The cost of doing the wrong work.
To be a legendary leader of your team, with more time to do the work you love, and therefore a much happier person, you will need to clearly establish what work you must do and try to spend all of your time on that.
Recognise the work you must not do and work out how to eliminate that from your responsibilities. This will save time and reduce the cost to the business of you doing work someone more affordable could be doing. It will make you feel more valued doing the work you do, and lift your reputation as a legendary leader.
Financial cost
Realising the financial cost to your business might help you reassess. If you’re on a $200k salary, the approximate cost per hour is $100. Perhaps you have a social marketing and content contractor on $50 per hour. If you spend five hours writing content and posting on socials, that costs $500 of your time compared with $250 to let the person hired to do the work, do the work! And this is only one example
Opportunity cost
What then is the opportunity cost to your business? What could you do to drive growth rather than get into the weeds on work you should leave to your team?
Fail to scale by failing to let go
There’s a time when they (founder) are the person to make it the best thing ever, but then they have to do this weird flip and become the best leader ever and let go of a whole load of other stuff. Failing to let go is part of the reason a lot of startups never scale.
So, what is the right work and what is the wrong work? In the simplest terms, the more time you spend in any quadrant that’s not Do!, the more likely you are a liability to your business.
Let’s unpack the quadrants.
Do!
Do the legendary work. Finding work that you love and that you also must do, is really, really important. Think strategically.
If you are the designer of your product, and need to take time out of the noise to think, do that.
If your strength is building customer relationships, then get out and meet customers.
If you are the visionary for your business, the one who inspires the team, get in front of them and inspire.
A legendary leader does the right work. It’s the strategic work that only you should, and possibly only you can, do. You’re the face of your business. You’re the person the board wants to hear from. What you do and how you do it, is seen and felt by everyone involved. How you lead your team has the greatest impact on the whole business.
Develop
If it’s something you don’t love doing, it’s highly likely you’re also not very good at it. However, we all have work we don’t love. It might be presenting to the board or taking part in panel discussions. It might be leading internal meetings or having difficult performance conversations with your team. Rather than avoid it, learn how to get better at it. And then you might learn to like it. Invest in developing your capability for this work. Try not to make assumptions about work you think only you can do. There is talent throughout your business — give them a chance.
Decrease
Be honest, while this is work you love and are comfortable doing, are you good at it? If you’re not, then minimise how much of it you do.
Even if you are really good at it and love it, I still want to say stop doing it. But, hey, it’s your business. If it’s work you truly love, then only do some of it. It’s not fair on your team to do work they could be doing, and that could help them develop and grow. By all means, get involved in brainstorming challenges, lead innovative conversations or meet with potential clients if that’s what gives you energy. But know your boundaries, know when to step away and let the people you hired to do this work get on with it.
Delegate
This is all that stuff that you intentionally, consciously, actively don’t do. It’s the day-to-day stuff, like approving stationery orders, sourcing candidates online, doing first-round interviews, updating your org charts and sending meeting invitations. Wait, are you a roadblock??
Legend List. Start here:
What are the costs of doing work you shouldn’t be doing?
Get clarity on your role. Decide what you want to do and do that.
Create space to move into the Do! quadrant.
If you want to take the time and space to focus on doing the right work, I’d love to chat and see how I can help.
