I am not going to bore you by telling you why time management is important and all that. I suspect enough books have been written on this topic. (I always have wondered though how people focused on effective time management are supposed to read up all those books on effective time management J ). Instead, let me tell you a couple of observations on some of the executives that I have learnt from.

First – and this might surprise you – what to spend time on differs vastly from executive to executive (and I have filtered the ones that I consider are very successful). Some spend lot more time on understanding the details – some prefer to drive the strategy. Some spend more time with their directs, some spend less. Some consider spending time with employees after work improper time of their work and some make it a point to do so. Regardless of the usual story of “balance” and “do both” and all that, my observation is that the successful executives – knowingly or unknowingly choose what they want to spend time on. And usually this differs from one executive to another.

Second – and this will not surprise you – they are very disciplined about managing their time with the choices that they have made above. It is very easy to fill up one’s calendar – especially as you go up the hierarchy. There is always some crisis, there is always an important customer, there is always an important presentation and so on and so forth. The ones that I admire most have struck me with their ability to say “No” and question why they are getting involved in things that they should not.  That is undoubtedly a common thread between successful executives.

Third – and this is more empirical evidence than I have taken the time to observe in detail – it seems that some amount of ability to compartmentalize your time and thoughts is important to be able to succeed. Some of the best ones had an uncanny knack of being able to switch gears yet grasp the “linking points” when they existed.

Finally – there is no correlation as I have seen between success and how much time some of the best executives spend on work. There are the ones who are absolutely obsessed with spending as much time as they can on work related items and there are the ones who draw boundaries and stick to them. While it is very difficult to compare two executives since they tend to differ so much from one another, I can definitely make the following observation thinking thru all the great executives I got close to – customers, partners and employers: In the longer term, the differences they made to their companies was very little to do with how much time was spent but a lot more to do with what they did with their time.

I am sure you will have something to share with me on this…

The other day, I had a pretty engrossing breakfast meeting with a top executive of a large public company. It was engrossing because we started debating  – what turned out to be a really interesting –  topic. I would love to hear your views on this.

The central question was – What should be the perspective that a top executive in a company should have? That he/she is going to be in the company for a long time? Or that he/she is going to be around for some stipulated period of time (say 5-6 years)?

As we debated, we found a lot of pros and cons on both sides. Presumably, the executive has shown somewhere in the resume that he/she has held at least one job for a pretty long time (8-12 years, say). So, that, at least proves that he/she is not a job hopper or that he/she bailed out everytime the wind blew unfavorably.

After that what?

If the executive joins the company thinking “I will be here for 5-6 years. I need to bring in the maximum effect I possibly can in that time”, the advantage is that

(*) the executive will have a certain level of impatience that is required to continuously push the organization

(*) will have little sense of job protection and is therefore probably not going to be too shy of picking battles

(*) just like a doctor’s advise “you will die in 2 years” quickly sets priorities in one’s life, a sense of “end date” will push the executive to focus on the right priorities

On the other hand,

(*) the executive might come across as being “not loyal” to the company or the cause

Let’s take another executive who joins the company with the assumption he/she will be there for the long haul (or even retire from the company). Chances are that the executive

(*) will be more patient about bringing some larger changes which inherently take a long time (especially if they require culture change in the company)

(*) will be valued as loyal to the cause of the company and

(*) inherently will be interested in learning different aspects of the company (with the assumption that he/she will see a career path thru various different positions in the company)

On the flip side,

(*) a sense of job preservation may drive the executive to acquiesce/avoid uncomfortable decisions/situations

The truth is most executives overestimate their ability to drive what their “end date” will be (more often than not , I have seen companies drive this calendar for them). Still, it would be interesting to understand from the company and the individual’s point of view what would be the right strategy under what circumstances.

Most importantly, the question is what perspective should they have? In reality, they may land up staying longer or shorter depending upon many other variables.

In an interesting twist to the debate, we also wondered, if we were the CEO of the company, which kind of executives would we hire? For what kind of positions?

Thoughts?