Tracking goals with meetings

Being overwhelmed may be the new normal, but taking on too many responsibilities may be watering down our overall impact.

Bring back your focus to what matters most. Work on the projects that are the real game-changers. Delegate the discretionary work and eliminate unnecessary meetings.

Running a thriving business means understanding how to organize your work by importance and knowing when to delegate.

• Find your sweet spot. When you consider taking on a project, see if it aligns with your purpose and the organization's broader goals. Ask yourself if you're the right person with the right skillset.
• Automate. As your company grows, use automation tools for low-level work. It also allows your employees to make more meaningful contributions.
• Set boundaries. Learn to say no to low-level tasks. Set your own limits about what you'll take on.

The goal of an effective 1:1 is not an update from your direct report or for you to lay down some instructions. It's a conversation. It's a chance to hear about your direct reports' ideas for your product, their career goals, and possibly their opinion of their performance.

Keep a list of three potential topics ready for discussion. When they say they have nothing to discuss, you can jumpstart the conversation with one of your items.

Your most precious resource is your own time and energy. When you spend it on your team, it helps build healthy relationships.

Your job as a manager isn't to give advice or 'save the day.'' It's to empower your reports to find the answer themselves. If you want to understand what's going on, ask. Let her lead the conversation while you listen and probe.

Creating motivation and making your team feel appreciated is a critical part of long-term productivity.

Encourage your team to keep gratitude journals - writing down a couple of sentences about what you are currently grateful for a couple of times a week. This practice improves productivity by increasing happiness.

If people can't focus on their work, they are less effective in areas like collaboration and learning, and they are less likely to be satisfied with their jobs.

Workplaces with a balance between individual focus and collaboration are more innovative, creative and encouraging.

Intentionally design for the same interactions that would otherwise happen if people were in the office.

• Culture is what naturally happens when a group of people gets together for any period.
• A great culture happens with intentional design and influence. It's the reason you should make your company's mission, vision, values, operating principles, standards, and agreements visible. 
• Culture is experienced through emotions, including how your employees feel about the company, you, other leaders, and peers. That feeling is developed through human interaction at the water cooler, kitchen, or hallway conversations.

Your people need to feel your presence as a leader as they will have fewer opportunities to see you face to face when they work remotely.

• Regularly show up in a variety of forms that can include weekly video meetings, periodic company-wide emails, or presence in public channels.
• Err on the side of more communication rather than less.

Your objective defined in a single sentence should be:

• Qualitative and inspirational. The objective is designed to get people jumping out of bed in the morning with excitement.
• Time-bound. You want it to be a clear sprint toward a goal, doable in a month or a quarter.
• Actionable by the team independently. Your Objective has to be truly yours, and you can’t have the excuse of “marketing didn’t market it.”

Key results take all that inspirational language and quantifies it.

You create them by asking a simple question “how would we know if we met our objective?”

Every time you take a risk in your business, you face the possibility of failure.

Improv, a theatrical exercise where you improvise a scene with a group of people, essentially mirrors that experience. You have to get used to change fast.

If you work behind a closed door, this will be a great exercise for stepping outside your safety zone.

You might have a less productive week, but seeing your workplace from a different perspective will foster an open mind and encourage collaboration.

Instead of increasing the number of productive hours, we can focus on getting the right things done in a timely way. We also need to restore and balance ourselves, our colleagues, family and environment, instead of a neurotic or pathological focus on deadlines.

Find out what's truly important to us and use the finite resource of time wisely.

Phantom workload looks like real work but results in massive unproductivity and even conflict in an organization. The pressure to meet unrealistic expectations causes a vicious cycle of further workload.

Leaders need to take a hard look at what is being avoided or not addressed. Facing difficult tasks that were 'swept under the carpet' earlier strengthens them further to make hard decisions and face difficult people and situations.