读书笔记 - 7 Ways Managers Can Help Their Team Focus

 https://hbr.org/2023/01/7-ways-managers-can-help-their-team-focus

Inventory tasks and projects.

This is a discipline where common sense is not common practice. If your people don’t have a complete list of their commitments and projects, they can’t realistically prioritize. As a leader, hold people accountable for keeping current to-do lists and give them time each week to do a full weekly review of these commitments so they can stay in control.

Clarify and curate communication channels.

Most of our distraction is the result of a plethora of internal communication channels people must navigate in a typical workplace setting — and that’s not to mention actually processing the content in each channel. Clarify what each channel should be used for and the expectations around response times.

Normalize saying no.

Leaders need to create psychological safety around airing overwhelm and burnout. One brilliant example comes from Rich Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, a custom software development company. Rich understands the value of employees communicating their bandwidth. He not only encourages employees to speak up, he also normalizes and rewards the behavior.

When an employee says they don’t have bandwidth or are burned out, Rich teaches his project managers to smile and say, “Thank you for sharing that bad news with me.” Why? Here’s what Rich told us: “Most leaders want to quash bad news. But bad news doesn’t just go away. Instead, it permeates the culture, creates quality and morale issues, and leads to endless hours of overtime.” Normalize saying no by making it safe for employees to communicate their overwhelm. Reward the behavior by being deliberate in your reactions.

Make meetings meaningful.

Most people’s workdays are monopolized by meetings. Help employees stay focused by allowing them to decline meaningless meetings. To improve meeting efficacy, one manager we coached set a bold precedent. He said, “If someone invites you to a meeting without a clear agenda and reasons why you’re vital to the success of the meeting, you have my permission to decline it.” This manager put the onus back on the meeting creator (which was often himself) to show greater respect for others’ time. It also put employees in control of their days so they could focus on high-priority work.

Enable purposeful productivity.

During your weekly 1:1, don’t ask your people if they’re “keeping busy.” Rather, ask them if they have the time and space to do the work they need or want to be doing. If the answer is no, support them in addressing that gap. Perhaps they need help prioritizing their to-do lists or are being pulled into fringe projects and tasks and need your help getting removed from those requests. Maybe they need support to block out their calendar for focused work time or need to adjust their hours to work more seamlessly with their ability to focus. Find the gaps and close them.

Formalize focus.

Perhaps the easiest way to encourage focused work is to put it on the calendar. Create a team norm of protected work time. For example, tell the team to block out Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for focused work. During these hours, no one is allowed to schedule meetings, and others across the organization will see the employees are unavailable as well. But a word of warning: If you’re simply going to schedule over this blocked time, don’t block it in the first place. That will only lead to a mistrust of your calendar.

Respect boundaries.

When people say they’re in focused work mode as indicated by their status on team chat tools or their calendar, honor it. As their leader, you may feel these rules apply to everyone but you — but as soon as you interrupt this time, it sets the norm for everyone else to do the same. It sends the message that protected time is a myth and anyone is allowed to encroach on it.