Making Time for Strategy: How to be Less Busy and More Successful

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