Executive Podcast #247: Developing the Prioritizer Within You

Today we focus on creating margin in one’s leadership to avoid burnout and improve self-awareness. Leaders must emphasize the need to focus on the tasks that provide the most return on investment. Great leaders align priorities with team members to ensure everyone is working towards the same goals.

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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 Holly, a Maxwell leadership, facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:

And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president. Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. As we get started, I’d love for you to visit Maxwellleadership.com/podcast. There you can have access to our family of podcasts where it’s corporate competitor by Don Yaeger is there. Or Maxwell Leadership podcast with Mark Cole? Is there? We’d love for you to be able to use those as resources. You can also leave a question or comment or maybe there’s something that you’re dealing with with a team member or in your leadership as general. You’d love for us to kind of build a lesson around that. Let me back up. You’d love for Perry to build a lesson around that. Put that in there. We love ideas.

Perry Holley:

Perry would love to build a lesson.

Chris Goede:

Around Perry would love to hear from you and build a lesson around that. Well, I often tell you guys in the past that Perry kind of springs these titles upon me. I think the set me up on this one as well because I’m not really sure that this is a word that’s in this title, but I’m going to say it and so then we’re going to build off of it. Today’s topic is developing the prioritizer within you. Perry, is that a word?

Perry Holley:

I thought it would be a great book title.

Chris Goede:

I love it.

Perry Holley:

Developing the prioritizer within you.

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Chris Goede:

I love it. It does sound good. Well, last week if you listened, if not, I encourage you to go back and listen. We talked about priority principles as a leader that can really help you become more effective. And today we want to look at three proactive actions that you can take to know and manage your most important tasks and to take your productivity to the next level. And that’s how the word prioritizer showed up in our lesson today.

Perry Holley:

Yeah, and it’s not a real word.

Chris Goede:

You did made it up.

Perry Holley:

Yeah, but I like it a lot and it all comes from John’s teachings. And we were talking before going on the air that I wrote this. He thought I wrote it for him, but no, I wrote it for me. Then I realized most of us that do work that we enjoy and working with people that we enjoy, we can get really head down into it and not really work on the most important things, the priorities that we talked about last week, those principles. But today a couple more on the idea of making sure I’m doing the right things and I’m taking care of the right priorities and right people and taking care of myself is going to be a big piece of this as well. So John had a very simple phrase. I wrote it down because I said, decide what to do and do it. Decide what not to do and don’t do it. There you go. That’s it. That’s a wrap.

Chris Goede:

Shortest podcast ever.

Perry Holley:

But let me go. I’ve got a few of these from John about the proactive priority solution. Number one is the Pareto principle. You may know this as the 80 20 rule. I’ve heard this my whole life, and I just don’t ever apply it. So I started thinking, how do I apply this to my life? And if you’re not familiar with the pareto principle, the 80 20 rule basically says that the 20% of whatever you’re doing leads to 80% of whatever you’re trying to accomplish. So if it’s business, 20% of your time will go to 80% of your wins, 80% of your production. If you spend time, energy, money, and personnel, 20% will get you the 80% to do that. So what’s been I know we’ve had this around us, Maxwell. We teach this a lot, but you put this to work. Yeah.

Chris Goede:

I think one of the things that come to mind right away when you talk about Chris is I think about volunteers. I automatically go to from the Pareto principle, I go, okay, if I think about volunteers before, oftentimes 20% of those that are there are doing 80% of the work. It’s true. It’s lived out. And even with some of my team members and then myself, I have to go, okay, what is the top 20% of what I’m doing? What we’re doing as an organization that would give us the 80% return and then stay in that wheelhouse and make sure one of the things I like to do with my team is say, hey, bring a list of things that you’re working on, and then let’s go through the and let’s figure out how you have them prioritized just to make sure that we’re in alignment, because they could be working on something that maybe is not in the top 20%, and it’s not returning 80% of what we needed to, and it’s just a misalignment of the priority. So without a shadow of a doubt, I think this is something that all business leaders should be looking at for themselves but also for their team.

Perry Holley:

A practical way of doing it is think about if you have a success. You look at what generated the results that you generated, and then just do a little after action review of what really led to the success. Was it 100 things that I did, or was it maybe 20 things that I did? And then you can really nail it down to say, this was a lot of spinning tires. This was actually making a difference and being okay. As John said, 80% of something, you’ve got it. You can hand it off. But if I can get 20% of what I did to get that 80% result, man, it’s going to be great, but it’s hard to analyze. I’m throwing this in as a little extra because I struggle with this. What is it that got me to the great result? And was it all the spinning of the tires? No, it was really a couple of things.

Chris Goede:

Well, and you just said the word analyze. Right. That’s what as leaders we need to be doing with our time is we need to be looking back and analyzing and breaking down and then it’ll show up. It’ll jump off the page for you when you begin to look at it. Proactive priority solution number two. This is we’re going to break down the three R’s. So it’s principle number two with three R’s. So hang with us here as we dive into this. The three R’s are number one, requirement number two, return. And then final one we’re going to talk about under. This solution is reward. And so as we kind of dive into this, I want to talk about requirement in regards to our major priorities as we begin to ask ourselves these three questions and the Perry will talk about return and I’ll come back and talk about reward as we work through these. So when you think about what is required, every role has responsibilities non negotiables. There are things that you must do. You’ve heard Perry and I say there are certain things that only you can do and that you cannot delegate to other people. Do you know what those are leading back to the pareto principle. Do you understand what gives you that 80%? And does that need to be done by you? Does it need to be done by somebody else? What is the requirement of that? And I think we also need to make sure that as leaders we understand what’s required of us is final responsibility. We are responsible for any and all things that we have to answer to that are required of us as leaders. And so if you work for yourself or even your own business instead of an organization, I think this question may even be more difficult for you to answer. But man, it’s even I don’t know if it’s more critical that’s the right way to say that, but it’s super critical because of being that entrepreneur, entrepreneur be that that you’re running your own business. You really have to get into the weeds and decipher. What is it that is requirement for me in regards to this priority solution?

Perry Holley:

Yeah, it’s really a great idea. Again remind you we’re talking about the inner prioritizer in you. How do you determine what are the things you should be focusing your energy and your time on? And it can’t be everything. So how do you determine what it is? Prato principle 80 20. What are the 20%? I should be doing this idea about the three Rs. So what is required of me in my job is great. The second one, the second R is return? Where do I find the greatest return for the energy that I submit? A bit of the 80 20 again, but where are you great at and what is it that you really do better than others? Where do you get the most productivity and the most energy going into your work? Where do people constantly complimenting you on? Where do you see results coming towards you? And what are people asking you to take on because they see you as a quality contributor in that area. These are the areas that I normally see the most return. You and I have had lots of discussions about where I should be spending my time is that I write, speak, teach, and coach. Now, I’m tremendously grateful that I boiled it down to four things, because before that, I was trying to do 100, but I’ve got it down to write, speak, teach, and coach. But where do I get the most return and what is return to me? What is it? Is it for our team? Where do we get the most productivity? Where do we get the most insights from other? Where do we get the most people joining us in the journey? What is the measurements? We have these conversations, so I need to know what’s required of me and where my greatest return is.

Chris Goede:

And then finally, third R. Number three of the R’s here is reward. This one for us is man. What is most rewarding to you both personally and professionally? You hear us talk about the fact that they run hand in hand in regards to our leadership. And we want to make sure that you understand that your best work is accomplished when you enjoy what you’re doing personally and professionally. And so Perry just talked about what are the four things that he does, by the way, all four of those things are very rewarding to him. They are maybe more on the backside once they get through some of the different things, but they’re extremely rewarding to him. And that can be an uplift for you mentally and emotionally and spiritually. If you’re in that focus where what you’re prioritizing in that inner prioritizer is in alignment, then that reward will end up happening. One of the things I like you put in here in the notes was man. When you do something like that for yourself, you have this feeling of, man, I was born for this. I’m on the right track. We talk a lot about energy as a leader. Like, it’s something that doesn’t pull or drag a lot of energy out of you. It actually gives energy for you. And so I think that that third R is really understanding what is most rewarding and what you’re doing around your priorities.

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Perry Holley:

Yeah. So just to make this real, what we’re talking about again about setting your priorities, what should you be investing your time in? What is it I have to do was required of me? What is it I get to do? Which is that return for me, that energy? And where did the reward come from? Me. And when I think of the four things I do is I love each of them. But you’ve seen me when I’m in front of an audience, I feel there’s a lot of return on that. To me, I’m looking at faces when I’m writing or even writing this content. I’m by myself. I enjoy it. It’s creativity. I’m a creative. I like that. But the reward comes when I’m now doing this and here with you. So I’m feeling the energy of it. It wasn’t rewarding when I was writing it, but I was required to do that. I’m required to write it. I get reward from that and it’s in return from that. But it’s questions we can ask ourselves to say, am I doing a bunch of things that don’t meet any of those three R’s? Maybe I need to rethink what I’m doing.

Chris Goede:

Yeah. Well, let me move into then our third priority solution, proactive. Priority solution number three is make room for Margin.

Perry Holley:

Do you know this guy margin?

Chris Goede:

I don’t. And we could probably talk about this principle for a long time. This is something that I think a lot of us really kind of struggle with and have to work through. There’s a law called Parkinson’s Law where work expands so that it fills the time available for its completion. I wasn’t familiar with this until I read it, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is so true.

Perry Holley:

Yeah. If you say I’m going to work for 3 hours, guess what? You got 3 hours of work. Yeah, I’m going to work 8 hours. I got 8 hours of work. I’m going to stay late. Guess what? I got 9 hours of work. It doesn’t go away.

Chris Goede:

It doesn’t go away. I remember having dinner a long time ago. This was a privilege with Zig Ziggler and John Maxwell and myself. There’s three of us, and you can decide which one didn’t belong at the table.

Perry Holley:

But I’ll never forget one of these things is not like the other.

Chris Goede:

One of these things is not like the other. So I’ll never forget something that Ziggler said that night. He said, hey, if you ever want to watch how productive you can be, just watch what happens the week before and the week after you go on vacation and then say, well, why couldn’t I do that all the time? And so that limited amount of time forced me, right? Or if I had more time, then it took all that time. And so I was thinking through that about the amount of time that I give to work. John says that margin is the space that exists between our load and our limits. Margin is the gap between rest and exhaustion and the space between breathing freely and suffocating. Margin is the opposite of overload. Perry, Vera felt like you were suffocating. Yeah. Then in the 21 Laws, John wrote about the law of priorities, and there it’s where he states that leaders understand that activity is not necessarily accomplishment. So creating margin is not easy for us, especially when you love to work. We’ve been workaholics, and we love what we do. We thrive on deadlines. Matter of fact, sometimes I put off stuff until it gets close to the deadline, and then I get ramped up because I got to meet that deadline. I just feel like then at times, I’m continuing to press to make things happen. That does not create margin in my life. What would you say, Perry, around this topic?

Perry Holley:

This is the main takeaway for me, and I’ve had it told to me from different people over the years, is that you need more margin in your life. I don’t want to thrive on going from thing to thing to thing, but I do because I love the things we do and I love what we get to do, that this is the way we get to serve. But it can burn people out. You can not do your best work. You need time for you. So margin, I love that you said between your load and your limit, this is what I have, and this is how far I can go. Is there any space? And for many of us with no margin, our load is at our limit, and that’s not good. So the way I look and the way John would teach this as well, is that putting margin into your calendar, into your life says, I just schedule time for me, some time for self reflection. I actually wrote here that margin improves my own self awareness, that if I’m just going from thing to thing to thing, I’m not taking any time to reflect. I’m not taking any time to experience what’s happened, to do an after action review. I lose all the learning. I’m just moving so fast at such a pace that I never take any time to reflect. So that reflection and that time to think about what’s happening, where are we going? What are the most important things? What are the things I should be prioritizing. What am I learning adds to my own self awareness about my own capabilities and where I can involve others. So if I don’t do that, if I don’t have margin, I immediately lose part of my self awareness and I’m on the road to burnout without being effective.

Chris Goede:

One of the benefits of margin, I don’t want to rush right past this, is you just mentioned about thinking time. And I know that there are leaders that we have worked with and teams that we’ve worked with where we talked about and challenged them to say hey, once a quarter, once a month. What are you doing to think on your business? All of us are we have a bias towards action, but if we continue to just act and we never take time to think, we’re not going to be effective for our leadership, for our team. And it’s our responsibility as leaders to be thinking out in front and what could be happening and what are things we need to be doing different, what do we need to change, what’s the innovation around that? And if we’re not spending time thinking on the business and continuing just to stay in it on a daily basis, we’re not going to be extremely effective. I love this quote that you put in here from Truet Kathy, the founder of Chick-fil-a, where the once said we need to be thought leaders before we can be market doers and man. I think if we create margin, it allows us to be able to think more than just do.

Perry Holley:

Probably because I’ve gotten older, as I’ve become more appreciative of those moments when I don’t have something on my calendar, when I can actually have some think time. I was telling you I received a challenge from an audience member, a question that I did not have a ready answer for. I thought, well, I actually had some scheduled time to think. And so I said, you know, I’m gonna think about that. How would I answer this challenge? So without it, I go right past it. No learning. I think finally when I think about margin, and we’ve mentioned it all around it here, but I’ll just be intentional about it. It’s about energy renewal. It’s about I cannot keep going at this pace and be as effective and make the impact that I’d like to make through the things that I do. Through my three R’s, I figured out what it is I want to focus on, but now am I building time for me in that? And the saying is often the best way to get more done is perhaps to do less, but to do the right things but take more time. So just to be real practical, tell you, some of the things I’m learning about margin is it doesn’t have to be just schedule and do nothing, sit in a chair and be quiet. It could be scheduling a workout during the day, maybe taking my lunch and going to the gym, maybe going for a walk. It could be stopping at a certain time. It’s one thing I’ve done is I put specific start and stop times to my day. If I don’t set that boundary, I’m liable because I just enjoy it. I heard many times that you would just stay in that office doing whatever that creative stuff you’re doing. If people didn’t scream at me to come to dinner, I’m going, yeah, you shouldn’t be screamed at to come to dinner. So putting a start and a stop time have really helped me with that. I’ve heard a lot lately and I’ve heard some very senior people talk about taking short afternoon naps. I have to tell you, that just seems way out of that for me. But I’m starting to think about it. What would it take to go and just sit somewhere comfortably or lay down on a sofa and you set a time limit, but to give yourself that little and there’s so much research now about how that happens. But walking out of the office, getting out around the campus there, wherever you are, around the yard, taking in some air, just little things can help you renew your energy. So don’t think margin is I’ve got a schedule, 3 hours in the middle of every no, you can do it small, but be intentional about it.

Chris Goede:

The three priority solutions that we talked about today are just it’s a guide for you. And under each one, there’s some practical things that you can do right now that I know I’ve had the privilege of leading for a long time, and I’m challenged by a couple of these to really go back and say, maybe check the three R’s against what I’m doing. Where am I creating margin for that? Am I being intentional about what that looks like? And again, going back to the 2080, the principle where it’s like, hey, look at your business, look at your KPIs. There’s no doubt that there’s data behind 20% of what you’re doing. What you’re doing is returning 80% of the work. You got to focus on that 20%. So just a great reminder as we think about this, this is something Perry and I have told you over the last two episodes. That’s a challenge for us because we do want to help and serve all people and do all things. And then what ends up happening is we just get too much on our plate and we don’t necessarily go through and prioritize. So from a word that wasn’t a word that we started off with, that you challenged me to talk about in the title, the developing, the prioritizer within you, man, I appreciate it. I learned a lot today, and I think this is something that’s going to help a lot of our listeners.

Perry Holley:

Terrific. Well, thank you, Chris. And a reminder, if you’d like that learner guy that goes with this episode. You can get that. Leave a comment, a question, or learn about our other offerings, or see our family of podcasts that are all available to you. Do all that maxwellleadership.com/podcast. We always love hearing from you and we’re very grateful you’d spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell Leadership executive podcast.