IT管理洗剑池

By  Susan Cramm

While most people have heard of executive coaching, few have personal experience working with a coach. Here's my view of the profession and process from seven years of working as an executive coach.

Truth be told, I was asked to be a coach before I knew what one was. Fortunately, my ignorance wasn't career-limiting because no one else knew either. Over the past 15 years or so, executive coaching has emerged as a practice and is making a real difference in the lives, careers and businesses of many.

There are plenty of references that describe the various types of executive coaching, the benefits, and the ideal approach to selecting and working with a coach (for example, "The Wild West of Executive Coaching," Harvard Business Review). But in reading the literature, I find that it falls short in disclosing the "caveat emptor" realities of executive coaching. If you are thinking about investing in executive coaching services, keep the following in mind.

Coaching is optional. You cannot force someone to participate in coaching. I have a client who wants me to work with one of his direct reports, but that person is not interested. In fact, the only thing the direct report is interested in developing is his golf game. While it might be possible for me to sell him on the benefits of coaching, ethically it is important that I pull back; a coach can't change someone who is not interested in changing himself.

Coaching relationships are long-term. Once someone "clicks" with a coach, she is likely to stay with that coach, in some capacity or another, over the long haul. The initial relationship will be the most intense. With the foundation built, subsequent "interventions" will be targeted and efficient. Just as with a well-loved doctor or mentor, it doesn't make sense to discontinue a relationship that continues to be useful. Senior managers who benefit from coaching and have their own budgets will find some way to pay for it, even if it's not within company policy.

Coaches work for the client. My client's interests trump those of his supervisor or company - regardless of who is paying the bill. Managers have input on the expected outcomes, but they cannot control the process or determine how their subordinates define success. I have a client who wants to start his own business in five years, and his motivation to change is driven from this objective. As a coach, I must respect this objective and help him move towards this goal.

Even in this type of situation, however, a conflict of interest is avoided 99% of the time because the resulting behavior changes will benefit the company, thereby enhancing my client's career prospects there and increasing the likelihood that he will remain with the company.

Coaching focuses on the soft stuff. The "hard" business issues—such as organization, strategy, measurement targets, processes and road maps—are the easy stuff of coaching. Ultimate success lies in the more difficult work of shoring up, mitigating or leveraging soft skills, including the ability to assign the right people to the right roles, gain commitment to a strategy, develop strong relationships, communicate effectively, "manage up" and delegate. Recognize that better soft stuff will lead to the right hard stuff and give the coach room to work on both.

Coaches must deliver. Executive coaches are sometimes called "performance coaches"—a term I love. I agree that "coaching that focuses on business performance is key to improvement in executive performance" (from "Coaching: No More Mr. Nice Guy," Gallup Management Journal). It is essential that coaching goals include the "what" of quantitative business improvement (for example, project success) as well as the "how" of qualitative behavior changes (such as stakeholder alignment). Coaching should be guided by business needs, fueled by proven business theory and practices and grounded in the work that is on the client's desk. The best coaching engagements are iterative and require contracts that are short-term and measurement-focused.

Coaches aren't nice. When someone hires a coach, she is agreeing to change. But since people like the idea of change better than the reality, the best coaches practice tough love. One of my clients tells me in the same breath how difficult and how beneficial coaching has been for him. Good coaching sessions are simultaneously stimulating and exhausting. Most clients look forward to the beginning and end of each session, but not the hard work in between.

As with any profession, there are good and not-so-good executive coaches. If you decide to work with a coach, do your due diligence and manage the relationship as you would with any professional services provider. If you do so, you have a good shot at embarking on a business-building relationship rather than an expensive journey towards mediocrity.

Source from www.cio.com

At first glance, it looked like your typical networking event. Three hundred research scientists from packaged-food giant Mars gathered in a Las Vegas ballroom last June, wearing name tags and working the floor. But instead of discussing the latest in M&M packaging or pet food nutrition, the scientists were roaming the room like a band of eager salespeople. Their RFID-enabled name tags lit up each time they met someone they didn't know, and their eyes widened as they watched diagrams of their social networks form on giant screens at one end of the ballroom. The diagrams expanded like giant molecules each time a manager spoke with a person new to him or her. To encourage the networking, Mars promised prizes to those with the most contacts or "points." The scientists—a largely introverted group from separate divisions in Los Angeles and New Jersey—were moving in a blur of handshakes, nods and cards changing hands.

Welcome to social networking for geeks. This particular exercise followed a yearlong study of social networks in Mars's sprawling research and development division. Top executives there wanted to improve the company's ability to innovate and were concerned that their scientists weren't networking enough with outside colleagues. To find out who was working with whom and how scientists were getting new ideas, they decided to map the group's professional contacts using a process called social network analysis (SNA). In an online survey, R&D managers were asked to name the 15 people they work most closely with and whom they go to for advice, as well as further details of their professional network. Working with Rob Cross, assistant professor of business at the University of Virginia and SNA expert, the company was able to map the network and examine data on how the scientists work—and don't work—together.

John Helferich, senior R&D vice president for Masterfoods USA, says Mars has used the SNA results to sort out relationships among key researchers. The company has determined, for instance, which scientists were overburdened (too many people were going to them for help) and is working on eliminating the need to go to senior people to get approval for things. "This speeds up innovation," Helferich says.

Companies that have been frustrated by traditional knowledge management efforts, such as Mars, are increasingly looking for ways to find out how knowledge flows through their organizations. Looking at the company org chart, it turns out, often doesn't tell the real story about who holds influence, who gives the best advice and how employees are sharing information critical for success. This all takes on greater urgency as millions of baby boomers prepare to retire over the coming decade. Social network analysis provides a clear picture of the ways that far-flung employees and divisions are working together, and can help companies identify key experts in the organization.

"SNA identifies the go-to experts and can help companies find the technical knowledge within their organization needed to develop a new drug, launch a new product and stay ahead of the competition," says David DeLong, author of Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce and a researcher at MIT's AgeLab.

SNA isn't a replacement for traditional KM tools such as knowledge databases or portals, but it can provide companies with a starting point or blueprint for how best to proceed with KM initiatives. And SNA alone can't always provide crucial information about why people behave as they do, says Hal King, CEO of market research company King, Brown & Partners. "SNA as a KM tool is basically a monodimensional analysis that still needs to be supplemented by demographics, and most importantly, attitudes," says King. As a component to a larger KM strategy, however, SNA can help companies identify key leaders and then set up mechanisms—such as "communities of practice" or other groups—so that those leaders can pass on their knowledge to colleagues.

SNA Goes Corporate

Social network analysis got its start as a social theory developed by scientists in the 1930s who were exploring social patterns. One of those researchers, a New York City psychiatrist named Jacob Moreno, is often credited with inventing the "sociogram," a diagram of points and lines designed to illustrate relationships and social interactions among people. Scientists and mathematicians built on these ideas over several decades, investigating ways in which people get jobs, become leaders and develop friendships. They then mapped the flow of information through social networks. From the start, SNA has attracted philosophers, sociologists and statisticians looking to analyze human relationships in a mathematical and visual way.

According to Valdis Krebs, an SNA guru who worked with IBM and started his own SNA software company called Orgnet.com, SNA can be defined as "the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, or other information- or knowledge-processing entities."

Over the past several years, with help from Krebs and other SNA believers, the corporate world has been waking up to the uses for this once arcane social science. Some of the interest stems from diSAPpointment with efforts to build knowledge management databases that were largely ignored by employees. "We're seeing that companies want to have a picture of who the key knowledge brokers are in their organization," says Cross. "The rise of blogs, online support sites and social networking sites—such as Friendster and LinkedIn—have also helped raise SNA's profile."

"So many communications are electronic these days that it has become much easier to record who is talking to whom," says Stanley Wasserman, professor of sociology, psychology and statistics at Indiana University and chief scientist for Visible Path, a software company devoted to analyzing social networks. "It's a natural thing to examine these networks and try to make sense of them."

Companies interested in trying SNA can use software that falls into two basic categories: programs that track e-mail and other kinds of electronic communication, and programs that work from data collected via employee surveys. Such surveys typically ask employees to identify their top contacts within and outside the organization, as well as details about who provides good advice and how often they communicate. Companies may come up against some resistance from employees who may not want their networks mapped, but, as Mars was able to do, this resistance can be muted by promising confidentiality on the data supplied and by offering them versions of their "personal networks."

SNA can be a useful diagnostic tool in a wide variety of industries and professions, ranging from law firms to drug companies and financial services companies. But the practice is relatively new in the corporate arena, and finding ROI can be a challenge. "We use it to find out how we are connected," says Vic Gulas, chief people and knowledge officer for environmental and construction consultancy MWH Global. "The challenge is to link actual [company] performance to SNA." Still, there may be strategic and targeted uses in which SNA can make a difference. For example, pharmaceutical companies are using it to help identify key scientists and discover how they are developing ideas for new drugs; government agencies are using the technique to pinpoint top performers who may be close to retirement in order to quickly devise methods to transfer that knowledge; and investment banks are using it to find better ways of serving clients and clinching deals. "Lost knowledge is an invisible problem, so companies don't always see the threat," DeLong says. "SNA makes it visible."

Finding the Gaps

SNA can also make the lack of connections (or collaboration) painfully clear. Two years ago, IT executives at MWH Global looked around at their sprawling, decentralized company and knew they had to make some changes. Over the years, the Denver-based company had expanded through mergers to include 6,000 employees and 150 offices worldwide. Three separate IT organizations worked in different locations in groups dedicated to ERP, IT infrastructure and other large projects. The company decided to reorganize so that all 160 IT employees dedicated to servicing the company's internal IT needs reported to one location. The goal was to break down the silos and get people in Europe, Asia and the Americas talking to each other to improve service and create efficiencies.

But before this reorganization, Gulas, who spearheaded the IT centralization plan, decided to run an SNA to see how the groups were connected. The SNA was completed in September 2003, and the results, he says, clearly showed how the ERP group was cut off from the rest of IT, working in almost complete isolation. The analysis found that there was more collaboration between IT staff in Europe and Asia than within the 20-person ERP division. And because of this isolation, he says, there was little collaboration with users of the ERP software, and the ERP group got a reputation of being hard to work with. "People sometimes don't believe that they are disconnected from the rest of the organization, but in our case, a picture spoke a thousand words," Gulas says.

According to Cross, who helped Gulas map his social network with Web-based software, the technique can help companies such as MWH Global get a sense of who is best connected in the enterprise, as well as who is most overloaded. The results can be surprising. "People are finding disconnects across functional lines, physical distance and even between people working on key projects," says Cross, who is also coauthor of The Hidden Power of Social Networks. Some of these are to be expected, but others can cause real damage to an organization.

At Mars, the SNA project uncovered a lack of good communication between the snack food division in New Jersey and the food division in Los Angeles. "We found very few bridges between the two groups, and that lack of communication was leading to duplication of efforts in some areas," says Caroline Ruzicka, who was then group research and development manager for Masterfoods USA, a division of Mars, and has since left the company. Clear evidence of this lack of communication also spurred company efforts to fix the problem. Now, employees are expected to keep in touch with certain colleagues, and their performance reviews are based in part on successful networking.

Gulas has also taken steps to correct the problems highlighted by his SNA. Motivated in part by the disconnects it saw on the SNA diagrams, MWH has a plan to reorganize around functional groups instead of regional teams. For example, the company used to have people around the globe working on messaging technologies such as Lotus Domino. But these people were often working independently, with little knowledge of what their counterparts in other countries were doing. Now, there is a single manager overseeing the domain, directing the efforts on a worldwide basis.

In order to improve communication in the ERP group, MWH decided to break up the California-based team. The company was in the midst of upgrading the J.D. Edwards software and saw an opportunity to create cross-functional teams, combining people from ERP and other parts of IT, in order to break down barriers. Some of the ERP team members were assigned to the large upgrade project, which also included IT staff from other divisions.

A year after the first SNA, Gulas decided to complete another analysis to measure where progress had been made. The results showed that connectedness and communication improved in the IT group and that "more people knew who was doing what." What's more, the first SNA showed that average IT employees knew 29 people in the organization, while the second showed they knew 39.

As a result of the SNAs, Gulas has helped organize team-building sessions that brought people together from Europe and other parts of the organization who had never met before. He has used the SNA data to identify "strategic knowledge communities" in project management and client service management, which were largely unknown to senior staff. Gulas says his group is performing better after the SNA, and this improved collaboration has contributed to cost savings of about 8 percent. "It's an important tool to help us make sure that people are talking to each other," he says.

Danger: Disappearing Knowledge

If SNA is a good tool to use to find out whom people are going to for information, it can also help flag a potential problem if a lot of those "experts" are about to retire. That's a pressing problem given that, by 2010, more than half of all workers in the United States will be over 40—and that tens of millions of baby boomers turn 60 this year and will be contemplating retirement in the coming years. By mapping the social networks in their organizations, companies can find out ahead of time who has necessary knowledge and create ways of transferring it to younger employees before it's too late.

In one case, the central IT unit in the Canadian government, with a staff of 1,600, decided to do an SNA to establish which skills they should retain and develop. The IT group, which provides IT services to most of the Canadian government, made the move because they expected to lose 40 percent of senior managers to retirement within five years. Using SNA software from Knetmap, the agency was able to determine who had the most important knowledge and experience, and it was better equipped to start succession planning.

Even if succession planning isn't at the top of your agenda, data from an SNA can be used to help motivate your current staff. At Mars's Las Vegas meeting, the scientists were given a booklet mapping their own personal network as well as ideas on how to expand it. Later, they were encouraged to network outside the organization in order to increase possibilities for new ideas at the company. Now, networking has been built into the development and performance review process, and scientists have to set goals on expanding their networks.

Mars executives acknowledged that the data from SNAs can be sensitive, particularly when it comes to employee performance. Those who turn out to be highly connected are often high performers, and conversely, those with few connections often are not performing as well. "We looked at the outliers to figure out why they were isolated," Ruzicka says.

Initially, some of the scientists were reluctant to respond to the surveys. But because Mars officials were discreet with the results—Ruzicka and Helferich were the only ones who saw the results (about who was an outlier, for instance)—and because they didn't use the data in a punitive way, the scientists ended up embracing the project.

PEOPLE TEND TO think of a leader as someone who can set the agenda. But the real value of leadership lies in execution. The key difference between a great consultant and a great leader is in the ability to turn ideas into reality. What’s more, while ideas can be generated by an individual, execution can be accomplished only by a team that works together.

In my previous column, I talked about the key competencies for cios to be able to create a compelling business-technology proposition: Great pattern recognition, street smarts and technical savvy. An additional set of competencies is required to build a great team that is skilled and loves to get up in the morning and go to work. These competencies are more like qualities than intellectual or managerial traits. They include character, leadership development, passion and influencing skills. Although these qualities are seldom emphasized in executive performance objectives, I have found them to be the "secret sauce" of great leaders with whom I have worked over the years.

Character: Doing the Right Thing
Character has been described as ethical behavior, intellectual integrity, openness and honesty. These terms have come to the forefront over the past few years-the attention spawned by corporate excesses. Although Sarbanes-Oxley, corporate governance and ethical guidelines are top-of-mind these days, they are simply table stakes.
My definition of character is much more fundamental. It is what you do, not what you say. I’ve worked for and with many terrific leaders over the years in various corporate cultures. Some of these leaders were collaborative, others were directive; some were relaxed, others intense; some had "command presence," while others were quiet and calm.

As a young man, I found it very curious that I was attracted to so many diverse leadership styles. As the years went by, though, it beCAMe clear to me that style had little to do with it. The common ingredient all these leaders possessed was the substance of their character. No matter what the issue or the struggle or the possible personal gain or loss, they always-not just occasionally-did the right thing. Not only the right thing from a business or economic aspect, but the right thing including social and philosophical dimensions.

This consistency of character is hard to describe but easy to recognize. People will rally around leaders who do the right things consistently. They know they can count on their leaders to be open and honest at every fork in the road and to take a stand regardless of the personal risk. When people feel their leaders are erratic, political or detached from them, they will become cynical. They will generally do their work but won’t be committed. Their trust can only be built over time, so don’t become discouraged if people take a "show me" attitude.

Leadership Development: The Most Important Task
The second competency required for great execution is developing the leadership skills of your team. Organizations are seldom led by a single person, no matter how charismatic. The team at the top determines the environment and the culture. The team decides what gets rewarded, punished, recognized and ignored. Although they don’t run all of the plays, they call the plays.

For CIOs, it’s important to remember that the team at the top represents and reflects your character and agenda. Regardless of what you say you believe, who you choose for your IT leadership team speaks more loudly. So choosing and developing your leadership team is the single most important competency of a leader. This is a time-consuming task. Many great leaders talk about spending up to one-third of their time on leadership development. Since no one is perfect, everyone needs help and coaching.

Developing leaders means that you can articulate the requirements in a clear and thoughtful way. Without a basic framework of leadership skills, it’s hard to evaluate and give people feedback-and without constructive feedback, most people will not change and grow. When I was at PepsiCo, developing others’ skills was a major part of the life of an executive. The role models were plentiful, leadership competencies were well-known, feedback was continuous and growth was expected.

Unfortunately, most people deliver feedback only once a year in a performance evaluation, rather than conducting an ongoing structured development effort. I encourage you, as a leader, to make the investment in sustained leadership development. It will pay tremendous dividends and help give you and your IT organization leverage and continuity.

Passion: The Organizational Energy Level
Passion for the job is hard to manufacture, but when present, it is contagious. Enthusiasm from a leader enables people to sustain themselves through demanding times. The energy level of an organization is set at the top.

It’s hard to be great at something you don’t enjoy, and very few great things are accomplished without great passion. We see it in sports, communities, businesses and individuals. Don’t underestimate the value of passion.

Influence and Persuasion: Better than Power
CEOs, cfo target=_blank class=link_tag>CFOs, CIOs and other CXOs have inherent positional power. When I had just become CIO at Frito-Lay, I would sometimes say something without much thought. The next thing I knew, people were actually beginning to execute on one of those remarks-or worse, I had hurt someone with an offhand comment. I began to realize how much weight my positional power carried.

Executives tend to think it is much easier and less time-consuming to just tell their direct reports what to do. Part of leadership, however, lies in spending time to explain a directive, in giving employees perspective and in helping them understand the "why" behind the direction. This is influence-the flip side of positional power. It is easy to rely on positional power and forget the usefulness of influencing skills.

One caution on the use of influence: There’s a presumption that you have all the answers-and you will set out to persuade everyone else of that. But a great leader will create an involvement with his staff and a dialogue on decision making because the door swings both ways. It’s possible that you are wrong and your managers have a better idea. Understand, however, that an open dialogue doesn’t relieve you of the leadership responsibility to make a decision and move the team forward.

This group of competencies is what it takes to build a great team. As important as team-building skills are, though, they only help set up the game. In my next column, I will describe the competencies required to actually play the game.

Source: www.ITTOOLBOX.com

Source: www.ittoolbox.com

The Ideal And The Reality
A guide for building the most effective cio position possible, and a test to assess the state of your own role.

What makes a good CIO today? What should a CIO be responsible for? What are the best traits for the job? CIO has been posing these fundamental questions for nearly two decades. The answers have changed over time, but they’ve never been more critical than they are today. The CIO position is undergoing a bifurcation, with a growing gap between the strategic leaders who leverage IT to drive the business, and the stewards of data and systems whose purpose largely is to cost-manage what is perceived as a commodity. Because all types of CIOs turn to this publication to learn from their peers, the editors must respect a variety of needs. But if you ask us what the CIO ought to be, we have one answer: a strategic business leader.

The ideal CIO position—the one that will bring the most benefit to the most companies—is defined by a finite set of responsibilities, accountabilities and essential skills. We’ve collected these job elements into a simple, digestible document, formatted as a CIO "job spec" from a hypothetical company that understands the value of IT. The spec was developed by drawing upon data from many studies of the role, and from extensive input from CIOs and executive recruiters. It was refined and finalized jointly with the CIO Executive Council, a professional association of CIOs founded by CIO.

It’s one thing to know the ideal; it’s another to see where you stand against it. Our self-assessment test lets you see how the role in your company stacks up against our ideal. We hope that IT leaders, and the executives who hire them and shape company attitudes toward IT, will use both the specification and the test as guides for crafting, assessing and refining the CIO role.
 
Position Specification
Chief Information Officer
The Best Practices Co. Inc.

The Company A global company with a long history, the Best Practices Co. is committed to achieving and maintaining market leadership through a business strategy that emphasizes competitive differentiation and customer loyalty. The company recognizes that its employees are its most valuable assets and that knowledge and information are critical to its success.

The Position
The CIO drives the development and delivery of world-class systems and services, as well as a technology architecture that will enable our business strategy. The CIO is responsible for ensuring that our technology strategy converges and integrates with the strategy and goals of the corporation and its business units.

Reporting
The CIO is an integral member of the company’s executive committee, and as such participates in all committee tasks and responsibilities. In addition, the CIO is expected to form a strategic IT governance committee (inclusive of key business leaders) to prioritize business initiatives that leverage technology. The governance committee reports to the board of directors on critical issues relating to competitive advantage, operational risk, security and regulatory compliance.

The CIO reports directly to the CEO but also works closely with the executive leading day-to-day operations (for example, the president or COO). The CIO has two main constituencies: other executive peers and P&L unit leaders.

Staff
As appropriate for our size and structure, IT employees are dispersed within business units but report directly to the CIO’s IT organization. The CIO also oversees a core group of IT staff that provides cross-enterprise services. The CIO defines and executes an agile sourcing strategy, while maintaining a substantial core of IT managers and key employees internally.

Responsibilities
As head of the global IT organization, the CIO holds accountability and authority for all of the company’s IT aspects. These fall into three categories:

1. Core IT concerns—including infrastructure, architecture and standards-setting, application development and maintenance, integration and data integrity.

2. Business applications—the CIO must apply an architectural knowledge of applications at the enterprise and business unit levels and must show expertise with the mission-critical applications, while delegating day-to-day responsibilities to direct reports as befits our complex, heterogeneous organization.

3. Enterprisewide concerns—including business processes and workflows, security and privacy, risk management (including business continuity and compliance) and quality improvement. The CIO sets policies in collaboration with other executives as appropriate and delivers necessary tools and systems.

The CIO’s organization is responsible and accountable for selecting, approving and managing all major procured IT products and services, including anything that touches multiple business functions and processes or requires significant internal IT support. The CIO periodically reviews all major IT contracts entered into by the Best Practices Co. The CIO must manage the IT department in an efficient, cost-effective and transparent manner, benchmarking costs against commercial service providers. The CIO should apply best practices to IT project management, such as prototyping, tracking and post-implementation auditing. In major IT capital initiatives, the CIO or a designee partners with a business unit sponsor to establish a business case, and to share ownership and accountability for the project and its outcomes.
The CIO oversees the IT department’s formal leadership development program, working with HR to identify candidates for leadership tracks and succession planning, and to create a curriculum that emphasizes business and people skills.

The Candidate
To fulfill the many demands of the position, the CIO must have considerable years of diverse experience and a variety of skills related to managing technology, business and people.

Background/Experience Successful candidates will have a technology background, with experience in both infrastructure and applications development, complemented by demonstrated business knowledge, such as experience leading a P&L unit. Business knowledge must be relevant to the operational environment of our vertical industry or market.

The candidate will have demonstrated financial and accounting acumen. The CIO will also have a proven ability to prioritize competing demands.

The candidate must have substantial management experience in these categories:
• Large, distributed IT environments
• Global resource and project management
• Staffing and sourcing alternatives, including remote, contract and outsourced
• Matrixed organizational structure
• Crisis response and recovery

Skills
The CIO must be able to envision and articulate IT’s role in enabling and driving innovation, competitive differentiation, customer loyalty and efficiency for the company. Communication and interpersonal skills are essential—including the capacity to articulate the case for IT investments and alternatives in the language of business; the ability to shape and manage expectations of IT at all levels of the organization; and a facility in building effective relationships with corporate officers, function heads, business partners and suppliers.

Likewise, strong leadership and management skills are critically important—including the capacity for motivating IT employees; cultivated people skills (including the ability to sense and empathize with employee concerns); coaching, teaching and mentoring ability; a track record of hiring, developing and retaining critical talent and of building an effective management team.

Finally, the candidate’s personality and values must make a good fit with the culture and core principles of the Best Practices Co.

Performance Measures
The CIO’s job performance will be measured against achievements strategically important to the business, and performance objectives will be determined on that basis. IT operational excellence is a basic expectation.
CIO compensation will be tied to the demonstrated financial value of IT to the enterprise, as well as internal customer satisfaction goals.

It’s Never Too Late for Time Management
You can’t be a good manager until you learn to manage your own time

Leadership jobs should come with a warning label: "Beware of meaningless tasks masquerading as fundamental job duties." As a case in point, meet Sam. By looking at him, you wouldn’t guess that he is being managed by his job. He’s bright, aggressive and results-oriented with a track record of success. As a reward for his accomplishments, he’s recently been given a role that is ten times bigger in scale than his previous responsibilities. He arrives at the office at 7:00 and leaves at 8:00. His desk is a mess, his e-mails aren’t answered in a timely fashion and his calendar is booked solid. His wife and children miss him and his boss wants a strategy.

Sam’s a busy guy. Unfortunately, he’s too busy doing the wrong things to think much about the right things. Many of you are in the same untenable position as Sam - working too many hours and lacking the time to intervene with yourself and find a better way. Psychologists say that some people are chronic time abusers because of deep-seated needs for control or approval or fear of being evaluated. For others, the underlying psychological motive confounding good time management is tied to an uncertainty of trusting and acting on one’s own judgment.

While we all have our own personal neuroses, it’s my experience that most people don’t actively manage the content of their jobs because they have been lulled into the illusion of busyness by the steady drumbeat of e-mails, meetings, reports, presentations, budgets and telephone calls that constitute corporate life.

To gain control over your work (and personal) life, you have to gain control over your calendar. You must eliminate the meaningless distractions and focus your efforts where they count. Often, that’s around the areas of strategy-making, informal influence, effective delegation, and monitoring. Much like gaining control over your finances, managing your time requires understanding where your time is going, outlining your priorities, defining a time budget and plan, changing behavior and monitoring the results.

Where does the time go? Analyze your calendar over the past four to eight weeks and figure out where you spent your time. Sam, for instance, was spending 10 hours per week on managing two large projects, 10 hours discussing minor projects, and another 10 hours responding to emails and open-door "_drop-by" visits.

Know thyself. Identify how you want to allocate your time by answering the following questions: When and how much do I want to work, what do I want to achieve in my job, what activities are essential to my success and what activities do I disdain? These may sound pretty basic, but answering them requires a good understanding of your job, the existence of a long-term plan to drive your tactical objectives, and the self-awareness to know what you should keep and what you should delegate. If you are new to your job or don’t have a long-term plan, allocate time in your schedule to gain these insights. Sam’s goals included:
• Leave work by 6:30
• Exercise three times a week
• Meet with peers every two weeks
• Manage by walking around on a daily basis
• Coffee and lunch with senior customers and executives three times per week
• Devote a day a week for longer-term planning
• Devote no more than a day a month to develop and analyze operational and financial metrics
Do the math. Define a time budget by translating your goals into a daily and weekly time budget. Compare your budget to your calendar analysis to determine the "gap" you need to close. For example, Sam needs to reduce his overall workweek by 7.5 hours while finding an additional 4 hours to meet with peers and 8 hours for planning.

Make it so. Outline a plan to close the gap between the current and target time allocations. Sam was able to close his almost 20-hour gap by:
• Reducing his involvement on the major initiatives through appropriate delegation
• Consolidating minor project discussions into the existing weekly one-on-one meetings with his direct reports
• Reducing _drop-by visits by introducing brown bag lunches - thereby ensuring he was available to people, but on his schedule, not theirs
• Delegating the majority of e-mail to his assistant and coaching his staff to modify their e-mail usage
Start a support group. Implement and monitor the calendar changes by getting others involved with your plan. Your assistant and direct reports are essential participants because your plan will require that they take on tasks you can no longer afford to perform. Ensure that they understand their responsibilities, your expectations and the "right way" to manage you. Meet with your assistant on a weekly basis to review how you are doing against your time targets and modify upcoming calendars to keep the program on track.

Many people have difficulty managing through this process on their own, so they find a trusted advisor to help them understand the implications of the calendar analysis, challenge their thinking on high- and low-value activities, and hold them accountable for behavior changes. Sam and others who have been through this process understand that the payoff is worth the effort. By taking a hard look at their calendars and creating some targets, rules and discipline, they have quieted the drumbeats, learned new skills and created their own management rhythm to govern their day.

Source: www.ITtoolbox.com