Life creeps up on us.

When we have the day job coming at us seemingly incessantly, we absorb, adapt and get on with it, just because we’re in the thick of it.

This is when we are at our most vulnerable.

The creep of unsatisfactory performance is hidden away from us, because we lose focus sometimes on what’s happening around us.

Indeed, we can get too close to the action to see what’s happening.

Imagine being somewhere that is similar to where you manage your team.

It’s easy to see there the positives and negatives of what they are doing, as if our senses are more finely tuned.

When we play at home, we allow inadequacies to happen, because they are beneath our radar.

Familiarity ensures that we have blind spots and miss some of the standards that we set out to achieve in our management.

Being able to stand back and see what we are achieving and measured against what we want as a manager is pretty important, especially where we have been in post for a while.

Sometimes, it helps to literally publish the standards you want to achieve, with the support and input of your team members, just so that you all know and that it’s really clear, what you expect and want.

At other times, you might find yourself doing a personal ‘quality audit’ against a checklist you have within you.

‘Just what are we achieving here?’

As you refine this approach, you will become more sensitized and able to define more quickly and easily when performance gets out of line.

When this happens, you will find that the alarm bells ring quietly and often, as you fine tune to achieve the best.

No crisis, things just get back into line as you go.

Ask any manager and they will tell you one of the biggest challenges they have, is the time that seems to always be filled.

A manager’s life is, indeed, a busy one.

The opportunity is to understand exactly what is important enough to occupy your time, and what really isn’t.

There are vital activities in a manager’s life that often get shunted to the back of the queue.

So often, these are the activities that are the ones that actually are critical to success.

These are activities like coaching, developing individuals and team, planning, relationship building and more of the like.

Managers find it tough to make time for these because there is always so much ‘more important’ stuff to do!

Yet a small investment of available time in each week will make more progress in reducing that level of urgency in some of your less productive activities.

It’s just a question of how!

That ‘more important’ stuff just isn’t that important in the big picture, it is, for some reason more demanding – some might say ‘urgent’ – and it needs to decrease.

So, take out a red pen, check your diary or your calendar, find one hour (you need to be withdrawn from your urgency addiction slowly!) and circle it.

This is your hour for the non-urgent and yet vital times in your week.

In week two, find two hours, with an initial target of 4 hours a week.

The red circles are impenetrable times where you find a quiet spot and get on with the bigger work you do.

Not the impositions on your time that are maybe someone else’s problem; nice things to do; fire-fighting and more.

When you show the courage and focus to make this investment in yourself and your development, you will quickly reap the benefits.

Delegation is a very valuable management tool.

It enables a manager to do less of the activities they don’t personally need to do, whilst enabling members of their team to take some of this workload and gain from it.

They gain from the valuable experiences they now enjoy as they explore new challenges and build up their skills, from the delegated tasks you creatively engineer for them – real tasks, suited to their needs as well.

This is a real win-win!

When the task is delegated, there is a fine balance between how intrusive a manager is in the ‘how’ of what they want the task done, as distinct from the ‘what’ it is that the task will deliver.

It’s so easy to overwhelm the person accepting the delegated task when you overlay your personal ‘how’ on them as the only way the task can be done effectively.

So a great way forward is to actually show the individual concerned what the outcome needs to be like – telling them what’s important to you in that outcome – and then let them get on with the exploring the best way for themselves.

When you watch a small child, they learn from you showing them things.

They also learn from those times when you supervise them loosely and they explore for themselves.

In both these circumstances, the time you let them be, is where they will find the most amazing of discoveries.

Your people are just the same.

They need to explore freely for the best value experiences for themselves and in the long run, to develop as very valuable and capable members of your team.