Today’s Leader’s Lens comes from Dan Helfrich, the Chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP where leads a growing team of over 85,000 professionals around the world. He is a big believer in purpose-driven leadership and is an advocate for creating an inclusive culture that focuses on continuous innovation.
Here’s Dan
Imagine you are a new leader to a team or organization, and you want to have influence on the team’s direction and the organization’s growth. How do you best position yourself for creating that influence? It starts with how you choose to spend your time – from the people you intentionally engage with, the topics and issues you focus on, and how you structure that time for maximum impact is what can make a difference in the influence you are able to foster and the culture you are able to create.
As the Chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, how I spend my time has helped me lead our 85,000-person team over the past five years to build a transparent and diverse culture focused on helping our clients advance their organizations. If you are stepping into a new role or been in one for a while and want to refresh your approach, here’s three ways to rethink your time and its relationship to your influence.
1. The People You Spend Time With
Some leaders may think that spending most of their time with their leadership teams or direct reports is the best way to build influence. Those are small enough groups you can meet with, build relationships with, and they have influence within your organization given their roles. While knowing your leadership team is important, I argue that intentionally spending time with people from across your organization, especially those outside of the c-suite, can help you build even greater influence. The more conversation between you and team members from diverse areas of the business eventually creates a more coherent strategy that your team can get behind – because they helped build it.
Creating those conversations means two-way dialogue and soliciting unfiltered feedback and perspectives from team members outside of the corporate hierarchy. For me, that means spending time with teams across “all levels” – recent college grads, new but experienced hires, longtime experts in a particular field, professionals who “grew up” at Deloitte – all from different businesses and disciplines.
The critical part of these interactions, whether they are formal townhalls and project meetings or informal chats, is that I ask everyone I meet to send me feedback – texts, emails, calls. I want to keep the dialogue and perspectives flowing over time.
When I first came into the role, there was some skepticism that I really wanted feedback. Fast forward five years, I am proud that my teammates know that I want their perspectives. Do I agree with them all? No, of course not. Do I learn from them all? Unequivocally yes.
And one aspect to time management that many people overlook is metrics. My team helps me track and measure who I spend time with – have I spent time with one industry more than another, have I been talking with more recent hires than people who are 5-10 years in tenure? Am I over-indexing in a particular geography? If so, my team’s analysis helps us figure out where I need to adjust.
All this feedback informs our decisions. That way when we share why a certain decision is made, we can put it into context and can discuss it in a more informed, nuanced way. And after that decision is communicated, I keep asking and getting perspectives from across our teams on how that decision improved or didn’t improve the situation at hand and adjust over time.
2. What you spend your time on
While who you are spending time with is critical to your understanding of your people and culture, what you spend your time focusing on is equally important. Many leaders struggle with balancing the pressures of the present with the future – meaning positioning your organization for future growth. Present challenges cause you to react instead of act, to focus on the short-term instead of the long-term, to move quickly instead of strategically. They are not inherently bad. In certain moments, urgency and reaction are essential.
One reason why leaders tend to focus more on the present is because what’s near-term is often what’s most easily measured. It’s a lot easier to point to the scoreboard to show that you’re winning than to focus on thornier, longer-lead issues that don’t have a score (at least not yet).
Here’s a few ways to track and pay attention to whether you are too focused on the present versus the future:
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