I was inside an elevator with several managers who were on their way to a time-management seminar I was facilitating.
Someone asked what the program was for that day.
“Time management,” the HR manager answered.
One manager said they had already attended a similar seminar. The speaker was famous. He was entertaining, impressive, and expensive. The company had paid around ₱350,000 for the session.
“Did it help?” the HR manager asked.
The managers praised the speaker. They remembered the stories and enjoyed the experience.
“But what changed?”
“Same, same,” they said. “We are still busy.”
The elevator opened. We walked toward the training room, but the question stayed with me.
The Speaker May Have Done His Job
It would be unfair to blame the speaker. I was not in the room during that earlier seminar. He may have delivered everything the company asked him to deliver.
The participants may have learned how to prioritize tasks, protect their calendars, delegate work, and avoid procrastination. They may have given the speaker excellent ratings. HR may have reported high attendance and active participation.
By the usual measures, the seminar worked.
But the work did not change.
This is the gap we often miss in leadership development. We measure what happened during the event because those things are easy to count. We count participants, completed activities, test scores, and smiling faces.
The organization, however, did not spend ₱350,000 to produce smiling faces. It spent the money because managers were too busy and something needed to change.
The company measured the event. Nobody followed the movement.
“Time Management” Is Not the Problem
Time management sounds like a problem, but it is only the name of a subject.
To find the real problem, we must ask what is making the managers busy.
Perhaps they attend meetings where nothing gets decided. Perhaps five people must approve a simple request. Perhaps different departments submit information at different times, forcing managers to wait and redo their reports.
Maybe the company keeps adding priorities without removing old ones. Maybe managers are doing work that should be delegated. Maybe they prepare reports nobody reads because no one has had the courage to stop asking for them.
None of these problems can be solved by a new planner.
A manager can learn to block two hours for focused work. But that block means little when the boss expects an immediate reply to every message. A supervisor can learn to prioritize, but prioritization becomes impossible when three executives call their projects the number-one priority.
Sometimes, people do not have a time-management problem. They have a work-design problem.
You cannot teach people to manage their way out of a system designed to keep them busy.
Start at the Other End
One of Amazon’s best-known leadership principles is Customer Obsession. Amazon says its leaders start with the customer and work backward. They do not begin with something they want to build and then search for a reason people should want it. They begin with the desired customer experience and determine what must be built to create it.
Leadership development needs the same reversal.
We usually begin with the program. We ask what topics to cover, which speaker to invite, how many hours to schedule, and what activities to include.
Only later do we ask what the program is supposed to accomplish.
We need to begin with the work instead. What should people be able to do differently? Where is the work getting stuck? What result must move?
Then we work backward.
Suppose managers submit reports late. A time-management seminar seems reasonable until we examine one actual report. We discover that three departments provide the required information at different times. Managers cannot complete the report until the last department sends its figures.
No productivity technique will make unavailable information arrive earlier.
The first solution is to fix the handoff. After that, we can determine whether a skill gap remains.
A Complete Program Can Still Miss the Problem
A complete time-management seminar may cover goal setting, prioritization, scheduling, delegation, interruptions, meetings, procrastination, and productive habits.
It looks valuable because it covers everything.
But completeness can deceive us.
The seminar may teach the whole subject while missing the specific reason people in that organization cannot finish important work. It gives a complete answer to the wrong question.
This happens because training titles make us feel that we already understand the problem. Someone requests accountability training, so we design a program about accountability. Someone requests coaching, so we teach coaching models. Someone requests strategic thinking, so we assemble frameworks about strategy.
We begin producing before we begin investigating.
A responsible doctor does not prescribe the largest collection of medicines. The doctor first looks for the cause. Leadership development should demand the same discipline.
Give the Training a Job to Do
Before approving another time-management seminar, ask for one recent incident.
What was the manager trying to complete? Where did the delay begin? What interrupted the work? Which information arrived late? Which approval took too long? What could have been removed, clarified, delegated, or decided sooner?
Follow the work from beginning to end.
You may discover that managers need to delegate recurring tasks. You may find that meetings must end with an owner and a decision. You may learn that leaders need a rule for choosing which requests deserve immediate attention.
Now the training has a job to do.
You no longer need to teach everything about time management. You need to help managers practice the few moves that can change what happens at work. You can then observe those moves and see whether they produced the result.
That is how I now approach leadership training that begins with real work. We do not begin by filling a calendar with programs. We begin by finding the moment where leadership must make a difference.
The managers in that elevator already knew that time was valuable. They did not need another person to tell them to use it wisely.
They needed someone to examine where their time was going, why the work kept returning, and what the organization had made unnecessarily difficult.
That is the question worth ₱350,000.
Not, “Was the speaker impressive?”
But, “What moved when the managers returned to work?”
About Jef Menguin
Jef Menguin is a leadership development consultant and motivational speaker. He created The Leader’s Game and Supervisor Factor, practical leadership-development systems that help organizations turn priorities into everyday leadership behavior.
Explore his work in leadership training, discover his motivational speaking programs, or connect with him on LinkedIn.