Those who know me know I’m a sucker for a good pun. Among many types of pun, I love this classic joke about Switzerland: —

— What’s the best part about living in Switzerland? — I don’t know, but the flag is a big plus.

I couldn’t lose the opportunity to use this pun when talking about a diverse set of techniques, for a diverse set of problems, all sharing a common trait: they all start by drawing two perpendicular lines.

They also have another common trait: they help bring clarity to something that might be overwhelmingly complex. So yeah, both graphically and metaphorically, each of these techniques is a big plus in your professional life (and, to some extent, in your personal life as well).

I am not going to dive too deep into each of them, rather just enough so you understand:

In which contexts and situations you can apply them. What each of them is about, in a nutshell. What outcomes and struggles I’ve had applying them, mostly in my most recent roles as a Product Manager.

(I’m no expert or holder of the sole truth on any of this stuff: all I’m sharing is what I know, and my experience — YMMV.)

The techniques I’ll focus on are:

this post — Urgent–Important matrix, and Merrill & Reid’s Social Styles;

Part 2 (upcoming)— BCG matrix, stakeholder management matrix, and (bonus) the Radical Focus approach to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs);

but beyond the techniques themselves I’m hoping to convey the underlying theme of focusing on a few dimensions of a certain problem to make it simpler to handle.

Urgent–Important matrix

Although originally devised by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower, this tool was made popular by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (originally published in 1989) — so you’ll find material calling it both “the Eisenhower principle/matrix” or “Covey’s (time-management) matrix”.

In this technique, the two lines are axes for two dimensions: importance and urgency. When being overwhelmed with a big backlog of things to accomplish/do, it’s easy to fall into the trap of mixing these up — the classical way being to treat all urgent things are top-priority regardless of importance.

Urgent-Important matrix

So you’ll get four quadrants out of this drawing:

I — Urgent and Important

II — Important, Not Urgent

III — Urgent, Not Important

IV — Neither Urgent Nor Important

Since it scores high on both dimensions, you’d be tempted to think of Quadrant I activities as the top-priority ones — and you’d be right. But you can also be tempted to believe that this priority should blindly guide where you spend your time, energy, attention — and then you’d be wrong.

If anything, if you find yourself spending too much time on Quadrant I activities, it’s a symptom of not spending enough (or the right) time on Quadrant II activities : planning, preparing — avoiding the need for fire-fighting. Quadrant I stuff still needs to be done, but you shouldn’t just blindly tick items off your to-do list. You should be critical about your time dedication, and put into your schedule time for the right Quadrant II activities that (among other things) spare you from spending so much time firefighting.

This sums up the classical approach to the first two quadrants:

Quadrant I — Do

Quadrant II — Decide when

Some sources user “Defer” for Quadrant II, but that may be deceiving. You might as well decide that a Quadrant II activity is so important that, despite not being time-sensitive, you decide to do them now (not defer them).

For the other two, the textbook recommendations are:

Quadrant III — Delegate

Quadrant IV — Drop

From my experience, the least intuitive activities to deal with under this light are the Quadrant III ones — but of course this may vary widely depending on your context, and particularly depending on your own personality and working ethics/style. I think it all boils down to how open to interpretation the adjective “important” is, but ultimately one needs to acknowledge that it means (for this purpose) “those activities that contribute to your mission, values, and goals”. You should shy away from pursuing activities that, despite their contribution to the company’s mission/values/goals, don’t contribute to your role in that mission/values/goals. They’re still important — just not specifically important to you.

Photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash

It may sound selfish (and it may be a bit), but it’s also selfless in some way. Those activities are probably core to someone else’s mission/values/goals (i.e. to someone else’s role in the company’s mission/values/goals), so you should delegate them to the right people, so that they are able to deliver (and learn, and grow, and excel) on those. No matter how diligent you are, and how vested you are in contributing to your company’s success, there’s a reason why companies are made of multiple and different people.

You can read more about this technique on Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — but of course there is plenty of material on it online. Shana Lebowitz wrote this great guide on Business Insider, which is particularly detailed on the challenges of protecting your Quadrant II time.

Merrill & Reid’s Social Styles

I was introduced to this one by Eva in one of the sessions where she coached me. To give some context to these coaching sessions, let me share that, as a Product Manager, I was at some point falling prey to two classic conundrums of the job:

Couple that with the interaction style that came naturally from my introvert nature, and you get me not feeling as effective as I could be. It’s of no use knowing all the theory above (about doing, deferring, delegating) and then lacking:

the self-assurance that I was making the right decisions; and

the assertiveness to act quickly upon them.

So I sought help — something that no one should be afraid or ashamed of.

In one of the sessions, Eva showed me the Social Styles, created by David Merrill and Roger Reid in the early 1960s. This framework uses two dimensions:

the assertiveness style—does the person assert themselves mostly by “asking” vs “telling”; and

style—does the person assert themselves mostly by “asking” vs “telling”; and the responsiveness style — “displays emotion” vs “controls emotion”;

to create four Social Styles:

Analytical — asks, controls emotion;

— asks, controls emotion; Driving —tells, controls emotion;

—tells, controls emotion; Expressive — tells, displays emotion;

— tells, displays emotion; Amiable —asks, displays emotion.

Merrill & Reid’s Social Styles

The full power of this system lies in a third dimension: adaptability. One does not have a social style, rather one or two preferred ones and more or less capacity to adapt one’s social style:

to the situation; and/or

to complement the social styles preferred by the remaining team members in the same situation.

The way we used it on that session was by assessing:

which was/were my preferred social style(s);

how that played with my role in the team (Product Manager).

It was a no-brainer concluding that my preferred social styles were

Analytical — detailed thorough, deliberate, fact-based, to get things done correctly; and

Amiable — harmonious, collaborative, inclusive, flexible, helpful, considerate, to get things done in a way that works for everyone.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

These has been an advantage in my past researcher and engineer days, where I was doing analytic work in teams of like-minded peers. These have surely worked out in my earlier Product Manager days, in a software development agency setting. But now, as a more experienced Product Manager in a startup environment, my needs are different, and I find myself more often in need of employing the Driving and Expressive styles. These don’t come naturally for me, I admit, so this is a continuous improvement journey—through a mix of: