Our increasing global perspective fans the flames of competition, and in our world of abundance, we face the ultimate corporate paradox from our leaders. "Do more with less." The tightening of belts force us to manage what we can. Time becomes are greatest resource. In a river of shifting corporate sand, a gold nugget manages its way to the surface. Inscribed in the rock are the words Time Management.

Sales leaders salivate at the promise of greater productivity. Images rush to our minds. Squads of sales representatives armed with day timers locked and loaded for battle. Hills to be taken, battles to be won all in the name of productivity and of course ...prosperity.

Fredrick W. Taylor, a 20th Century leader in the efficiency movement was one of the founding fathers of do more with less. His time and motion study became the battle cry of the industrialized world. In the wake of his work, managers began realizing productivity improvements, but sales managers realized even more: Motivation, efficiency, and bottom-line improvements require a different set of guidelines to manage today's leading sales professional. Rubbing the lantern and exposing the genie, most sales managers make the following three wishes.

Wish #1: I want to motivate my staff everyday.

Wish #2: I want my staff to be better at multitasking.

Wish #3: I want everyone focused on bottom-line improvement.

Unfortunately, employee productivity and its maligned cousin Time Management are mired in myths and misunderstanding. Time itself becomes the resource to be harnessed. It is rode hard and put in the barn wet. Discover the most common myths and misunderstandings from your wish list.

I want to motivate my staff everyday.

Employees need to have a clear set of goals to be motivated. These goals are established through collaboration and teamwork. They are the mantras that provide meaning to an otherwise endless day of tasks. Management cannot deliver motivation. Employees must discover it. Management helps in the development of goals. Goals provide motivation. Goals help shape our everyday tasks into significant life experiences filled with meaning.

I want my staff to be better at multitasking.

The Journal of Experimental Psychology found that it takes your brain four times longer to recognize and process each thing you are working on when you switch back and forth among tasks. This means that if your day is a random free for all, in which you hop from one task to another, in no particular order, your work will take much longer because of the real time you lose switching gears. With multitasking, comes stress. Stress is the leading cause of employee dissatisfaction. We are not stressed by what we are doing; we are stressed by the thought of what we should be doing. Multitasking is a myth. A focused effort in each task produces greater results, and increases employee and customer satisfaction.

I want everyone focused on bottom-line improvement.

Expecting bottom-line improvement requires top line attention. Measuring activity against performance is the basis of developing productive team players. However, all too often one or all of the productivity components are missing. You can't hold your cards to close. Employees need to know the impact of their sales activity on margins. Jointly, you need to establish a clear understanding of their "return on time invested". Most importantly, you need to help them set the benchmarks for performance to define success.

Knowledge, motivation and skill represent the most important components in the development and training of productive sales staff. A good understanding of time management can be learned in the classroom. Adapting the class material into the workplace will create motivation, and coaching will help your top sales leaders define and discover the skills they need to be effective. Time management is the first skill required to be a successful sales professional and clearly one of the most important.

Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a writer and noted historian stated that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Parkinson's law is still used today to help in the understanding and importance of Time Management. As sales managers, we don't own employees, we only rent their time. We encourage an environment of creativity that results in accomplishment. Productive sales professionals are goal oriented with the single-minded purpose of completing each task toward achieving their sales goals. They are bottom-line thinkers who understand their return on time invested, and are appreciated by management who wait at the finish line to cheer them on!