By Andy Burrows
Iâm continuing a series where Iâm trying to show the power of some key âsoftâ skills that Finance business partners should learn, and CFOs should have.
Today, I hope to show you how to make time to focus on whatâs important. This is not simply prioritisation. And whilst you may feel that youâve heard most of it before, Iâm going to finish up by showing you why your prioritisation is probably not working in your daily organisation.
What Iâve said so far is that the core of the behavioural skills you need are all about âpersonal effectivenessâ. If you canât lead yourself personally, how can you lead or influence others as a Finance business partner or CFO?
There is a real difference between average Finance business partners and the high performing, highly effective Finance business partners and CFOs.
Average Finance business partners continually complain about not having time to do business partnering because theyâve got too much number crunching to do. On the other hand, the highly effective Finance business partners seem to have no trouble having the right conversations and gaining the confidence of the business without breaking a sweat! They even have time to come on LinkedIn and tell you about their experiences!
And Iâve been saying that the secret â because I havenât seen many people saying this until now â is in learning the skills that make up âpersonal effectivenessâ. Thatâs the starting point.
The first thing you need is the skill of the âcan doâ attitude â an understanding that you are able to make choices and effect change in your life.
And in my last article I went on to talk about the skill of setting destination and direction.
The skill I want to talk about today is all about being able to take action towards your destination.
I mentioned earlier the Finance business partners who complain of not having enough time to do the business partnering part of their job.
And, to be honest, itâs a general problem â not having enough time I mean. Thatâs what we find our ourselves saying quite a lot. âI wish I had time for xyz!â
But hereâs the thing. My wife has this one worked out! She says to me, âwhy didnât you do xyz?â
I reply, âOh, I didnât have time!â
And then she nails it â âitâs not that you didnât have time. You just chose to do something else instead!â
That can be quite embarrassing when you chose to play video games rather than do one of the many household jobs that have needed doing for weeks! âDidnât have timeâ, doesnât really come across well then!
But what it shows is that the challenge isnât really time management. Itâs self-management. Time needs no management. It just happens. What you choose to do in the time, and your efficiency and effectiveness in using time, is the issue.
One of the most useful ways to think is in terms of a matrix that looks like this:
(By the way, this is not an âEisenhower Matrixâ. Iâm taking this version from Stephen Coveyâs awesome classic, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.)
The two factors that can be used to describe an activity are urgency and importance.
Urgent things require immediate attention, whether theyâre important or not. The person standing at your desk wanting to ask you a question, the phone ringing, some emails, text messages.
Importance, on the other hand, is to do with where it fits with what youâre trying to achieve. If something isnât important, itâs because it doesnât get you anywhere that you value as a worthwhile destination, when all is said and done, urgent or not.
I think weâve all experienced times when we spend most of our time in the first quadrant, where things are urgent and important. This is crisis management and, if it isnât rectified, leads to stress, firefighting, more firefighting, and eventually burnout.
When weâre predominantly in quadrant 1, we sometimes come out for a break into quadrant 4, because it gives us the feeling of doing stuff without the pressure. We wouldnât dare touch quadrant 2, because it feels too difficult.
Some people spend a lot of time in quadrant 3, thinking theyâre in quadrant 1! In reality, theyâre probably just spending a lot of time in other peopleâs meetings, answering text messages, emails and phones in between (and often during the meetings too). Theyâre reactive, letting other people determine their priorities. They donât plan much, and often feel out of control and like a victim.
People who spend their time mainly in quadrants 3 and 4 (i.e. doing unimportant activities) are on the road to nowhere!... or being fired!
Quadrant 2 is the key to effective self-management.
Unfortunately, Iâve come across people who seem to think that just because they can use the terminology it means theyâre being as effective in their self- and team-management as they can. âYeah I know your project is important to the department, but we need to get through all our urgent and important stuff before we can get to your important non-urgent stuff.â
But it doesnât work like that.
Effective people spend most of their time intentionally on quadrant 2 activities, and minimise the size and impact of quadrant 1 through good planning and risk management.
Thatâs the point. These activities are not pressing on you. If youâre going to do them, you have deliberately start them and deliberately continue and complete them â by choice, and act of independent will!
How do effective people schedule their time to make sure they give attention to the much-neglected quadrant 2 (important but not urgent)?
What Iâve learnt is to spend time at the start of every week planning the week (not just at the start of each day). And, yes, it takes self-discipline to set aside that time. But there are 96 hours in a week when youâre not asleep. If you canât find 0.25 to 0.50 of an hour each week to make your week more productive and make yourself more effective, then you might as well give up!!
And thereâs a two-stage process:
Obviously, there are many factors involved in finding appropriate times for various types of quadrant 2 activities. You may need a quiet place for some activities, a phone line for others, the internet for others, just a laptop for others. You may want to minimise travel, or there may be things you can best schedule into travel time (audio books, podcasts, etc).
Thinking about all this in advance makes it more likely you will actually do it.
But you still have to be flexible. Sometimes days donât turn out as planned, and maybe you have to change your schedule. Itâs not the end of the world.
As Stephen Covey says, âThe key is not to prioritize whatâs on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.â
If youâre stuck in the vicious circle of everything being urgent, and youâre constantly working long hours with tight deadlines, one idea to break out of the cycle and take control is to identify the quadrant 3 and 4 activities (i.e. non-important) you may be doing. Then you can start to replace that with spending some time focusing on quadrant 2.
As you spend more time on the forward-thinking activities in quadrant 2, the urgent crises of quadrant 1 should become less frequent, and you will spend more of your time achieving the important results you really want to, in keeping with your mission, your values and vision.
But what this really highlights is that in order to do the important things you really feel will make a difference in your life, and in your work, you have to choose to say ânoâ to other activities, which some people may consider urgent (like answering their text messages and phonecalls).
Well, you can see that this is all common-sense stuff. Itâs not particular to the Finance audience I regularly address. Itâs not particular to Finance leadership, CFOs or Finance business partners.
It is a critical skill to learn, though, as Finance professionals, Finance business partners and Finance leaders.
Itâs not uncommon, however, to be dissatisfied with the results. Maybe youâve tried such things and think youâve failed? And I think we have a particular lesson to learn here as Finance people.
You see, most people think that if this technique doesnât work well for them, thereâs a problem with the way theyâre doing it. Perhaps they lack the self-discipline? Perhaps they are too weak to say ânoâ to the non-important stuff?
But, in actual fact, it turns out on reflection, to be the fact that what is driving us and motivating us is not strong enough. We have not reflected deeply enough on the values and purpose that give us the motivation that leads to our personal mission â the destination and direction I was talking about in my last article.
And itâs the congruence of our weekly goals with our personal mission and values that gives those goals importance to us.
And I made the point in that article that we need to be self-critical when it comes to our motivation.
For example, if your personal mission is to make your business partners happy, then youâre not going to spend much time in quadrant 2, because youâre making your goals and priorities depend on the reaction of others. Youâll be forever reacting to their needs and spend all of your time in quadrants 1 and 3.
But if you were to rephrase that in terms of being a good Finance business partner (the focus here is on you and what you can control, rather than on external responses you canât control), then youâd be able to say ânoâ to the âurgentâ quadrant 3 requests of even your non-Finance contacts so that you can be a better Finance business partner.
The particular lesson I want Finance business partners, CFOs, Finance leaders, in fact anyone in Finance, to learn, however, is to spend more time on mission, vision, purpose and values â the destination and direction from my last article.
If we want the power to be able to say ânoâ to competing priorities and focus on the important, then we need a âbigger âyesâ burning insideâ (Stephen Covey).
We have to really believe in our principles and our values and the source of our motivation.
And the reason I particularly direct this at Finance leaders is because weâre not very good at it!
From my experience with CFOs and senior Finance leadership teams, we really do just pay lip service to purpose, vision and mission.
We assume that because weâre accountants we must have been somehow brainwashed by our qualifying bodies to know what weâre all about in our work in business! Or we write it off as âconsultant-speakâ! Or we roll the eyes in a way that says, âthatâs namby pamby stuff for people in Marketing. Fine for them. Weâll just get on with our work!â
We have to change this culture, and become purpose-driven. We have to develop the skill to set the destination and direction, as well as the skill to organise ourselves to follow the direction and reach the destination.
We cannot afford to neglect the âsoftâ skills that start with âpersonal effectivenessâ if we want to be good Finance business partners, and to become the great leaders that CFOs are supposed to be!
Next in the series, we move on to look at relationship building skills.
Finance leadership and influence starts with this one simple thing
Setting the destination and direction â a big CFO skill
If you want to be CFO, develop these three skills
I've put all the articles from this series into a book which you can buy on Amazon ... but you can also get the pdf download version of the book free by clicking the link below:
An introduction to personal effectiveness for CFOs and Finance professionals
Consider also the following:
7-Day Finance business partnering email challenge
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