Sales Training Insight: Stop Viewing Tasks In Time Management Terms

By Paul Nolan

As published in: SalesForceXP - July-August 2011

Sales managers often complain about having a time management problem, but the reality, say Linda Hill and Kent Lineback, co-authors of "Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader" (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), is that even if you were a great delegator, you'd still struggle.  

"The reality is that management is fragmented and reactive by nature," the authors state. "The problem isn't you, and it's not a lack of time management skills. It's management itself."

Hill and Lineback say the most effective managers don't focus merely on managing their time better. They don't think about their work as comprising two different parts - handling unexpected, daily problems versus doing what they should do as bosses. Instead, they use the chaos - unplanned events, crises and obligations - to do managerial work using an approach the authors call "Prep-Do-Review."

Prep-Do-Review requires you to think of every activity not as one step - doing - but as three steps: preparing to act, acting, and reviewing the outcome.

Prep: Before you do anything, ask, "What am I going to do and why? What's my goal or purpose? How will I do it? Who else will be involved or affected?"

Do: Do what you prepared to do.

Review: When you're done, think about what you did and what happened. What did you learn? How would you do it differently next time? (Don't assume the right lesson is obvious; it often is not.)

 

Great managers use prep-do-review (whether they call it that or not) to convert every activity into a means of pursuing some management purpose - to make progress toward a goal, to develop someone, to reaffirm work standards, to strengthen bonds among members of their team, to model the behavior they want.