Making Time for Strategy E-Book

Richard Medcalf

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 209

Beschreibung

Your future success as a leader depends on your ability to extract yourself from operational minutiae and make time for strategic activity.

If you’re having trouble getting out of the weeds, you don’t need a new productivity trick. You need to begin a deeper leadership journey to address four core factors – Tactics, Influence, Mindset and Environment (T.I.M.E.).

Richard Medcalf, an advisor to some of the world’s most accomplished CEOs, reveals the secrets to becoming a more strategic leader, and offers a complete set of strategies to help you elevate your focus. Learn how to:

clarify on your most important strategic activities

build a robust plan to quickly free up time

win over your key stakeholders

address the beliefs that are keeping you in busywork

create a culture of focus across your entire team

and much more.

Making Time for Strategy will radically change how you think about your path to leadership impact, and give you practical tools to move you away from incremental progress and closer to breakthrough results.

Leseprobe

First published in Great Britain in 2023

by Xquadrant

In partnership with whitefox publishing

Copyright © Richard Medcalf, 2022

https://xquadrant.com

www.wearewhitefox.com

ISBN 978-1-915036-74-2

Also available as an ebook

ISBN 978-1-915036-75-9

Richard Medcalf asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

Designed and typeset by seagulls.net

Cover design by Mecob Design

Project management by whitefox

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

CHAPTER 1 Long days, slow progress

Part 1THE POWER OF STRATEGIC TIME

CHAPTER 2 It’s not busyness. It’s the Infinity Trap

CHAPTER 3 Your #1 KPI

CHAPTER 4 Stop trying to free yourself up from things

CHAPTER 5 Next year’s success formula

CHAPTER 6 The most important project is the one nobody is asking for

CHAPTER 7 I’m calling you up

CHAPTER 8 Choose your own adventure

Part 2THE TACTICAL CHALLENGE

CHAPTER 9 It won’t get quieter next quarter

CHAPTER 10 Define your starting point

CHAPTER 11 Set the boundaries

CHAPTER 12 Make the bold decisions

CHAPTER 13 Step 1: Cut

CHAPTER 14 Step 2: Reduce

CHAPTER 15 Step 3: Assign

CHAPTER 16 Step 4: Systematise

CHAPTER 17 Step 5: Hold

CHAPTER 18 You’ve built a perfect system for being busy

CHAPTER 19 Your $100 hammer

CHAPTER 20 Three minutes, not thirty minutes

CHAPTER 21 Now, do the work

Part 3THE INFLUENCE CHALLENGE

CHAPTER 22 The diet saboteurs

CHAPTER 23 Preparing for high-value conversations

CHAPTER 24 Scripts

CHAPTER 25 Daddy speaks English

CHAPTER 26 You’re a leader, not Sherlock Holmes

CHAPTER 27 The ‘Accept’ button is the lazy option

CHAPTER 28 The magic of success checklists

CHAPTER 29 Tactics were never going to be enough

Part 4THE MINDSET CHALLENGE

CHAPTER 30 It’s all in your head, Mr Tweedy

CHAPTER 31 You’re the High-Performing Janitor

CHAPTER 32 When trustworthy becomes untrustworthy

CHAPTER 33 You say responsive. I say distracted

CHAPTER 34 What if the problem with your team… was you?

CHAPTER 35 You are productive… too productive

CHAPTER 36 You’re addicted to firefighting

CHAPTER 37 Make contribution your North Star

CHAPTER 38 Be Superman. Or Batman

CHAPTER 39 WWXD

CHAPTER 40 Keep it front of mind

CHAPTER 41 On dragons and demons

Part 5THE ENVIRONMENT CHALLENGE

CHAPTER 42 You say agile. I say chaos

CHAPTER 43 Work the system

CHAPTER 44 Six barriers to IMPACT

CHAPTER 45 Words are your weapon

CHAPTER 46 What are we not getting to?

CHAPTER 47 Remove the chocolate from the mini-bar

CHAPTER 48 Clear, quick, convenient

CHAPTER 49 Making it matter

CHAPTER 50 Roadmap to revolution

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 51 Two Paths

NEXT STEPS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER 1

Long days, slow progress

‘I’m overloaded, my team is overloaded, everyone is overloaded.’

You’re not alone. All around you, leaders, teams and whole businesses are frantically scrambling to meet operational demands. Overloaded. Overwhelmed. Trying, and failing, to deal with an infinite number of calls upon their time.

You may say that ‘infinite’ is an exaggeration, but I don’t think so. The way I see it, we live in a world of infinity. Technology has created a unique situation in human history, where every knowledge worker faces infinite demands and opportunities. There are infinite pulls on our time, infinite ways to build relationships, and infinite content to consume. If you’re not convinced, go check your messages, your social media accounts, or your favourite streaming app. We are faced with infinite opportunities and possibilities.

And yet, we are mere mortals with very finite amounts of time, energy and attention. So how can you survive, and thrive, in this new world? How can you extract yourself from the lower-value tasks that demand your attention, so that you can focus your thinking on the strategic projects that will deliver breakthrough results and a new level of performance?

For many top leaders, the problems are real and the stakes are high. ‘I leave the office every day after twelve hours of work and I still don’t feel I’ve made a dent in what I need to do,’ said Mike, a client of mine. He is Chief Operating Officer at a large technology services company, running a global organisation. There are many moving parts. He has to deliver a big corporate transformation as well as achieve many short-term deadlines. He’s up early, talking to one part of the world, and he works late, speaking with another. He’s an incredibly capable leader, but the sheer complexity of his role has created real overload. For the first time, he’s unsure whether he has what it takes.

This level of overload creates issues at home. His family would like more of his time. He does his best but he’s always got a sense of being ‘behind’.

What’s more, being super-busy isn’t serving him at work, either. When we’re swimming in all the operational detail, we end up with tunnel vision and get stuck in busywork. We lose our capacity for real strategic thinking and we don’t spot the opportunities and shortcuts that would get us to our destination faster and with far less effort. We’re stuck on the hamster wheel.

As Mike said to me, ‘Can I get above the detail enough to be successful?’

A roadmap to move from productivity to strategy

This book recognises that highly competent and successful leaders such as Mike – and you! – get overloaded and stuck in operations. In fact, the more competent you are, the more likely it is that you’ll become the bottleneck in the system. This limits your overall impact and creates only incremental progress for both you and for your organisation.

So how do you break out from the incremental to the exponential? What will it take to get out of the weeds and make progress on the truly important issues?

Like most leaders, you’ve probably tried to implement advice about productivity and delegation. But productivity can’t get you where you need to go. Productivity tells you to go faster, work harder, take on more. But none of this makes a dent in the infinity of demands. In fact, the faster you go, the more pulls on your time you have!

This book takes a different angle and addresses the real organisational barriers, mindset issues, technology drivers and behavioural factors that are stopping smart leaders – and their teams – from working on the most strategic topics. As an advisor to some of the world’s most accomplished executives, I’ve repeatedly seen that becoming a more strategic leader isn’t just a question of tips and tricks; it’s a deeper journey of transformation and a personal leadership challenge.

As you make your way through the five parts of the book, you’ll diagnose and overcome the real issues for you personally and for your organisation as a whole. This will help you to free up several hours of what I call ‘Strategic Time’ each week. This is time spent on your most strategic and valuable activities, which will allow you to create real progress in your organisation, whilst also improving the time you spend with friends and family.

Freeing up Strategic Time requires us to address four essential factors, which helpfully spell out the word TIME: Tactics, Influence, Mindset and Environment. We’ll cover each of these critical components in the different parts of the book.

The scene is set in the first part of the book, ‘The Power of Strategic Time’. You will get clear about your personal opportunity for increased impact, and how what you think is desirable and productive behaviour may actually be harming your future success.

In ‘The Tactical Challenge’, you will learn to make bold moves to free yourself up in the short term whilst also building structures, systems and habits that will help you raise your game on an ongoing basis. Many leaders never put in place these basic disciplines, and suffer for it every day of their working lives.

In ‘The Influence Challenge’, you will examine how to bring your stakeholders on board, so that you can turn your plans into reality, and ensure that your new methods of working are supported and welcomed by your superiors, your reports, and your peers.

Then, in ‘The Mindset Challenge’, you will get to the root cause of your overload and your inability to make time for the most strategic topics. Whereas most leaders believe they have no choice given all the pressures and demands on their time, you will shift your thinking and address the fears, the people-pleasing, and the unconscious assumptions that are keeping you on the hamster wheel.

Finally, in ‘The Environment Challenge’, you will begin to shape the entire culture in your team and in the wider business, helping the organisation shift from the addiction of ‘firefighting’ to more impactful ways of working and collaborating. In other words, you’ll create an environment where making time for strategy becomes more and more natural for everyone.

PROVEN KEYS TO UP-LEVEL YOUR IMPACT

These four challenges – tactics, influence, mindset, environment – are the topics that I regularly work with my clients on. In my previous roles – a partner in a top-tier strategic consulting firm, and as an executive at global tech giant Cisco – I saw time and time again that even the most accomplished executives and teams get snarled up in the operational quagmire, which results in incrementalism instead of bold and meaningful progress.

And now, as a trusted advisor to some of the world’s most impressive founders, CEOs and their teams, I find that ‘getting out of the weeds’ is a top-of-mind topic for an astonishing number of these high achievers.

When I work with these extraordinary individuals and teams, our goal is generally to create an order-of-magnitude improvement in the impact they’re making. This requires re-engineering a ‘success formula’ that’s often already working extremely well. And one of the first obstacles that comes up, time and again, is operational overload and not having enough time to think and lead strategically.

This book, then, has emerged from deep client conversations. It’s the result of seeing which shifts in perspective and which shifts in behaviour actually make a difference for busy business leaders. As you’d expect, these ideas have proven their value in the C-Suite, with clients including CEOs of multi-billion dollar corporations, executive teams in scale-up tech firms, award-winning entrepreneurs, and many more.

You don’t need to be top dog to apply these ideas. The ideas in this book have also been tested by a broad cross-section of managers. They have participated in our public Impact Accelerator programme and learned to free up 5–10 hours per week for more strategic activity in just a couple of months.

TIME TO BEGIN

This book is for leaders who want to operate at a new level, extracting themselves and their teams from the mundane so they can work on the issues that matter.

It’s for mere mortals who realise they cannot beat an infinite set of demands with productivity, but who are ready to arm themselves with strategy and courage.

It’s for leaders who are ready to be world class.

This isn’t a theoretical guide (because our goal is transformation, not just information) but it does spend time on key concepts. It’s not a how-to manual (because you can Google a million productivity hacks), but it does give practical steps. And like any book, it won’t do the work for you. I’ll put the keys to more impactful, strategic activity in your hands, but you will need to unlock the door.

To help you get the most from the time you’re investing in reading this book, we’ve prepared a number of bonus resources and interactive tools, including an action planning worksheet for each part of the book. You might like to head over to https://xquadrant.com/bookbonuses now so that you have them to hand and can work through them at the appropriate time.

So where do we start? Well, to thrive in our world of constant overload, we need to understand it – and understand ourselves. What are the unique challenges, traps and success requirements of this new context? It’s there our journey begins.

Part 1

THE POWER OF STRATEGIC TIME

CHAPTER 2

It’s not busyness. It’s the Infinity Trap

I could tell by the speed she was talking that something was wrong.

‘I need to speak to you about two things today. I’ve got a problem with a team member and a big meeting coming up with the Head of Region.’

This was Susanna, a Cambridge-educated superstar who’d been promoted at a young age to the UK leadership team of a major pharmaceuticals company just a few months before.

I tried to slow her down: ‘OK, but how are you?’

‘Fine really. Very busy, but all good,’ came the predictable reply. I could feel our conversation was still rushing along at the surface level.

Over the next few minutes I slowed her down some more, and it started to come out. The overload. The days stuffed from beginning to end with meetings. The relentless deliverables. The Sundays that were the only time she had to actually do focused work. The adrenaline, and the exhaustion.

As we continued to talk, we explored the bigger picture. I probed: what were the big outcomes she was really hired to achieve? It turned out that there were two key objectives that only she could really make happen. She was making progress on one, but the other had practically fallen off her radar.

And as we talked further, she had another insight: it was well over a month since she’d spoken with her boss, the general manager. The result was a lot of operational activity but very little understanding of, and alignment with, her most important stakeholder.

Susanna was in ‘superhero mode’. The new leader arrives, strikes a power pose, and declares to the organisation: ‘Don’t worry, people, I’m here now!’ – only to immediately dive in to a million activities at once.

Of course, this relentlessly fast pace does get a certain level of result. It does make an impact. But we fall very quickly into what I call the Infinity Trap.

The Infinity Trap is when we’re super-busy delivering on what we see as the operational necessities, but in reality we’ve succumbed to tunnel vision. We’re laser-focused on this week’s deliverables, but we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.

Chao was in a similar position. He’d just been hired as the Chief Revenue Officer of an innovative and very rapidly growing Fintech firm. The CEO and the board were asking him to increase his short-term revenue goals; his team were asking him to crack open his address book and set up high-level meetings; and he was still in the process of finalising and socialising his strategic plan to triple revenues in a couple of years.

THE INFINITY TRAP

As a result, he was working seventeen-hour days. Enjoying the buzz, but feeling that something was missing and that he was losing control of his agenda.

During our conversation I focused Chao on the critical conversations that he needed to have to deliver a successful outcome in the next twelve months. It turned out that there was a make-or-break investment decision that would be taken by the CEO in an upcoming meeting. However, because he’d been so busy, this meeting wasn’t getting the level of preparation it probably needed.

Again: superhero mode, overload, tunnel vision, and missing opportunities.

The Infinity Trap, once again.

As I’ve said, the demands on us are infinite. Every conversation begets another conversation. Every email stimulates more emails. We buy one book or watch one film, and ten more are proposed to us.

We think that sheer effort will see us through. And it’s worked for us in the past. When you’re in an operational role, head-down focus on deliverables often gets good results. But in leadership, where you’re navigating complex, volatile and ambiguous situations, the Infinity Trap – tunnel vision – is deadly.

I invite you now to get honest with yourself. Where are you stuck in the Infinity Trap?

What’s the one conversation that will change everything?

There’s a deeper question here. What’s the payoff for you? What draws you in to the Infinity Trap? Personally, when I fall into busywork it’s because there’s a part of me that quite likes the adrenaline rush. For you, it might be the sense of being productive, being needed, or being in control. Realise that this is less about ‘needing to be heads down right now due to short-term business pressures’ and more about your own inner drive and habitual ways of operating. And when we change those, new possibilities for impact will open up.

I invite you to consider how the Infinity Trap is affecting you. Mentally zoom out. See yourself beavering away, trapped in busyness and suffering from tunnel vision. And then ask yourself, what are you not getting to? What’s the one thing that will make everything else easier? What’s the one conversation that will change everything?

Where are you stuck in the Infinity Trap?

CHAPTER 3

Your #1 KPI

As leaders, we live and breathe metrics and key performance indicators. However, in this world where there are infinite demands on your time there is one metric that is the determinant of your long-term impact and success. And the chances are that you’re not giving it enough focus.

Let me illustrate with a story. It explains how I became the youngest-ever partner in the top-tier strategy consultancy where I started my career.

I joined as an analyst, and a big part of the job was building financial models and business plans in Microsoft Excel. These were often incredibly complex and detailed, and a core part of what we delivered to our clients.

Fast forward a couple of years; I was known for delivering top-quality and beautifully laid-out Excel models incredibly quickly, and had also taken on client management and business development responsibilities that my peers didn’t have time to do.

What was the secret? Well, after a few months I realised I was repeating similar activities on every project. The financial models were all different, but I started to see commonality and repeated steps. So I started to build infrastructure. An Excel template with reusable ‘modules’ that I could copy and paste to quickly build all sorts of business plans. A financial calculations sheet. Charts to present the key results in flexible ways. A toolbar that would allow me to apply complex formatting with just a keystroke or two.

This involved me working late for a couple of weeks, and most of my colleagues didn’t understand why I was wasting time ‘playing around’ instead of doing client work.

But this investment quickly paid off. My business cases now looked better than anyone else’s in the company, and I was building them incredibly efficiently. What took them a week took me a morning.

I was able to use the extra time to work on higher-value activities such as interpreting and presenting the results of the model, making recommendations, and engaging in sales and business development activities. And so my skill set up-levelled quickly, and the promotions followed.

WORKING HARDER IS NOT THE ANSWER

Most people attempt to tackle the challenges of an infinite workload by working harder, becoming more efficient, taking on more projects, solving more problems and addressing more customer demands. The problem is you rapidly hit what author and business coach Dan Sullivan describes as the ‘Ceiling of Complexity’, where there are no more hours in the day and you’re wearing yourself ragged.

You’re USING your time, and it’s a hamster wheel.

Instead, shift up a gear. Instead of solving this month’s/quarter’s issues, work on different problems and projects, the things that will make next month/quarter/year/decade far more manageable and impactful.

You’re INVESTING your time, and it’s a flywheel.

The problem is, most people are so busy on the hamster wheel they don’t build the flywheel. They’re using their time – engaging in the same kinds of tasks every time there’s a new customer, a new project, a new quarter, a new financial year. It’s never ending. They’re not investing their time, building new capabilities and new relationships that will set themselves up for greater success in future.

Most people are so busy on the hamster wheel they don’t build the flywheel.

In that consulting company, the other analysts were busy on the hamster wheel, using their time on each project to build their financial models. I chose the ‘short-term pain’ of investing my time to develop templates and tools, but this became a flywheel that helped me build real momentum. It generated an incredible return on the time I’d invested, and it catapulted me forward in my career.

By freeing myself up, I’d created what I call Strategic Time.

STRATEGIC TIME IS YOUR #1 PREDICTOR OF FUTURE SUCCESS

Strategic Time: The hours in your week you invest on the ‘up-levelling’ projects that’ll put you and your team in a far better place to deliver on your operational goals in the future.

Strategic Time is the #1 metric that determines your future success. You create a little bit (enough, in my case, to build my templates and tools) and use this to build new capabilities. This frees up even more time, which you can invest to up-level even more. In my case, this up-levelling took the form of client management and project management activities that were typically reserved for more experienced consultants.

Strategic Time, like any investment, creates a compound effect. In the world of finance, we see this clearly. You invest $1 today that brings a return tomorrow, and you reinvest that so you earn even more the day after. It’s exponential.

If you’re using your time, you’re spending your days on tasks that need to be done, but those same tasks are basically going to reoccur. You’re keeping the lights on, but you’re not moving forward in a significant way.

However, if you’ve created Strategic Time, you’re investing your time; you are working to create a permanent improvement in future. This is why it’s your #1 predicator of future success.

Are you on the hamster wheel, or the flywheel? How many hours of Strategic Time do you have each week right now? How many do you want to have?

CHAPTER 4

Stop trying to free yourself up from things

‘I became a delegation expert overnight…’

I’ve argued that the #1 metric that governs our future success is Strategic Time: time for important activities that eliminate risk, overcome bottlenecks, or build new capabilities.

But how do we actually create that time?

Most people start by trying to free themselves up from all the lower-level tasks around them. But it’s the wrong approach.

It’s almost impossible to free yourself up from low-value tasks. As the saying goes, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ – and we live in a world of infinity. So if we plough through our to-dos and manage to free up a few minutes, we just find more and more things to do. If you free up ten minutes, they’ll just get swallowed up by the next task on the list.

So, stop trying to free yourself up from things. Instead, take a lesson from Billy.

INSTANT DELEGATION MASTERY

Billy D’Arcy is a telecoms-sector CEO, a previous client, and a former guest on my podcast, The Impact Multiplier CEO. In that interview, he explained how he achieved what I describe as ‘instant delegation mastery’.

Billy’s wife was taken into hospital, seriously ill, a few years ago. As he said, ‘What that meant was that I had to rely much more on my own team, let go and actually get them used to doing meetings and events, and other really important stuff that I otherwise would have done myself.’

Because his real priority was suddenly very clear, the typical excuses and procrastination and half-hearted delegation tactics we all play with fell away. He freed up his time overnight to be with his wife, despite his natural tendency to be a very hands-on leader. And this lesson stuck with him.

So, be like Billy. Don’t try to ‘free yourself up from’ things. Instead, ‘free yourself up to/for’ things.

Freeing yourself up to/for creates a purpose. You’re not trying to create ‘empty space’ in your diary; you’ve got specific high-value activities and outcomes in mind that you’re creating Strategic Time for.

The lesson here is simple. Don’t start by worrying about how to extract yourself from the Infinity Trap and the incremental goals you’re pursuing. Instead, begin by thinking about what you want to free yourself up for – those areas that will really catapult you forward and make a difference.

What are you trying to free yourself up for? What’s the ultimate goal?