Leaving for more money, better positions--employees are
leaving organizations these days for lighter workloads. Why? They want to
feel productive and that's tough to do when you're not getting your
work done. Jim Evers, former owner of The Training Development Corporation,
says, "Cut some of your roles." So let's help staff manage
themselves by cutting some of the roles they can leverage out. Cut and paste
this into your next staff communication:
Here's a workplace example:
Many people hate the task of writing a letter, memo, or report because
they have never learned a system for effectively doing that. Writing
required five steps:
- PLANNING -- includes doing any
research necessary and creating an outline.
- DRAFTING -- writing by following the
outline and without worrying about the finished product.
- REVISING -- reading the draft out
loud to yourself or to someone else and listening for the flow and
support of the ideas in the content and then making any content
changes necessary.
- EDITING -- correcting the grammar,
usage, and punctuation errors found, or getting someone to do this
for you.
- FINALIZING -- putting your piece
into an aesthetically reader friendly format.
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-
List ALL of your roles,
including ones that you don't think of as a role (for example, all your
reports, forms you complete, meetings you participate in, answering
phone time, commuting or reading the newspaper, or watching TV).
-
Decide which of these
are optional and which are required. (An optional role is one that you
can eliminate if you choose: a required role is one that you can't
eliminate.)
-
Take steps to eliminate
any optional roles that aren't furthering your goals.
-
Once having done that,
become more efficient with the roles you've chosen and with the roles
that are required. How?
-
Realize that every role
and decide which of these tasks are consuming a lot of your time.
-
Turn this task into a
SYSTEM of steps that from now on you pledge to do consciously and
systematically.
-
Be honest about any
weaknesses you may have in any of the steps within a given task. It is
those weaknesses that use up a lot of your allotted time.
-
Improve your skills in
this step/task or find someone else to assist you (trade, out-source,
delegate).
By breaking down the task
into steps, you can see where it is you need to invest much of your time.
What usually happens is that most people who hate to do a task do a lot of
stalling before getting to the task, which they see as, for example, WRITING
rather than seeing it as planning, drafting, revising, editing, finalizing. |
