Effective Management - Choices in Time Usage

Focus: Management Success, Time Management

Audio: 1 min. 49 secs.

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Being Effective in Management
wc: 599
Transcript - print now

This lesson is in compliment to others on the topic of  time and priority management. In other audios in the library, we talk about the principle of being efficient. And we talk about the differences between being efficient and being effective. 

In this audio, we’re going to talk about being effective in the context of being a manager. You know, it’s amazing how you can get a lot of things done, and then, have essential elements of our job performance either fall through the cracks or not get the attention that it actually needs. And not giving attention to those things actually takes up more time in the long run and that speaks to being effective. 

Here’s an example. Let’s say that a manager has a couple of members of their team that are not performing up to par. And instead of that manager taking the time to coach them, to give them attention, to help them in their performance, they, in fact, are sort of left dangling themselves. Yet that manager’s still very busy and getting a lot of things done. 

In the long run, however, that’s going to cost the manager time because, let’s say, the manager does take the time to coach those employees, to help them improve their performance, or even find out that they’re not going to improve their performance. That is really being more effective; taking the time to do that though it might not be an immediate pressing issue. 

So really the challenge of being effective is that sometimes the things that feel very urgent are keeping us from doing the things that we need to do to help us be more effective. 

Effective is then defined as doing the best things at the best times. Or the right things at the right time so that you can, in an overall strategy, save time, improve your performance, and be able to get the outcomes that you want as well. So that’s a distinction between being efficient and being effective.