Margin — The Hidden Advantage of Great Leaders

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Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast. Where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining us. Today we’re going to talk about a topic that’s going to be hard for Perry and I to talk about. We were just kind of catching up before we hit record to be able to share this with you. We’re going to talk about margin. The Hidden Advantage of Great Leaders. And I know this is an area that I can’t wait to dive in and talk about and learn more about just to continue to drive awareness in my own life. Before we do, I want to encourage you to go to MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast, and there you’ll be able to click on a button to be able to download the learner guide.

Chris Goede:
There’ll also be a form there to where you can just put in, man, what’s the leadership challenge you have? What are you struggling with right now? Is there a way for us to help you, whether it’s taking this content to your team or maybe it’s around the 5 Levels of Leadership, whatever it might be, we’d love to hear from you. Well, as I mentioned just a minute ago, we’re going to talk about margin. So here we go. This is no doubt something that all of us want more of, but man, we don’t do a really good job of protecting it. And man, it seems like the more responsibility that you have, the less margin you’re probably going to have. And I’ve had people question me and just say, what else are you going to put into your calendar or your responsibility? And what does that look like? And so we need to make sure that we’re doing that professionally and personally. And that’s what we’re going to dig into today. And so margin is a space between your capacity, like what can you handle, what are your limits, and your commitments.

Chris Goede:
What’s the load? What are you carrying?

Perry Holley:
What are you saying yes to?

Chris Goede:
What are you saying yes to? And then I’m just going to mention this one word. I’m going to throw it to you. I’m going back to resilience again. This is another, I think, leading indicator of how resilient you become as a leader.

Perry Holley:
I know it feels like an intervention for you and for me because we both run at a high rate of speed and most leaders do, and they’re out in front and they’re doing great things. But our team used to make fun of me for not being able to say no. Now they’re making fun of me for saying no more. It’s kind of the way it goes. Yes, that’s right. Something triggered this in my mind, something we— you and I were at an event recently and somebody mentioned that they didn’t have any margin and I thought, oh, I flashback to a book my wife bought me, and this was an intervention that she was putting me in probably 25 years ago. Said, Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Dr. Richard Swenson.

Perry Holley:
And actually, that statement you just made, margin is the space between capacity and commitment, is from Dr. Swenson. But her point was, you’re filling your days every waking minute. You have somewhere to be and something to do. How do you How do you get things done? How do you make things happen? And I’m not good at this because I like to stay busy, but it almost felt to me as if I was being lazy or I was being inefficient doing that, that I have more time, I should be doing more things. And I don’t think I’m the only leader to struggle with this. Now would’ve been a good time for you to say amen. Amen.

Chris Goede:
I’m actually thinking I should probably step out of this entire podcast is where I’m going.

Perry Holley:
Well, good news.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I mean, it’s across the board, right? You are not the only leader. As a matter of fact, everybody listening is like me too, thinking about what their calendar looks like today as they’re listening to it or when it is.

Perry Holley:
Well, it’s not laziness, it’s not inefficiency, it’s not wasted time. Good leadership does not happen at 100% capacity. Yeah.

Chris Goede:
My wife loves the Enneagram assessments, right? She’s a 1, which is a reformer. Everything’s to be better. We can be doing this. I’m a 3, which is an achiever. So this is a true story. When it comes to a Sunday afternoon, we’re empty nesting now. And let’s just say there’s nothing between church and dinner, and maybe we’re just on the couch watching a movie. We’re like, we are being lazy.

Chris Goede:
And then we have to have this self-talk and go, no, look what we just did the last 6 days. Right? And how do you create that margin? And she does a much better job than I do. But I think every leader struggles with this. And so I think we max things out. And when that happens, it’s not a good thing. What ends up happening is you react to things instead of thinking about things. You are managing tasks instead of leading people. And so John Maxwell says that activity is not necessarily accomplishment.

Chris Goede:
And sometimes we just want to stay busy. We want to stay moving because then we think we’re not being lazy. And margin, though, is what allows leaders to move from being active to being productive. And there’s a difference between being active and being productive. And so if you want more perspective, more wisdom, better decisions, you’re going to need to build more margin in your schedule to be able to do it.

Perry Holley:
And what’s frightening, if you think about this as a leader, we— people do what people see. You’re leading by example that when you fill every calendar minute with something, or you send emails at midnight or you never disconnect, you’re always online, that you’re silently giving permission for the entire organization, at least the part that can see you, to do the same. And there’s no margin at the top means there’s really probably no margin anywhere. And this can deteriorate your culture, can cause people— I’m telling you, it seems to be okay to send a midnight email and people think, I heard the ping and I woke up. I should get up and answer it. No, but we’re trying to train them for that. I got brought up this way. I was with IBM a lot of years, very high intense workspace, but they kind of cut— right now my calendar is in 30-minute increments.

Perry Holley:
I can schedule 30-minute calls, hour calls. Things are working that way. And my wife says, do you run your whole life in 30-minute increments? I do.

Chris Goede:
Yes, I do.

Perry Holley:
But at IBM, we actually cut it to 15. So things began 15 minutes and 15 minutes, and you were moving from thing to thing to thing. It’s just not nothing. And you can’t, you can’t do deep work, quality work, if you’re not taking some of that for you.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, totally agree. So before we get into some practical ways that we’re going to share that hopefully will help you and us create more margin in your life, let’s talk about why leaders resist adding margin to their schedule. Maybe they feel like they’re going to fall behind. Maybe if they slow down a little bit, like I just gave you my example about Sarah and I Sunday, I mean, what should we be doing? We could be moving the needle forward on something versus sitting here and enjoying a movie, right? Or whatever it might be. Being busy proves that I’m valuable. So maybe you think that just because you’re moving, that then you’re valued, or people are going to see you as valued because, look, he’s always running through the office, he’s going to the next meeting, and yeah, like it’s your— yeah, that’s your identity. Yeah. Margin is a luxury, uh, that I’ll create later.

Chris Goede:
So then when I get to No. And then a last one is my job is to be available at all times. To Perry’s point, emails anytime, text anytime. What does that look like? So what we want you to hear as we dive into this is that margins isn’t the reward for good leadership. It’s going to be a requirement. If you’re going to last for the long haul, then you got to have the margin.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. John talks about the law of priorities and that leaders must choose what matters most. And I think For me, this is where margin— what am I working at? We talked last week about the 3 most important and the 1 must and the things that you do to choose your priorities, your urgent and important. Are you doing important and not urgent? I think it’s helpful to remember that margin is really just white space on the calendar. But I like where you were going with your part there about don’t label that as I’m weak, I’m lazy. No, it’s white space on the calendar, which I can use for thinking, for planning, for preparing, for doing some of my to-dos that I don’t have to take home and do at night because my calendar was booked. It’s buffer for the unexpected that happens. So I leave space that when somebody pops in my office— actually, right now I’ve got a guy that was texting me during some of our recording that he’s a guy I coach.

Perry Holley:
He’s just got an issue. Hey, can you call me? Well, if I have no margin, unfortunately, I blocked time after this and said, yes, when we’re done with this recording, I’ve got an hour blocked off for me. Can I give it to him? Yeah, sounded kind of important. So now I have margin to give this someone else, that unexpected thing to do. Margin is not avoiding responsibility. It’s not lowering your standards. It’s not doing less important work. It’s not being disengaged.

Perry Holley:
I think it’s getting this in your mind to say, and I’m really doing this as a leader. I think it’s incumbent upon us to put these spaces in there where we can do deeper work, deeper thinking, and deeper connecting with people.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I don’t think that great leaders do less. I just think they’re extremely clear about what are the things, what are the right things that they should be doing? And I want to encourage you, I’m learning this right now, is that how do I delegate and empower really more ownership in things, not just, hey, go do this task, right? And so now I have this filter system right now to where when I think about this, it’s that, hmm, if it’s not me to do it, then who, who can I help? Who can I partner with? Who can to be able to to do that, right? Because then we’re getting things done together, but it’s not me taking up more of my time. It’s actually given me a little bit more margin. You and I were just mentioning about a content meeting that we have coming up, and I’m looking at my calendar and I see that we’re both in there, and I’m like, do I need to be in there? Well, not if you’re in there, right? And so you being the expert in that world on our team, I’m just riding shotgun. So I look at it and I go, well, to create margin, then I should remove myself from that meeting and then use that 2 or 3 hours to do something else. Now, what you got to be careful is what do you replace it with, right? And so it’s not about us doing less. It’s about being clear about what we need to be doing.

Perry Holley:
I think this is an incredibly important point you’re making because let’s be honest, in this organization, you’re the senior vice president in this organization. People like having you in the meeting. You are a good catch. We want you in the meeting because it makes us feel like it’s a better meeting because of you. I know it’s uncomfortable with me saying that, but I think every leader needs to hear that is sometimes your title and your position and your influence makes you a great catch to have in every meeting. But I wonder, kind of a question back to you, and not for you, but you coach a lot, you see a lot. Are leaders losing margin because they’re trying to do too much?

Chris Goede:
Oh, 100%.

Perry Holley:
What other people could be doing.

Chris Goede:
100%. Me too.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, okay.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, me too. Like, I, I, I have that bent to where I’m like, you know what, I got it. Perry doesn’t need to be there. Well, Perry would probably enjoy being there more than I would, first of all, and he’s going to add more value to the meeting than me. Oh, and for what we’re going after as a team and as an organization, that’s not probably the best use of my time when I know and I trust that you’re going to be there.

Perry Holley:
So this Hard question, maybe. But so if back to the other thing I’m saying is that you’re a great catch to have in a meeting, that meeting seems more important when the senior vice president is there. You’ve obviously empowered me to be in the meeting for you, but do they know that? Does it carry weight? Do they feel like they’re losing traction because Chris is not coming to my meeting? They’re making this now is less important. This is not a priority because Chris is not in the meeting. But you’re putting margin on your calendar and delegating. How do we overcome that?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So here’s what I did in this particular example. I’m not just not showing up or declining and Perry’s going to be there. I actually sent a message from my office saying, hey, I see that Perry and I are both in this meeting. Perry is the guy you want in this meeting, not necessarily me. I’m empowering Perry to be there. He is our content guy. And so I’m out.

Chris Goede:
In essence, I didn’t say I’m out, but I did say those first couple of things. Why? I want to transfer that title. I want to transfer that authority. I want to transfer that ownership to who’s going to be in the meeting. So leaders, listen to me. You can do this, but make sure you’re doing it in a way that you’re transferring that authority, that ownership, that responsibility, that spoken confidence from you to the person that’s going to be in that meeting in this situation. And so I think there’s a way to handle it so that they feel like that is there. And at least the organizers of the meeting know that the person that you’re sending is going to add so much more value than you would through that process.

Perry Holley:
Well, as the person that’s representing you, thank you, because they could be out walking, oh, geez, Perry, no, it’s not that. But you’ve also told them that This is very important, and I have my number one person on that in that space coming, and we’ll be circling back with you. But I don’t need to be there. I think that’s—

Chris Goede:
you should do that. That’s right.

Perry Holley:
All right, let’s get practical before we get out of here. Number one, calendar margin has got to be the first battlefield you’ve got to attack. And margin isn’t scheduled, then it really doesn’t exist in my world. So practical ideas around this. I thought scheduling— I know almost every meeting goes out as 60 minutes. How about you schedule a meeting for 50 minutes or 45 minutes? And just you say, well, it can never get it done. Well, is there any prep work? I know Apple sends them a memo and you have to read the memo before you get to the meeting. So the meeting is just focused.

Perry Holley:
They don’t even have chairs. You stand up. We can do meetings shorter. Block thinking time and then defend it. We talked about this last week about setting up your scheduling, what’s important to you. Do you put thinking time for you on there? Leave at least one unscheduled block per day. You think that’s got to be impossible. I bet you can work up to that.

Perry Holley:
I didn’t say how big it is. Maybe it’s 15 minutes. Do you schedule your lunch? Could you add 15 minutes to lunch to say, I’m going to take a break, give me a little bite to eat, but then I’m going to spend 30 minutes thinking through the afternoon or taking care of the morning to-dos or walking around the building, whatever it might be. Build transition space into the meetings you’re doing so that we can move from one. Because I know you struggle with the fact that you don’t want to be late to the next call, right? But even if the previous call ended on time, it’s still going to— and if you need to go to the restroom or something or get a refresh your water, there’s no transition, right? And so now you’re 2 or 3 minutes late. And how do people read that? So now you have— are you hurting your influence? Because we scheduled meetings back to back to back, right?

Chris Goede:
I totally agree. I have moved my meetings to 45 minutes and 30 minutes and then tried to protect the back half of that hour to be able to have that block time. Follow up or it runs late or whatever it might be.

Perry Holley:
Here’s another tip on that is that most people assume even though you schedule it for 45, it’s on their calendar as 45, they assume it’s 60. Do you say something at the start of the call?

Chris Goede:
I don’t. But here’s a tip is that send an email out ahead of time. Hey, this is going to be a 45-minute meeting. Come prepared or whatever, right? Like communicate. I think you’re exactly right. I actually made a transition in some of my one-on-ones leading into this year and I have not done a good job of communicating this. Yet I have a note to do it. Haven’t had the margin to do it.

Chris Goede:
Speaking of the devil. But it’s like I’m reducing some of my meetings from 45 to 30, and I’m going to ask for an agenda ahead of time, and I’m going to say, come in, we got to go. So that they’re aware of ahead of time of the change, because otherwise you just assume it’s on the block that you’d be able to do that. The next one is decision margin. This is interesting, right? Because not only Do we have a ton of hours and a ton of activity and all kinds of, but we get exhausted because we make so many decisions and decision fatigue is real. And so how do you create margin? By eliminating what I would call decisions that other people can make in your place, right? So Jeff Bezos at Amazon categorized decisions as type 1 and type 2 decisions. Type 1 is irreversible, man. It’s high stakes.

Chris Goede:
He’s making those decisions. Type 2, They could be reversible. They’re lower risk. We could make some changes. And so most decisions shouldn’t require throughout the day type 1 or tier 1 for me. It should be that other people should be able to make those decisions. There are going to be some, but not all of them. And do you feel like you need to make the decision on all type 1 and type 2? So it doesn’t always deserve your leadership attention.

Chris Goede:
And that may be hard for some of you to hear and or to think, but you absolutely could have other people making decisions on your behalf and you don’t have to make all of them. So ask yourself this question, what’s one decision that I keep making that someone else could own for you? Good.

Perry Holley:
This next one. So we talked about calendar margin. That was decision margin. There’s another one is emotional margin. We did talk about this briefly last week around your energy level, in that a lot of this leadership drains your emotional energy and that you really don’t lead people well when you’re emotionally drained. And so do you know what restores you? So we’ll go a little quick here, but if you listened last week around, is it getting a coffee, walking around the building, getting fresh air, talking to a friend, just taking a walk down the hall, giving yourself— another thing I don’t think I mentioned this last week was, do you recognize the early signs of depletion? Are you a short temper? Are you easily distracted? Are you disengaged? You’re not paying attention in the meeting. You don’t remember what people said. Is that I’m starting to find myself being drained.

Perry Holley:
And by the way, it’s a great one for home as well, is that notice when you need to restore and replenish your energy, take that seriously. It’s one of the reasons why we have margin is I don’t need 60 minutes, 60 minutes, 60 minutes. I need 45 minutes and a 15-minute refresh my water, take a walk, and then go to the next one. I do think you need to let people know up front. Hey, this is a 45-minute meeting. I have a hard stop at 45 past whatever it is to train them. And they will honor it. I think they want to help.

Perry Holley:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
I want to add something. It triggered a thought where we talked about refueling in margin, especially personally. This is where I think understanding we do in the Five Levels of Leadership, the training and coaching we do, we talk a lot about the values. Of, of an individual. And I thought about this personal example again, go back to Sarah and I, um, my wife, and one of her top 5 values is fun. Well, part of having fun helps drive energies and refuels margin for her, right? Like, and so when we get a little depleted, we have this common language. She’s like, hey, I think we need to have a little fun, like let’s go do something, let’s go whatever that activity is that drives that fun, that allows you to kind of get away to be able to build that margin. So even tie it to the values of yourself and others.

Chris Goede:
The next one is strategic margin. Great leaders don’t just react to the business, they’re actually anticipating it. You got to be thinking about it. This is where the whole you’re thinking on the business versus being in it. What does that look like? Do you have quarterly days that are just blocked out that you go somewhere and you are just thinking on the business? You’re having conversations with team people, customers. What are we missing? I love that this morning that you actually did some training for a company and you were talking about, hey, what are you missing in providing excellent service for the community? Have you asked them that? Same thing with your team, right? Like having conversations like that. And then just again, time to think about the future and what that looks like. One of the things we did as a team last year was Everybody got a day, and I wanted you to think about personal, but I also wanted you to think about our team and the organization and what could we do different and what could we better.

Chris Goede:
And those are some of the things that we’re working on now in this year that came out of that day. But you got to— again, this is that margin thing. You’ve got to put it on the calendar and you got to protect it.

Perry Holley:
And I was freaking out when you did that because I’m thinking, what am I going to get a whole day? Well, yeah, you’re saying I’m giving you permission to take it.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, take it.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. Let me— before they get Chris To wrap it up, just think about maybe doing an audit of your margin audit for your life. Where are there areas either in your life or leadership where you have zero margin? What’s it costing you personally or even professionally to do that? Is there a small decision you could make starting tomorrow about adding a little margin into there and kind of asking the question that what would break if I created some margin, or would something get better to do that? So you have to call yourself on it. I’m noticing for myself, I had my wife call me on it years ago, but it really hit a trigger with me to say, she’s exactly right. I like work, I like what I do, and I would do it all day long. I started getting— starting at a certain time and stopping at a certain time. That’s problematic some days because I have a lot more to do. But guess what? I’ve given ending time to them, to the family, as margin.

Perry Holley:
And I need to give that space. So some of these things are hard, but they’re incredibly rewarding.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, it’s so good. Well, as we wrap up, John Maxwell says when he talks about longevity of a leader is that it’s really not about managing your time, it’s about managing your energy. And energy comes from how much margin do you have and how much are you devoting to it and how much are you— we talked last week about preparing, and that helps create margin. One of the things that I struggle with is that when something gets pulled off my calendar, I go, oh, well, let’s fill it with something else. Should you do that? Probably not. Maybe you should depend on where it’s at and how important it is in your goals and what you’re focused on. Maybe it can just move to the next week or the week after that. And so we just need to make sure that we’re protecting our time and being able to create margin.

Chris Goede:
Because it is the leader who lasts, not the one that survives. If you survive, it’s like you’re hanging on for dear life and eventually you’re going to fall out, right? But you want to be one that lasts. And so I put down this question. This is for Perry, myself, and it’s for you. And it’s, are you saying yes because it’s important or because you’re a little insecure on you want to be able to control it and you want to do it? Because if you say no, then you can have a little bit of margin. And when your capacity is gone, as leaders, your thinking and your perspective is gone. And so you got to be really making wise decision on what you’re saying yes to.

Perry Holley:
Fantastic. Well, thank you, Chris, for great insights and for being so candid.

Chris Goede:
Now I got to go back and listen to this and apply it.

Perry Holley:
So if you’d like the learner guide for this episode, if you’d like to learn more about our offerings, if you’d like to leave us a comment or a question, you You can do all that at MaxwellLeadership.com/Podcast. We love hearing from you and very grateful you spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.

Transcript created by Castmagic.