007: Success Focused Management Techniques

speaker 0:   0:00
in today's episode, I'm talking about a few management tools you can use to make dealing with the many requirements and deadlines you face. It's gonna be a great discussion. Welcome to the Finance Leader podcast. Where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host, Stephen MacLean. This is episode number seven of the podcast. Miss Discussion. I'm gonna offer a few tools that will help you manage your tasks and the team is the hole a little better? We're gonna talk about prioritizing, improving communication, back briefing, backwards. Planning and delegation were both a leader in a manager. Each day, the leader creates and shares a vision that the team can carry out. Your management side combines the art and science of getting things done so you can achieve that vision management guru Peter Drucker said. Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. As leaders, we must approach the task that we have and the many things that we need to get done as a teacher, a coach and mentor, definitely not approach showing our team had to do things in a condescending way, but as a person who wants to see others grow. The way you talk to others is important because it affects them. It affects their performance. It affects their mindset. It affects how they see their role on the team and how they see their future with the organization. We're gonna talk about a few things that I have experienced in my career, and a lot of these techniques that we're going to discuss today comes from my long career in the Army. And I want to share them with you because if you adapt them and use them in the management and leadership of your team than it's gonna be a little easier for you In order to get through all those tight deadlines that we talk about and all those requirements that come at you, you're gonna be able to manage those tasks a little bit easier. First thing I want to talk about is time management and in the Army, we used to use a technique called the 1/3 2 3rd rule, and that is when we get a new task, a new requirement or planing for something like a project that we determine what the total amount of time is for the project and then we divide it up. We're gonna take 1/3 of the time for ourselves, and then we're gonna give back 2/3 of the time to our team. So they get a majority of the time to plan and work out all the things that they need to do. Once we know what the project or the task is, it's very important. It helps to make sure that as the leader, we don't take all of the time ourselves and that we do what we need to do quickly up front and then get what needs to be done out to the team. And then they get a majority of the time we give them back to them, so it makes it a lot easier. I recommend this with any kind of complex task, complex project that gets handed to you. I just think it's that it's a lot easier to manage a complex problem and complex issue, and it made it a lot easier throughout my career in the Army, that concept of just take a little bit of time for yourself and push back that all the rest of that time to your team and you set them up for success. The next thing we're gonna talk about is prioritizing. Prioritizing is about sequencing all those tasks and requirements. You have importance from the most important, to the least important. If you do this successfully, then you're gonna be able to manage your time a lot better. Man is the time of your team a lot better. You're gonna be able to take those and identify those important tasks upfront and concentrate most of your effort to accomplishing those tasks. You don't identify the tasks that just kind of come at you that aren't as important. And you push those down in the priority in the key to all this is that you communicate that priority on the team. Now your team members have tasks that they're doing every week. There's reports that need to be done or every month, reports and emails that need to be sent out. Analysis that needs to be done. Those are all very important. Those need to be done. But we're also inundated with new requirements, new tasks, new requests for information from the executive team, or director or vice president someone, somebody out there that needs something, some kind of piece of information helps them do their job. Sometimes those requests, even though it's coming in from a director of VP, it may not be a top priority, and that's why you need to continually be assessing what's the most important. And then you prioritize it within the team. And don't be afraid to push back on something that's not quite as important. And your team members need to continually be reporting end new requirements, new things that they're being asked to do so that you can sequence it properly. And it's not wrong to make sure that they're telling you the things that people asking you to do because as the manager of that team, you get to set the priority of the tasks that come in. You may have knowledge that they don't have because you sat in a meeting and you know what's important was coming down. And you need to have your team members working on these sets of tasks. If another leader, another person from around the company asked them to do something, and that will then step back a top priority task. So again, communicate to everyone on the team. What's the most important task. They need to be continually communicating back to you. If anybody asked them to do anything, then you can set a new priority and communicate with that person who asked and say, No, we can't do that right now. Maybe we could do that next week or the week after, but we've added it to the list and will continually assess the priority. Your weekly team meeting is a great place. Talk about priorities. I would say it's probably the most important thing you talk about. It's your weekly meeting is where you can coordinate all the resource is and requirements and then cross talk on the team. What needs to be done and you just kind of listed out. Put the items up on the screen and we need to talk through all these things. And then you solicit input from your team members, and then you can make a decision whether on item used to move up or down on the priority highly recommend this. Of all the things we're gonna talk about in this episode, prioritizing if you can grasp this concept and put it in action and then communicate with everybody on your team and communicate with your boss. And just if you just sent that priority up every day, every week, you can start to get a lot more synergy and movement on the team in the right direction. You've already as leader. You've already shared your vision and your purpose for the team. You've taken the company's mission and saying, Hey, we're gonna do this and then addition to that. We're prioritizing our actions so that we achieve that vision, that mission, that purpose that you've talked about if you're gonna work on anything, prioritizing and communicating and making sure everyone knows what the priority is, everything that comes in new set, that against what I already we have on our priority list. And we make a new priority list and we continue to work it, continually assess it. We communicate with our boss, we communicate with our team members and we make it better. Next thing I want to talk about is improving communication. Communication needs to continually be worked by every manager, every leader at every level and our organizations. I recommend that you pushed down information as quickly as possible to everyone as much as you can, because I believe in as much Transparency is possible. Also, when you push information out, that means you're giving your team members enough advanced warning on something that's coming or something that's gonna happen so they can start doing their thinking and their planning. This goes back to the first thing that I talked about in that 1/3 2 3rd rule. Push out the information as quickly as possible, down as low as possible in an army. We used to call these warning orders as soon as we got a new mission, our new task. We start to generate that first warning order so that our subordinate units can start working on the most important things now, while the rest of the order comes down to us in a few hours, we can start doing are planning so that everyone is doing parallel planning. And then when it comes time to do the mission that we have saved a lot of time and a lot of effort by doing this parallel planning. In addition to that, when you when it comes to a complex task or a project, I really would like you guys to start describing what you want to see What's the end state of the task that you have? What does the task look like to you communicate what you want this thing to look like? You kind of give a vision to your team members, and that helps them clarify the things that they need to do and what this task will look like. And it just continually serves to give a very clear idea of the standard that you want. What you what do you want? This look like a the end when the when the product that they give you back do you want to see it this way? You want to see it in a graph form you want to see in a written form. Be very clear and concise in the end state of the task that you want give as much information as possible, and it takes time. It takes practice to do that. The next tool that I want to share with you that helps with the communication process is back briefing after you assigned the task, then you have that person tell the task back to you, and I say that this insurers that they have comprehended the task and it's always leads to good questions afterwards. Once you have given that task, they have stated that task back to you, and that gives you opportunity to assess that. They really grasp what's required of them was a standard what needs to happen, what needs to be done. And then it creates a discussion, clarity, questions and a little bit more information, maybe to get the task done to the standard that you want it done. And I think this is always a good way to have a discussion around something that's required, and I just recommend that you just take that time. Take that effort to clarify what needs to be done. It'll just help you. It'll help the person. And again. That's why I recommend using a simple tool. It's called the back briefing. You issue out a task, and then they stayed it right back to you, and it just insures good communication, good clarity of what is required. The next item I want to talk about is backwards planning. That's when you get a task of project that's complex of nature. It's a long term task. It might be more than a month to three months, maybe And that's when you start to think about what the project will look like, what is going to deliver and what date. And you start working from that and state from that finalization date and you start working towards the president and you start laying out all these things because most people start out okay, I have a task. It's gonna take 90 days, and I just start thinking about maybe the things that I have to do in the next week or two and just believe that it's easier to work backwards. You start with what? The project, what the end state looks like and you start working towards the present and you start fitting in all those things that you need to do, and it just gives you a lot more clarity, and it shows you how much time really what the project is gonna take. So the next time you have a long term project, start with the end of mine and start working towards the President, and I believe that's gonna be a lot easier for you to kind of visualize and see Holot project play itself out. It'll be a lot easier. It'll fit in a lot, a lot more, and I think you're gonna have a lot more clarity. The last thing we're gonna talk about as far as management tools. And that's probably one of the hardest that managers have to deal with when they're leading a team. And that's delegating. Soon you're going to realize that if you want to be successful as, ah leader, that you can't do it all alone, you're gonna you're gonna need other people to help. You can be successful and try to get it all done by yourself. You're gonna need help from every member of your team. You're gonna need help from a lot of people in order to get all of your tasks on the project's done in achieve excellence at the same time. So whatever level you are at, in order to go to the next level, in order to achieve excellence, you're gonna have to bring on more people into a task, and you're gonna have to learn to delegate. You're gonna have to learn to give out tasks to other people to help get everything done and with delegating, I want to take it one more level. I want you to think about one more thing, and that is one of the things that I believe in as leaders again that we need to continually be doing. And that's growing our people. So we're gonna delegate. We're not just going to delegate those tasks that we don't want to do. We're gonna start delegating some tasks that require a lot of thinking and a lot of attention to detail some of the most important tasks we're going to give to memories of our team so that they grow. I don't want to just see the simple tasks we put out there. I don't want you to hold on to all of these important tasks because then you don't have opportunities for your team members to grow. Because if you're not doing that, then you're not teaching and growing your team members. You're just holding on on all those important things. All those things that will get you recognition. And you're not going to that extra step in that critical leader task of growth and developing your team. So think about that. It's hard for managers to delegate. See it all the time. Sorts of her young managers, they think they get it all done or they're afraid to issue out a task and that's not what we're about. We need everybody on the team working in the same direction. We're prioritizing our tasks were issuing out tasks because we know we can't do it alone. So again, just continue to work towards in your own mind. If I want to be successful from, have our team be successful. I need everybody on board and we need to start getting some things out around the team and we can even delegate out parts of the complex task. And that's what I recommend is that when we have something that requires a long term focus, that we can delegate out pieces of it and then we continue to come back and talk about it. We have milestones and we issue out dates that things need to be done and we talk about it and then we've come together and we finish the products and then we are ready to present it to whoever assigned it to us. Next, we're going to return to Michael, who we talked about an episode Number six. He was on manager who was dealing with complacency as task come in. Michael does very well at prioritizing them because he listens to the importance of the task. He could improve at pushing out information quicker and finding out what else his team may have been asked to do. Any task a team member of yours receives should be reported to you so you can fit it into the bigger picture. On priority again, Michaelis was fighting with issues of complacency. He was waiting for things to come in, But once they're coming in, he's able to then prioritize the tasks into the bigger picture. One more thing that he, of course, needs to work on is getting the information out quicker and then also asking what his team members are being asked to do so that he can go ahead and fit it into the bigger picture. A recommended easy wind that I want you to consider doing today is going back to that priority list and establishing how tasks come in and task you're currently working on. I want youto keep a running list some way to manage those tasks so that it's easier for you and the team to accomplish everything that you need to do that fits into the bigger picture that fits into the strategy of the organization, and once you start prioritizing, it's going to make it a lot easier to achieve that strategy. So write out a list. Find some way to manage that list, ad that process to your weekly meeting. And then every week we reworked the list, and we communicate the priorities every week and every day if you need to, especially if it's rapidly changing. Make sure that your team members are telling you if somebody is asking them to do something because you have the responsibility, established the priorities on your team. That's not micromanagement you are managing. Resource is you're managing people who have limited time in their day, and we want to maximize that time to do the right things at the right time. So established this today get this process rolling and your life is gonna be a little bit easier. One more thing that I want to ensure that you guys were doing when you're given a task when somebody's asking you to do something, make sure you get a due date due dates are critical. That fits in the priority if something is due in a week. Then we can see how it fits in and makes it a lot easier to manage expectations. In this episode, we talked about a few management techniques that you can use to lead and manage your team better. We talked about some time management and prioritising. We talked about improving communication and back briefing, backwards planning and also delegating. You can find this episode and pass episodes on Apple podcast, Spotify and other places that you can download podcast episodes. You can download the show notes or Stephen McLean dot com Next episode. We're gonna talk about a few leader attributes or values that leader should have. I hope you enjoyed the show. Please join our community on Facebook, the finance leader Podcasts Facebook Group. This will be our community to grow within the finance and accounting profession until next time you can check out more Resource is that Stephen mclean dot com and sign up for my updates. So you don't miss an episode of the show and now go lead your team and see you next time. Thank you