It's weird, but having "ability" when you're building a business as an owner or a leader isn't necessarily a good thing. What is ability? Talent, skills, learned specialization... being "good" at things.
Basically meaning that, when you have that ability, it's so simple to just do things yourself, that you... do things yourself. I challenge that this is the very thing that limits most business owners and leaders. In a nutshell,
Your ability largely holds you back because you can do it yourself, where people who don't have the ability have to leverage others.
Leverage out performs ability, always
- Todd Fleming
The reliance on others out of necessity is actually a huge strength, and it's a muscle (if you're stuck in ability land by default like I am) that I've found I desperately need to train, daily.
My favorite book on this topic is Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and he has a couple quotes that live in my head:
"A Who turns your goals into their goals. The right Whos are motivated to achieve results you couldn’t create on your own."
- Who Not How by Dan Sullivan
"The fastest way to multiply your success is to stop asking ‘How can I do this?’ and start asking ‘Who can do this for me?"
- Who Not How by Dan Sullivan
Huge.
So, get employees? I think mostly everyone already knows that...
Kind of. I think much more importantly though is, what if you changed how you build yourself, your family, and your business to a relentless attack to remove the things that don't require you to do them? Instead of hiring to get bigger and more revenue, we hire to free ourselves of literally every single thing, in our whole life not just the business, that take us away from the things that need... ME.
What needs ME?
- My family
- The vision of my company
- The team as a strong leader
- ... probably more?
What if we viewed the acceptance of anything outside of what literally has to be me as a direct assault on the time with our family, and a denial of what we do best in the business(es) we're building?
A book called Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell took the things I know on this topic and quickly turned my knowledge into action. He so perfectly articulates what being bogged down in a life of work that doesn't need me looks like, and how easily you can release yourself from the things that don't need you that you just start to feel like a dumbass for not doing it sooner (in a good way).
The book operates around a principal he calls "The Buyback Principle":
"Never hire to grow your business, only hire to buy back your time. Then reinvest that time into things that move the business forward."
- Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell
There's a lot to be said here about "highest and best use" principles which I can nerd out on for a long time and probably deserves its own blog (note to self), but Dan sums it up well in this quote:
"Every time you say yes to something that isn’t your best work, you’re saying no to the thing only you can do."
- Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell
We should stop saying no to the things only we can do.
Results or activity?
If reliance on leverage truly produces better results, why is it such a struggle for so many leaders to stop themselves from getting trapped in the idea that they have an ability for something that can't be replicated by anyone else?
As someone who has struggled through this for years, I think it's just a lack of awareness of the ability of others that surround us, and too much focus on activity instead of results. The activity reveals itself as the "how" things are done. This is an easy place to get stuck in your ability because it's so common to feel a strong pull to be a major part of defining all of the hows. What if they miss something?
Well, if you get the result you want, how much do you really need to care about how you got it? If your result was defined well enough that it covered the major pitfalls of a bad how, could we free ourselves to truly focus on that result and give up our responsibilities around defining the how? If they do miss something and we fail, can you be okay with that?
When we look at businesses that have truly scaled, it's overwhelmingly obvious that nearly all of them had many others responsible for the how, and that the owner/leader is not only oblivious to what the how was, but even the most incompetent to design that how in the first place. These leaders surround themselves with people much better than them, can recognize those people are better than them (IMPORTANT), and can squarely aim at results instead of the activity– the how.
I already delegate, I think?
But what about the little things? Here's some quick examples:
- Who does performance reviews?
- Who designs the how?
- Who fills out dashboards for KPIs or other similar metrics?
- Who creates processes?
- Who runs your calendar?
- Who runs your email?
- Who answers your phone?
- Who is responsible when the refrigerator at your home breaks and a repair man is needed?
- Who schedules your vehicle for an oil change?
- Who drops it off?
Time is the one commodity we can never get back or create more of. Why do we so freely give it away to things that don't even need us?
Personal life is nearly completely neglected in this conversation, yet it consumes so much of our capacity to be a better parent, spouse, leader, friend, etc. What areas in your life have you accepted are your job that could be almost literally anyone else if you just made the decision they were?
Sometimes your idea of how is wrong, and from the outside looks a lot like incompetence
For years I lived and worked next to a guy we'll call Steve (now dear friend) that at the time, I found myself having some weird feelings of (almost) superiority because I was analytical, organized, precise, calculated, thorough... and I couldn't understand how he couldn't manage to read a calendar or complete basic job duties like keeping notes or documentation. It was frustrating. This was basic stuff, but not only did he not do it, he didn't really even care about it that much aside from trying to make other people around him not hate him.
There were others in his same role that were nailing the calendar, the notes, everything. They were on point. The perfect version of that role. I frequently thought through ways to try and make Steve more like them... but one day, I found out I was wrong when I needed to make dashboards. The purpose of these dashboards were to show performance metrics for the department Steve was in...
Something stuck out.
I thought it was broken and I had the data wrong because there was such high variation.
This guy was easily 5x or more the performance results of anyone else in his department. How!?
Instead of nailing those calendar entries and notes, he was out fishing with clients, grabbing lunch, dinner, beers... NOT WORKING, I would have said. But guess what? Scoreboard.
This was one of many times where it was firmly planted in my head that I need to care about the result much more than I care about how we got there.
and subsequently...
Maybe I'm not as good at the how as I had imagined.
So what does one do with this information?
My absolute biggest take aways:
- I need a relentless focus on results
- Results take away all opinion and feelings and instead just gets to the heart of it and keeps you out of the how– What result did they produce? Who or what is most effective? Coach from the result. Empower others to refine their how in failure, don't fall back and do it for them. Throw away all pre-conceived notions about people on your team or around you, their ability, the how, talent, etc. Just get the W, and do it by empowering others, not by taking more control.
- I need to eliminate everything from my life that doesn't have to be ME
- Getting rid of ME makes me a better person, a better husband, a better dad, a better leader, a better advisor. Trusting others to make hows creates capacity, builds others up quickly, gives ownership and pride to the people doing the work, and lets me be who I need to be for them– a leader.
Balance?
If you can manage a combination of ability and leverage, that seems like it would be the best... right? Maybe, but the problem is your relentless pursuit of results and buying back your time requires you to kick responsibilities off your plate so consistently and so often that your previous version of what you thought was "ability" completely changes. Your new ability is doing your best to not have any ability (as you once knew it) so you can be the visionary and leader for the whos around you that are making the hows that desperately need you... which, isn't exactly intuitive, but is the goal, turns out.
Ability is limited to the sum of you. Leverage is expanded to the sum of everyone around you.
If you want to build something much bigger than yourself, I think you have to reshape how you think about ability.
If you enjoyed this blog and would like to read more, please subscribe! If you REALLY enjoyed this blog, please consider a paid subscription. It costs you about a coffee a month, and makes me feel less like I'm screaming my thoughts into the void.
Thanks for reading!
