Perspective Six
Your Role
Cliff Robinson, EVP and chief people officer at Chick-fil-A, sees his primary role as a leadership developer. Cliff focuses on selecting and coaching the highest potential leaders who will lead the business in the future and eventually replace him. He understands the balance between living in Current Reality and becoming who the Vision will require him to become.
I first met Cliff when he was in a previous role and when he was new to his executive role. The scope, pace, and complexity that came along with the promotion manifested itself in his daily schedule. He knew the way he was functioning in his role was not going to be sustainable, so we went to work on identifying where his energy and focus would add the most value. Chick-fil-A hadn’t asked him to run the business but to lead it. And the year-over-year double-digit growth the business was experiencing required him to scale his leadership.
During one coaching session, Cliff realized that in order to become the leader the business required and to contribute to the business as he wanted, he needed a clean slate. He’d filled his calendar with meeting after meeting, from sunrise to sunset. He never had anything but a full inbox. Cliff was driven by quantity and needed more quality.
He had to shift to a leader-influencer mindset.
Cliff transformed himself from the more reactive and overinvolved leader he was to more of the strategic leader the business needed him to be. This meant more delegating, coaching, and empowering those on his team who had the leadership competence and expertise to own the work that aligned with their roles. This then enabled him to focus on the work that aligned with his role and to grow and develop into the leader the business needed him to be then and in the years ahead.
Chick-fil-A continues to enjoy remarkable growth year after year, decade after decade. The business continues to evolve at such a pace that it demands its leaders manage their teams exceptionally well today, while evolving into the leaders the business will need in the future. Because Cliff understands this reality, he knows this is a constant process and spends a lot of his energy making sure he sees his role clearly.
Defining Your Role
Time is your greatest and scarcest resource. Especially today, we are constantly bombarded with information, inputs, ideas, projects, people, requests, and opportunities. Most of us see no way to fit in everything.
It therefore comes down to priority. How do we choose where and on what to focus our time, energy, and attention? To what do we say yes and to what do we say no? Many leaders, myself included, find this a constant struggle and balancing act. Precisely here, the perspective of Role comes into play. This perspective can provide enormous lift to your leadership effectiveness.
To understand your role, first get clarity on what you do today that adds the most value to the organization. What activities are you uniquely positioned to do? Beware of a common trap! You do some things well, and enjoy doing them, but they are neither the best use of your time nor where the business needs you. You must find the balance between doing what you do well and enjoy—the tasks that give you energy—and doing what the business needs.
If you can align the needs of your business, your skill set, and what you enjoy, you’ll become the best version of you as a leader. If those things don’t line up, over time you’ll find it difficult to reach your leadership potential.
Second, look into the future. Do you see your business growing and evolving? It will look different three years from now than it does today. You need to grow and evolve with it. Part of defining your role is knowing what you need to do today to best position yourself and your team to meet the future needs and demands of your business.
Fellow executive coach Marshall Goldsmith wrote a fantastic book titled What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Great leaders know that Marshall speaks the truth. Rather than waiting to change and then playing defense or catch-up, they invest time in developing themselves and those around them so they can become the leaders the business needs in the future.
You cannot and should not flip a switch and get rid of all the good disciplines you’ve developed over the years that have enabled you to become the effective leader you are today. Keep those disciplines, thought processes, and absolute convictions while adding new skills, new thinking, and new discipline that you’ll need in order to lead in the months and years ahead.
This requires maintaining a tricky balance, because you want to keep this discipline of working on yourself, adjusting your role, and getting new energy and input into how you operate. While you need to best equip yourself for the future, you still need to remain firmly planted in Current Reality so you can manage the business today. Many leaders don’t make this shift; they lose the one thing that can make the difference between succeeding today and succeeding in the future.
I find this perspective not only energizing but challenging. When I started Building Champions more than two decades ago, I had to focus on two primary roles: selling the product and delivering the service. The company consisted of two people—me and an assistant. Today, with a team that is much larger, the business needs a far different leader than it did back then. At that time, I had no idea what the CEO role would require of me today.
As the business has grown, I’ve had to remain intentionally curious to develop the new skills, the new thinking, and the new beliefs that would allow me to add value as the CEO. I know that if I continue doing what I did last year and try to go forward with no new energy, no new input, no new development, then I will become the very thing that holds the company back. I will become the ceiling.
By clearly defining and understanding this perspective, leaders can best position themselves to improve their decisions, influence, and effectiveness, and not only today but for years to come.
▼
While you need to best equip yourself for the future, you still need to remain firmly planted in Current Reality so you can manage the business today.
If you were to sit down and make a list of everything you do, most of you would end up with a sizable list. Your teammates, customers, and businesses constantly ask and even fight for a piece of your attention and priority 24/7.
To clearly see your role, first narrow your focus to gain clarity on your high-payoff activities. Every one of us has a few activities and responsibilities that deliver the most value to the organization. These high-payoff activities should reflect what you do best, what brings you the most energy, and what really helps to drive and support the business.
To look at these activities in a unique way, take your annual compensation and divide it by 2,080 (the number of hours you’d work each year if you worked only a forty-hour week). The result is your hourly wage. If the organization were to pay you that wage directly for your work, would that be a good investment? Would you pay someone else that amount to do those activities?
Using that number as a filter helps bring clarity and defines the core activities that should serve as the foundation and focus for defining your role. These activities should help you drive decisions about which opportunities to pursue and prioritize.
The clearer you get on the high-payoff activities that enable you to win in your role, the better decisions you make, because you allocate your time and energy to what matters most.
Chances are, more activities than the high-payoff ones consume your calendar. In order to create more margin for these activities, you must understand where you currently invest your time. Time tracking steps in here.
My executive assistant, Lynne Brown, and I continually scrutinize how I invest and allocate my time, with an eye toward pruning back and cutting to create more free space. In that way, I can better lead our company both today and in the years ahead.
While time tracking can feel tedious (some have compared it to a root canal), it can play an incredibly valuable role in helping you gain clarity regarding how you invest your time. For a week or two, track what you do in fifteen-minute increments, from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. If your work requires frequent travel, consider doing one week at home and one week on the road.
Try to identify the big themes or areas where you spend your time. How much is intentional versus reactive? Where do you get pulled off course? Do you have enough margin or white space to flex and be accessible when needed? Do you make time for the activities important to you as a person (rest, connection, exercise)?
Evaluate your schedule through those fifteen-minute increments with a ruthless eye. What tasks could others in the organization do? If someone else can do it, and it’s not a high-payoff activity, then why are you doing it? The only way you can take on new responsibilities and disciplines and find the time to think and develop new skills is to say no to those things that others could and should do.
Time tracking allows you to look at everything you’ve done over the past week or two and run it through the filter of your hourly wage. Were each of those fifteen-minute increments truly worth what the business pays you? If you answer no, then you have a stewardship question. What are you going to do about it?
Make it your goal to figure out how to continually assess your activities and then delegate those that don’t need your touch, so that you can spend more and more of your time doing what you and only you do best. Focus on what the company considers your primary responsibility.
While it can feel painful, revisit time tracking on a regular basis. As your business and role change, so will your schedule and activities. When you reevaluate from time to time, you can do some helpful readjusting.
We’ve had clients who so believed in this concept that they tracked their time for one week out of every month. This practice allowed them to see where they needed to adjust their calendars, so they could keep up and best lead their organizations.
How do others see your role? That’s yet another way for you to better see it. Ask others on your team, as well as outsiders you trust (more here in the next perspective), for their thoughts and viewpoint on your role. Use the Keep, Start, Stop format, discussed in the previous chapter, to gather this type of feedback. You could ask these questions:
- In regard to my role, what things should I KEEP doing? In what areas am I effective and where do I add value?
- What things should I START doing? Where can I add even more value and improve my effectiveness?
- What things should I STOP doing? What behaviors and activities either create confusion or hold back our people or business?
Gaining this type of broader perspective can help you better focus your energy today. Your Vision (Perspective Two) and Strategic Bets (Perspective Three) are great places for you to start identifying those high-payoff, priority development opportunities that can prepare you for your role in the future.
By focusing on where you want to go (Vision) and how you’ll get there (Strategic Bets), as well as who will do the work (Team), you’ll often surface development opportunities and point to where you need to shift in your role. Identify the types of activities you’ll need to take on in the year ahead to execute on strategy and make your vision a reality. Think through the skills and resources you’ll need to develop in order to become that leader.
Next, you can develop a plan to bridge the gap from where you are to where you want to go. Most of the time, you can’t flip a switch and change tomorrow, but you can build a plan that you can use to begin executing now in order to fuel the growth and development you’ll need in years to come. By seeing those opportunities clearly, you can start incorporating them into your role.
To do this well, you need the time, space, and structure to work on this future version of yourself. Tim Tassopoulos began his career at Chick-fil-A nearly forty years ago as a restaurant team member. Now president and COO of the company, Tim is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Those who have had the privilege to work with him consider him a true level-five influential leader, a man incredibly well respected and even beloved.
Tim devotes a great deal of time to thinking about his role and who he needs to become in order to lead most effectively. Tim sets aside one day a month for what he calls “library days,” when he unplugs and visits his local municipal library. There he thinks about, researches, assesses, and develops himself to be what the business needs him to be. His findings from this significant investment of time enable him to do what he needs to do.
A simple tool has helped thousands of leaders over the past few decades to clearly see their role: the personal, one-page business plan. Most of us have gone through the process of creating an annual plan. If I were to ask you to pull it out now, it might take you a few minutes to find it. It likely contains pages and pages of specifics, with cross-departmental data, milestones, spreadsheets, budgets, charts, and so forth. It’s big, and it serves its organizational leadership purpose.
We suggest leaders extract their responsibilities from their macro organization plan and align their roles around them to create a one-page role-specific business plan that shows
- the goals for which they’re responsible
- the three to six nonnegotiable disciplines considered their highest-payoff activities
- the projects or improvements they need to make to best position them to win
We ask our clients to create the one-page business plan annually, and then break it down into quarters, so they can adjust throughout the year. These one-page plans clarify your priorities, which better equip you to manage those priorities.
Items on the one-page plan will make their way from the plan to your calendar. In this way, you go from being the leader of yesterday and today to becoming the leader of today and tomorrow.
Back to psychologist and executive coach Dr. Henry Cloud, who believes that a tool like this enables us to efficiently manage our executive functions. It enables us to attend to what matters most and to inhibit what doesn’t.
When you repeatedly review your one-page document, it kicks your working memory into gear. The more you review it, the more of it you will execute, because you’ll be attending to what matters most.
What lies behind this one-page personal business plan? Brain science, for one.1 For another, twenty-plus years of experience and thousands of leaders who have grown better at performing in their roles and managing their priorities testify to the power of this tool.
Your Role and Leadership Effectiveness
By focusing on this perspective, you gain the ability to make better decisions about how to invest and prioritize your time, a key to improving your effectiveness as a leader. Without this focus, you can easily get distracted and pulled off track.
Consider the example of Adam Grant. In addition to his work as an organizational psychologist and a Wharton School of Business professor, he’s also a bestselling author and sought-after speaker. The demands on his time and attention can feel overwhelming. In a podcast, he described how he got clear on his role and created a filter to help him better prioritize:
I realized the only way to make progress is to say no more often. I set priorities about who to help: family first, students second, colleagues third, everyone else fourth; when to help: at designated times that don’t interfere with my goals; and how to help: in areas where I add a unique contribution. Now when people reach out with requests that stretch beyond my wheelhouse or my calendar, I refer them to the relevant resources, an article, or an expert.2
What Adam did here reflects a concept we call “managing the decision.” Rather than making a decision every time a request comes in (should I help this person?), Adam decided once by defining his priority order. Now he simply uses that framework to manage the decision, rather than spending time and energy to evaluate each request and remake the decision every time. This can provide a huge lift to your effectiveness, especially when evaluating what activities to pursue and which to refuse. As Adam realized, most leaders have to say no more often.
Friend and colleague Bob Goff has written several bestselling books about life, love, and faith, including one of my personal favorites, Love Does. He says he quits something every Thursday.
You have to quit things, stop doing them, in order to free up space to do the new, the exciting, the passionate, the responsible, or the needed things. The mindset of saying no allows you to excel in your role.
When you say yes to one thing, it always means no to another. When you say yes to something—yes to this meeting, yes to this project, yes to this response—you say no to something else.
Sometimes saying no to an activity means that it just goes away; you can eliminate it. But more often than not, you must delegate the activity to someone else. This act of delegation itself can not only improve your personal effectiveness but also your leadership effectiveness.
Often you can find someone more qualified and better for the activity than you are. Plus, by allowing others to take on these responsibilities, you increase your influence. You show them you trust them by giving them opportunities to grow.
A word of caution: many leaders find delegating to be a hard task. I think back to another conversation with Tim Tassopoulos. “When you delegate,” he said, “and you hand off to someone else a specific responsibility that you’ve held, the specific emotion that you have to let go of is the challenge to your own ego that wonders if this person might be better than you were. Your ego says, ‘I want them to miss me.’ Yet that’s exactly what’s best for the organization; the person who replaces you should do the job better than you.”
Just because we know it’s the right thing to do doesn’t mean it’s always easy.
One of the more challenging assignments I’ve had as an executive coach is helping a leader in succession, someone getting ready to leap from corporate responsibility to the unknown of retirement. Here, more than anywhere else, you hear the voices of demons and doubts. What if the delegation goes bad? What if the new leader flames out?
Tim’s vulnerability strikes a chord when he alludes to ego: “I want my teammates to miss me. I want to be known as that leader, the most successful leader.” How do we get ourselves to the place where we not only feel comfortable but incredibly excited about the new heights, the better relationships, the better strategies, and ultimately the better results that will come from the leaders who follow us?
Regardless of your current position, this is your key to freedom—freedom to evolve, improve, think, learn new behaviors, and become the leader that the organization needs you to be in your Vision. If you don’t delegate in a way that best equips others to succeed, the business won’t allow you to move forward. You will always get held back. Invisible hands around your ankles will hold you down, because you have not made the shift to appoint, develop, and empower someone else to handle the responsibility after you’ve gone. This might mean creating a new position and adding someone new to the team, with specific expertise. Or it might mean coaching and empowering someone who even now sits to your left or right.
In order to build your team’s capacity—both for future opportunities and current needs—you must heavily invest in one of your greatest opportunities and responsibilities as a leader: developing your people. In my book Becoming a Coaching Leader, I talk about the superhero complex. Many of us believe that we determine the value we bring to our organization by how many solutions we can create. As businesses grow, the complexity increases, and all of our businesses (imperfect as they always are) suffer breakdowns, inefficiencies, flaws, and failures.
Often, we make the mistake of believing that we determine our leadership effectiveness by the speed and quality of the solutions we create. If a problem vexes the east side of the building, we fix it. If a problem develops in this division, in this time zone, and bottlenecks the company, we fix it.
But great leaders don’t focus on solving problems. If you see problem solving as one of your greatest contributions to the business, then you may not see your Role properly. Leaders equip others to innovate, meet challenges, create solutions, and come together to get extraordinary results. Leaders create heroic team members by coaching, developing, and resourcing them, so that together the organization can get optimal results.
Earlier I mentioned the World Business Forum. During the event, Jack Welch, former CEO and chairman of General Electric, was interviewed. I’ll never forget his words: “CEOs, your primary responsibility is to develop the capacity of your leadership team. Your primary role is to develop and elevate the skill of those on your team.” He mentioned several leaders who once were incredibly well respected and successful, but then failed. He believed that leaders who succeeded and later failed had missed the key discipline connected to their role: they hadn’t developed talented leaders. If the organization lacks leadership capacity, its ability to scale and grow will at some point be limited.
Leadership is a game of multiplication, not addition. We can get the staggering results that come from multiplication only by effectively delegating, empowering, equipping, resourcing, and supporting others in the organization to do the most important work. The best leaders keep that priority in focus and always see developing capacity as one of their highest-payoff activities.