Like a Virgin

Q: Virgin is a large company with many diversified businesses and a culture of delegating. How do you avoid breakdowns in communication and ensure that good decisions are made? Another question I have to ask is how you deal with the hundreds of emails you must receive? What’s the secret?

—Shezad Virji, Kenya

A: Reading through recent emails, I was struck by the number of questions from readers about how to better manage their own time as they go about the task of running their complex businesses (and lives).

As a successful business matures and expands, bureaucracy usually starts to take hold and members of the senior management team can easily find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of meetings and volume of correspondence. At this stage, an entrepreneur faces the challenge of how to effectively manage this new structure-it’s kind of like mastering the Chinese plate trick-and it’s a transition that has been the undoing of many enterprises.

First, let’s look at how to manage your own time, the first step in managing the complexities of a business. On average I receive about four hundred messages a day, so effective time management is a huge issue for me. I’m aware that some senior executives simply delete all emails from people they don’t know personally, arguing that such messages just create an unwelcome distraction. To them, it is not worth the effort of weeding out these uninvited emails to find which, if any, merit attention. I find this approach to be impolite and bad for business.

Recalling the time when I was just starting out and needed advice, I try to respond to as many reader emails as I can. When I’m not on the road, I always try to allocate some time to read through the list and dictate quick answers to my assistants, pass some to my colleagues, and usually write a couple of longer, more detailed responses myself. This is the most effective way of dealing with my in box, and while doing so, I learn about trends that may affect Virgin businesses or about problems that may warrant my attention.

You must manage your BlackBerry; do not let it manage you! Way too many executives check their smartphones throughout meetings and during their off-hours. Apart from the fact that it’s tantamount to rudeness in a meeting, it isn’t good for anyone’s concentration and has a negative impact on decision-making. Show the little gadget who’s the boss in the relationship! Use it only in bursts: check emails for an hour or so and then put it away, so that you can focus on the task at hand.

When you’re thinking about how to manage not just your own time, but all your employees’, the key is to enable everyone to stay focused. I have become much more aware of this in recent years, as I have invited groups of entrepreneurs to meetings on Necker Island, where expert speakers discuss issues such as climate change, poverty and peace. I often spend some time talking about my experiences, hoping to share lessons that will help my guests, many of whom find themselves managing that transition from scrappy start-up to established company.

The advice that entrepreneurs seem to find most helpful at this stage: give the rest of your team space to work-in many cases, by moving your office out of the building. Physically remove yourself from the business’s day-to-day functions and, if it’s not already the case, find someone to replace you as head of operations so that you will have enough uninterrupted time to look at the big picture and plot the company’s future direction. If you don’t break up the workload, you and your team are more likely to find yourselves struggling to manage the complex and competing responsibilities of running the business today instead of determining strategies for tomorrow.

You must be sure to hire great people who you can trust to run your business. But remember, no two people do anything exactly the same way and your replacements will not do everything the same way you would have. And everyone-yourself included-makes the occasional mistake, but you must resist the urge to snatch back control. This is the only way to instil a true sense of responsibility; it will prompt your senior management team to run the business as though they own it themselves.

I often speak about the advantages of staying small, which is one of the Virgin Group’s strengths in terms of communications. Our many small businesses require less bureaucracy, and so our people are more likely to know who is doing what and why.

You can build good communications into your company’s DNA by ensuring that discussions are built on openness, unambiguous language and a demonstrated willingness to listen to everyone who has something to say. And by everyone I mean everyone-from the person at reception to your top managers. Make sure that people’s curiosity is encouraged and watch it grow. If they have made good suggestions and have seen results in the past, your staff will ask questions and be persistent, which will help them to solve any problems they encounter.

This will free you up to focus on the big picture: to dive in when you see an issue that needs your attention, to help senior management to sort out a crisis, to lend your expertise when executives are swinging a deal and, importantly, to deal with those emails from people seeking advice or with complaints, either of which may turn out to be a source of inspiration!