Know your role
In an open environment where people are engaged and can come to you with problems, you may find yourself burdened with issues that you shouldn’t be handling.
“If there’s an issue, I’m not going to get involved in trying to find a solution,” he says. “That’s not my job. My job is to really make sure that the situation is resolved or the problem is resolved, and if I can be of help, obviously, I participate or offer to participate. But I don’t try to micromanage or get down into the details.”
You need to know what to delegate and what to do yourself to be an effective leader. Turner doesn’t delegate requests from his board of directors, and you can’t delegate tasks that affect the overall direction of the company.
“In some cases, some people don’t delegate enough, and in other cases, people delegate too much,” he says. “But for sure, you really have to make sure that you are delegating enough where you can, at times, spend more time at the 30,000-foot level versus being at the 1,000- or 3,000-foot level. You’ve got to manage what you do and don’t delegate.
“Everyone has responsibilities obviously. Based on those responsibilities and the level of those responsibilities, that sort of helps you decide how you delegate then what you delegate.”
Don’t try to mark in your schedule how much time you want to spend at the 30,000-foot level versus the 1,000-foot level. That’s something you will learn with time.
“If I see certain things that need my attention, obviously I grab on to those,” he says. “It’s not a 10 percent or a 50 percent. You can’t really come up with a number that you spend at that higher level.
“You have to live through it. You have to live through several things when you are at least at the CEO level and try to manage t
hat the best you can.”
The better you are at delegation and knowing what you want to be involved with, the better you can rank your priorities.
“I try to focus on customer satisfaction and making sure that we are performing our goals,” he says. “I sort of know the importance of the growth of existing customers that we are involved with.
“So, I try to balance customer satisfaction with our internal performance and really that leads me to many things. It’s just trying to balance the day-to-day operations where I should or should not be involved.”
