Everyday Strategic Leadership: Strategic Leaders Strategically Invest and Protect Their Time

Most of Everyday Strategic Leadership addresses the question, “What do strategic leaders actually do?” It’s organized around six practices, which I’ll share in the coming weeks.

The first of those practices is that strategic leaders strategically invest and protect their time.

The simplest way of articulating that: strategic leaders prioritize. However, because that point was obvious to everyone I spoke with for the book, I usually followed up by asking, “What have you seen cause the light to turn on for people, enabling them to prioritize successfully?”

The response I often heard was that when people start their careers, they are valued based on the number of things they can accomplish. Unfortunately, because they are praised for this behavior, people can get stuck in what my friend Megan Williams calls “super-doer mode.” She describes super-doers this way: “They are chasing deadlines, and their sense of a project’s importance is wrapped up in how much personal time and energy they spend on it. The project tends to be the most important thing in their mind, but it’s not necessarily the most strategic.”

The light comes on for these professionals when they realize that their value does not come from completing everything on their to-do list, which enables them to feel free to pause and to choose what’s most important to do. According to Williams, they can “zoom out” and ask, “We may be spending a lot of effort on this, but looking at the external context and our business context, what will be most impactful?” 

Another frequently cited challenge to prioritization is that many professionals do not feel empowered enough to act on their priorities. It feels risky to say no to others because that might damage the relationship—a fear that’s present in our professional and personal relationships alike. When left unchecked, the worry about relationship damage becomes an issue with boundaries. We allow others to push us beyond the time and space we want to give them, which means we operate based on their priorities rather than our own.

When these professionals make the transition to being strategic leaders, it’s through believing in their right to set boundaries and developing the skills to do so effectively. They realize what Greg McKeown writes in his book Essentialism,  “that either we can say no and regret it for a few minutes, or we can say yes and regret it for days, weeks, months, or even years.”