INNERGISE!

In our role as recruitment leaders in a busy industry, it is hard to know where to prioritise our time and efforts. In particular it can be hard to make the transition from billing recruiter to recruitment leader, having the desire to continue to dedicate the same amount of billing time as before.

The decisions we make as leaders need to be focussed on the long term productivity of your workload and your team – not the short term fixes.

Below are some ideas that we can use as leaders to support long-term changes in the way we work:

Delegate More

This is where leaders really struggle to free up time, we often delegate the small tasks on a daily basis but it doesn’t free up your time in the long term. Think about the tasks and core components of your role that you need to dedicate your time to and add the most value to the business.

You then need to identify tasks that fall outside of the core components and look at delegating these for the long term. Avoid holding onto them and then delegating when you realise you have no time – this leaves the person you are delegating to frustrated as they have their own workload to balance and then have to find the time to do the tasks you don’t want to.

However if you look at these tasks outside your role as a leader and your suitable team members you will be able to delegate effectively ensuring the team will be able to handle these tasks for the long term.

Measure Client Value

The Customer Vitality Curve allows you to map out the value of all your customers using criteria that is important to your business.

You should map out all your clients using this process; this will allow you to see where you are spending most of your time and ROI you are getting from that time. This will also highlight the clients who are costing you more than you are getting back (in terms of time, money, testimonials etc. or other criteria you have selected for your vitality curve), this will help streamline your client base, after all, you shouldn’t be afraid to say no to a client.

Create Mentoring Pairs

Creating mentoring pairs between new and experienced consultants, so that those who are new to the business have the support mechanism needed to fulfil potential, will free up some of your time.

With any new hire you want to make sure that they are comfortable in their role and the business as well as capable of working to your company values – this can be time-consuming for you as a leader so pairing them up with someone who can guide them through this is a very valuable resource. This shouldn’t mean that staff have no access to you as a leader but

This mentoring approach will also give a greater responsibility to those in your team to further develop their skills.

Hand Clients to other Consultants

Handing clients over to other consultants in the business will allow you to focus on the core components of your role as identified above. Handing over clients can always be tricky; you know their quirks and how to handle the client so it can often feel like you should keep hold of them. However your team have been hired for their talent so you should be able to trust them to do their job as effectively as you would. To make this transition easier for you and the client you should lightly introduce the new consultant to the account and let the client know it is happening.

Taking the new consultant along to meetings you have with the client will introduce the new consultant to the client as well as let the consultant see how you handle the client.

Prioritising our time as leaders is about working smartly and identifying the aspects of your role that add the most value to the business and effectively delegating the remaining responsibilities to your team.

Took something valuable away from this blog? 

Take even more away with our upcoming Leadership Essentials masterclass, our full day masterclass held in London and taught by Gordon Stoddart. This masterclass is an invaluable opportunity for existing and aspiring leaders to really get to know what Leadership is and to take away years of advice in one day, that'll give you the tools to effectively inspire and run a team to maximum productivity and help you outperform the competition. 

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