CEO of Deloitte Consulting – How You Choose to Spend Your Time Impacts Your Influence as a Leader – Jacob Morgan | Best-Selling Author, Speaker, & Futurist | Leadership | Future of Work

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If you’re a Chief Human Resources or Chief People Officer, then you can request to join a brand new community I put together called Future Of Work Leaders which focuses on the future of work and employee experience. Join leaders from Tractor Supply, Johnson & Johnson, Lego, Dow, Northrop Grumman and many others. We come together virtually each month and once a year in-person to tackle big themes that go beyond traditional HR.

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:

Timelines: If a project has a multi-year timeline, a monthly cadence of reporting probably doesn’t make sense.  The monthly progress can be hard to measure or there might not be meaningful data yet, so you can push back against that frequent of a cadence – which helps you focus less on the near-term and more of the actual progress of the long-term. Instead of monthly meetings or reporting, ask for quarterly reviews or as-needed updates from the team related to a key milestone.

Meeting Agendas: Evaluate every leadership team agenda or “town hall” conversation to see how close to 50/50 the allocation of time is spent on shorter-term/operational topics versus longer-term/strategic ones. If the latter is drowned out by the former, make the adjustment.

Calendar Metrics: Use your calendar app to the maximum potential and give your team – chief of staff, administrative assistant, or other team member – a clear idea of your time goals. And then use those calendar app features to help you track your time. Is most of your time spent in meetings about the burning issues of the day? Are you getting time with the people who are helping you advance, invest, and build your team’s culture or organization’s future? Your calendar can give you that insight and help you strike a better balance.

3. How you structure time with your teams

In the time you spend with your teams, what does that look and feel like? Are teams presenting you with 30 minutes of context setting in a formal presentation without much time left for decision or action? Are the teams spending more time prepping for that internal presentation in which half of the slides never get spoken to?

To me, a good pre-read (sent with enough time to read and digest) followed by a 15-minute huddle focused on key questions or next steps is more impactful and helps you and your organization be more decisive and action-oriented. And that pre-read? Let’s cut the logos, unnecessary formatting and save our teams some time as well.

Most of my meetings are spent in these briefer, huddle-style formats. Starting that habit can be as simple as changing the default setting on your calendar app to 15 minutes instead of the default 30. Asking for meeting attendees to be prepped for recommended next steps is another key ingredient.

In terms of a longer meeting format or townhall with your teams, I like to plan time for unplanned Q&A. Given the size of our Consulting team, I use the Q&A feature, scroll through live on the call and pick questions from the team – (and I don’t pick the easy ones). I know many leaders who aren’t comfortable with that – they want safe questions to answer in front of an audience. But to me, an audience can always tell when a question is planted – there’s something in the energy, in the exchange that is lacking, and your team can tell.

Being able to be authentic in the moment and learning how to get comfortable in the uncomfortable not only strengthens you as a leader, but it makes you more human. By being open to unscripted moments and asking for feedback on your perspective, you get the dialogue going and get your team invested in exploring the issues and the outcomes. Yes, the questions will be tough, and you won’t always get it right, but there’s more grace and understanding that comes in authentic moments.

This connection between influence and time spent may feel counterintuitive. Yes, it is about time, but it’s also about being human in how you engage with people, being authentic in how you communicate and being future focused. To me, those are the elements to being an influential leader, and how you spend your time will help you build that influence.

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If you’re a Chief Human Resources or Chief People Officer, then you can request to join a brand new community I put together called Future Of Work Leaders which focuses on the future of work and employee experience. Join leaders from Tractor Supply, Johnson & Johnson, Lego, Dow, Northrop Grumman and many others. We come together virtually each month and once a year in-person to tackle big themes that go beyond traditional HR.