Being on time is contagious — as is being late. As a leader you need to be on your toes vs. your heels.
Being late happens to all of us, but when it’s a consistent theme, it really gets old. In fact, it’s one of my biggest pet peeves. If you can’t manage yourself, how in the world can you manage others?
Being on time is a critical habit to get right. When you’re not on time and others are impacted by it, it sets up a bad example and begins to reinforce that the leader is consistently late, so you can be, too.
If you think about it, when you’re late — you’re already behind.
Find more time
Being late might be a symptom of a larger cause. You might need to create areas of more time.
One area to examine “to find more time” is watching how many meetings you are in. As a company grows, the people who attend the various meetings will change as well. If you were the founder of the company, you shouldn’t be in all the meetings you were in when you first started the business.
You’ve got to work smarter and enable the associates to take on the tasks for which they were hired. This is a relearning of what your job is now, versus earlier in the company’s history.
Examine the meetings you are in and challenge yourself to ask why are you still in this meeting. Step back and make a change. Make sure that the team that’s in the meeting knows the “what” they’re solving for and “why.” From there, let them determine the “how.”
Tying in the team
How things should be built or solved is a great way to tie accountability to an outcome from the team defining them. The team should come up with the recommendation for the mechanics of how it should get it built and present their recommendation to you.
You might ask a few questions and/or ask them to revise the approach, iterate on it and then come back and review it together — a good way to get the desired outcome and the team owns the approach as they determined it.
This is great from a team dynamics perspective as well. It’ll demonstrate that you trust them to figure this out and begin to free up time that you need to solve for other things.
The meetings should now be starting on time, you’re getting control of your schedule and giving your team the opportunity to really drive in the areas they should.
Playing from your toes is much stronger and better for everyone involved.
Pamela Springer is the founding partner of SpringerNav LLC. A 20-year entrepreneurial executive focused on developing profitable strategies that scale, drive revenue and build cohesive teams, Pamela has received numerous honors. She was voted by Business Insider as one of 13 Powerful Women Running Today’s Biggest Startups in 2012 and ran a Top 100 most valuable digital media startup for three consecutive years.
