Know your leverage points
It's time to intensify your search for people who expand your org's impact.
One thing I’m always coaching our directors on is to know where their key points of leverage are.
If they are always performing individual contributor work, it scales down their impact. And let’s be honest - they are not directors for a scaled-down impact. They are in that role to expand the impact of the team, just like the CEO is there to expand the impact of the executives. At any point, if someone is scaling down the impact of the people below them in the org chart, it may be time to move them laterally or let them go.
When I speak to founders about their leverage points, I get pushback. There are things that they know about their product that a PM or Head of Product may not intuitively understand. I always challenge them on this. Does this mean that they need to be hands-on with the product? Or, does it mean they didn’t hire the right person? Usually, it is the latter. Remember what I said before - they need to be able to expand the impact.
Finding your leverage point
In the new era of “no-code and automate everything”, there are many more technical solutions to leveraging your time. I was an early believer in Calendly and Zapier as a leveraging point for my business Ignite Financial. I knew there was something different about being able to force the software to accomplish tasks that were in the “urgent and important” quadrant of the Urgent vs. Important decision-making matrix.
That’s just software though. The best leveraging points are people. When you can find, recruit, hire, and train team members to take on the items that are in your “urgent and important” quadrants it makes it see you continue to expand the impact of your organization.
When you are first starting out, you are answering emails, delivering on a product/service, and all of the other pieces required to satisfy customers. Then you hire someone to do the urgent and unimportant tasks. You still have to make sure the pieces are in place to delight your customers, but you may not actually be the one who is doing the work. Soon, that person gets to take on the urgent and important tasks that involve delighting your customers - you now have free bandwidth to reach further in the future of delighting your customers.
You may expand to a new location. You may incorporate a new service or product feature. You may expand into a brand new target market and start over again at the bottom. The person you hired is now your leverage point. They help you scale. Simply put, they make it so that you can be in two places at once.
This is the holy grail. When I’m working with our directors I am coaching them on finding and training their replacements. This will allow me to train them as my replacement - which allows me to expand the impact of KnowCap.
Where is your leverage point? Do you have a plan for creating more throughout your org?
You should.