How to manage time like money

I was in Livermore, CA, last week doing a private No-Compromise Leadership training session for a client and friend. I stayed over an extra day so we could do a bike ride through the beautiful vineyards and countryside. While riding, we got into a discussion about time management. I said, “Manage time like money. Think of all the stuff you need to accomplish as if they are line items on a Profit and Loss Statement. Income is your time. Now, what would you do differently?”

Time truly is like money. We only have so much of it and always wish we had more. If we are frugal with it, we can maximize our time, invest it wisely, and be incredibly productive. We can squander our time by being disorganized, lazy, and a master of procrastination. Lastly, we can allow our time to be stolen by others simply because we let them. Like money, time will disappear if you don’t pay attention and budget it like the precious resource it is.

How to retire from your own company

Every entrepreneur is a unique mixture of passion, vision, innovation, gambler, salesman, and dreamer. The mixture may vary from one entrepreneur to another, but the common bond they all share is being crazy enough to chase their dreams and test their abilities to lead others. The failure rate of start-up businesses is staggering, but the entrepreneurial warriors that do succeed get to live their dreams and become captains of their own ships for many years to come.

The problem for successful entrepreneurs is finding a way to retire from their own companies. Many have that, “I’ll sell it and cash out one day,” thought tucked way back in their brain. Others have children working in the company and think, “My kids will run the company when I retire.” Still others maintain that, “My employees will run and own the company one day,” thought that allows them to fall asleep at night. These are all great thoughts, but in reality, most entrepreneurs are so caught up in running their companies that they do a pretty lousy job of building a solid exit strategy. Many just avoid it altogether.

Why individual incentives compromise team performance

As a leader, you are responsible for harnessing and orchestrating the talents and capabilities of employees into a high performance team. To do so requires an ongoing commitment to training, coaching, evaluating, mentoring, and inspiring individuals to achieve their full potential – so in turn, your team can achieve its full potential. Yes, people work for money, but studies consistently show that money is not the prime motivator for job satisfaction and impressive performance.

Individual financial incentives motivate employees in the short-term picture, but emphasizing financial rewards leads employees to focus on personal gain at the expense of teamwork. Avoiding the short-term and producing the right outcomes over the long-term requires preparation. This means planning, discipline, and execution. Preparation shapes and defines your company’s culture. Preparation pulls a team together into a cohesive entity capable of achieving the extraordinary. It’s about the team, pride, quality, and winning.

What it really takes to be the best

Growing a great company has nothing to do with luck. It has to do with your leadership ability to surround yourself with the best players; to innovate, execute, and make good decisions; and to manage cash while capitalizing on opportunities. Throw in a healthy dose of accountability and being the best just may be within your reach. And if you do become the best, you’ll quickly discover that it takes just as much hard work to stay at the top of the game as it did to get there in the first place.

Every company starts out wanting to be the best, but things happen along the way that keep pushing that coveted title further and further beyond your reach. A few years of bad decisions, cash-flow challenges, and dealing with toxic employees can sap a leader’s mojo and self-confidence. When a company’s thinking and behavior is stuck on average – i.e. not actively pursuing the extraordinary – the outcome, as expected, will continue to be average.

When trusted employees steal

A coaching client just informed us of their discovery that a trusted employee has been stealing from the company by manipulating and creating false transactions in the company’s business software. Luckily, another employee saw something questionable and informed the owners. After hours of examining and comparing transaction logs, it was clear who the culprit was, how it was done, and for how long it’s been happening. Damn…isn’t running a business difficult enough without having your own employees stealing from you – especially one from your trusted inner circle?

The owners were shocked and devastated to discover just how extensive their trust was violated by this key employee. To learn that thousands of dollars had been siphoned out of much needed cash flow is one thing, but to learn that someone you trusted intentionally stole from the company right under your nose is where the real and lasting damage is done.

Leading is about believing in people

Being the leader of a business is perhaps one of the most complex, rewarding, and often brutally frustrating professions. Leaders are constantly held accountable, subjected to relentless demands, and must always be at the top of their game. A true leader works tirelessly to drive the Four Business Outcomes: productivity, profitability, staff retention, and customer loyalty. But when you peel away all of the trappings of leadership, what it really comes down to is believing in people – and that’s where things start to get interesting.

A leader’s job is to achieve results through the work of others. They keep people and teams on task. They maintain order, direction, and momentum. But would you want to work for a leader who is solely driven by the numbers, in an organization where people are simply the means to an end? In turn, would you want to be that kind of leader? You will get your results, but at what cost to those you lead; and at what cost to the work environment, or company culture?

Six strategies to find more time

Our lives are consumed with deadlines, “to do” lists, emails, deleting spam, meetings, interruptions, urgent problems, family … and that spectacular bucket list of things you want to check off before you check out. We all know that time is precious. It simply ticks by and cannot be recaptured. Nothing drives this reality home better than remembering that our time in this world is finite – not infinite.

It’s virtually impossible for leaders to be immune from time management challenges. Stuff happens and you need to lead in the moment. The world around you relentlessly tries to invade and capture bits and pieces of your time. Guess what? You do the same to those around you. It’s what leaders do. All it takes is for someone to say, “I need to speak to you for a minute,” and before you know it, half a day has passed and you are thrown completely off schedule.

Six strategies to create a culture of accountability

This Monday Morning Wake-Up is for everyone – not just leaders. In its simplest form, accountability means taking ownership. You take ownership as a leader to grow your company, create opportunities for others, and ensure fiscal health. You take ownership of projects, situations, and outcomes. You take ownership in your behavior and the behavior of others. You take ownership when the wrong outcomes occur – even if not directly involved – because it happened on your watch. Accountability is about getting the right stuff done when it needs to get done. No blame. No excuses.

Take a moment to imagine what your company’s performance would be like if it was built on a culture of accountability. What would productivity look like? What would profitability look like? What would staff retention look like? Most important, what would client loyalty look like? Without a doubt, your company would be leaner, faster, and fiercely competitive. That’s the good news. The bad news is that too many companies give a lot of lip service to accountability but fall short of the level of commitment and execution needed to create a culture of ownership in their companies. As a result, creating distance between status quo and extraordinary performance is painfully and incrementally slow.

Six reasons projects and change initiatives fail

There is nothing more common in business than launching a new project or change initiative. That’s how companies strive to remain competitive and adapt to changing market conditions. It’s how companies tweak current systems and build new ones to improve productivity and maximize resources. New projects and change initiatives must occur for a company to remain vital and relevant. However, the other most common occurrence in business is the number of new projects and change initiatives that fail.

As a coach and consultant, my job is to help companies achieve the right outcomes in what I call “The Four Business Outcomes”: Productivity, Profitability, Employee Retention, and Customer Loyalty. To achieve different and more desirable outcomes, new projects and change initiatives must occur. If the company is in dire straights, its ability to execute change with a high sense of urgency is put to the test. Unfortunately, it is the company’s inability to execute change combined with a low sense of urgency that causes it to be in dire straights in the first place.

Six simple questions to test your company’s health

Companies are very much like people. They are born from a union of ideas; they experience all of the awkward phases of learning to walk and develop basic skills; and hopefully, they grow up with much success. Like people, companies can catch colds – they face obstacles in health when it comes to performance issues, cash-flow challenges, and other problems that surface unexpectedly. Companies need to work out to stay strong and lean rather than heavy and lethargic. Companies can get sick and die.

As a leader, it is your responsibility to protect and ensure the health and vitality of your company. That being said, you are also the one who is ultimately responsible for making your company sick through bad decision-making, procrastination, allowing the company’s culture to deteriorate, poor cash management, and a host of other faux pas that leaders notoriously self-inflict.

Companies of every shape and size are susceptible to infection. The question always comes down to whether or not the company is healthy and strong enough to fight the infection off.

Here are six simple, yet intensely profound, no-compromise questions to test your company’s current health:

1. Are you the system? Systems exist to create predictable outcomes. Building, perfecting, and locking systems are tedious yet essential parts of ensuring the right outcomes. When the leader needs to micromanage daily work, the leader becomes the system. If you’ve ever uttered the words, “Can’t they just do their jobs?” you have become the system – and it’s not working for you, your team, your company, and your customers. If you are the system, your company is not healthy.
2. What is your company fighting for? People fight for causes they believe in. Fighting for a cause unleashes the most precious energy source a company can possess – passion. Passion drives productivity, innovation, efficiency, and the ability to achieve outcomes that others perceive as unattainable. If the vision, purpose, values, and guiding principles of your company do not ignite the passion of your team, your company is not healthy.
3. Are you managing cash flow? Cash is your company’s fuel. It’s hard to fight and win in today’s economic climate if your company’s fuel gauge warning light is flashing. Too many leaders don’t pay enough attention to cash management until their fuel tank is critically low. Repeatedly filling your fuel tank with borrowed money is dangerous because debt saps future cash. Maintaining a cash reserve of three to four months operating expenses is not something you dream about – it’s something to discipline yourself and your company to do. If you’re not relentlessly managing cash flow, your company is not healthy.
4. Is information really flowing? The human body possesses a sophisticated information flow system. The simple act of walking is a coordinated effort of information flow and execution. In most companies, information flow is best described as constipated. Information may flow to some areas, but only trickle or bypass others. Think of information flow as “what, why, how, the score.” The right outcomes occur when expectations are clarified, processes are defined, deadlines established and agreed to, and progress is monitored via feedback or the equivalent of a scoreboard. Invest the time and energy to ensure information is flowing to every nook and cranny of your company. If it isn’t, your company is not healthy.
5. Is your GPS turned on? I use GPS navigation in my car, on my iPhone, iPad, and the Garmin on my road bike. These days, it’s almost impossible to not know where you are and if you’re on course to your intended destination. Do you know your company’s present location on its three-, five-, or ten-year plan? What are the ten initiatives you plan to complete this year? Which benchmarks and critical numbers are meeting expectations and which ones need focused attention? If you don’t know precisely where your company is, your company is not healthy.
6. Can it endure? As a human being, your time on earth is finite – so is your time as leader of your company. In contrast, a company can and should endure long after you’re gone. The ability to endure is the ultimate indicator of the health of a company. Are you building a company capable of enduring or a fortress to support your ego? Are you building a company that is growing in value – and does your Balance Sheet prove that it is? Are you grooming your replacement? Are you letting go of the reigns and allowing your leadership team to be accountable? The most important thing for a leader to remember is that he or she is not the company. The company is a living entity with its own vital signs and purpose for existing. If your company cannot endure beyond your leadership, it is not healthy.

- – - – - – - – -

Please share your thoughts with me about today’s Monday Morning Wake-Up. Click above to comment.

Pass this e-mail on to your business colleagues, managers and friends. They’ll appreciate it.