Episode #451: The Leader's Time, Talent and Treasure

Meetings, email, social media, reporting, coaching, planning, performance reviews, firefighting, supervising re-work, the list goes on regarding where our leader time gets taken up. Our talent got us into this illustrious position as the leader but do we have enough talent to sustain staying in this job over time. Can we move up to an even higher position and what additional talent development would that take? Are we investing enough of our treasure in ourselves, beyond anything the organisation may be providing?

I have the most powerful hand held tools at my command 24 hours a day. I have access to the fastest communication tools ever produced. I can access any information I want at lightening speed. Do I feel I have more time? Am I keeping up with the demands of business in this modern world of global interconnectivity and the global 24 hour work cycle? In simple terms “no”. If feel constantly pressured to do more, faster with less. I have a continual anxiety about FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. I worry that I am not sufficiently on top of everything that is going on and keeping up with the constant change. I worry that my competitors internal and external are doing a better job of it than I am.

As my organisation gets bigger I get pulled further and further away from the frontline and have to operate through others. I lose control and access to insights because I am not in those client meetings, I am not there in the meeting room and all I see are the numbers which fall out from the activity. It reminds me of those favourite samurai war movies. The samurai warlord leader and his key people are sitting around a low table with the map of the area, all the while hidden behind a fabric wall, with guards set outside to protect them from sudden attack. Messengers rush in and out constantly to tell them how the battle is unfolding. They have delegated the fate of the battle to their field commanders and they are totally reliant on their efforts. That is how I feel.

Given I am constantly time poor and reliant on others, where should I be spending my time? The answer to that question is critical. We do have time, don’t we, maybe not much but still it isn’t zero. We can’t do everything, but we can do the most high value, most high priority items. Great – but are we doing that and are we doing that every day? If we aren’t, then we had better get busy with a system which makes sure that is how we are operating.

When I was at school, Pluto was a planet. It is still up there presumably, but we don’t refer to it as a planet anymore – how could that happen? In 2006, scientists excluded Pluto as a planet and re-designated it as dwarf plant. This story is a metaphor for leaders needing to keep educating themselves and developing their talents. If we don’t, we might wind up like Pluto and re-designated as a dwarf leader and find ourselves replaced. The pace of change is dynamic and what we knew a few years ago is now irrelevant because technology and society have moved forward.

I have attended Harvard, Stanford and Insead Business School’s Executive programmes. Those experiences were excellent, but that was around the turn of the century, over twenty years ago. A lot of research has come to light since then. There are whole new areas of business which didn’t even exist then. Facebook was kicked off in 2004, the same year Google went public, Twitter was launched two years later and Instagram four years after that. What are we doing to stay current, to stretch ourselves intellectually and to access the rich experience of others? Ongoing professional education has to become a habit, not an option. What we have seen with the pandemic is that if those delivering the content are skilled, we can tap into the best people on the planet online, no matter where we are located. I have been making the most of this global business education cornucopia online. This is a breakthrough which was unthinkable even three years ago. That means the excuse basket just go tossed straight out the window. Let’s get busy learning, never stopping and constantly rebuilding our talent.

Treasure was spent by my companies to send me off to these expensive high end marque educational institutions. How much have you allocated for your own growth as a leader in your company budget or from your personal account? We are awash with free content thanks to content marketing having everyone put their stuff out there for free. That means we can try before we buy and see if this organisation has the goods.

I was watching a sample course on LinkedIn Learning and the instructor talked about our impact as a presenter was 55% based on dress, 38% on voice tone and 7% on what we said. That is fake news folks. Dr. Albert Mehrabian, the author of the research found these numbers only come into play when that what was being said was not being matched by how it was said. When the congruency was lacking, people became distracted by our appearance and how we sound and they were not paying full attention to what we were saying. She didn’t know that, so I realised I don’t want to buy anything she is putting out there on offer.

We have a lot of choices and we can really get a lot of bang for our buck, in a way which simply wasn’t possible in the past. We can get reviews from people who have tried the training and it is all out there in the public domain. There is no barrier preventing us from spending ourtime and treasure wisely, in order to bolster our professional development. Let’s get busy doing that and become a modern leader, a well educated leader, a real talent.