"I'm actively taking steps to improve my calendar management, and delegation, to a certain point. When I managed just two teams, I spent afternoons with instructional designers, ideating and whiteboarding. I'd sit with the learning and development managers developing evaluation tools, and we would get so deeply into the flow of our work for hours. As the team scaled, spending long, focused blocks of time on a single subject or activity became a real challenge. My calendar is rife with back-to-back meetings that required me to almost unlearn the past discussion and mentally prepare for the next one.
I've adopted a few techniques to manage my calendar better: scanning through it first thing in the morning and preparing for each meeting, coming up with bullet points for each one, and setting realistic tasks. I've also deputized my training managers on certain general training tasks. For example, if any meetings are about analytics and business goals, I've trained one of the training managers to represent me. This way, I'm not only freeing my time to be able to lead better, but I'm also developing who's next in line."
