Welcome to Friday 411, issue #048. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you will answer 4 questions that will increase your time, energy, and attention.
1 Insight
If you don’t regularly evaluate the type of work that is most significant for you to accomplish, you won’t have enough time to lead others well.
As a leader, you face a common phenomenon: over time, your responsibilities increase. Your team takes on more projects; the organization identifies new goals; you participate in more cross-functional work.
Over time, you give more attention to doing the work rather than leading the work.
As your Capacity decreases, you and the whole team accomplish less—even though you’re working longer hours. The tendency at this point is to put your head down and work harder for more hours. But this tactic inevitably backfires, causing everyone to become even less productive.
Instead of working harder and longer, you need a different strategy to increase your Capacity and lead others well. Why? Because you cannot lead well if you don’t have time, energy, and attention to give to the vision and to your people.
You must decide which responsibilities are the most important for you to keep. Then, give away everything else.
I (Garland) spoke with a leader recently who was experiencing this challenge. His business was growing, but his capacity was shrinking. He knew that he needed to give up some of his tactical responsibilities. But he faced a significant challenge. He liked a lot of the tactical work that he was doing. How would he decide which responsibilities to keep and which to delegate to others?
This conversation was recorded as part of the Boardroom Buzz podcast. In today’s Friday 411, I’ll share with you a snippet of our conversation, where I give him four questions that will help him decide which responsibilities to keep and which to delegate to others.
If you want to hear the whole podcast episode (it’s over an hour!), you can find it on these platforms:
For a transcript of the whole episode, go here.
1 Action
Determine at least one responsibility you can delegate to someone else to free up your Capacity.
