 Is your team struggling to get to their work and the time you've got available? Today we're going to help you build a battle rhythm that will make each day a success. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. If managing our own time is hard, helping our team manage their time to be successful can be even more difficult. Today I've got five tips for you that will help you build a battle rhythm on your team to make each day a success and stay tuned till the end. I'm going to give you a link where you can download our free leadership development plan workbook and that'll help you set your goals for the next two, five and ten years and build a plan of action to achieve them. If you know anybody who's in the military or has been in the military for any length of time you've probably heard them talk about the idea of a battle rhythm and battle rhythm was something I'd heard a lot through the first 10 or so years of my career but never really got to experience until I got to the Air Operations Center and started to work with the daily planning cycle that we have there in the AOC. And I wanted to look up a good official definition for you guys to talk about battle rhythm but I couldn't find a really good official definition that I thought really brought the concept home for you so I'm just going to stick with my Air Operations Center example and when we were in the AOC we would work every day we'd be planning the next day's events it was actually a 72-hour cycle but really for simplicity's sake we were basically planning the next day's events of what missions were going to get flown who was going to fly them and what all the air air components and air forces in the theater were going to do that day and we were doing all that at the same time that we were doing command and control executing command and control on today's missions and if it sounds like a lot of moving parts in this planning cycle this execution cycle it was but it worked because we had a battle rhythm we had a plan going into making the plan every day and executing the plan every day the five tips i'm going to give you today are going to help you take a look at your activities on your team and see if there's a way you can build a plan to go into the plan every day or a plan to go into each day to really optimize your time and your team's time and make sure that you can get everything done that you need to get done the first thing you've got to do is map out your team's inputs and outputs you've got to have a really good handle on what's coming in and what you have to put out if those things don't match up you're going to have a really hard time if your team is getting inputs in that don't that don't cover all the things you have to put out in your outputs your team is either going to have to spend a lot of time chasing down those inputs and getting them to come getting them to come in the right way or they're going to have to spend a lot of time doing the research and the work figure out what needs to go into the output now if that's part of your team's job that's okay you may have to take some inputs an analyzer synthesize though is and turn those into outputs and that's your team's job and that's great but if you're not getting the inputs in the input information and you need to do your job to create the outputs you need correctly it's going to be a lot of extra work for your team and that could be where a lot of your team's time is going every day so get a really good handle on the inputs and outputs as the start of developing your battle rhythm tip number two is to identify the tasks that go along with the inputs in the output and this may sound a little backward because most of what you do and your team does every day is tasks but the reason I didn't mention this first is that a lot of time the tasks we're currently doing may no longer be aligned with the inputs and the outputs we might be doing things that are extra that we don't need to do anymore or we might not be doing enough things when we do the output the first time where we come back and we have to do some rework later on so taking a good look at the tasks that go that are necessary to go along with the inputs and the outputs might be a might be a place where you can save some time on your team it will also give you an idea of what tasks might be able to be done simultaneously instead of sequentially or how you might be able to inter leave the tasks to go along with the inputs the outputs between your different team members so you can really be much more optimal with your team members time tip number three is to assess how long it actually takes to do each task and it's important to have a really good handle on this because some days inputs come in late and some days the deadlines for outputs get moved up early and a lot of times those happen to be the same day for various coincidental reasons and that's really frustrating to deal with so understanding how long it takes one person or even a team of people on your team to do each task will give you a lot more flexibility when real-world events pop up and you have to make a decision on how do we get our daily tasks done while still responding to this one-off thing that popped up and this also gives you a little bit insight once you understand how long the task really takes to do this gives you a little bit insight into if I need to do this task quickly can I throw more people at it or is it one of those things we're actually putting more people on it will actually make it take longer because of the confusion the learning curve going on so get a really good handle on how long it takes your team to do each task in a normal day situation tip number four is to map it all out I'm a really visual person so laying these kinds of things like inputs and outputs and task durations on a calendar is very helpful for me to get an idea of the interactions between those things take the case of if I've got a deadline at noon I get the inputs of 11 and it takes my team three hours to get something done now I'm already starting at a two-hour disadvantage of when that input comes in so I've got to figure something out here whether it's to go negotiate the input or the output or how many or decide to put more people on this task to get it done in just an hour that's a little bit of an extreme case and I'm not saying go out and map every minute of every day for each of your team members but having a really good understanding of inputs outputs and task durations will give you a good idea of how you can go through and either renegotiate input deadlines output deadlines or make smart decisions about how many people you put on a task and which people you put on a task depending on how important it is the last tip I have for you today and this one's really important is once you've got the battle rhythm figured out go communicate it to your team set those expectations show them how the inputs outputs and the tasks align and show them where they've got flexibility to make choices as long as they make the output deadlines it's always a good idea to go talk to the people who are actually doing the task to make sure you've got a good handle on how long the task takes so go communicate that to your team get their input and if you have to make a few changes so that you can make some tasks interleave a little better or make some things work work simultaneously instead of sequentially that their input can be valuable to make that battle rhythm work even more smoothly as you carry it forward now we've talked about this in such a way that it's a daily battle rhythm and don't worry about it if your team doesn't have a daily rhythm you may go look at your inputs and your outputs and your tasks and you may not see a correlation to a day your time scale may be a longer time scale or maybe a shorter time scale but more likely it's probably longer your time scale for inputs outputs and tasks maybe more like something like a week or a month or an even longer time scale especially if you're doing creative work or project-based work but these tips will still work for you so go take a look at your inputs and outputs and then see what kind of time scale that correlates to whether it's daily weekly monthly or even if it's on a project basis once you have a good handle on those inputs or outputs now you can work with your team to develop that rhythm to meet that time scale no matter what it is if you found this helpful please like comment and share it with a friend or co-worker click on that link below in the description that'll take you to where you can download our free leadership development plan workbook and that'll help you set your career goals for the next two five and ten years and build a plan of action to achieve them if you have any business or leadership questions we'd love to hear from you leave us a comment or email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com evilgeniusleadership.com is also where you can find out about all of our coaching and training programs so if you want to get some one-on-one work on your leadership style or bring us in to work with your team contact us we'll set you up with a free consultation and see how we can help thanks for watching today I really appreciate it and remember the future is out there lead the way