Johnny Boy Marketing
Great Work. On Time. No Hassles.
What Type of Bosses Do Employees Leave?
The answers to that are as varied as the types of horrible bosses, but it’s possible to roll those individual reasons into just a few bigger buckets. By far, the biggest bucket is the one filled with employees who have bosses who belong in intensive treatment for psychopathy. (Kidding. … Sort of.) But the next largest bucket are the employees of bosses who unwittingly create a chaotic, unsettled environment for their team.
Only a very special type of person thrives in constant chaos. The majority of people like to settle into their jobs and do their best work when there aren’t constant fires raging around them.
Which begs the question: How do leaders create an environment as devoid of infernos as possible?
Two words: Time management.
Few managers think they are bad at time management, but if you walk them through a simple exercise, you’ll find far more should be self-identifying as fire starters. This is by no means a new or original exercise, yet it’s one worth the time if you’re seeking to become a better leader.
The Four Quadrants
Make a big square. Then divide it in half each way. Boom. You have four quadrants. Look at you go, you artist you.
Now, label your quadrants.
- The top left quadrant should be “Important & Urgent.”
- The top right quadrant is “Important & Not Urgent.“
- The bottom left quadrant is “Not Important and Urgent.”
- The bottom right quadrant then is … you got this … “Not important and Not Urgent.”
Ready for the Truth Bomb? Here it is:
Your mission as a leader is to keep as many things out of the top left quadrant for you and your team as possible. Good leaders fill their days with stuff in the top right quadrant and fill their team’s time with things that, to the leader herself or himself, are in the bottom right quadrant.
Those who work for you as a leader? Their lives should be filled with as much stuff in your own personal top right quadrant as possible. This trickles down the organization until the question can be asked: “If it’s in the bottom right quadrant of the entry-level employee, why exactly are we spending any time doing it?” That doesn’t mean there’s a point where all bottom right stuff can be dumped. Some stuff isn’t important or urgent but someone still has to do it. Yet it’s a good thing to at least ask the question.
Where Managers Screw Up
Managers who never become effective leaders mess up this quadrant system in two main ways.
First, their own time management skills are so bad or their lack of forward-thinking is so poor that they fill their own lives with top left quadrant things — the important and urgent.
Employees feel this. Sometimes that’s just in the manager’s lack of availability or visibility to the team. Sometimes it’s in the frazzled vibe they give off. Most often it’s because a full top left quadrant for a manager (not a leader) is likely to overflow and dump all over the team.
That leads to resentful employees who now regularly have to deal with fires of the manager’s creation. Not only does this make their lives unnecessarily chaotic, it chips away at a manager’s authority. Employees don’t respect bosses who can’t manage their own time and fail to have good forward vision and who, in failing to do so, make their team’s lives less good.
Put another way, employees respect leaders who are on top of things and who are good at seeing what’s coming at them as far in advance as possible.
The second way bad managers mess this up is by holding onto far more bottom left and bottom right quadrant stuff — the not important but urgent and the not important and not urgent — than they should.
These are the managers who are bad delegators, and it leads to stuff eventually flowing upward into the dreaded top left quadrant.
Leaders delegate. That’s what their teams are for. What’s urgent but not important for a leader could be the daily work for an effective team member. What’s not important and not urgent to the leader could be the long-term project for the people working for her or it could be the thing that gets cut from everyone’s to-do list.
Managers who hold onto too much create chaos because they aren’t giving themselves enough time for top right quadrant stuff — the important and not urgent — and those things easily turn into top left quadrant stuff.
To Do: This Exercise
The exercise everyone should take, whether they have supervisory responsibilities or not, is to make a list of everything they have to do and are currently doing, and then place those things into one of the four quadrants.
A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, and a graph with a stuffed top left quadrant is a sign of bad time management. That trait in a manager is deadly when it comes to employee morale and turnover. Executives in charge of managers should be focused on those managers’ quadrant management. Here’s why:
Anyone who’s been in any business for any length of time knows that fires happen. Stuff that wasn’t in any quadrant suddenly appears and becomes top left stuff, not just for the leader but for the business. Effective time management — keeping as much stuff away from the top left quadrant as possible — leaves room for that inevitability. Employees whose own work days are not dominated by top left stuff have time and capacity to help a leader deal with the top left stuff that springs up.
This is a great thing. Successfully dealing with a top left fire as a team — with a leader who is able to remain calm under pressure because his or or her own top left quadrant isn’t stuffed — is a great bonding experience and amazing for employee morale. These are the things that lead to “Let’s go grab a beer together!” once it’s done.
Failing at this means you’re likely spending a lot of time interviewing candidates for open positions.
An Example
Here’s an abbreviated list of some of my own tasks at my day job right now.
- Weekly internal eNewsletter
- Monthly external eNewsletter
- Social media management
- Helpful Hints video production.
- Script writing for spokesperson video series
- Flyer management for account managers and graphic designers
- Drip campaign for water filters.
- Develop a reward system to encourage university participation.
- Write a review for first quarter objectives
- Develop second quarter objectives.
None of these things are top left things. So were my leader to have a fire fall in his lap today, there’s nothing stopping me from having the time and creative energy to help him out. Everything else on my plate can be put off another day if necessary.
Is that ideal? No. A bunch of those things take one step closer to the top left quadrant. But assuming my leader doesn’t continually have fires fall into his lap — which he shouldn’t if everyone’s following this system — then nothing will migrate over that line.
So for example, the weekly internal newsletter comes out every Thursday. I already know exactly what’s going to be in next Thursday’s (it’s Thursday as I write this) and the Thursday after that. I’ll have a draft for review by Monday morning at the latest.
Bad time management would tell me to do the internal newsletter on Wednesday. What happens if my leader has a fire that day? I’m stressed because I have to help him and still get the newsletter done. Or the newsletter doesn’t happen, and then the guys who depend on it for vital information that allows them to do their job more effectively don’t get that information. Suddenly, my bad time management is affecting a whole lot more people than just me.
Give the quadrant system a try. Talk to your HR department and have them do it for the entire organization. And let me know what your quadrants look like. I’m always interested to hear how other people prioritize their work!
John Agliata is a marketing professional with more than 30 years of communications experience. Reach him at johnagliata@gmail.com or (352) 226-5852.
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