Successful Weekends

I just finished reading What the Most Successful People Do on Weekends by Laura Vanderkam. In the book, Ms Vanderkam states that weekends are important to our lives and that we need to apply the serious attention to them that we apply to our work lives. She uses a word that many people don't like in terms of free time: planning. Her general point is this: plan ahead of time what you want to do in your weekends that you find fulfilling. By having a plan, you can spend your weekend doing the things that you enjoy instead of thinking on Saturday morning what you want to do. The things you do might be as exciting as going to a concert or going to the beach, or it might be as pedestrian as taking an afternoon nap.

In reading her book, I could identify my own successful weekends and those less so. The successful weekends are the ones I feel good about and look back on and smile. These are also the ones that my coworkers comment on, “David, you do such interesting things”. My less successful weekends are the ones where I look back and ask, “what happened to my weekend?” As hard as we work in our jobs, it only makes sense that we make the most of the time that is ours.

My last weekend fell into the successful category. My wife and I went to dinner at a new restaurant on Friday night where we spent quality time talking. On Saturday morning, we volunteered at a rowing event where I was also competing. On Saturday evening, I played boardgames with friends while my wife read at home. On Sunday, we went to my parents' house to celebrate my mother's birthday. Looking back on it, it was an action packed weekend, but I felt good going into work the next week. We had specifically planned the Saturday and Sunday events, and while we didn't specifically plan the Friday night dinner, we often do dinner dates on Fridays.

You can purchase Laura Vanderkam's eBook version of What the Most Successful People Do on Weekends on Amazon for $2.99. It is a good, quick read. Our weekends are precious. What are you doing this weekend?

The Best Use of My Time

It is annual performance review season at my workplace. That means that for the last two weeks I have been formally meeting with each of my direct reports and discussing with them what they accomplished in 2012, how they accomplished it, and what are the goals for 2013. The meetings have been going smoothly: some review highlight a lot of accomplishments and demonstrated strong traits, others describe opportunities for improvements and examples of behavior that needs to change in 2013.

What has made these meetings easier than they otherwise might be is that my direct reports are used to meeting with me. The most important way I spend my time as a supervisor is meeting with my employees. It takes a conscious effort to do this and it takes time. It takes a conscious effort because there are many other things going on competing for my time: communications from clients, planning meetings for different ongoing projects, review of performance data – the list goes on. Each is important in its own way, but I always feel I am making progress when I meet with my people.

My people are my conduit into knowing what is going on in the business. Working at a help desk, I have all sorts of technologies at my disposal that tell me how many calls and emails come in, how quickly they are resolved, and many other data points. Regularly meeting and talking to my employees informs me what challenges they are facing, what new techniques they have discovered, and provides context and background to data points I see in reports.

Now it took time to develop a level of trust with my employees for them to be open with me, but it is worth it. As an example, I was able to develop an incentive program for my people that rewarded them when they emulated a certain behavior that increased revenue. I learned of this model behavior from one of my employees who told me what he was doing (simply because he thought it was the right thing to do). I used his performance as a goal for others on the team, set up an incentive program, and rewarded those who emulated the his behavior and success. Over the course of three month, this created a 10% increase in my team's revenue – something that originated from my regular meetings with my employees!

My scheduled one on one meetings are also my way of guiding and coaching my employees to more productive practices. Making these meetings discussions and/or conversations gets them involved in understanding their own performance. With that understanding, they take more ownership of what they are doing. I can leverage the technology of phone call recordings, email transcripts, and metric reports to foster discussion with each of them. The fact that these meetings are regular reduces the stress of “going to meet with the supervisor”. People don't dread coming to my desk (they did at first, because they didn't know what to expect).

So I come back to annual performance review season. For my team, these reviews are just another set of meetings with me. The opportunities for improvement are not surprises and neither are the commendations of success. They are both things we have discussed many timesin our recurring meetings.

As a leader, if you find yourself unable to schedule regular meetings with your direct reports or find yourself canceling many of these meeting because of other demands on your time, ask yourself what is the best use of your time as a supervisor or manager. You will probably be better off keeping, or at least rescheduling, your one on one meeting with your employee. I know I have been.