Securing the Future - Essential Development for Senior Managers

Mitchell Phoenix are pleased to announce the next public dates for their sought-after senior management programme Securing the Future. The course will start in London from September 22nd and continue through October 20th, November 17th and December 15th.

What areas does the programme cover? Securing the Future develops managers’ abilities to respond effectively to meet the demands of the future business environment. The long-term goals of the organization are linked to day-to-day activity in a way that makes planning and decision-making a predictable and enhancing process. Each manager’s inseparable relationship with decision-making, responsibility, creativity and time usage is explored in the context of organizational responsiveness.

What gains can executives expect to make? Securing the Future focuses on the essential management activities of the Implementation of Strategy and Tactical Decision-Making. Since the decisions we make largely define our future (both long- and short-term), this essential and crucial skill lies at the heart of all business success and failure. As managers, our daily lives are a continuum of constant decision-making – the better these decisions are, the better the business future will be.

As businesspeople, we understand how critical it is to devote time to the important and essential tasks that we carry out. But how can we defend our time against the intrusions, interruptions and wastage caused by inefficient practices, processes and the poor behavior of others? Effective people know that time-usage is an attitude not a system. To gain strength and skill in applying correct principles to the use of your time requires future orientation, discipline and understanding. Securing the Future will provide the necessary input to help managers make gains in all three of the essential components of effective time usage.

Who should apply? All those who sit at the head of an organization, division or department and who face the challenge of growth and change; individuals who seek inspiration from ideas and have a bias for action; managers who wish to gain clarity on the potential they have and the potential they can release from their people and their organization.

The Real Secret of Time Management

What is the true value of time?

For businesspeople, the adage “time is money” rings as true as coins clinking into the till. Consultants, accountants and lawyers bill their time. If the time taken to manufacture a product is halved, profit margins increase. If a new product is brought to market quicker than a competitor, businesses gobble up market share. In business, wasting time means wasting a resource which could be spent more profitably.

But businesspeople who see time simply as money are missing half the picture. Anyone who gets frustrated sitting through endless unproductive meetings will know that poor time usage is highly demotivating. Anyone who has offered their staff the incentive of an extra day’s annual leave will know that time can be a reward. Anyone approaching retirement can appreciate that there is no difference between your time and your life – one is simply a measure of the other.

How highly is time valued in your organisation? Most businesspeople are diligent in guarding their time from external threats – we quickly cut off cold callers, throw junk mail straight in the bin, and duck invitations to conferences and events which will be unprofitable for us.

What about internally? How easy is it to encourage our colleagues to run meetings effectively, so that a group of expensive executives are not sat in their chairs for long hours making little progress? Who has had experience of others arriving late, being unprepared, and taking decisions without proper consultation, which then have to be amended, courses of action changed, whole project days lost, and so on? These are just some of the unprofitable behaviours which can eat away at arguably our most precious resource.

“It’s not enough for senior managers to improve their decision-making about their personal time usage,” says Kevin Yates, managing director of Mitchell Phoenix, “they also have to make decisions about what the attitude to time will be in their part of the business. Only if they create a culture in which time is valued will they truly reap the rewards. In other words, the real secret of effective time management is that it can’t only be an individual initiative – it has to be a group effort. You can be as decisive and creative about your personal time usage as you like, but as soon as you are forced to participate in a directionless two-hour meeting, all your good intentions have been scuppered.”

Hamsters on Wheels

“Time Management” is a myth. No matter how slowly time seemed to drag in the meeting you just attended, no matter how quickly a deadline appears to be thundering down on you, time passes at a constant rate. We cannot manage the passage of time any more than we can influence the phases of the moon.

What we can do is make decisions about how we fill the 24 hours we have in each day. Time management is really decision making on how we spend our time.

Yet most of the advice on time management available to businesses and individuals tacitly assumes that these decisions have already been made. Type “time management” into any search engine and scan the results. You will find tips on making to do lists, prioritising activities, and putting those activities in a diary. There is information on stopping procrastinating, filing documents so you can find them quickly and motivating yourself to press on and achieve your goals.

The question is how did you arrive at those goals? When you stop procrastinating, what exactly are you going to do? After all, the major decision is not to pursue a certain goal between three and five o’clock, but to work towards that goal at all. The available information on goal setting mainly revolves around how we should formulate and subsequently achieve them. In other words, traditional time management does not cover what you do, merely when you do it.

Imagine everybody in your department improves their time management. They choose goals, focus on them, and stick to their schedules scrupulously. Unless major decisions had been taken about the department’s strategic aims and how they will be distributed and achieved on a team and individual basis, everyone will simply get better at doing what they were already doing. The status quo will be maintained even more efficiently than before, like hamsters taking steroids so that they can run on their wheels for an extra hour every night.

In the second half of 2009 sound decisions around our time usage are more important than ever before. The recession has inspired a new more frugal attitude to what we really need: businesses have slashed costs and profligate practices, over-staffing is a thing of the past and in its place is a hard focus on what investment actually produces profit.

Kevin Yates, Managing Director of Mitchell Phoenix, sounds a warning note about our appetite for time management, “as we creep out of the recession, everyone is over-stretched. Clever diarising doesn’t help staff who are covering more than one position, or teams operating at half the strength they had two years ago. This is a problem for senior management. Only informed, strategic decisions about time usage from the top of organisations will create the conditions for more profitable behaviour throughout the business and ultimately secure the future.”