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.
Julian BirkinshawProfessor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship
