As your family business grows, managing your time becomes a crucial activity. You are forced to prioritize your activities, so you can focus on critical activities and address them. This is a natural response to the emerging situation.
But when you are into an ownership position of a growing business, you cannot afford to miss many meetings even though the tasks may not fit into your top priority list, but it deals with an important task. You missing the meeting may lead to other members taking the meeting lightly and you may get delayed update on the meeting proceedings.
Another problem is many times multiple meetings are scheduled at the same time, considering everyone’s availability. In such situations, it becomes impossible to attend all meetings. What do you do in such a scenario?
Well, you need to develop a runner for you. Do you recall in a cricket match, if the batsman is injured, then he has an option get a runner. Similarly can you have a runner to attend those meetings which you are unable to attend.
The job of the runner is to attend the meetings on your behalf, put your points across to the attendees as well as to give you timely and complete briefing of the proceedings of the meeting. For this to happen, you need to train the runner by making him/her attend meetings with you and spending time with the runner to make him/her understand your thought process and logic of putting up required points.
This can be very well done to all the meetings of routine nature, where you require a regular update; and where the nature of agenda is mostly of updating on activities. This can reduce the pressure on your time schedule, at the same time keep you updated with the latest information.
So next time when you are hard pressed on your time, ask yourself:
Do you have a runner?
- If yes, can you have your runner attend the meeting?
- If no, can you develop a runner?