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Meg* and I were lunch-brainstorming how to help one of her direct reports who is struggling to “fit” into her recent Director-level promotion. Meg noted that this woman – we’ll call her Kathy* – found it hard to see the forest for the trees. Meg thought Kathy had tons of potential but was frustrated and wanted to grab her by the collar and elevate her perspective every time she gave Kathy a new project, and she wanted my business coaching suggestions on what skills she could help Kathy acquire to help her be more successful.
We listed out the challenges Kathy was having and tried to decide if these were issues more challenging to women than men. We concluded that they really weren’t women’s issues but were more related to the “Leadership Stretch" that requires us to take on a broader perspective when we are ready to – or just have – jumped up a major level in management responsibility. We also agreed that it was possible men received help with these issues more regularly through mentoring than women did.
Here is what we identified Kathy was struggling with, and how Meg could help her.
Get a Grip on Magnitude
Meg was pulling her hair out watching Kathy prepare for a board presentation by micromanaging her staff to the decimal point when the overall message and theme of the presentation were still weak – two days from showtime!
Kathy didn't have a sense of magnitude and where she should be spending her own energy. When you start your career as an individual contributor farther down the food chain - i.e., before you get promoted into leadership - you’re typically held accountable for details your superiors don’t have time or skills to manage. You’re rewarded for focusing on the weeds and then later on the trees. Quite often you spend years of your career wandering the forest without even realizing there are such things as oceans, plains and moonscapes. If the trees are all you know, you take them for granted and get fixated on the smaller stuff. But when you want to rise in the ranks, or survive a bit higher up, you’ve got to get a handle on the magnitude of challenges at ecosystem, forest, tree and weed level. Most importantly, you need to learn to spend most of your personal time at the higher levels. When you have a problem to solve, learn to rely on your staff - i.e., delegate the trees and weeds to them - and manage the forest-as-ecosystem level issues. Good leaders understand the magnitude of each issue and problem they work on and allocate their time and energy accordingly.
Meg's job was to help Kathy understand that her energy was needed on the higher level messaging issues and she needed to let go of the details she was no longer paid to spend all her time on.
Master the 80/20 Rule
Kathy struggled with tackling a big project that landed on her desk where she had an extremely short turnaround time. Meg had told her she didn’t expect perfection in the first client deliverable – knowing Kathy didn’t have time to get fully up to speed – but Kathy flailed around trying to decide where to start. Meg realized that if she’d understood the 80/20 rule, Kathy would have been in Meg’s office the next morning with the question, “What one thing can I do to knock this out of the park for the client? What about you?”
Focus on what matters most. No matter how complex the situation, there are only a few things that will actually make the big difference you’re seeking. The 80/20 rule traditionally refers to what customers care about. It goes something like “we spend our energy getting right the 20% that meets 80% of our customers’ needs” and the implication is that by meeting 80% of the customer’s needs you’ll gain their satisfaction. This approach isn’t necessarily enough if you’re in a precision environment that requires .99999 reliability, but even in those environments, if you become adept at sussing out the 20% that meets the 80% need, you quickly focus on what to do first, then second then third. It’s a good way to put the details – even the ones that matter – into immediate perspective so you can focus on what will give you the biggest bang for the buck.
Mastering this rule requires that we get better at thinking like our customer/audience/superior. Many of us
