All businesses are in a race to move faster, but that doesn’t mean you should be running yourself ragged every day. When someone asked me recently how I balanced my own time as a CIO, I told him you have to have discipline around time management. It’s critical, because you have to understand what you can and can’t do as a human being.
As leaders, I believe we should try to pass that perspective on to colleagues and help them learn to manage their own time. First and foremost, you can help them prioritize all the things they have to do. Start with your company goals and objectives, and then boil them down to different themes that are relevant to IT.
Within those themes, come up with initiatives that are very important, that contribute to the success of the theme, and that ultimately contribute to the success of the company goal and objective.
From there, cascade those initiatives through the organization with a series of measures and metrics. In that way people can say, “Okay. This is really how it’s going to be measured, so this is what I focus on.”
One of our tag lines here within IT in the architecture group is: Don’t just work on things. Make sure you’re working on the right things. That is all predicated on knowing what the priorities are, knowing what the alignment is, and then communicating. And, I would say, helping people make those connections.
