Leading Under Pressure: Strategies to Overcome Time Poverty

Brief 

Understand the impact of time poverty on leadership and discover effective strategies to combat it, such as time travel, giving time, and pause time, while maintaining long-term perspective, attention, and well-being.

 

Insight

In today’s fast-paced professional climate, many leaders like Rachel, an Engineering Director, grapple with time poverty. Juggling the demands of strategic responsibilities and the immediate needs of their team, leaders often find themselves overwhelmed, compromising their long-term vision for short-term pressures.

This struggle is not confined to an individual. Leaders at prominent companies like Intuit, Pinterest, and Google have expressed similar sentiments, further intensified by the past few years’ social, political, and economic upheavals, including the pandemic.

The scarcity of time prompts leaders into a “tunneling” mode, causing them to overlook the important tasks for urgent ones. As a consequence, critical elements such as setting a vision, team restructuring, and stakeholder relationship building are neglected.

Another reaction to time poverty is multitasking, which, while seemingly productive, dilutes attention and affects productivity and creativity. Time poverty can also negatively impact well-being, with research revealing that a subjective feeling of time poverty could have a stronger detrimental effect than unemployment.

However, the issue is not insurmountable. A few unconventional strategies can alleviate the sense of time poverty, leading to effective leadership even amidst a busy schedule.

The concept of ‘time travel’ encourages leaders to imagine their future selves, allowing them to align current actions with their future aspirations. ‘Giving time’, contrary to intuition, suggests investing time in others, which can enhance our perception of time affluence.

Lastly, ‘pause time’ advocates taking small breaks throughout the day to recover, re-align goals, and prevent an automatic, reactionary work mode. These deliberate pauses can augment well-being and attention.In conclusion, great leadership demands a thoughtful balance of time and energy. These strategies can assist leaders in maintaining their long-term perspective, attention, and well-being while managing busy schedules and competing priorities.

 

Highlight

1. The scarcity of time prompts leaders into a “tunneling” mode, causing them to overlook the important tasks for urgent ones.
2. As a consequence, critical elements such as setting a vision, team restructuring, and stakeholder relationship building are neglected.
3. Lastly, ‘pause time’ advocates taking small breaks throughout the day to recover, re-align goals, and prevent an automatic, reactionary work mode

 

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Related Questions:

• How can we overcome time poverty?
• What is poverty of time?