When you become a manager, your other responsibilities don’t disappear overnight. Parent, carer, school governor, part-time student… we all wear many hats. Knowing which one to wear and when is a skill in itself, and it’s an essential element of leadership.
When you get to a managerial level, you have to look at all your responsibilities as a whole. If people rely on you for their livelihood, priorities shift. It becomes less easy to skip a meeting to pick up a poorly child or take a pet to the vet, so you have to ensure you have frameworks in place to deal with all eventualities.
At a basic level, this means timeboxing your activities to ensure that you’ve allocated enough time for everything you need to do. Be clear about your priorities, and make sure you’re not being over-optimistic in the amount of time you need to perform a certain task so you’re not constantly behind and stressed.
However, fundamentally you need strong frameworks and support mechanisms in place to deal with emergencies and critical situations. In a work situation, you should never be in a position where you are the only person with business-critical information. At a personal level, you need to ensure that there are people who can step in during emergencies. Contact information in both cases should be readily available to other people.
When you have responsibility for others in any capacity, then you also have a responsibility to set and manage boundaries and expectations. Sometimes this might mean being selfish and saying, “I’d love to help you but I’m afraid on this occasion I need to refer you to my colleague,” or “Yes, I can do that, but it will be in 24 hours.”
Nobody is infallible. Those who thrive at multi-tasking are those who have the confidence to recognise that they can’tdo it all and need the support of a trusted team.
