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In this segment, I'm going to give you some, some thoughts, some final thoughts,
on what we can do, what you and I can do differently as managers,
of others, to become essentially more effective, and this.
This little segment, builds on an article I wrote in the Harvard Business Review
last year 2000 and, and 13.
Really trying to report on some particular results from
a study I did about helping people to do their jobs just that little bit better.
The, the chart you see here gives us the results of a, of a survey that we did.
And what we did was we asked people to tell us how much time they
spent on different activities.
Very straight forward they basically just kept a time sheet for a week.
And what we discovered is that they spent 32% of their time on desk-based work,
basically sitting in front of a,
of a desk working on email, working on reading, on writing or whatever.
And 38% of their time managing across.
What do we mean by that?
Meetings basically, I mean any number of activities that involve liasoning with and
talking with our peers, our partners in other parts of the organization.
So the two big chunks of time, is we sit in meetings and we sit at our desk.
And the last third really is all the other stuff about managing up, managing down.
And managing externally, actually spending time, for
example, talking to customers is a very, very small chunk of time.
Now that, that's not particularly earth shatteringly novel as a finding.
Many people have found something similar before.
But we went a little bit further, and we said to each of these categories of
activities in turn, and then tell us how worthwhile they are.
And we asked them for
example, how easily could this task be offloaded to somebody else?
How tiresome is it?
How, how, how much is this personally intrinsically interesting to you?
How valuable is it to the organization?
And the fascinating finding there was that the, the thing that,
things we spend most of out time on, sitting at our desk.
Sitting in meetings are the very same tasks that people say,
that can be easily off-loaded to others and are actually kind of tiresome.
So there's a little bit of a curious thing going on here.
What we're saying is, we spend two-thirds of our time at work.
Doing stuff that we don't think is particularly interesting or
enjoyable and we don't think it's particularly valuable.
And we think it could be delegated to others.
So it's a fairly obvious, sort of follow on questions to say, well, why on earth
don't we actually delegate or even get rid of a big chunk of those activities?
Now, why is it we don't do it?
It's because of the habits of a lifetime.
We're just kind of wrapped up in a web of commitments to others.
We're wrapped in our own personal habits.
And that's why we continue to do stuff which is basically not that valuable.
So, we decided to do a little experiment, we took about 20 people, and
we said to them, okay, for the next two weeks we want you to commit.
To actually doing something differently.
And so we said to them, take that long list of tasks that you're planning to do
in the next two weeks and prioritize them and
of the low value added tasks we asked them to take 20% of those tasks.
The most low value added of the lot, and for
each of those 20% we said to them either.
Get rid it completely, just stop doing it.
Delegate it to somebody else, or shall we say redesign it.
For example, you might want to outsource it to a third party, or
you might want to re, rethink how it's being done in the first place.
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The key part of the experiment was the next bit which is we said now you have to
commit to doing something about it.
In other words, you have to make a visible, visible,
verbal commitment to us to appear that you're going to change these habits.
And two weeks from now we will follow up on you and
make sure that you've actually done what you said you would.
So, by making that commitment, those people then offloaded those tasks and
they used the time that they'd freed up.
For more strategical value added tasks.
And that was the essence of the experiment.
We, we tried it out and what we discovered was with,
with that two week period about 20 people involved, we got roughly speaking,
15, 20% more value out of those people in those weeks than they would
have done if they'd just continued to do their old thing.
And for me the,
the heart of it is, taking the time to actually think about what they're doing.
Making a sort of public commitment as it were,
to, to others that they will change their habits.
Because of course, if you think about it,
stuff like like basically delegating work to a secretary or to a colleague.
It's dead easy.
I mean, you've just got to spend a little bit of time thinking about what you're
doing, and then, from then on, that person can run with the thing.
They're probably happier.
You're certainly happier.
And the work gets done just as well.
One final very specific example to make this live.
we, we actually have a couple of people turn these.
This, this sort of change into a formal experiment.
And what you see on this slide here is a very specific experiment done by
one person.
A lady in, in Finland.
Whereby she actually got five hours a week of her
time freed up by working with a colleague and the colleague essentially took
five hours of her boring kind of meetings or spreadsheets or whatever off her hands.
And she dedicated that five hours to working much more collaboratively.
As a coach to the team of people she had working for her.
She works as a manager of a of a call center in selling insurance in Sweden.
And by essentially changing her style of working to be working as
a coach to this team and getting them to focus on cross selling opportunities,
not only were they happier as a result, they also actually.
Ended up getting productivity improvements as well,
that the lower performers actually were working at a higher level.
So I'm not trying to claim that this is going to completely revolutionize the way
that each of us works.
But by giving a little bit of thought to what we're doing,
freeing up some time to work on more value other things, we can actually.
Essentially deliver on, on, on,
on what we're promising in terms of changing our style of working.
Julian BirkinshawProfessor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship
