In business we live in the world of shallow statements of opinion. Imagine there is a topic for discussion amongst the leadership team. People will let fly with their thoughts and this becomes the basis for decision making, based on people’s statements on the matter. Usually everyone is pretty busy, so the drill is to listen to what was said and then make the choice from amongst the various alternatives and move on. There is a problem with this. We are trapped in Phase One thinking if we continue in this way. Phase One thinking is that first reaction level of contemplation on what you have just heard. Instantly, you pour out your immediate thoughts on the issue. The problem with this is, although it is quick and saves time, there is pretty light contemplation going on here.

The famous Greek philosopher Socrates lived from 470-399 BC and was famous for his questioning techniques. He used this method to help others dig deeper into their thinking. We have to take inspiration from him and develop our own questioning techniques. If we do, we will get to a deeper realm of understanding of the issues. This is the platform we need to make the best decisions.

I notice this issue in our training classes. When we ask someone for their opinion on something, they will give us an immediate Phase One answer. Because Dale Carnegie was a devotee of the Socratic method of asking questions, our teaching methods rely on us digging in a bit deeper. We are trained to never take what someone says at the Phase One Level, but to always push further. This applies to leadership and to sales.

In both disciplines, the students in the classes are encouraged to go further and question more deeply. In sales, for example, imagine we were talking to a customer. They tell us they need the widget in green. We train our students to ask why they want it in green, as opposed to accepting the green option at face value. This gets us to a Phase Two much deeper answer. That is good information, but it isn’t enough. We need the client to go to Phase Three thinking and we do that through further questions.

If they said they wanted green, because of XYZ reason, we don’t stop there. In Phase Three we ask, “what would be the impact on your business if your were able to get XYZ?”. We have now elevated the discussion to the achievement of their strategic goals. We have taken them to a much richer source of information to help them clarify what they are doing. In sales, we have started to position ourselves as the customer’s trusted advisor.

In leadership it is the same thing. Members of the executive team will give their opinions on an aspect of the business. Normally we collect all of these various opinions and then we make a decision based on that discussion. Often, we are influenced by the force of personality behind the opinion. This is only Phase One thinking though. If we ask them to explain why they think that, we have now driven deeper down to Phase Two. Once we hear everyone’s Phase Two level of thinking, we could make a decision at this point. We shouldn’t stop there however, instead we should keep going. Push them to go to Phase Three and tap into their ideas on how XYZ would strategically impact the business.

This is a tremendously simple process. It does take slightly longer than just tapping Phase One thinking outcomes, but the harvest is so much richer. We have all had the experience of having had a discussion with someone, often an argument and a couple of hours later, we are having a conversation with ourselves. We are telling ourselves genius things such as, “I should have said this” and “I should have said that” etc. This is because in the interval, our thinking has moved way beyond the simple Phase One responses we were applying in the conversation. We have moved to Phase Two and Phase Three thinking, but we have missed the boat.

Instead of having to wait a couple of hours to get a richer response in meetings, as the leader, we have to get our Socrates mojo working and go for Phase Two and Phase Three responses right there and then. We have to guide our people to start thinking more strategically about the business. You will be surprised by the improved quality of thinking that you trigger. This means the leadership group discussion and the decisions made will also be much better. Let’s all decamp to the Phase Three world and live there from now on.

Leaders are now leading invisible people. Their staff are no longer in sight or at best are only visible in person a couple of days a week. What are their people doing at home? How are they spending their time, how motivated are they, how engaged? Being in the office brings a certain level of discipline with it. You can see if people are goofing off. In an open office environment, you can hear the phone conversations with clients to gauge what is going on. When people are at home though, there is no way to be sure the team are using their time effectively.

Time is life. Time management is life management. The key tool to controlling time is the schedule, daily, weekly, monthly and annually. The temptation is to just imagine that time management is only about work time management. We are holistic beings, multifaceted, with multiple responsibilities. We play different roles in our lives and the work role is only one of those. Concentrating all of our time on work throws our lives out of balance.

The schedule is the key tool, so what goes into that schedule determines the life we lead. We have parents or children or siblings or partners or friends. Devoting all of our tine to work means that these key personal relationships are starved of the time needed to be allocated to them, in order for us to have a more rounded life. If we are late for lodging our personal taxes, unfocused about our finances because we are too busy working, then we will suffer both now and in the future. Getting our financial lives in order needs time and that time is in our schedule. We either allocate the time for that purpose or it gets allocated for something else.

Our health is the same. If we just work all of the time and don’t schedule time for exercise or relaxation, then we will encounter health issues. It is like running the machines 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The production numbers are initially impressive until the whole enterprise has shut down to spend time repairing the broken machines.

We start by nominating the key roles we play in life. Work is certainly one of them, but not the only thing. After we establish the roles we play, we can now attach some goals for each of those roles. This becomes important, because the schedule prioritisation process will be run off the achievement of these goals. When we consider the competing goals, we have to make a choice about which goals have a higher priority than others and then time is allocated for the attainment of each of those goals. It sounds so simple and it is. The surprising thing is that you realise you are a multifaceted person and not just someone who works all the time. You need to allocate time to call your mother, to see the kids sports fixture, to go to the dentist, to check your bank accounts, to go for a run, etc.

As the leader, this is the concept of time usage we need to be teaching to our team members. If you are running in the wrong direction, going faster doesn’t help. If you rapidly climb the ladder and find it is on the wrong wall, that doesn’t help. What do we want to have, do and be? We need to think about these aspects first, then set the direction, the goals to support that effort and the scheduling, based on priorities, to make it all a reality.

Teaching people how to get more done each day at work is fine, but the modern leader needs to see their people in holistic terms. If they become sick or experience family breakups or financial instability because they only concentrated on time allocation for work, then they will not be able to fully contribute to the organisation. What’s more they will be very unhappy and unmotivated and that doesn’t produce the culture that breeds the quality of professionalism we need. The machine will break and require extended downtime. Having a key person in the business experience illness, which takes them out of the picture, can be devastating to the firm.

We want our clients served by happy, engaged, healthy, satisfied and motivated staff. The leader’s job is to educate the team about proper holistic time management. If we do that, we will have a much more successful and sustained business. We all spend a lot of our time working, so making that a happy, fulfilling experience rests on getting all these aspects of people’s lives to be in alignment. For that, they need time and we teach them how to allocate that time in their schedules. Are you doing it?

The usual advice is to get off the tools and concentrate on being the leader and focus your energies getting leverage from the team who work for you. This makes a lot of sense because as the leader we are supremely busy these days and the pace of business in only speeding up and growing more complex. It also depends on how big your company is. When you get large numbers of people working for you, then the chance of doing anything other than attending meetings basically dries up. And this is exactly the problem.

Without noticing it we have been consumed by the beast and we now live in its belly. We are surrounded on all sides by our own team members. We might meet clients, but usually they are not our client and belong to one of the troops. We are there for ceremonial purposes and not to seal the deal. We live at the margins of the business and we are gradually separated from knowing what is really going on.

Some leaders may protest and tell me they know what is going on because their Division Heads, their direct reports, tell them. I would answer that what your Division Heads are telling you is what they want you know and that may not necessarily be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

It may be difficult, but where possible I would recommend keeping a couple of clients for yourself. That way you keep your hand in with the market, the issues, the problems, the ups and downs of the flow of business. You are getting this news unfiltered and your clients are telling you like it is, with no sugar coating. More than couple of clients will be logistically very hard. We can all probably manage a couple and the intelligence we hear from these sources will be very valuable. We can also evaluate more effectively what our own staff are telling us.

There is no doubt that the boss hears the bad news last, because everyone is hell bent on covering it up for as long as possible. But as the boss we operate on a different plane. We know we have the power, money and resources to fix problems and the faster we find out about the issue the less costly it is for us to fix it. So we have staff motivations and our own going in different directions.

There is nothing worse than thinking our systems are certainly correct, to only find out that is not the case. We assume things are being put in place as part of the overall ecosystem, but actually there can be gaps. We don’t discover these gaps fast enough when we rely on others to tell us about the gap. In fact, think back to the last time someone on the team told you about the gap compared to when you unearthed it yourself? I am struggling to remember when that happened because it is so rare. The snapper there is if no one is volunteering this information then how do we discover it?

This is where keeping your hand in the game comes in handy. We are more likely to see problems or imperfections is we remain part of the process. I was reminded of this recently. I had been teaching our High Impact Presentations Course which has two days in the classroom, then a follow-up half day, a twenty eight week self-paced programme so that the class participants don’t forget what they learned and a monthly Professional Ongoing Education class.

As I was talking about these things at the very end of the class, I saw some blank faces. That set off a warning siren in my head to check how we keep people informed about the follow-up programme. And not just for this programme, but for all of them. If I hadn't been teaching that class, I may not have found this gap at all or for many months. We try to really work on providing added value beyond the class content, but all of this effort is wasted if people don’t know about it.

I think I have systems in place to make sure the communication is working smoothly, but sometimes it isn’t and I have to fix it. The scary part is I only ever fix the gaps I know about and what happens to all the gaps I don’t know about? There is a cost to being on the tools but also some clear benefits. So take a look at your work and see where you can keep a hand it without the work devouring you.

Large organisations have many willing hands. Often, the quality of the people employed is very high, and the firm has the deep pockets sufficient to attract and retain them. Leading smaller firms is more challenging. There is a large degree of multi-tasking going on, as the workload gets spread across the troops. Everyone is busy, busy, busy and that especially applies to the boss. Time is in short supply, so corners are cut, elements are skipped and the quality of work produced can be an issue.

The temptation is for the boss to concentrate on their meetings with their direct reports, as individual one-on-one get togethers. The time left over for regular meetings of the leadership team can be compromised quite easily. It is never blatant. The direct reports don’t rise up and storm the barricades chanting “death to more meetings”. Instead, the scheduling process becomes the enemy of progress, as trying to get a number of busy people together to coordinate availability can be the death knell of the meeting. The boss is usually the one with the worst schedule openings.

You might have tried to circumvent the issue by not over scheduling the number or frequency of the meetings. Maybe they are held fortnightly, in the belief that getting everyone together will be easier. Often, though, this proves to be a false hope and something always comes up to ensure not everyone can make it. When you have a small leadership team, the point of the meeting becomes compromised.

The purpose of the leadership team meeting all together is to make sure information is being shared and that alignment of purpose and execution of the business is going on in an effective manner. I belong to Tokyo Rotary Club and Rotary itself was founded to connect disparate industry representatives together, so that we wouldn’t be locked into our Guilds and become insular. The leadership team meeting has the same objective, to get people together to talk and share what is going on in their sections with everyone else. It is so easy to become wrapped up in what you are doing and to forget to let others know what is going on with your area of responsibility.

The boss has to drive this process, and this is where we meet the first big hurdle. The boss is always the busiest person and the one who most often cancels the meeting because their schedule changes so frequently. In a small company, the boss will not only be liaising with the Mothership back home, leading the team locally, talking to their direct reports one-on-one, checking on the company finances, tracking the revenue achievement and keeping a close eye on HR issues, they will also be dealing directly with clients. As we all know, that meeting with the client will take priority over a meeting of the section heads.

This is why the boss is the hardest one to pin down for the meeting. When the boss is also the scheduler and driver to hold the meeting, things drift very easily. Before you know it, the leadership team hasn’t met for weeks. Time flies at the best of times and unless this leadership team meeting is made a priority, then there will never be a regular cadence for the get together of the section heads.

It is always a good practice to look for a day and a time when things are less frantic. I know that for many of us, that would be a very good question: “just precisely when is it not frantic around here?”. Everything is relative, so look for a fortnightly cadence which will give the meeting enough regularity to make it relevant, without the time drifting too much.

Next pick a time of the day when it will work best. This might even be a bento lunch together, because lunch times are usually a less scheduled time during the day for most of us. Because of the morning rush hour phenomenon, breakfasts are a lot more complex to pull off. Getting the kids off to school, fighting for space on the train to get to work, exhausts everyone too, so early is rarely good. Evenings are difficult too because people want to get home and they are tired after a hard day at work, so the collective brainpower available is down.

There is never an easy time to hold these meetings, but unless a strong will is enlisted, they just won’t happen. Make them over lunch, make them every fortnight, and make them a high priority. Will this work perfectly every month? I

severely doubt it, but at least the strike rate will improve and better coordination and team building will occur compared to the usual chaos.

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