I’ve always been the type of person to get the hard things out of the way first. So I’m doing that now. This first portion of the roadmap is the hardest and the most important. It is all about getting your priorities straight.

Time management is a myth. Everyone gets the same amount of time, the same 24 hours each day. It is how you use it that matters. How much thought have you put into each minute of every day? Yes, every minute. Because each of them count.

The first thing that you need to do is figure this out. The first activity in this roadmap is a time study. I want you to account for your time, all of it, for at least a week. I’m giving you a nifty little tool to keep track of your time. Time Study

Be honest with yourself, if you spend 2 hours a day playing Candy Crush, write it down. Unlike other time studies might have you do this without really being cognizant of what you’re doing or actively making changes but not this one. I want you to record it, pay attention to it and throughout the week, make changes so that you are spending time on the things that you should be spending time on.

What’s that you say? How do I know what to spend my time on? Well, thanks for asking!

Tool # 2 is a Priority Matrix to help you figure out what you should be actually spending your time on. I didn’t create it, I can’t take credit for it. It was actually created by Dwight Eisenhower, who was a president here in the US in the 50’s.  The 34^th president came up with a really good way of figuring out what should be a priority in your life. Priority Matrix

The way that this tool works is you put everything that you feel like you have to get done in a box. Do it now, Get this scheduled, Get someone else to do it, and Stop doing this. When you put things in your boxes, think about how impactful the task is and how much effort you’ll have to put into making it happen.

Last thing with prioritizing your time.  Time for tool #3.  I’m giving you a productivity planner that you can use every day to help stay on track. Daily Productivity Planner

WHEW! This was a lot for the first part of the journey but I promise, doing this work is worth it!!

Time Study

Priority Matrix

Daily Productivity Planner

Thanks for coming back for more! The first step of the Phenomenal Leader Roadmap is quite a doozy. This step is just as meaningful, probably even more work, but can be tons more fun. Employee motivation is one of the most crucial parts of being a leader. If you don’t know how to motivate and engage your team, quite frankly you’re screwed.

So, tool #4 is designed to help you get to know your team, engage them, keep them motivated and growing and developing. Let’s walk through the tool. There are 3 tabs. The Employee Overview will help you engage, the Employee Recognition will help you motivate and the Employee Feedback tab will help you continue to develop your team.

Employee Tracker

The Employee Overview tab has a spot for Employee name, Career Goals, Personal Goals, Motivator, Top Skills, Communication Style, Training Needs and Notes. If you don’t know how to answer these questions for your employee, that’s telling. You need to fix that pronto. During your next 1:1, which I hope you’re having at least once a month, more so if they are new to your team, you need to make sure that you are asking questions that lead to these answers. Where do they want to go in their career, what is important to them personally, what motivates them, what do they do well. If you don’t have a personality or communication assessment that you are married to, I suggest using DiSC and I can give you more information about that. I love it because it is easy to use, actionable and allows you to easily assess the communication style of those around you.

The Employee Recognition tab is important because just like everyone has different motivators, people like to be recognized differently. You have a couple ways that you can use this tab. You can either have a row for each TIME you recognize each employee, or you can have one row for each employee, copy the columns for Reason, Method and Date for each time that you recognize that employee. Or you can just squish each time into one box. Totally up to you, I have a preference but I won’t divulge and squash your creativity.

The Employee Feedback tab will help you keep track of the things that each of your employees is doing well and what they need some help with. Same deal as with the recognition tab, how you track it is up to you, but you have to track it diligently.

Ok, have fun with tool #4 and get ready for the next stop on the Phenomenal Leader Roadmap.

Employee Tracker