The modern professional is constantly hemmed in between the demands of life and the constraints of time. The more talented one is, the greater a problem this becomes. One of the most common ailments facing today’s competent, upwardly mobile worker is too much capability. Tasks of ever increasing importance pile up on the few individuals capable of executing them, which in turn only increases their experiential isolation and effectively paints them into a corner. They can’t get out for fear of dropping the ball in the process.
Yet this becomes the glass ceiling on their success. Paradigm shifts in productivity and achievement don’t happen by systematically upgrading your ability; they happen by systematically upgrading others’ abilities. When we become willing to coach and develop others to do a job that at least approximates our own skill, we effectively begin the process of cloning ourselves. This frees us up to focus on the activities that happen in the margins of life: planning, vision, strategy—all the things that live on “tomorrow’s” to-do list for people saddled with the urgency of day-to-day tasks.
Great leaders spend more time in the margins. It may look like a privileged place in life, the result of years of hard work and suffering. We often look at the seasoned, prolific executive and wonder when, exactly, they got that promotion where they were suddenly asked to just think and strategize all the time. The reality is that this never happens: those who accept and tolerate a never-ending deluge of task-oriented work tend to do this forever; those who constantly work to develop strong teams and processes for managing the day to day tend to spend more of their time focusing on developing strong teams and processes—and this eventually becomes a professional existence based on strategic planning and thinking.
Getting to that point is the hardest thing a talented and capable professional will ever do because it requires a great deal of trust and, more challengingly, shutting up when your people are doing it differently than you would or could. Accepting mistakes is a critical part of building people, and most of us tend to renege on the whole “spread the love” initiative at the first sign of struggle or failure. This drastically reduces the do-ers’ confidence, which creates a vicious cycle of disempowerment, lack of initiative, tentative work and, ultimately, you having to do it all at the last minute to save the day.
If you want paradigm level changes in success, you have to find a way across this productivity gap. You’ll never be able to increase your own productivity to the level it needs to be to achieve the unthinkable. Doing that requires others. If you want to spend more time on vision, strategy, and planning, you have to find a way to accept less than perfect, and develop your own ability to help others build on their experiences and mistakes and get better. Eventually, with time and patience, they’ll probably get better than even you. But getting to that place takes a clear picture and plan for what it’s going to take along the way.
Question: How can you empower and develop others in order to spend more time in the margins?
