#119 5 Essential Strategies to Keep Your team on Track While You’re Out of Office

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Welcome to the 360 leadership podcast, the top rated show for driven women in senior leadership with new episodes released every Wednesday. I’m your host, Lucy Gernon, a multi award winning executive coach for women leaders and the founder of 360. Leaders Club exclusive high level membership for career driven family orientated women just like you. I created the 360 leadership podcast to share practical tips, actionable step by step strategies, and inspiring stories to support you to unlock the power and belief within to accelerate your impact and potential. So you can build a life filled with success, balance and happiness. So are you ready to achieve 360 degree success? No more excuses. No more waiting. Your time is now. Hi, there, and welcome to another episode of the 360 leadership podcast. I’m your host Lucy garden. So if you’re new here, you are very, very welcome. And if you’re a longtime listener, like I know I know a lot of you are, you’re very welcome back. So I’m hopping on the podcast today very impromptu actually to share something that is happening in the moment. Because sometimes they feel like when I share stuff with you that’s happening in the moment. It’s really, really valuable. as I record this episode, I am literally just about to log off for a week as I’m heading away to Dubai with my family for a few nights. And this episode won’t be coming out for a while. But I thought I’d record this now because there’s a few things that I’m doing to ensure I can really switch off for the week when I’m on holidays. And the reason I thought it would be useful to share that with you is because I know many of you feel you can’t switch off when you’re away, you end up checking your work emails, or you put the dreaded contact me if it’s urgent on my mobile on your email signature. So today, we are going to be diving into all of that, I’m going to be sharing five things that I’m doing right now we’ve done it today, so that I can switch off and enjoy with my family. But before I get into all of that, I also want to share something that I’m trying right now on the podcast in the hope again that it’s going to help you a little bit too. I am consciously trying to slow down my speech. So as I’m recording this, today, I am going to make a conscious effort to slow down. And the reason I’m sharing that I’m doing that with you, again, is because I know many of you talk fast like I do. And sometimes when we talk fast, it the energy that’s loaded behind it can be a little bit overwhelming for people. So I am trying to make a conscious effort. And I’m hoping you won’t really notice but let me know if you do when you are going on your holidays. You deserve a break. Most of you work in large organizations, and some of you are business owners too. And if you run a business or you’re running an area of a business, there’s a lot of responsibility, not only when you’re in work, but also the headspace that it takes up for you outside work. Now for you to truly perform at your best for you to truly be the leader you want to be for you to have headspace for strategic thinking, and continuous improvements. None of that can come when you’re doing the work. And so a lot of the time it will come when you’re on holidays, or it will come when you’re on the flight. That’s why it’s so important that you give yourself this time and space to step away fully. Now, aside from that, I don’t suggest you work on your holidays at all. In fact, I’m a complete advocate for totally switching off. But if ideas pop in, you know, you could whip out the notes on your phone and pop down a couple of things. But what you don’t want to be doing is logging onto your emails, or you know, allowing people to contact you because life is just too short. It’s too short, give yourself permission to enjoy it. So there’s five things that I think you can do that is going to allow you to switch off and feel like your team are in control. And I’m going to share the five things right now that I’ve done to prepare myself as a business owner to be able to step away fully from my business. So the first thing that I did is I have a new assistant Her name is Jana, and she’s absolutely fabulous. But she doesn’t understand my tone of voice yet. She doesn’t understand how I manage things or you know, the rules around my calendar when she can book things in when she can’t. I have little codes in my calendar that she’s not up to speed yet. My old assistant knew this stuff really, really well. She had been with me for two years, she knew how I worked and everything was fine. But when she moved on to another company, I realized I didn’t have the business processes and structures in place, I needed to be able to delegate those more, let’s say non technical tasks to somebody. So if you’re multitasking come back to me, I think what’s really important is that you will probably have procedures, or guidelines or things like that, for all of your business processes, right, you’ll have in a lot of you will work in large organizations, you’ll have standard operating procedures, all of that good stuff. But where you fall down, or a lot of organizations fall down is procedures for the non technical or non business process related stuff, like managing your inbox, managing your cluster, some customer support inbox, if you have it. So in my business, lots of you will receive emails from Hello, Lucy garden.com. Now I don’t manage that inbox. Personally, that’s managed by my team, because I just can’t manage everything. Just like my team helped me to manage my messages on LinkedIn on an Instagram. Again, I cannot manage everything myself. And that’s something I had to allow myself to let go of control of right, because if I’m in the weeds, and then the detail on every email and every message, I’m never going to have time to improve 360 liters club, or to design a new course or to record this podcast. So in order for me to be able to really hand over control of my inbox, for example, I had to write a procedure. It required me to sit down and think about, okay, well, what are the standard queries on requests that come in to that inbox, it’s the same for you, that’s the very first step. If you have a central inbox for your department, or you know, you have some, you know, there’s emails that are standard requests coming in to you. And you have an assistant or somebody on your team who manages that. So I know if you’re at a more senior level, you might have an EA, if you’re at a less senior level, you may have be managing, like a customer support inbox that maybe you look at from time to time to, you’ve got to set up standards for that. So what we did is I created an email, i ne an SOP that describes the types of emails they can expect to receive in there, and some standard response templates. We’ve even gone so far as together with my team to come up with, you know, follow up response email templates so that they know exactly what to do if somebody doesn’t reply, or how to respond if somebody does reply. So for you, my invitation for you would be things don’t change that much in business, you’re gonna have the same types of requests coming in. So it’s about identifying those requests, and putting a process a standard process in place with templates for your team, describing exactly how to do it for the most part, okay, so that’s the first thing. The second thing then is, in my business, there is one system that we just cannot live without, and it’s called Asana. Now, I will link it in the show notes. Most of you who are in the corporate world, you probably have Microsoft Teams. And I believe teams can do the same thing if you are using a property, but again, don’t quote me on that. I don’t use teams. So we use Asana, which is essentially a task management tool in my business. Now, everything goes in Asana, if I have to, if somebody it’s just a task thing, no matter what it is, if it’s not in Asana, it doesn’t get done. So there’s no emails back and forth saying, Can

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you do this? Or will you do this, if I need my team to do anything, I go into asana and I assign them a task. If I need to attach an email, I will, but it just makes sure that everything is getting tracked in a central location. Now, before my new team joined, so I’ve had 1234 New team members join my team in the last four months. So it’s been an adjustment and it really shone a light on the fact that the business processes we needed to be really efficient and really slick just weren’t in place. Again, it was a lot of it was tacit knowledge myself and my old assistant and my old team. Everyone knew what we were doing. But now the team has grown roles and responsibilities have been split. So it really exposed the fact that the business processes weren’t there. So it’s the same for you. The reason I’m telling you this is I’m wondering for you are your business processes all clear. How do you manage all of your tasks for your team? Is it done in an Excel file for some of them. Maybe it’s emails for another, maybe it’s on a tear board for another. Maybe it’s in some sort of another system for other tasks. How much simpler would it be? If you were to pick one area, one tool, one system and use it to track everything. I can tell you in my business, it’s been an absolute game changer. But what I noticed when I went into our Asana is we’ve had, we have it all set up by teams. So I have a sales team, I have a marketing team, I have a podcast team, I have a general admin team, you know, and so on, and so forth. And within each one of those teams, we have set up specific, they’re called projects in Asana. So for example, in 360, leaders club, we have a project for members due for renewal of their memberships. So we can track when people are due our correspondence with them, so that you know, we are supporting them, and everyone knows where we’re at. Because we’re dealing with like multiple, multiple multiple people, it’s not possible to track everything by email. We also have a project in there for continuous improvement initiatives. So if I want to know where anything is at, so say, for example, if I have a client who one of my team has reached out to, and we’re trying to figure out, are they going to renew their membership with those are they have they got what they needed, and they’re going to join, I are going to going to finish up, I just need to pop into that project. And my team, we have, again, have a procedure around this, where all correspondence will put updates in there. So I never have to guess anything, but we had to set all of that up. It’s the same with the podcast, it’s the same with all of my marketing. It’s the same with all of my client work leads that come in everything is tracked in Asana. So that’s my invitation for you is is if you have Microsoft Teams doesn’t have that functionality, or do you have another system that you could literally set everything up with tasks, because it’s been an absolute game changer for us. The third thing, then that I did, so I could switch off is we looked ahead to what we know is coming and what might happen. So it’s the same for you before you log off and holidays. Again, unless you’re brand new in your role, you have a fair idea of the fires that are going to come your way, you’re going to know the stuff that might rear its head most likely. And based on historical performance, you’re going to have an idea about what might happen. So for example, my team and I identified all of this. So we looked ahead, for example, at the month of February. And we know that we have a lot of new members who are coming into 360 leaders club, we have a lot of corporate work that’s coming our way we have International Women’s Day. There’s lots of stuff happening right now in terms of getting people booked in my calendar, for example. So my team know exactly how to respond to all of that, because we have been strategic about it and looked ahead. But then also we brainstorm together. And I said, right, well, what else might happen while I’m awake? And they said, well, the system might go down. So I gave them a path forward for that step one, contact the vendor. Step two, send me a WhatsApp, if they don’t get it resolved on the same business day. They know the only thing that they will escalate to me is if there is a major major problem with one of my existing clients, which I can’t imagine is going to happen. Or if the business crashes. Okay? So aside from that, if you get an out of office email from me, it will not give you my mobile number. It will not say I’m really sorry, I can’t get your email, it’s literally going to say I’m away living my best life. And I will respond to you upon my return. If my team haven’t got back to you, you know, in the meantime, something like that. So my invitation for you here would be challenge yourself that if you’re taking time off to ask yourself, number one, what might happen, what could happen, have the due diligence and the self discipline to get yourself organized, take a day away to do this, okay, half a day or get your team whatever works for you and your business, your area of business and get really clear on what you want them to do. Because then you can log off knowing you’ve anticipated what could happen. You’ve told them the only things that they can escalate to and for me the escalation path is WhatsApp. So I am not going to be on my slack which is like Microsoft Teams I’m deleting from my phone, delete my emails, I’m not going to share my phone on this particular holiday because for the entire summer you guys who are longtime listeners will know that I moved to Spain for a few weeks in the summer, but I will Mark’s the entire time. And I really just want to be present with my family. So it’s the same for you, you can absolutely do it. And then finally, the fifth thing I did, so I know I can switch off and log off is I gave my team clear direction, on where to focus while I’m away. So at our last team call this morning, I went around to all of them. And I asked them, what are their areas of focus while I’m away. And so when they shared with me what they were thinking, I could tell, you know, exactly that they knew what they were doing. But also, they didn’t realize I had other things in mind that are coming up later in February that I want them to start getting prepared for. Now, you know that if you’re away, your team are probably going to have a little bit more time. There might not be as many meetings, there won’t be back and forth with you. That’s with my team. So this is a perfect opportunity to assign your team some continuous improvement work. So for example, one of my team, I’m going to start getting her to help me more with email marketing. So we do a lot of email marketing, I have a team member who already helps me with email marketing, but we’re kind of increasing some of the value contents that we with our newsletters and things like that, I need help to be able to manage all of that. So I’ve given her some training to do while I’m away so that she can be in a better place. When I come back to ask me questions. One of my other team, a great thing I’ve given her to do is to optimize our tracking system for our 360 liters club member. Again, this was probably a mistake I made when I set up the business or a learning in that I let somebody else set up the business processes how she liked to work. Whereas now I can see that it’s it was very much based on, you know, a person centric rather than an actual business process, if you know what I mean. So my new team member and I worked together, we both realize it just isn’t working as slickly as it could. So she’s gone off to optimize the process, and I’ve started everything and given her clear direction. So it’s the same for you, I would always recommend that if you’re taking some time away, you know, talk to your team, find out what they think their priorities are, while you’re away. Be clear on your expectations on what you expect when you kind of return on the escalation path. And then my dear, you can log off, knowing that you have done everything, you’ve given your team direction, you’ve anticipated problems, you’re using systems instead of relying on tacit knowledge for everything, and it’s going to be a game changer for you. So that’s it for this week’s episode, I really hope that that was of some use to you. I know my business is different to a lot of yours. But I think the principles kind of apply. And if there’s one thing you take from this episode, it’s this. You work too hard to have an out of office that gives out your mobile number. When you’re on vacation, or holidays. Please, please, please allow yourself the gift of time away. As mean, as this may sound, it’s coming from my heart. But nobody is that important that you need to give out your phone number on holidays. And if you do, there is something in your business processes that absolutely need to be rectified. You can’t have a single point of failure, there’s got to be somebody who can step up in your absence. So just some food for thought. So that’s it. Did my speech slow down?

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I think it may have a little bit let me know on LinkedIn or Instagram when you listen to this, if you notice a difference in the speed of how I’m speaking, trying to kind of you know, make it a big commerce. That’s my invitation for you to if you are a an over talker like I am to just tone it down a little slow down. And let’s just go from there. So that’s it my gorgeous, gorgeous listener. If you have any questions or comments, as always, please slide into my DMs and please if you enjoy this episode, please would you rate and review and don’t forget to subscribe as it really really helps my podcast. So until next time, have a fabulous week and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye for now