The Leaflet #124: unclaimed time 1, unclaimed time 2, building leader identity in humble operators

I’ve got some unclaimed time! Oh no, I’ve got some unclaimed time.

Let’s say you’re a leader who has achieved the mighty, rare, and wonderful thing: you’ve gotten most of the day-to-day operations in the hands of other leaders you trust. Now you’ve got some time you didn’t have before. What to do with this unclaimed time?

Before you decide, write the scorecard you’d want to be evaluated against twelve months from now. This is the one-page (maybe even half-page) document that would tell your board chair or your most rigorous critic on the last day of the year whether you were a good executive over the past 365 days. It’s got three or four or five (not nine or ten or twenty) un-gameable measures of your performance on it.

Note that this is not an invitation to lose yourself for weeks in a first-principles strategic planning retreat. You answer a much narrower question with the CEO scorecard and you can probably answer it an hour. What should this one human, in this one body, doing 30 to 50 hours of work per week, have produced or moved by next year?

Two things usually become clear when you do this:

1. First, there are way more outcomes you’re nominally responsible for than you can plausibly own alone. That’s why your team exists.

2. Second, you’ll notice that some of the work you’ve been considering for your “spare capacity” doesn’t correspond to anything on the scorecard. Not because it’s bad work. It’s just not your work. It belongs to a director, or a function lead, or to nobody — it’s a habit you’re holding onto.

The scorecard makes it much easier to know how to use spare capacity. If your capacity idea doesn’t advance something on the scorecard, it’s the wrong idea.

-ben

An alternative view of spare CEO capacity

A sharper version of “where do I invest my spare capacity?” is “what work, if I didn’t do it, would not get done by anyone, ever?”

A few kinds of work tend to land in that slot.

1. Leading stuff that doesn’t exist yet. The fun happy version of this is planning for a new team or business line. The bracing version of this is planning for downturns and disasters that haven’t hit yet (your primary funder pulls out; a major hurricane hits headquarters; I don’t know, a global pandemic quarantines humanity for six months).

2. “We’re good at x. So what?”: Looking at the many local optimizations your team is chasing and pressure testing those. Challenging yourself (and maybe also that team) to explain how excellence at this thing gets the organization closer to achieving its mission. This can help you find things to lead that don’t exist yet (see 1, above).

3. Building and maintaining relationships outside the team: Getting the most out of your board, opening a conversation with a potential funder, learning from vendors, mentors, and competitors.

4. Roving antenna: you’re the one person with an all-access pass to the entire organization, from your own inbox to 1:1s between an entry level teammate and their nearly-as-green manager. Arguably you’re also the person with the best internalized measure of “how excellence looks around here”

A test I give clients: at the end of the week, look at your calendar and ask of every block of time in there: could this have been done by anyone else on the team? When the answer is yes, you have latent capacity on the team and in your calendar. Spend some time training someone else to take the thing from you so you can do more of 1-4 above.

-ben

I need this humble, excellent operator to step up as a leader

When a humble operator isn’t becoming a leader, a diagnosis you often hear is some version of “they need more confidence.” This can be true and also useless, because confidence typically shows up after an underlying identity changes. Confidence is the visible exhaust from the engine under the hood.

Sometimes, the gap between a great operator and a great leader is not a skill gap. The operator knows how to run a project, manage a calendar, clean up a mess, hold a high standard, sweat details. Where they’re on bambi legs is mobilizing other people to take stakes-y bets in service to the mission.

As their manager/coach/leader, you can help them build the leader’s identity with some provocative questions.

1. “What would it cost you, internally, to start asking your peers to take real risks on your behalf?”

2. “What’s the difference between a leader and a project manager? What would have to be true for you to feel like a leader instead of a project manager”

3. You can follow up on 2) with: “What’s the worst thing (or likeliest bad thing) that would happen if you actually showed up that way?”

These questions can help uncover some latent beliefs people cart around and cope around. Stuff like: “I don’t want to ask people to do things I wouldn’t do myself” or “I don’t want to be the person who pushes others into the fire” or “if I’m wrong, I won’t have anyone to blame but me.”

You can’t talk someone out of a hidden commitment.¹ But you can name it and ask whether it’s still serving them. You can ask what a version of leadership would look like that doesn’t require betraying the part of themselves they’re protecting.

-ben & eric

COMPELLING QUOTATIONS

Poet Ocean Vuong on the writer’s job:

We’re out here to write sentences that the species has never encountered.

Songwriter John Darnielle on writers’ errands:

To elucidate is one errand of the writer, and to obscure is another. When I can do both at once, I’m happy.

Poet Pablo Neruda on loving:

I love the handful of earth you are.

1. or, as former Marine Corps General Jim Mattis puts it: “You cannot order someone to abandon a spiritual burden they are wrestling with.”