Strengthen your relationship with time for better leadership and communication

Newsletter #5

Each time you communicate as a leader, your recipients are influenced by your own relationship with time. Do you have plenty of time or is there never enough?

Do you come across as stressed and frantic or calm and centred? Is there any time left over for unscheduled developments in interviews or meetings? Is your own time in sync with the participants’ time – or are you always running ahead?

The way in which you orchestrate time has an impact on the unspoken communication that exists between you and your recipients. Let me give you an example:  

Case story - the CFO and his relationship with time

The CFO of a large international company often had to communicate globally through livestreams to over 10,000 employees. His presence was chaotic and unfocused, with wandering eyes, rapid, unmotivated movements and a flow of speech that lacked articulation or any breaks to aid comprehension. Too many non-verbal cues undermined his contact with his recipients and their confidence in him. The CFO was a busy man and wanted just one piece of good advice that could combine all my communication techniques. The advice that I gave him he was that he should make friends with time. 

As I worked with him, it quickly became clear that all his communication problems arose because he regarded time as something precious and limited; no doubt a symptom of the continuous optimization that was a subcurrent throughout most of his professional life. As soon as the CFO became aware of his relationship with time, he was able to change his presentation radically.

By making friends with time, he became a more credible and convincing leader. He took breaks, which gave him a chance to consider what he was going to say next, and his recipients time to digest what he’d just said and make their own references in terms of his message. He took deeper breaths, which made him appear calmer and more authoritative. He experienced that he had more cognitive energy to accentuate his key points and also to read the recipients’ reactions and mood, which enabled him to adjust his communication accordingly.

By focusing on his relationship with time, he was able to transform his entire communication process and come across as a more credible leader.

Can you reflect on your own relationship with time? Who owns your time?

Dive deeper into this question by reading this article in Danish