The Leader-to-Leader tools are now conveniently grouped in the back of your FY2023 Planner starting on page 115.

LEADER-TO-LEADER UPDATE
The Leader-to-Leader Update is the from you’ll use to prepare for all 1:1s with your leader. You’ll work through your personal and business best and then your top three updates in each of our core focus areas: resilience, engagement, experience, and innovation.

Those updates can be wins once a project is complete, status updates for a work in progress, or a record of “to-dos” for upcoming tasks in each area.

You’ll make a note of any support needed on any of those items and then list any and all “burning ideas” you have after this month.

Last Triannual, we heard that if we don’t burn things that aren’t working by doing simple tasks to get them off our plate, delegating something to another capable team member, deferring a task to a later date, or deleting the item from our calendar and our to-do list, we will get overwhelmed and won’t be able to manage our time, resilience, engagement, and attention very well at all.

Jennifer told us clearly, we either “Burn, or BURN OUT.”

Capturing your Burning Ideas here, gives you the opportunity to work through any of those tasks or meetings with your leader and get their support to get them off your plate.

LEADER-TO-LEADER AGENDA
When you meet with your leader, they’ll structure the meeting with the Leader-to-Leader Agenda, asking you about everything you’ve prepared in advance and working with you to create a plan for next steps and accountability and support to help you move your projects forward.

Exercise: Go to the L2L section of your planner and begin to prepare for your 1:1 this month. Fill out the Leader-to-Leader Update and make sure you’ve got your 1:1 with your leader on the books.

And, if you are someone who supervises leaders, make sure you’ve got time scheduled to work through this agenda in your 1:1s with them.

On page 8 and 9 of your FY2023 Planner is space to complete your Yearly Planning.

FY2023 officially begins a new year for us here at Trinity Health, allowing us to take advantage of the fresh start and opportunity to make our mark and start building our legacy.

Work through each of the Four Focus areas on page 8 and determine your top three goals in each area. What can you do to instill personal and team resilience, increase employee engagement (for you and for your team), improve the patient and customer experience, and inspire operational innovation?

Once you’ve worked through your leadership goals on page 8, use the extra space on page 9 to detail any other personal and professional goals that are important to you this year.

Pro tip: Once you’ve outlined your goals, make note of milestone dates to check in on your progress and record those in your planner.

The start of FY2023 in July also marks the beginning of a new quarter. Open to page 10 of your FY2023 Planner and work through your Quarter 1 plan in each of the Four Focus areas, blocking out which weeks you’ll work on each goal. 

What will you accomplish this quarter around Resilience? Can you adopt a few practices from your bucket list or recommit to your resiliency challenge?

What practices from Triannual II can you build in around Employee Engagement? Is there a stage of the employee journey (i.e. Connecting, Inspiring, Rewarding) you can commit to improving?

Which touchpoint of the Patient and Customer Experience can you redesign or refine? What are some tangible steps you can make this quarter to improve the process?

Where can you inspire Operational Innovation? If Trinity Health is going to be the next Mayo Clinic, what are steps you can take this quarter to move closer to that bold vision?

Then, when you’re done with your Four Focus goals, look to page 11 and add in any personal or professional goals outside of the Four Focuses you’d like to accomplish.

Action step: Schedule milestone events on your calendar to complete your quarterly goals.

Everything we’ve learned in the Leadership Quest is going to help us create an exceptional culture where employees love to work and patients love to come for care, but as great as these practices are, if we’re honest, they can lead us to feel more overwhelmed than ever.

We’ve been working to practice our use of the 10% Secret to strategically plan our days and prevent unneccesary emergencies and fires, and we’ve worked to burn what isn’t working or what’s weighing us down.

Our next bit of work to reclaim our time comes from a few unusual, but observable truths about time management. As we jump into this lesson, it’s essential to embrace time management with the same quest mentality we’re using for this entire Leadership Quest.

We have to be poised with the audacity of belief and the determined positivity that we will be able to make something good out of what seems to be bad. We can create a system where we feel in control of our time instead of being a victim at the mercy of time.

TYRANT TIME VS POWER TIME
One paradigm shift on our approach to time lays out two different views of time, Power Time and Tyrant Time.

Just as we learned that complaining constricts and coaching champions, so too, the tyrant approach to time makes us feel constricted, constrained, and crumpled beneath the weight of all our to-dos. Time is a task master, competitive, transactional, and logical and cracking the whip on us who can never quite keep up. Time in this paradigm is in charge of us and quantity driven, looking disapprovingly at our efforts and never being satisfied.

On the contrary – Power Time is an embodied sense of ease and flow. It’s being in the groove and able to get things done without strain. Power Time prioritizes our relationships with others and an attention to quality. When we’re in this state of Power Time, things feel almost magical and we aren’t quite sure how we were able to pull something off, move something forward, or have so much fun getting it done.

NEWTON TIME VS EINSTEIN TIME
Another demonstration of this same phenomenon can be described with Newton time vs Einstein time.

With Newton Time, we live with a scarcity mindset – there’s never enough time or always too much. We find ourselves running ragged and scurrying or bored and out of sorts. In this mindset, time is linear and again acting upon us.

With Einstein Time, we experience the fruits of the theory of relativity. Einstein notes how an hour with your beloved can go by in a flash yet one second with a hand on a hot stove feels like an eternity. With that same vein, then, our projects too can take on that expansive quality where we can make time stretch to fit our needs, making things happen. We become the owners of time and can be the source of where it comes from and how it is spent.

As Michael Altshuler says, “The bad news is time flies. The good news is, you’re the pilot.”

PARKINSON’S LAW
And finally, one more great shift on how we budget and manage our time comes from the insights of Parkinson’s Law. The law states that work will expand to fill the allotted time. If we budget 8 hours for a project, sure enough, it will take us 7 hours and 56 minutes (or 8 hours and 15 minutes as we race to beat the deadline!). Conversely, if we budget just 3 hours for a project – like we would if we were racing to wrap up the workweek before a 3 day weekend, you better believe we’d be the most productive employee our company had ever seen!

When we have too much time to accomplish something, we get pulled away by interruptions, other tasks, or we spin our wheels with uncertainty. But, our pure work time is only a fraction of the overall time spent.

Parkinson’s Law helps us capitalize on our investment and make what felt like not enough time become more than enough.

Leonard Bernstein says it best, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”

Exercise: Look back to page 17 of your Triannual II Workbook and think through how you’ve used – or abused – your available time. What can you do this week to try to live in those magical realms of possibility and promise offered by Power Time and Einstein Time?