Executive Leadership Coaching - Creating a Time Culture That Works

How can you ensure that work is time and life well spent for your team?

As a leader, you direct the time and attention of the entire organisation – whether you know it or not. We believe the single most important thing a leader can do is learn how to do this consciously and well. This is a central focus of our executive leadership coaching.

Strategy as time: Aligning goals with reality

The business strategy is simply a time agreement – a public commitment to how everyone in the organisation will allocate and prioritise their time at work (and outside work) for the next three to five years.

Every component of that strategy – every unit sold, every hour billed, every business transformation, restructuring or acquisition – translates into an individual’s or a team’s working day. The strategy may look compelling, and the big picture makes sense, but does it come at the expense of employee wellbeing? The seeds of future burnout are already sown in the finer details of the business strategy.

As a leader, you need to ask yourself the question: “Is time spent here, at work in this business, time and life well spent?”

Leadership and time culture: The metronome effect

Aside from the commitment of other people’s time, a leader’s own behaviour creates the organisation’s ‘time culture’ – a culture that can be frenzied and chaotic, or calm and creative. Yet few leaders even take time to think about how they are using time, not to mention the ‘time culture’ they are creating. Time is the single most powerful determinant of corporate culture, yet also the most overlooked. Time is the biggest off-balance sheet asset and the most wasted.

As the one whose job it is to decide how everyone spends their time, you have the ability to make the employee experience different. How might it be if you led your teams as if there was all the time in the world? How would it be if you could speed up and slow down as needed?

The staff engagement survey can give you a clue about what’s needed. If people are feeling overworked or overlooked, it may be because there isn’t enough time for what matters.

The leader as model: Behaviours that drive success

As a leader, you need to become aware that whatever you are seeing in the organisation – its pace and rhythms, its constant ‘fire alarms’ – may have come from you. So, consider what your behaviour models. Does your rushing and over-commitment signal that work should be at the expense of everything and everyone?

Your people look to you as the pacemaker. How you are is how they are.
You might publicly proclaim the good stuff: “I don’t expect people to look at emails on holidays.”

But if you then proceed to take your own laptop to the beach and hammer out a bunch of emails, then that is what your people will respond to.

Your most unconscious micro-habits can have a disproportionate impact on the flow and cadence of how your people work. Consider, for example, your most recent leadership team meeting. Were you late starting because you were back-to-back?

Impatient with the speed with which your questions were answered? Skating over tensions or concerns in the interests of time?

Did you look to the same old extroverts to contribute, or did you take time to check in with everyone?

Executive team coaching helps uncover and shift these habits, creating new space for team reflection, rhythm and shared accountability.

The leader as a victim

Leaders who fail to pay attention to time risk living and working in a chaotic way – always feeling behind their day. The message they are sending is that they are a victim of time (‘buried’, ‘snowed under’, ‘drowning’), rather than a leader of time.

They can easily accrue deficits in their personal life and health, and these balances eventually must be repaid. They also fail to do the truly essential aspects of a leader’s job, such as coaching their reports, keeping abreast of change, strategic thinking, innovating, and taking the pulse of their people – which may diminish their success.

Their failure to give time its due also creates stress and wastes time for others. In our consulting work, we have discovered that many of the most significant causes of stress, frustration and burnout turn out, on examination, to be related to time: poor prioritisation, bad scheduling, thoughtless deadlines, undefended calendars and poor facilitation of meetings.

Time-sensitive opportunities: Executive leadership coaching in action

A leader who leads on time hosts quality conversations about time, and discovers that such conversations are an ideal way to explore values, foster intimacy, and understand what people really need.

Such leaders can then identify and sponsor healthier time habits, which can transform the fabric of their organisation.

Executive leadership coaching provides the tools and insights to hold these conversations more effectively — fostering a culture of clarity, energy, and mutual respect.
As we head into a new world of hybrid working, the leader who is a leader of time will be in an advantageous position.

Their people won’t be left alone to simply ‘will’ hybrid working into existence, but can rely on their leader to set the tone and design frameworks that make time at home and time in the office equally fulfilling.

The result will be an organisation that is finally up-to-date – i.e. with a time culture that is actually appropriate for the age we live in, an organisation that people choose to work for because work itself is flexible and sustainable. And it’s about time.

As author Annie Dillard says:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

To learn more about how your organisation can break through the time barrier and unlock the potential of this moment, contact The One Moment Company.

Practical support: Time habits for high-performing leaders

The best leaders visibly demonstrate a creative and finely-tuned relationship with time. They don’t just point their people to HR for wellbeing and support, but insist that their people adopt healthy time practices and call it out when they don’t.

Here are some of the many great time practices that you can adopt:

• Set boundaries, gently yet firmly, clearly signalling unavailability. Take holidays and have weekends. Don’t confuse matters by saying you won’t be working and then shoot out a barrage of emails. And know that your people actually benefit from having a break from you!
• Respect the time boundaries of your people and ask permission to stray outside agreed work time when absolutely necessary. Never assume that someone is available. Ask first.
• Regulate the pace. Be thoughtful and proportionate about deadlines – not setting deadlines that are aggressively, competitively gung-ho for the sake of it, or piling deadlines on top of deadlines until everyone’s everyday becomes a race against the clock.
• Know that good meetings are the backbone of the working day and that bad meetings waste time, sap energy and leave people resentful. Secure training for team leaders in how to design and host meetings better, so that all meetings are productive, intentional, meaningful, and, at a minimum, end on time.
• Make time for the smallest courtesies – to say good morning, ask how someone is (and wait for the answer), and say thank you. Take time to listen, to appreciate, and to celebrate.

Conclusion: Time-smart leadership for long-term success

Executive leadership coaching drives performance and builds better ways to lead. When leaders model healthy time habits, they create calmer, more focused teams — and better work for everyone.

Ready to lead with more clarity, focus and purpose? Get in touch with The One Moment Company to explore how executive team coaching can transform your relationship with time.