Most companies have chief marketing officers, chief financial officers, chief human resources and a host of other functional leaders backing the CEO. Is it time to add a chief time officer, responsible for how the organization deals with that precious resource?
How an organization deals with time is deeply connected to the strategy and operational priorities decreed by the C-suite and perhaps determines how successful you will be. But it’s rarely, if ever, on the table for discussion, other than in instinctive calls to do something fast.
British consultant Helen Beedham calls this lapse time blindness. It’s a collective failure to notice, acknowledge and debate our habits and choices about the way we spend working time. We accept without question that the way we have always treated time at work is the only way to treat it. We cling to the belief that time management is solely a matter for the individual.
We may complain to colleagues that we are swamped. We talk about milestones, deadlines, working hours, process design and efficiencies. But in her book The Future of Time she notes we talk far less about our priorities, choices and trade-offs regarding how we spend our time. Time isn’t collectively addressed.
We may gather data at the individual level or team level or for a very specific purpose, such as time spent cold calling prospects or on learning and development. But we don’t routinely analyze what we’re collectively spending our time on.
We start new initiatives but are far less likely to stop existing activities, as if time is endlessly elastic, which it isn’t. How often, she asks, have you heard a leader saying “I want you to stop spending time on X,” and explaining why? They prefer to announce new strategies and projects, piling one atop the other. More generally, we’re not good at admitting wasted time. It reflects badly on us as individuals. “So it can feel countercultural and career-limiting to even question why we are spending time on certain activities,” she says.
We may discuss the fact we’re short of money or people or customers but not time. Nor do we discuss our actual norms about time and work. For example, everything is always urgent. We need to therefore respond immediately, putting us in reactive mode, dealing with incoming demands day after day. We squander time, distracted by social media, constantly checking emails or procrastinating, figuring we’ll have time later, often after the regular work day. Part-time employees and working parents, because they have a hard stop to their work day, often are more productive.
Meetings dominate our life, and she describes our discipline around meeting management as “woeful.” Busy is considered good, idle bad – so reflection, stepping away for perspective, noodling ideas with others, and taking breaks are avoided. Our time matters more than our colleagues; we may be mindful about managing our own time but far less cognizant or caring about the impact of our choices on others.
“Our time blindness isn’t a harmless condition,” she stresses. “Like blind spots when driving, it can be downright dangerous.”
Some organizations rise above that blindness. They tend to be outcome obsessed, with a sharp focus on results and leaders modelling intelligent use of time. They have a core purpose and a sensible number of priorities. They view collective working time as a valuable corporate asset and proactively manage it. The operating premise is not: How much can we get done in the short term and how quickly? Instead, the ethos revolves around finding the most valuable way to spend time over the short, medium and long term.
In these organizations, she finds leaders demonstrating a deep appreciation of working time. They promote beliefs such as our time is inherently valuable; thinking time is precious; time spent building relationships is as valuable as time spent on tasks; we are all responsible for how we spend our time; your time is as important as my time – indeed, our time choices are interconnected. They accept that to make good time choices, there must be regular communication about those decisions with each other, reconsidering assumptions about time when necessary.
These time-focused organizations are also on a permanent quest to help staff focus on important work and do that efficiently. They minimize wasted time by stripping out duplication, reducing bureaucracy and streamlining processes. Such deliberate design – including dealing with distractions – should be part of the debate as we reimagine our workplaces for the postpandemic period. She cites McGill psychologist Daniel Levitin’s observation that to successfully ignore distractions we have to create systems that will encourage us to stick with the work at hand.
So maybe you need a chief time officer and time spent by the leadership team exploring how time collectively should be invested in the organization. She recommends defining what you mean by productive and every six months or so holding sessions where you re-evaluate whether you are spending time effectively on the right things. Or you could simply ignore her thinking, and continue to moan about how there’s never enough time, working longer hours … endlessly.
Cannonballs
- Organizations need to-don’t lists argues New Zealand consultant Suzi McAlpine. Focus on three to five strategic priorities – having 10 to 20 strategic priorities, as some companies do, is an oxymoron – and back that by listing what your folks can ditch or delay.
- The best managers are devoted students of character says consultant Art Petty, studying how people conduct themselves in various situations, so they can help them improve.
- The recent lawsuit in Britain by an environmental group against the directors of Shell for failing to properly prepare for the energy transition is a reminder that other boards must up their game. Ron Soonieus, director-in-residence at INSEAD, suggests establishing a dedicated sustainability committee, or attracting a respected sustainability heavyweight with a special assignment for that issue as a non-executive director, or, his favourite, integrating sustainability into all board committees to delve into the details.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
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Harvey Schachter