It’s important to realize that not only do you have permission, but also as a leader you are expected to be able to deal with an overwhelming workload and not be overwhelmed. That’s the job.
The right kind of productive selfishness and laziness motivates and allows you to take care of yourself so you are in an even better position to lead and help others.
KEY INSIGHT: Welcome to being a leader. This is your job. Your job is not to deliver work when everything lines up to support you. Your job is to get the most important stuff done despite everything that lines up to kill you. Your job is to deal with the overload and the lack of personal support and to negotiate room, keep your boss and stakeholders at bay, and keep your team on board. This is indeed one of the hardest things leaders deal with and therefore one of the key things that sets the most successful leaders apart.
There is a well-tested marketing principle that says that for your audience to understand your message well enough to act on it, they must hear or see your message seven times. And for every one time they consciously see it or hear it, they have to be exposed to it three times, thus, the “21-Times Rule.”
It’s important to note that the people who are getting ahead are not the ones who are burned out, used up, and pissed off. Most of them are kind of OK.
Don’t assess your life or yourself when you are in a bad mood! There is no upside and no useful information will come of it. You are not [lazy, stupid, ineffective, unlikable, unattractive, slow, incompetent—wherever your mind goes]. You are in a slump. Wait till you are in a better mood—you’ll get a better and more accurate assessment.
If you are known as being someone who can always take on more work personally, guess what? You will keep getting more work. After all, why would anyone be motivated to promote you and lose their workhorse?
When you are a workhorse, people value you for your work output; they don’t value you. They don’t care how hard you work; they only care that the work gets done. Your company can absorb an unlimited amount of work from you.
Here are some ideas for what you should be focusing on as a leader at the right level to work on the business. Build a plan to drive the overall strategy for your team and its contribution to the business. Look for game-changing opportunities. Clarify Ruthless Priorities. Tune everyone’s workload to ensure that they deliver on the most important things. Ensure that there is strategic alignment of your team, peers, and boss with priorities and values. Assess your organization’s fitness for what it needs to do, and make changes, train, and/or upgrade talent where necessary. Create systems and frameworks to execute, track, and measure the work so you can feel comfortable that you know what is getting done without diving into the details. See also chapter 7, Delegate or Die. Create a specific learning agenda for your team, such as understanding the financial realities of the business, getting closer to customers, or competitive awareness and positioning. Develop talent. Help your team become better leaders and support them. Focus on the development of their top talent. Improve communication inside and outside your organization. Find ways to steadily reduce the cost of things you do every year to make room for new things. See also chapter 8, Better with Less. Continually make connections outside your direct organization to create positive visibility for your team and create a broader base of support.
A good checkpoint for yourself is to make sure that you are never the one to carry detail up. Part of working at the right level is always to turn detail into higher-value information. This may happen through summaries or abstractions, or it may happen by picking out one compelling, detailed example that tells the whole story to the next level up. But if you simply get detail from your team and then you share it with your boss, you are working at the wrong level.
Let’s start with the basic math. If you have ten people working for you, you will create way more value for the company by developing ten people to step up and deliver at your level than by adding one more person—you—to step down to deliver at their level.
Don’t think of delegating as just giving work to other people; think about it as making sure the highest-value work gets done at the right levels.
You don’t need to learn how to deal with the worry; you need to eliminate the need to worry!
If you prevent your people from getting better than you are at their tasks, you are failing as a leader.
The way to build trust is to select your Ruthless Priorities, as we discussed in chapter 2, and stick to them until they are finished. Then pick the next ones. Sticking to a strategy, actually getting stuff done, and actually making progress is a huge trust builder. People love to finish things.
Do this now. With each of your reports, say the following: “As your manager I am going to worry about what matters to you. When I worry about you, what should I worry about?”
I wish I had learned this much earlier in my career—building credibility should be a specific item on your task list. Good work does not stand on its own. Delivering results alone does not ensure you will get recognized and rewarded. It’s sad but true. You need to take it upon yourself to make your work visible and make it count.
If you need to educate people about what you do, by definition, you are not relevant.
I have spoken with many talented people who are surprised to learn that consistently doing excellent work and flawlessly delivering on their job description does not make them a top-ranked employee. Doing your job well, as defined, keeps you from getting fired. What makes you stand out is finding additional ways to add value to the business over and above what is in your job description. Otherwise, you are just one more person doing what is expected of them.
If you take away only two ideas about brand, here’s what they should be: 1. Behaviors 2. Consistency
It’s better to be consistently bad than inconsistently good!
What do you think it takes to be good at this job? What do you think is the hardest part? What is the most challenging issue? What corporate issue, rule, or program is most annoying to you? What business drivers do you react to first? What business drivers do you affect directly? What is the biggest problem you have overcome? How do you set goals for your team? How do you find stars and identify low performers? What do you seek to learn about the competition? Where do you invest to add value or extra quality? Where do you cut cost to drive efficiency? How do you communicate with your organization? What are the most important peer relationships? What has worked well in leading a team of this size? What has not worked? What would you do differently if you had the chance? What best practice have you discovered that you can share? How does your organization deal with changes in course? How do you process direct feedback from customers? How do you interact with the sales force? What does the CFO bug you about? What are the things you would like to fix but can’t get to? What elements of what you do drive revenue, cost, and profitability? What elements of what you do, do other organizations depend upon? What do you believe you should stop doing but are forced to continue? What do you believe you should start doing but can’t get support for?
Backing off never makes your performance better.