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Increase the Return on Your Time (ROYT)

If you're like most hipos I know, your biggest complaint is that you don't have enough time to do everything you need to do, especially as you rise in an organization and face larger and more complex projects and challenges. There's a limit to how much you can expand your working hours without ruining your health or damaging your personal relationships. (Sleeping less is not the best option.) But just as you can raise the return on your money by smart investing, you can learn techniques to raise the return on your time. Leveraging your multipliers-those things that allow you to accomplish more-will free your time and mental space to focus on bigger things, including your own learning and self-improvement, while delivering excellent results.

Get Comfortable with People Better Than You

At one point in my career, I decided to call some of my former students from when I was teaching at Harvard Business School. Several had become CEOs of very large companies when they were only in their forties, and I wanted to hear about their experiences. I remembered that I had given one of them a rather poor grade, but when I called him he was profusely polite. "Please come see me. You can stay at the house," he offered. "And let me know anything that you need."

I accepted the invitation. After a pleasant dinner, his wife dismissed herself, and he and I talked over glasses of wine. I apologized about giving him a low grade, but he said not to worry, he had learned a lot from the class. Then I posed some questions that had been on my mind: How was he able to move up so quickly? And what might up-and-coming leaders learn from his success? He was momentarily pensive, then replied:

"When I left school it became clear to me that the most important resource I had was time. I decided that I had to somehow create more time within the day. I thought about what would free me up the most, and I came up with three things. First, I had to become really good at hiring the right people and putting them in the right jobs. Second, if I saw that somebody wasn't up to the job, I had to move them out quickly. When I paid more attention to those things, I saw a difference in how much time I had. Third, I started planning six months ahead of time what I would no longer do-the things I would pass on to others. I decided who would take them over and what would have to happen to get that person ready."

My former student understood that your highest leverage is not process, organization, or money. It's people. Every task from creating a strategy to implementing a marketing plan depends on the quality of the people responsible for it. Yet leaders consistently fall short when it comes to hiring, developing, and promoting the best people for the work at hand, for a variety of reasons. They get preoccupied with matters that seem more pressing at the time. Or they pick people they're comfortable with without considering others who may be better suited to the job. Or they settle for the "best person available" without expanding or extending the search.

It takes a deep personal commitment to devote the time and energy to ensure that you have the very best person in each of the jobs you oversee. You may want help from HR or recruiting firms, but this is your personal responsibility. The better you are at it, the more you expand your own capacity and capability.

Dig in to fully understand the requirements of the job and how it may change over time, and be systematic and objective in assessing people. Take a simple example of the job of a sales rep. Maybe it used to require terrific interpersonal skills and product knowledge, but if the company is moving toward selling solutions, not just products, the same job will require broader business skills and more strategic thinking than before.

For any leadership position you fill, look for people who can do the job as you have defined it, but also look to the future. How does that job need to evolve, and can the person grow with it? Does the person have a history of innovative or entrepreneurial thinking? That can indicate the ability not only to grow with a job but also to adapt to changing markets. Suppose your company needs to escape from a maturing business by expanding beyond manufacturing and into services. If all of your leaders are coming out of manufacturing, their experience might be limiting.

If you're uncomfortable hiring people outside your band of loyal followers, try to pinpoint your psychological blockage. Maybe you're afraid to take a risk on people. If that's the case, push yourself. Do your best to calibrate the person and take a chance; then later reflect on where you went right or wrong. That's how your judgment will improve.

Maybe you are settling too soon because you didn't find someone who matched your criteria. Be tenacious and keep searching. I know one CEO who withstood heavy pressure from the board and others when the position as head of R&D went unfilled for two years. It was crucially important to get the right person for the job, and it took that long for the CEO to find him.

Another common blockage is being afraid to hire people better than you, yet hipos succeed because they do precisely that. It may seem like a good idea when you are a CEO, but as a junior level leader, it can be very threatening. Spencer Rascoff, CEO of online real estate marketplace Zillow, shared his view with New York Times interviewer Adam Bryant: "The biggest mistake I tend to see from junior managers is not hiring people who are better than them. It might be subconscious-people don't want to be shown up by one of their direct reports-or maybe they don't know how to identify talent." i

Lacking the confidence to recruit strong, capable people or to give them big responsibilities where their talents can shine-and perhaps outshine yours-is especially risky in today's world, where companies need an infusion of new skills on a regular basis. Reluctance to hire people with technical capabilities you lack will compromise the company's performance and your own. Watch for this in your own behavior and go the other way. Recruit stars for your team, people with skills beyond your own, and your own capacity and ability to deliver results will expand.

Set and Reset Your Priorities

Most hipos want to be comprehensive-to do everything that's important, and do it well-but their time and concentration soon get diluted. You will be far more effective if you narrow your priorities to the few that will have the greatest impact on your business. Determining these is the result of having clear goals, knowing the realities of your business, and making a judgment about what matters most. It is a mental activity that you hone with practice.

Make a clear distinction between goals and priorities. For me, a goal is a crystal-clear description of what you want to achieve. Sometimes you'll set the goals yourself, sometimes they'll be set for you. Either way you need total clarity about what needs to be achieved.

The best goals, meaning those that produce a healthy outcome for the business, have several components, all of which can be achieved at the same time. A narrow singular goal such as boosting sales or reducing costs by a certain percentage, can do a lot of damage by encouraging people to cut corners or sacrifice the long term for the sake of meeting the target.

Priorities are basically the actions you take to achieve your goals. You have to decide which ones matter most. Use your knowledge of external and internal realities to decide. Let's say you head a General Motors division and you are striving to increase market share by one point, cut costs by 3 percent, and increase cash flow by 5 percent over the next three years. The probability of achieving those goals will be heavily affected by whether your Japanese competitors have a price advantage because of changes in the value of the yen. If you believe the yen will depreciate heavily and that the decline will be sustained, giving the Japanese an edge, you may want to change your product mix to minimize damage from price wars on products with thin margins. Changing the product mix would then be a dominant priority.

Think about priorities in a time frame: What do you have to accomplish this quarter, this year, and three years out? To be sure you're not sacrificing your medium- and long-term goals, translate them into specific actions that will be taken now. That is, what do you have to do in the short term to build the long term?

Setting priorities is an iterative process. Think about what you need to do, and group the tasks so they can be assigned to the individuals who can make them happen. Keep culling the list until it is a small number of tasks that will have a big impact on your ability to achieve the goals. Ultimately, you will want a set of three to five what I call laser-sharp dominant priorities. Arriving at these, keeping intense focus on them, and driving them relentlessly is key to execution.

What about your boss's priorities? To some extent, other people's priorities will be a fact of life for you, even if you're a manager reporting to a VP or a CEO reporting to the board. But it's still up to you to ensure that you are focusing your time on what you think is most important....