Last week, in Time – The Infinite Resource, I wrote about the “time culture” in your organization. If your organization is like most, you keep close track of how employees spend money and no track of how they spend their time. Yet, management gurus like Peter Drucker, say that time is our most precious resource. If you can’t manage your time, you can’t manage anything.
In my post, I outlined three (of five) time management techniques that McKinsey recommends to make organizations more productive and less stressful. The basic trick is to treat time as a corporate resource rather than an individual resource. In other words, we should treat time essentially the same way as we treat money.
Here are the other two time techniques from the McKinsey article.
Refine the master calendar — to identify things that you can stop doing, you first need to identify (to yourself and others) that you are doing them. This often means a master calendar for key individuals and meetings. In fact, meetings are some of the biggest time wasters. (See the Travis Rule). Make them do double duty. If executives travel to a meeting, ask them to schedule other activities at the same time. Perhaps they can visit customers or schedule personnel evaluations on the same trip. McKinsey also suggests categorizing your meetings. Are they for: 1) reporting; 2) collaboration and coordination; 3) managing performance through course corrections; 4) making decisions? (Not approving decisions, but actually making them). McKinsey reports that, in top performing organizations, executive spend some 50% of their meeting time in decision-making meetings and only 10% in reporting meetings. Less efficient organizations often over-schedule reporting meetings and under-schedule decision-making meetings. By wasting time that also increases stress.
Provide high-quality administrative support – how often have I seen companies lay off relatively inexpensive clerical workers and then ask expensive executives to pick up the task? Far too often. That reduces the time efficiency of your most costly employees and adds to their stress. In McKinsey’s study, 85% of executives who manage their time effectively also report that they have excellent administrative support. Only 7% of the poor time manager report that they have excellent support.
It’s also interesting to note how effective time managers spend their time. According to McKinsey, the best managers are alone 24% of the time. That doesn’t mean they’re not communicating — they could be on the phone or e-mail — but it does mean that they’re not in meetings. They also spend 17% of their time in meetings with customers or prospects and another 10% in meetings with external stakeholders. Taking the three activities together, they spend 51% of their time not in internal management meetings. If you’re trying to organize your time more effectively, that seems like a good number to shoot for.
When effective time managers communicate with others, their preferred method is face-to-face meetings. Indeed, such meetings account for 38% of their communication time. This was a revelation to me. I’ve always believed that meeting face-to-face is the most effective way to communicate. But I never thought of them as time savers. Perhaps because face-to-face meetings do provide richer, more nuanced communications, they also save time in the long run. With richer communications, you make fewer errors — and correcting errors is a huge time sink.
I’ve noticed a pattern among my clients. Many of them are small software companies with good ideas that are growing rapidly. When they first call me, they have approximately 150 employees. I’ve often wondered, what is it that triggers a problem — and a call to an outsider — at 150 employees?
Then I discovered Dunbar’s number and the pattern started to make sense. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, is an expert on the social lives of monkeys. (Wouldn’t you love to have a job like that?) Dunbar made an interesting observation: Monkeys with small brains have small social circles. Monkeys with larger brains have larger social circles. Actually, it’s not total brain size — it’s the size of the neocortex, the area of the brain where we do our abstract reasoning. In Dunbar’s charts, you’ll find a distinct up-and-to-the-right relationship between the size of the neocortex (relative to the rest of the brain) and the size of the social group.
So, you might wonder, how does this affect the lives of large-brained primates known as humans? How big is our “natural” social group? Funny you should ask. Dunbar frames the question this way: what’s the largest number of people in which it’s possible for everyone to know each other and also to know how everyone relates to everyone else? The answer is slippery but it seems to be around 150 people (plus or minus, oh, say 30).
If you search the topic on the web, you’ll find a number of observers arguing for a higher number. (I didn’t find any arguing for a lower number). On the other hand, you’ll also find observers who claim that 150 occurs frequently and “naturally” in traditional societies. Apparently, the Roman Legions were divided into companies of 150 men. Church parishes in 18th century England contained 150 people. If your parish grew bigger, the bishop would campaign for an additional church.
How does Dunbar’s number affect organizations? Generally speaking, a smaller organization can be fairly loosey-goosey. We all know each other and we all know how we relate to each other. We don’t need a lot of structure. Above 150, however, organizations start to get more bureaucratic. According to Wikipedia, “…analysts assert that organizations with populations of people larger than Dunbar’s number … generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms, to maintain a stable, cohesive group.”
Maybe this is why companies call me when they reach about 150 employees. They’re growing up and they’re feeling the growing pains. It’s not as simple as it used to be. In fact, it’s getting rather complicated. I hope they keep calling me. I’m becoming a bit of a specialist.
You can find Dunbar’s original article here.