Welcome to Friday 411, issue #122. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you’ll manage four areas of your life to lead others better.
1 Insight:
Managing others well starts with self-management.
As a leader, you have SO MANY things to manage: people, priorities, expenses, conflict, communication, project deadlines, and a myriad of relationships. Just to name a few.
You’re juggling so much, it’s no wonder things slip.
You wake up already behind. Your calendar is double-booked, your inbox is overflowing, and your team is waiting on decisions you forgot they needed. You’re reactive, not proactive. Exhausted, not energized. You feel like you’re holding everything together with duct tape and coffee.
But here is the truth: you are your most important project. If you can’t manage yourself well, it will become increasingly difficult to lead other people. That’s why self-management isn’t selfish. It’s one of the most generous gifts you can give to others.
Let’s explore the four areas every leader must manage well — starting with the one that determines the rest: your growth.
1. Manage Your Growth
Why It Matters: If you stop growing as a leader, you will quickly become leashed — your responsibilities will exceed your abilities. Failing to manage your growth will cause you to lose confidence in yourself, and your team will do the same. Furthermore, you’ll give unintentional permission to everyone on your team to stop growing.
What You Can Do: Pick one Unleashed Leadership trait to focus on every quarter. Not all seven or even three. Just pick one of them: Character, Competence, Capacity, Clarity, Community, Culture, and Consistency. Identify a handful of actions or habits that will help you grow in that area. Practice them every week and keep track of your progress. You’ll be shocked at how much progress this focused attention creates.
2. Manage Information
Why It Matters: Every day you drink from a firehose of information — emails, reports, text messages, updates, Slack channels, and drop-in conversations. All of that information comes with a hefty challenge: you have to determine what to do with each piece of data. An inability to manage the information and access it when you need it can waste time and diminish the trust of your team and supervisor.
What You Can Do: Establish a system for processing each piece of information and putting it in the right place where you can easily get to it. You require an outside system because your brain is designed for thinking, not remembering.
There are two resources we highly recommend for learning how to manage information:
1. Getting Things Done by David Allen
Early in my (Garland’s) career, a boss told me that I was so disorganized, people were losing faith in my ability to lead. He gave me a copy of this book, and it saved my bacon! Known as GTD by its practitioners, the book provides a process for putting every piece of information in the appropriate location. It’s a classic.
2. Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
This book is a current take on how to use software (like Microsoft Outlook or Notion), to get things out of your head and into the appropriate place. He focuses on a method called PARA, standing for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives — a simple way to organize everything from tasks to notes to ideas. Tiago Forte has a youtube channel to help you implement the system.
3. Manage Energy
Why It Matters: Energy is the core of your productivity because high energy allows you to be more productive in less time. Additionally, energy is both increasable and contagious. The more you increase your energy, the more productive you can be, and the more your team will become energized.
What You Can Do: Start by building a buffet of energy habits. These are activities that refill you physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. These can be simple activities like listening to a song that pumps you up or more substantial like working out.
Then, plan regular times to do some of those activities. They are especially helpful right before you need to be at your best or when your energy is about to drop.
See More: Four Steps to Become a More Energized(and Energizing) Leader
4. Manage Time
Why It Matters: Here is a depressing thought for today: you will die with an unfinished to-do list. That’s hard to hear, but it’s the truth. You choose what you give your time to, and that will determine how likely you are to achieve the goals and priorities — both personally and professionally — that matter most to you.
What You Can Do: Leaders need to manage time differently than others because you are responsible for your productivity and the productivity of those you lead.
There are five simple questions you can ask every day to help you manage your time:
What could I do today?
Identify all the actions that you could take.
What should I do today?
Take the could list and determine which tasks actually need to be done today.
What must I do today?
Select no more than 3 from the should list that you absolutely must do today.
What can I delegate today?
Identify any of those actions that could be delegated to others.
What won’t I do today?
Determine what you won’t have time to do today. That question is gold. It gives you permission to release the guilt and stop overloading your mental backpack.
This All Comes Down to Capacity
When you manage growth, information, energy, and time, you expand your Capacity. You stop being the bottleneck and start being the bridge. As you gain confidence as a leader, your team will gain confidence in you.
1 Action:
Pick one area — growth, information, energy, or time — and make a small but substantial improvement this week. Big change starts with one small shift.