Time management and leadership: Emily Uhland’s perspective.
This week, we had the pleasure of connecting with Emily Uhland, Head of CX at Clutter and an Execore learner. Clutter is a provider of on-demand storage and moving services used to help customers store their physical belongings. As a part of her role, she leads Live Operations, Trust & Safety, Customer Experience and Customer Success. Prior to Clutter, she was an operations manager at Retail Petroleum Consultants, a specialist petroleum appraisal firm. She has over eight years of professional experience in operations and CX. We spoke to Emily about management, the best career advice she’s received, and how she manages her time.
What’s your biggest challenge as a manager?
I’ve found that the biggest challenge as a manager is protecting my team’s time. There are so many competing priorities and there’s absolutely no way to accomplish everything. The majority of my time is spent making sure my team is focused on no more than one to three projects and unblocking them so they can move the needle on those specific things.
There are, of course, times when you may need to reprioritize so I typically rely on “red flag” metrics which help me quickly identify what is noise (or can wait) and what is actually business-breaking.
What’s the best career advice that you’ve received throughout your journey becoming a business leader?
on helpful career advice
“Recognize the difference between a one-way and two-way door decision and allocate your time accordingly.”
Speed matters. If it’s a two-way door decision, diving in, testing, and succeeding or failing fast may well be the best approach. This has allowed me to make progress quickly and has given me more time to devote to those critical one-way door decisions where there is no turning back.
As the scope of my role and the size of my team has increased, this advice has been invaluable.
You manage multiple functions at Clutter as Head of Customer CX. How do you manage your time on a weekly basis?
I like to block off 30 minutes on my calendar at the start and end of each week. This allows me to set a goal for the week at the outset and reflect on key learnings and progress made at the end. Otherwise, it’s so easy to fall into a pattern where I feel like the week controls me as a jump from one fire to the next.
The other thing that I’ve found to be helpful are weekly business reviews. Once per week, the team gathers to review action items from the prior week, go over KPIs and deep dive into the top 3 initiatives for the CX org. This ensures that we make regular, weekly progress while still giving people time to focus and execute in between meetings.