The Productivity Pro® Blog by Laura Stack - Time Management, Getting Things Done, How to Be More Productive

“Ignorance is not bliss. It’s fatal. It’s costly. And it’s for losers. You either get organized, or get crushed.” — Donald Trump, American businessman

One of the Six Keys of workplace competence is Accessibility: your ability to organize the inputs and outputs in your work life, so that you can easily locate data in any medium—whether it’s in paper files, on your computer system, on the company Intranet, or distributed in your team members’ heads. Given the fact that modern workers are constantly bombarded with data and communications, just being able to access information efficiently can enhance productivity to a surprising degree.

At the C-Suite level, Accessibility morphs into Organization…and from a productivity standpoint, it’s more important than ever. Organization means more than just maintaining an efficient schedule and getting your personal workspace shipshape. By the time you reach upper management, you ought to be a virtuoso at that level of accessibility, and you should also have a personal staff to help you keep things accessible. But when you’re overseeing a whole organization, company, or division, your organizational bailiwick expands. At that level, true Organization requires a thorough understanding of not just personal accessibility, but also the systems that define and support your entire team. They need to be as tight and effective as possible, and it’s up to you to ensure that reality — if necessary, by imposing it from the top.

I think this is a perfect example of the kind of big-picture work that a top executive, particularly a CEO or President, is responsible for. It’s about as far from micromanaging as you can get, because it effects everyone in your group. You’ve stepped back even farther than a good hands-off manager, because you’re not worried about individual performance per se; you’re dealing with the “platform” on which all the individual “apps” in your organization run, if you will. You’re tweaking the code, and making everything work better for everybody.

One of your prime responsibilities here is to determine what you need to change in order to maximize Organization, which requires that you spend some time studying the entire range of systems and processes by which information is organized, stored, and transmitted within your organizational structure. Don’t expect this to be a quick process; if you try to rush change, you’re likely to make damaging errors. Ultimately, the changes might take months or years to implement—not only because you have to study things thoroughly first in order to determine what needs to be changed, but also because you have to figure out how to pay for those changes…and then you may have to convince a board of directors, the business owner, or other individuals or groups that you report to that the changes are necessary.

Warning: don’t get lost in the concept of change for change’s sake! The cliché of the new broom that sweeps clean is a popular one, but don’t forget the tinkerer’s Number One rule: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The idea is to tighten up existing systems to maximize efficiency, if at all possible. Replacing systems wholesale is unnecessary and wasteful if all you really need to do is streamline and modernize. What truly matters is productivity, and your employees can’t be productive if you’re reorganizing for no good reason.

Once thing I’d like to emphasize before I sign off is the fact that in order to accomplish this new level of Organization, you absolutely need to get all your lieutenants on board. By the time you’ve studied the situation for a while, you ought to have an almost instinctual understand of not just what needs to be done, but also how the individuals who have to implement your changes will react when you propose those changes. It may be that one of your first tasks will be to restructure decision making within your group, so that the Organization can be pulled off efficiently.

You’re the boss. You can’t let your subordinates control the flow of information and data at their whim, not if you want to Organize your company to achieve maximum productivity. If your managers are used to treating their teams as their own private fiefdoms, you’re going to have to break that stranglehold before you can get anything done.

Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro(R), shares tips on keeping your children’s items organized. (C) 2010 Laura Stack. All Rights Reserved. www.TheProductivityPro.com

“Accountability breeds response-ability.” — Stephen R. Covey

Once you reach the uppermost layers of management, Accountability becomes Efficiency—and as a C-Suite manager, one of your first tasks should be to implement Efficiency wherever necessary.

If you’ve made it to the C-Suite, you didn’t get there by accident. You were elevated to the position because of your demonstrated SuperCompetence in all aspects of your work life. It’s a truism that you can’t be SuperCompetent without having a highly-developed sense of Accountability; and as one of your company’s leaders, you’re a cornerstone upon which the entire organization rests. This means that you have to set the Efficiency example for your team to follow.

The buck stops with you because it has to; after all, where else can it go, when you’re sitting at the top of the heap? This being the case, all the factors that define this Key—quick, effective decision-making, accepting both credit and blame, streamlining your work processes, cracking the whip on yourself, eliminating time-wasters, everything—expand and take on more significance than ever before.

This can be an overwhelming responsibility, the maintenance of which requires a rigid and consistent level of self-discipline—the kind that got you to the C-Suite in the first place. Yes, you’ve finally arrived, but this is no time to relax! I believe that some of the more spectacular corporate implosions of recent years have been caused by the breakdown of this Key at the C-Suite level. With a relaxation of Accountability can come complacency and self-indulgence. All too often, this leads to a disregard for corporate welfare…or, worse, an assumption that what’s good for you is good for the company, the kind of “le etat, ces’t moi” thinking that brought down the French Empire back in the 18th century. It’s also one of the fast-tracks to corporate ruin.

Like all the other Keys, Accountability is a tool; and the only purpose of a tool is to be used. In addition to keeping you on the straight and narrow, this particular tool enables you to infuse Efficiency into your entire organization. Properly applied, your high level of personal Accountability can permeate your entire team, creating an organizational structure founded foremost on personal responsibility. Because that’s what it comes down to: everyone, at all levels, accepting the responsibility for getting their own work done efficiently and effectively. This means learning to implement stringent self-discipline and a tight focus, and finding ways to work around distractions and bottlenecks. Pointing fingers helps no one, because the only thing that really matters is results.

Efficiency involves tightening up everything, from the shop floor to the highest levels of management. This involves clearing out deadwood, cutting costs, streamlining paperwork, bypassing (and ultimately eliminating) clogs in the process flow, and tweaking systems until they operate as flawlessly as possible. Like Organization, Efficiency may require imposition from the top down…and if you really want it to work, you’ll have to be ruthless about it.

Don’t institute change for change’s sake, but don’t hesitate to get the ball rolling when something can and should be done. Your ultimate goal is to create a culture of Efficiency, in which your sharpest employees naturally assess systems, processes, and individual tasks, and take the initiative to be accountable for them. If you can do that, your less accountable employees will either take up the gauntlet of Efficiency…or be squeezed out by the employees who do.

These days, “Operational Efficiency” is a popular buzz-term in business circles; and while it isn’t precisely the same as C-Suite Efficiency, C-Suite Efficiency can certainly help to bring it about. If you can inculcate everyone in your organizational tree with a high level of Efficiency, you can sharpen focus on the most important aspects of your business, which can’t help but spark innovation, drive growth, and increase market share. Productivity will soar, and your organization will make a bundle—because you’re doing things that most of your competitors aren’t.

It all starts with you and your personal commitment to Accountability in all its forms, which cannot waver. If you expect to raise the flag of Efficiency over your organization, and to reap all the benefits that result, then you’ve got to lead from the front.

“The older I get, the more I see a straight path where I want to go. If you’re going to hunt elephants, don’t get off the trail for a rabbit.” — T. Boone Pickens, American financier

At the lofty C-Suite level, the SuperCompetent Key of Attention transforms into Focus. Suddenly, your capacity to concentrate on your work and only your work becomes paramount—much more critical that it was before, if only because your actions impact the company more completely than they ever have. A distracted, overwhelmed CEO or VP can be much more damaging than a middle manager who can’t keep his or her head in the game.

Worse, the higher you go, the more distractions you have to deal with. When you’re just Josephine Schmoe down in Cubical Land, it’s hard enough to filter out electronic distractions, sudden drop-ins, and the noisy neighbors who want to socialize all day outside your cube. When you enter management, you suddenly have even more people who want a piece of your time, and, often, more who actually deserve one; so you have to try extra hard to avoid wasting your time on distractions. You especially have to disconnect yourself from your electronic leashes (especially handhelds and the Web) and force them back into their original function as tools. Focus!

This becomes true in spades when you reach the uppermost tier of management, even as what is truly important shifts. No matter how hard you work, if you can’t maintain a tight focus on the key activities that directly affect your organization’s success, you’re never going to perform up to par—and neither will the organization you’re ostensibly leading. At best, you’ll be like the Red Queen, running as fast as you can to stay in the same place. At worst…well, let’s just say disaster looms. And again, as a leader, your failure hurts many more people than just you and your family.

I think the biggest problem of the modern-day executive isn’t a lack of commitment or work ethic. Most execs are perfectly willing to work hard, and for a distressing number of hours. And it’s not that they don’t understand basic time management, either: anyone who has made it to upper tier management (with the occasional exception of the boss’s son) has mastered the basics of time management, or they wouldn’t be there. The real problem is that many C-Suite executives haven’t learned to do expand and refocus their understanding of time management to take into account the realities of their new positions.

When you reach the C-Suite, your first task should be to take a very close look at your responsibilities, so that you can determine precisely what’s most important for your organization. Then, you have to trim away everything else. Everything! The most effective C-Suite managers do the following:

• Compartmentalize issues so that they’re more easily handled.
• Limit meetings, and make those they have shorter and fewer in number.
• Limit distractions of all kinds: drop-ins, phone calls, emails, etc.
• Hire staff to help them organize and prioritize their responsibilities.
• Practice healthy life-habits to enhance personal performance.
• Learn to say no when they need to, and to make it stick.

What they don’t do is micromanage or solve minor problems. They don’t have the time! Those things are rabbits, not elephants; and if you do have rabbits that need taking care of, then that’s what subordinates are for.

Which brings up, again, the issue of delegation. C-suite executives don’t have staffs just so that they can feel important; the real function of an executive staff is to handle all those distractions that would normally divert them from their responsibilities. When you’re at the top of the heap, maybe the buck really does stop with you, but you shouldn’t even see those measly little dollar bills, or even fifties or hundreds. At your level, maybe that plaque on your wall should read, “The Megabuck Stops Here.”

A good staff can’t keep you from wasting your time if you really want to, but they can definitely filter your calls and email, and keep people from barging through your door or otherwise bugging you when you’re trying to focus on more significant things. You need to be working on budgets, new marketing ploys, and how to respond to the Board’s request for your department’s priorities for the next fiscal year—not dealing with drama, or putting out low-level brushfires.