Case Study: Hugh

Hugh is a mid-career Team Lead in Procurement in the Finance industry in Melbourne. He is currently responsible for a team of eight. He plans to be an executive manager within two years, and he was looking for a high-performance coach to get him there.

At his last performance review, he realised he had a gap in time management and delegation – two essential core skills for a next-stage leadership position.

Hugh’s challenges are interrelated. He is a perfectionist, so he can’t bring himself to delegate tasks he knows he can do better. “It’s quicker to do it myself,” he said in our first meeting. But that means late nights and a work life that bleeds into his personal life.

To take that next step in leadership, Hugh needs to work out how he can trust others to complete work to a high standard, and find a working rhythm where he can be high achieving but still have time to re-energise with his family.

We started with time management. It’s such an underrated skill. For most managers, the working week is taken up with meetings. Modern executives spend an average of 23 hours a week in meetings, compared to less than 10 hours in the 1960s. So that’s where we started.

When we looked at Hugh’s calendar, we found he had so many meetings that he had little time to do the more demanding thinking work he needed to do. This had to happen at night when he was already tired from a long day, and he just wanted to spend time with his young family.

Armed after our first session with Stephen Covey’s Big Rocks, Eisenhower’s Urgency-Importance Matrix and Cal Newport’s Deep Work to read, Hugh spent the next two weeks streamlining his meetings.

He worked with his team to develop a new meeting cadence, one that included only the most productive meetings, and system for assessing whether an issue needed a meeting (or just an email).

Finally, he had meeting free time for the all-important deep work, and so did his team!

With time management sorted, we tackled delegation. It is impossible to move up the ladder without this critical skill. Holding on to work and getting involved in tactical deliverables are huge barriers to senior leadership.

The critical question was “If he suddenly had to take next week off, would the projects and priorities he was accountable for, continue in his absence.”

Over the next month, we worked out a way for Hugh to delegate work in a way that the team could meet his standard. We worked out the team’s individual skills and matched tasks to abilities.

He spent more time upfront to ensure everyone understood the tasks, the rationale behind them, and how they fitted into the bigger picture, and less on the technical details of how to complete the tasks. He introduced checkpoint meetings so he could monitor, support and guide their work as it developed.

In five sessions over four months, he mastered these new skills and embedded them into his usual way of working. He finally had his working week under control. And his team was happier too.

Hugh now uses the same approach to help his team take on new responsibilities to develop their careers.

If you are feeling blocked from performing at your potential, I’ll develop a tailored plan with you to identify your barriers to success and how to overcome them. Get in touch.