began to suspect that it was neither fair nor impartial. In fact, it was just the opposite. That’s when I began announcing that team members wouldn’t be treated the same or alike; rather, each one would receive the treatment they earned and deserved. This practice may sound discriminatory or suggest partiality, but it is neither.
Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski, in his book Leading with the Heart, suggests that many leaders like setting rules because it’s easier (Krzyzewski 2001). They don’t actually have to think about the best way to handle each situation. While more difficult, he learned that the best thing to do was to stay flexible. He wrote:
Take being late for practice as an example. If a senior like Tommy Amaker, who’s done everything right for nearly four years, is suddenly late for a team bus or a team meeting, I would wait a couple of minutes for him. He’s built up trust by being on time over the long haul…However with a new player who has yet to build trust, I might be less flexible.
Coach K calls his preference for flexibility the “latitude to lead.” It’s important to note that the rules stay the same for everyone; it’s the punishment that changes. It wouldn’t be fair to insist some players have to show up for meetings on time and others don’t. But it is fair to take into consideration the larger context of the situation when determining how to handle it.
NFL Super Bowl champion Gary Brackett played for the Indianapolis Colts for nine years. After retiring from American football, he went back to school to earn his MBA and today owns and manages Stacked Pickle, a restaurant franchise with ten locations. When he came on The LEADx Leadership Show I asked him for his number one piece of advice for new managers. His answer interestingly was almost exactly what Coach K said.
My management style is that you don’t treat everyone equal, you treat everyone fair. The people that are inside your four walls who have been on time for the last three years, but for one week when she’s dealing with her car problems she’s been late, versus the guy who’s been on for three months and he’s been late every week since the day he started. They’re not the same individual. Understanding both of those scenarios, I treat them very differently inside our restaurant. It’s what really buys loyalty and buy-in from our staff (Brackett 2017).
The best coaches don’t play favorites based on who they like better; rather, they give preferential treatment based on those who’ve earned it.
PLAYING FAVORITES WITH YOUR TIME
Cy Wakeman is a successful entrepreneur who now studies and consults on workplace drama. In her book Reality-Based Leadership, she encourages us to “work with the willing” first (Wakeman 2010). These are the best people on your team who show up each day fully engaged, who proactively offer their ideas and solutions, and who are most productive. Wakeman estimates that about 20 percent of workers fall into this category, and our challenge is to keep them (i.e., to retain them), as this is the group that will always have the most career options available to them.
Wakeman also describes the mirror image of this group, the other 20 percent who seem to always complain, resist change, or cause trouble. Yet this is the group that most of us, as managers, spend our time on. We spend extra time giving them constructive feedback, coaching, and mentoring. We spend extra time listening to their complaints. We spend extra time on discipline. Wakeman’s own research suggests that one problem employee results in an extra eighty hours a year of work for the manager.
I look back at my own leadership trajectory and cringe at how hard I worked trying to get these people to be happy. Linda claimed to have low blood pressure that caused her to feel cold all the time. She would walk through my open door each week with a new request. Can you raise the temperature on the thermostat? Can I move my desk away from the window? Can you call the HVAC company to change the vent above my desk? Can I move my desk away from the vent? Can you buy me a space heater? Can you take away the space heater because now it’s too hot? Can I work from home where it isn’t so cold? The crazy thing was that I actually tried to accommodate all these endless requests. Today I’m more likely to say, “Linda, do you own a sweater?”
In fact, I’ve come to take a very hard line when it comes to those who fall into the category that Gallup labels “actively disengaged.” According to their most recent “State of the American Workplace” study, 16 percent of employees fall into this category
of people who are “miserable in the workplace and destroy what the most engaged employees build” (Gallup 2017). As I speak at conferences and company retreats all around the world I’m frequently asked about what to do with this group. Individual managers will ask, “My overall engagement scores are really high and almost everyone on the team is fully engaged, but there is one woman who I just can’t seem to get to. How do I engage that last person on my team?”
My answer always surprises people: Just fire her. You can do it kindly, you can do it with compassion, you can help her find a new job elsewhere, but you should force her not to work on your team. Let me be clear, I’m not talking about the vast number of average performers who are “not engaged” (i.e., neither actively engaged, nor actively disengaged). I’m talking about the small number of people who are chronically negative. These are the people who, when asked on surveys, say they are dissatisfied in their job, they wouldn’t refer friends to the company, and they frequently think of working elsewhere. As Wakeman points out repeatedly in her book, we can’t change people. These actively disengaged people are probably hiring mistakes. Maybe they’re a lawyer because their parents told them to be, but they hate being a lawyer. Maybe they enjoy working in IT, but they prefer a sandals-and-T-shirt Silicon Valley culture over your khaki-and-button-down New York City culture. Maybe they are feeling angry after their two-hour one-way commute each morning. Whatever their issue is, it’s their issue, not yours.