Don’t Manage Time, Invest it in People

When leading change, the last thing you want to do is manage your time. Instead, invest it in the people with potential to become change leaders themselves. The returns on your investment may surprise you.

Here are five tips to help get you started:

1. Hold yourself accountable for people development. Common comfort zones such as crunching numbers and formulating strategy have their place, but both are useless if you don't have leaders in place to execute. Therefore, hold yourself accountable for the people side of the equation, too. Recognize more pressing issues will always come up, so do whatever it takes to make finding and developing people a priority. Schedule time for building relationships into your calendar. Make a list or create a spreadsheet to track your progress if you must. Set goals for people development and hold yourself to them.

2. Identify your "diamonds-in-the-rough." You can't invest in your future change leaders if you don't know who they are. Some ‘diamonds' are obvious. Their talent and ability dazzles and stands out, but others may require energy and effort to unearth. This may be especially true if you work in a large organization where talented people lay buried within the bureaucracy. Visit places in your organization where you don't know as many people. Talk to at least one new person a day. Take the new guy or woman to lunch. When you visit remote sites, make it a point to meet people relevant to your line of business, then, follow up with those you meet.

3. Once you find them, don't delegate your ‘diamond' development. The savviest leaders take personal responsibility for helping people grow. Once you have identified the people you think could be future change leaders for your organization, get personally involved in their development.

4. Polish your gems by asking questions. The best leaders ask questions - lots of them. They don't invest much time in running around telling people what to do. In fact, they don't hire people who have to wait to be told what to do. Instead, they unleash talent by presenting problems and asking for ideas versus offering solutions. They understand their job is to lead, not do. They encourage people to think. They encourage people to act. They remove organizational roadblocks that hold talent back. They ask questions versus bark orders.

5. Explore ideas and build relationships beyond the boundaries of work. Engage people on a variety of topics beyond your common industry issues. Refining someone's leadership often means helping them look beyond the confines of their everyday world for novel solutions and product innovations they can bring back to it. Become emotionally invested, too. Spend time getting to know your future leaders. Find out what matters to them, inside and outside of work. Sometimes engaging in small talk can lead to big insights. If you want people to be there for you when the going gets tough, as it inevitably will when things change, you need to personally invest in them first.

SOURCE: Dr. Gary Bradt, Reprinted from RISMedia Real Estate News Service May 2007 with permission of RISMedia, Inc. www.rismedia.com, Copyright 2007. All rights reserved.