My coaching client, Katie, used to think she had to do it all. That started to change about twelve months ago. As the mother of two young boys and owner of her own UK-based lifestyle concierge business with an international clientele, Katie stood facing a strategic decision: Keep doing it all herself or find a way to get more done. She chose to change her mindset.
Katie began focusing on building a team of A-Players who run the day-to-day business, leaving her free to concentrate on her own learning and development. Katie joined a CEO peer group, ran new business development campaigns in the UK and US, and shifted to mentoring (rather than micro-managing) her team. The results have been dramatic. Her business now attracts the sort of high net worth individuals and corporate clients that will allow Katie to exceed what she thought was possible with her company.
This business leadership struggle is real. So is this fact: You cannot do everything for your business. But you can choose to do only the most powerful things. If your days are packed with putting out fires on multiple fronts, it’s probably time to step back and fight the cause of all those little fires—to strategize for problem prevention and organizational progress. But you won’t get there without the right kind of focus.
Strategic Prioritizing: Your Proactive Solution to “Doing It All”
For centuries, business leaders have wrestled with applying David Ricardo’s concept of “comparative advantage” to their work—focusing one’s resources only on those vital tasks for which one is best equipped and positioned. Strong leadership requires saying “yes” to the tasks that only the leader can do well and saying “no” to those which others can do equally well or better.
In small- to mid-sized organizations, leaders commonly experience blurring of the lines between working in the business and working on the business. Yet when they spend too much of their precious time in the business—handling daily challenges on the execution level—there’s no one available to work on the business, ensuring that desired outcomes like sustainability and growth actually happen.
Learn to Balance Your Roles of Implementer and Visionary
Every business needs vision: a bold, long-term objective that inspires and drives your team. In the Metronomics coaching community, we call this your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), a term coined by Good to Great author Jim Collins. When thoroughly incorporated into your strategy, a BHAG serves as a clear target for your company to work toward and is designed to transform your business by bridging long-term vision with short-term actions.
However, crafting such a goal takes focused time. For this reason, as a leader you cannot be constantly hands-on, executing ordinary business activities. Instead, regularly set aside time to leverage your industry insights and understanding of your current business to create a clear vision to steer toward—your own North Star.
Think of a ship’s captain. He monitors and responds proactively to conditions on and beyond the ship, to ensure that he and his crew and their cargo all arrive at their intended destination. If the captain spends all his time mending sails and swabbing decks, is anyone watching the horizon?
At a recent Metronomics seminar, we discussed the most common ways leaders divide their time between tactical (“execution”) activities and strategic (higher-level) work. The table below reflects typical patterns.
Balancing your work in and on the business is key to long-range business success. So, how does achieving that balance happen? It all comes down to priorities.
How to Prioritize Strategically
Identify Your Leadership Comparative Advantage
Begin by assessing your key responsibilities and assets due to positioning in the organization, along with your personal strengths. Ask questions like:
- What am I uniquely equipped to do?
- Where am I the best person to add value?
- What would a stakeholder want to find me busy doing?
- Which “should-do” lists—those outdated expectations for my role—have become unnecessary need to be eliminated?
Next, take an honest look at those who work with you:
- What strengths or positioning equip them to take on tasks I need to delegate?
- How can current operations be adjusted or streamlined to make space for them to handle delegated tasks?
When you and your teammates are clear on your functional roles in the business and take responsibility for the tasks for which each of you has a “comparative advantage,” you’ll set yourselves up to establish and reach your business objectives with greater success.
How to Distinguish Between Working “In” and “On” the Business
Leaders sometimes inherit a position in which the lines between strategic and tactical work have so long been blurred that it can be hard to tease “work in” and “work on” apart.
Essentially, tactical or execution work—working in the business—is all about inputs. It’s work done according to the SOPs, activities that support daily business operations. Its focus is always short-term, always today. Examples include:
- Customer service
- Producing parts
- Delivering orders
- Administrative activities
- Paying invoices
- Recruiting and hiring
- Making sales
- Answering calls
- Responding to emails
Are these important tasks? Of course. They are the crucial “execution” activities that carry out the organization’s plans. But they do not shape those plans.
Strategic work—working on the business—is all about outputs. It defines the results you aim to achieve. It makes the plans your tactical team will carry out to achieve those results. When engaged in strategic work, leaders think about and discover new directions, new objectives, new approaches. Their focus is on the long term, on tomorrow.
Examples of strategic work include:
- Making financial projections and forecasts
- Establishing strategic vision
- Planning for expansion
- Education & personal development
- Goal setting
- Forming strategic partnerships
- Automating processes
- Developing systems
How to Shift Balance Toward the Strategic
There are 3 D’s to making strategic change: Delegate, Develop, and Dedicate.
Delegate Tactical Work
Assign the tactical tasks to those best suited to add value through those activities. Ensure that together you have found space for new tasks in their schedules. To ease their way into taking on your offloaded tasks, consider investing in technological tools, providing training, or streamlining processes as needed.
At the same time, like the captain of a ship, you need to know the state of your vessel and your crew at all times. In my own family’s car dealership, I found being a “strategic” CEO required me to stay in touch with the “tactical” workers—the salespeople, office staff, and service personnel—who carried out the vital daily activities that kept our company running. This meant regularly walking the shop floor, asking for updates and observing any early warning signs of a potential problem.
So will it be for you. Keeping in touch with the tactical team will enable you to address small fires before they develop into infernos. At the same time, you can directly and meaningfully express appreciation for what is working well.
Develop an Abundance Mindset
An abundance mindset frees you from the burden of needing to do everything yourself. Look at the resources and people you already have in place. Think in terms of succession planning: Who is ready for higher-level work, and who can be trained for it? Establish your employees’ career development as one of your firm’s desired outcomes.
Doing this serves two ends. In the short term, you empower your team to pick up the tactical tasks you want to take off your plate. In the longer term, you build a team equipped and motivated to achieve your stated business objectives together. In this kind of environment, one that values and prioritizes employees’ professional growth, your delegation of responsibilities will be seen as a vote of confidence in your people, not an excuse to overwork them.
Abundance thinking can also extend to those you have yet to hire. Use your strategic work time to shape hiring and onboarding processes that align with long-term goals. This will equip your human resources people to intentionally onboard A-Players who will drive your vision forward.
Dedicate Time to Enabling Your Strategic Work
Both in your business day and in your off hours, dedicate time to new strategic habits.
On the job, reinvest the time freed up through delegating. Experiment with daily rhythms of strategic work until you find one that works best in your context. Some leaders create time blocks for focusing on strategic activities: one whole day each week, for example, or 90 minutes a day every day. Some schedule one day each week to strategize about one of the five essential business activities: marketing, sales, operations, accounting, or leadership.
I personally found working from home on a Wednesday morning with my phone switched off was very effective, allowing me to think more creatively about the business. Whatever pattern you settle on, fill that time with activity that helps move your entire business toward sustainability and growth.
A note of caution: When allocating their time, leaders often overlook safeguarding their own health. I understand this. During a time of crisis in my family’s business, it was hard to balance addressing the immediate problems against protecting my personal health. In the process, I learned the value of taking breaks to maintain physical wellness, social connections, and my sense of purpose. Now I encourage all my coaching clients to do the same.
Don’t assume that taking on more high-stakes activities will guarantee greater long-term impact. Heaping too many critical tasks onto one’s plate at a time is a recipe for burnout. Over-extended leaders end up with reduced capacities to create, innovate, and strategize—the very things they set aside time for.
Many leaders find, as I have, that stepping away from the business occasionally to learn new leadership skills, study industry developments, and develop ways to work smarter (particularly in this age of AI) prove to be wise investments of their time. Other valuable activities include monthly networking events or peer group learning—either within or outside your own industry. Often, fresh insights arise when we look up from the familiar to explore new ideas.
What Will Improve When You Stop Doing It All
Businesses with leaders who learn how to Delegate, Develop, and Dedicate for strategic balance among their activities experience an array of success-building benefits.
Benefits for leaders
A leader’s sense of purpose increases as they concentrate more time on the visionary, strategic functions of their role. They re-gain perspective on the “why” behind the “what” they do every day. At the same time, their confidence in their team grows when they see more engagement and career growth among the people who take over the tasks they handed off. Seeing progress and growth within their team can be very satisfying. If they can remember to protect their health, leaders also find work less stressful and more rewarding. They open up time to coach or mentor others who are advancing along the talent pipeline.
Benefits for employees
Employees who are trained in and entrusted with tasks once relegated “only to the boss” tend to feel more valued and more engaged with their work. Their sense of loyalty and ownership increases. As the strategic work of leadership creates a clearer picture of the business objectives and their part in achieving those, employees feel like essential players on a team rather than a workforce pointlessly laboring toward unknown goals set by someone else without their input.
Benefits for the business
Engaged and empowered employees tend to stay around to see that shared goals are met. This increased employee retention means smoother operations, reduced hiring costs, and a more positive work environment. When leadership balances time spent on strategic activities with time in tactical ones, the company ship steers more confidently toward well considered and defined objectives. (It’s likely the crew gets along better, too.)
When you learn to balance strategic leadership with the day-to-day reality of running your business, everything changes—you gain clarity, momentum, and the freedom to grow. I love helping leaders make that shift and unlock their next level. If you’re ready to explore what this could look like for you, let’s talk. [link to: https://richardjbryan.com/contact/ ]
