When we’re young and starting out, all we want is more money. “If I could just get more per hour”, “If I could just get a few more shifts”, “If I could just get a few more projects”. These are the things we think about.
And if we’re diligent, build our talent base and experience, and strive to exceed expectations, we get more money in various ways—for a while. Then we hit the professional glass ceiling.
The ceiling is time, and we see it in every industry. There’s a different “hourly rate” attached to different kinds of professionals, but in every industry there are those who are doing much, much more than just the multiple of hours in a day and an arbitrary value per hour. Those of us who master time management—who learn to manage and deploy resources, who learn to focus and prioritize effectively, who learn to build repeatable, scalable services and systems—truly master the professional puzzle. And it isn’t easy. At all.
Truly scaling your abilities means knowing what qualities and characteristics you have that are truly irreplaceable, and what qualities and characteristics are equally done by a young up and comer looking to cut their teeth and follow in your footsteps. It’s also about recognizing the professional qualities in support personnel or sub-contractors that really count: raw talent or high skill levels don’t always count as much as personal responsibility, ambition and problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Sometimes, mastering time management is as simple as learning to repeatedly identify and recruit accountable, ambitious problem-solvers to your team to help you out.
This is one of the most frequent headaches presenters have, too. Naturally, presenters are experts and leaders in their respective fields; if they weren’t, groups of individuals wouldn’t feel the need to learn from them. But it is in the nature of being the best, or an expert, that we struggle the most to outsource or delegate tasks to people who have more time but less value than ourselves. Yet it’s the most critical component of successfully protecting and maximizing your time.
The better we can get as presenters at clearly delegating research, image sourcing, deck organization and other activities that really don’t depend on our core body of knowledge and/or expertise, the better our presentations are going to be overall—and the more we’re going to be able to accomplish in other areas.
Question: What do you find is the hardest part of a presentation to hand off to someone else?
