The pressures to stay competitive in the market, motivate and retain staff, hit deadlines, and flex between the different work environments, requires leaders who are agile and inspirational.

Today, we have a combination of in-office, hybrid, or fully virtual work environments. The pressures to stay competitive in the market, motivate and retain staff, hit deadlines, and flex between the different work environments, requires leaders who are agile and inspirational.

What follows are tips that will increase your effectiveness as a leader, and create a culture of learning, growing, and enhanced contribution by focusing on three areas:

• New Practices for Time Management
• Facilitating More Productive Meetings
• Managing Remote Teams Effectively

Employ Best Practices for Time Management

Daily routines become more productive when you have an effective system in place for time management. If you are disciplined in your approach, by prioritizing the most urgent and important tasks, you and your team will have more opportunities to do the things that matter.

Dedication to time management processes across the organization becomes particularly important in a dispersed work environment.

According to Zippia, 82% of people do not have a time management system in place and the average worker spends 51% of their day on low to no-value tasks.

As a leader, you want to coach, mentor, and bring out the best in your team. To maximize potential, a good time management system is essential. Busy leaders who do not have time to foster good habits, will create a culture of inefficiency, missed deadlines, and burnout.

In the New Horizons course “Prioritizing Your Time Effectively” attendees will learn to improve focus, prioritize tasks, identify and avoid obstacles to staying on track, and develop time management tools and decision-making techniques to maximize daily results.

Tips to Foster Better Time Management

With the demands of today’s fast-paced challenges, mixed with meeting your team’s demands for support, coaching, and growth, working leaders can feel like they don’t have enough time in the day. Leaders need the time to be productive, too. Here are five tips to help your leaders and their teams to be more productive, even in the face of adversity.

• Encourage the use of productivity journals and project management documents to stay on top of tasks.
• At the end of each day, encourage team members to establish plans for the next day by prioritizing a to-do list.
• Allow for “focused work” or “do not disturb” time on calendars.
• Align project priorities against team members’ strengths, availability, and job roles.
• Aim for the team to complete three major tasks in a day.

Effective Meeting Facilitation

Facilitation is often referred to as the new cornerstone of management philosophy, which can enable any organization to make better decisions. Facilitation is a style of creating more efficient and effective meetings. It distributes leadership to all members of the group, instead of having one person as the only leader. This practice focuses on the needs of the group and leads people toward mutually agreed upon outcomes while encouraging participation, ownership, and creativity.

Facilitation is not only about the immediate task, but also about empowering a group or team to learn and problem-solve together so they can be more productive in the future. While empowering team members, facilitation also helps leaders from assuming too much responsibility, which enables them to focus on other top priorities. The best leaders are those who can press the team to produce best-in-class work, while still cultivating and nurturing authentic relationships.

In the New Horizons course “Critical Facilitation Skills for Leaders” attendees will learn how to apply techniques to encourage participation and reach consensus, deal constructively with disagreements or disruptions faster, strategically delegate initiatives for better workflow, and plan and hold more effective discussions.

Tips for Creating Effective Meeting Facilitation

1. Set the context of the meeting: what is the purpose, aa what do you hope to achieve, is there a decision to be made today.
2. Have an agenda for meetings, assign notetakers, and assign multiple people to be responsible for leading a portion of the meeting or a specific discussion topic.
3. Ask the team self-reflective questions to quickly generate meaningful solutions.
4. Build in time for round-robin opportunities and I shared whiteboard spaces, to spur more thought- provoking ideas.
5. Have a system ready should you need to solve a ass disagreement (i.e. voting system, mutual agreement, or consensus). Prepare a team charter to establish how you work together.
6. Encourage the team to allocate additional breakout time, if necessary, to further the discussions and brainstorming.

Overcome the Common Roadblocks of Managing a Remote Team

To create a healthy culture and maximize the full potential of your remote or virtual team, leaders must focus on three priorities:

• Relationship Management
• Communication Management
• Task Management

These priorities form the foundation for how the team will work together, how information is shared, and how issues are resolved. Maintaining connectivity and fostering the use of work sharing platforms, creating times to connect, along with adjusting your leadership style will be imperative to your success as a remote or hybrid team leader.

The goal is to build relationships and empower team members to increase productivity, positivity, and overall well-being. Through a combination of technology and flexible leadership skills, you can provide a regular flow of information, encourage the sharing of ideas, and foster creative problem-solving which, in turn, leads to increased trust, collaboration, and innovation.

The New Horizons course “Managing Remote and Virtual Teams” will teach attendees how to adapt management styles to successfully improve communication, foster better remote connections, and leverage communications technologies to maximize performance and impact.

5 Tips for managing remote teams

Working virtually offers unique advantages and challenges. How do you leverage the benefits while overcoming the drawbacks? Your management and leadership style will need to pivot and adjust to improve communication, foster connections, increase productivity, and develop highly successful remote and virtual teams. Here are some tips to help you.

1. Clarify responsibilities through written documentation.
2. Set up blocks of time to check in (not check up) on an employee's well-being, productivity, and job satisfaction.
3. Lead the team to develop meaningful rules of engagement when communicating.
4. Develop a process of cross-team communication to help you. to ensure everyone is informed of significant tasks and events.
5. Develop a process for regular feedback and encouragement.

Become a Transformational Leader with New Horizons

As a motivated professional, you recognize the importance of mastering relevant leadership competencies. Managing your time, perfecting your communication skills, honing your emotional intelligence, and mitigating conflict are just a few of the crucial skills that will propel you to becoming a transformational leader. New Horizons will help you to close any leadership gaps and move away from transactional leadership behaviors into a transformational leader style.

View all our leadership courses here

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About the author

Dr. Jason “Jay” Pugh is an award-winning Leadership & Development (L&D) Vice President, Author, and Facilitator and training experience, along with a Leadership from Robert Morris University. mind, heart, and soul.” In his personal life, Dr. Pugh is a father of four daughters (2 adopted, 2 biological, all loved)! His daughters and his wife April are his world.

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