Speaker 1If you're a leader of leaders and you're spending about an hour a day doing your people's work, that's six weeks a year. Six weeks doing their job and then your own job on top of that. And it's not going to fix itself because the way that you got to this level isn't the way that you lead at this level, but nobody really tells you that bit. Leadership Beyond the Theory is our nine-week leadership program for exactly that. Eight modules, two hours a week, and one of them can be your commute. Plus a live Q&A with me and Marty every single week. And Marty answers every single one of the questions that you submit. Hasn't missed one in eight years. Over 3,000 leaders have done the program and it's money back at any point. And look, five people have asked over the past eight years. So that's a pretty good stat. Doors are open now and they shut on Friday, 25th of September. Go to leadershipbeyondthetheory.com. I'll leave a link in the show notes and I can't wait to see you in there. All right. Let's get into today.
Speaker 2You can't hold someone accountable for delivery when you've never told them what's actually worth delivering. Simply not their fault.
Speaker 3Welcome to the No Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more. Access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences. And accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.
Speaker 2Welcome to day four of seven. This week, I'm giving you a workshop I ran called Stop Rescuing Your Underperformers. One leadership blind spot per day. Quick recap for anyone who's joining for the first time. There's a person on your team right now who isn't delivering. And the premise I'm exploring this week is that they're more likely to be a symptom of the problem rather than the root cause of it. Underperformers are made. They're made by the things their leader can't see. Now, today's about value. Most corporate leaders think a busy team is a productive team. But Peter Drucken nailed it decades ago when he said, The greatest waste of organisational resources is doing efficiently the things that you shouldn't be doing at all. So here's the question. Before you decide your underperforming person is slow, are you sure you've been crystal clear with them about what's worth delivering? Or have you just shown them how to stop? Stay busy. Stick with me. I've got a story about someone who worked reduced hours and delivered more value than anyone else on the team. So let's talk about delivering value. Is busy actually productive? In most cases, a busy team is just a busy team. The real question is, are you focused on the outcomes that matter the most? Or are you just ticking boxes? One of the keys to leadership performance. Is to be expert at focusing your scarce resources on the most critical work. What is the most critical work? The work that generates the greatest value for your organisation. Now, obviously, this depends a lot on context, your industry, the markets you operate in, your competitive position. But leaders who master the focus on value will always outperform the ones who hang their hat on working long hours. Early in my project management career, I worked on a major software development project called My boss was a project director by the name of Janice Hagen. Now, Janice didn't work long hours. She worked from 9.15 in the morning to 3 o'clock in the afternoon each day. She was out the door in time for school pickup. Just remember, this is 30 years ago. This is way before remote work was a thing. We had a bunch of people on the project who were at their desks for 8 or 10 hours a day. First in, last out. And Janice out-delivered everything. Every single one of them. Her productivity and efficiency were next level. In less than 6 hours, she accomplished more than most did in 8 to 10 hours. So how did she manage that? Well, because I reported directly to her, I was able to watch what she did really closely. And from what I could see, she didn't work on anything extraneous. She knew exactly which things mattered the most. And she did only those things. She knew how to delegate. So she didn't waste a minute of her day. She didn't waste a day looking over my shoulder at the work that I was accountable for delivering. She was focused. She was organised. She was sharp. And she was gone by 3pm. To lead really well, you've got to completely change your mindset about what's important. Value is not about hours. Value is about outcomes. Working on the right things multiplies the effectiveness of every single ounce of energy that your team expends. Now if you don't get this right up front, then there's a lot of effort behind it. You want your team's efforts to be focused and leveraged. It means getting rid of the things that don't create sufficient value. Stop wasting effort on them. This is why I like to say, lose the weight first, then buy the new suit. Doing it any other way is terribly counterproductive. Now let me give you an example of the relationship between the value and the resourcing. Whenever a leader petitioned me for additional resources, I would ask them to consider two questions. I would challenge them by saying that if they could put their hand on their heart and answer yes to both of these questions, then and only then would I consider their request for more people. So the first question. Is every single person on your team performing to the minimum standard? Now if the answer to that question is no, it means you're carrying tourists. Because you're not prepared to do the hard work of performing to the minimum standard. Why on earth would I compound that felony by giving you more people to mismanage? The second question. Is every individual working on the highest value work they could possibly be doing, not just spinning their wheels on low value activity? Now needless to say, most of the executives that I sent away to answer those two questions never came back to me. 80% of those requests just died a natural death because that executive knew instinctively that the people in their teams weren't working on the right things. Probably even worse, they were carrying more than one tourist. But stopping work that's already started is one of the hardest leadership challenges that you're ever going to face. That's why value ranking your work program is so important. It gives you the confidence to stop doing things. Now think about what that means for the underperformer you identified at the beginning of this podcast series. If half of what they're doing shouldn't be done at all, it may be that they're not underperforming at all. It may be that they're working hard just on the wrong things. And you're the only person who can change that. You're their leader. All right, let's score that deliver value blind spot. Six symptoms that indicate you might not be leading your team to deliver the highest value outcomes. Symptom number one. The team's flat out, but you can't see any real improvement in the results. Number two. You reward the person who stayed late, not the one who delivered a high value outcome by 3pm. Number three. Work keeps going because that's the way it's always been. Symptom four. Your status reports list the things that everyone's been working on, but not what's been delivered. There's a big difference. Number five. Your people gravitate to the work they enjoy, not the work that matters the most. And finally, number six. Being busy is how people on your team prove that they're needed. Okay, count your ticks. And if you're sitting there thinking you're good at this one, here's the test. Name this quarter's three highest value outcomes right now without looking. If you had to think about it, your team definitely won't be able to articulate what creates value for them and what doesn't. All right, just a quick one, then straight back into it. Everything this week has come out of a two-hour workshop that I ran live and the replay's still up there. It's got all the bits I couldn't fit into 15 minutes a day of this week. I'm going to show you a few of these podcast episodes. One of those is the full blind spot scorecard, which I did live with the room. If you actually want to learn how to fix these blind spots, the doors for the next cohort of Leadership Beyond the Theory close on Friday, the 25th of September. The link's in the show notes. All right, let's get back to some Q&A from the webinar. Chloe asked, what if your pace or your standard is faster and higher than your people can keep up with? Well, that's a fantastic question. That's what we call stretching. And it's a fabulous thing to have. As the leader, you want to be a little bit ahead of the pack. Not so far ahead that they look at you and go, well, where's Chloe gone? You want to be just ahead of them, just stretching them. So let me give you one technique, and this has worked really well for me. I won't talk about the standard. That's a whole different thing, but let's just talk about pace because this is an easy one to visualize. When someone would come to me to negotiate a deadline for a piece of work, I used to do this. They'd show me what they thought was a reasonable delivery timeframe. But because I've been around for a few laps of the sun, I know they've already done a bunch of stuff in the background to build the fat in. They've already put contingency on contingency on contingency. They've already been through the process of saying to themselves, I'm going to add 10% to give myself some breathing space. Then I'm going to double it. Then I'll add the number I first thought of. And that's the deadline I'm going to give to Marty. So they've already been through those mental gymnastics, that's a given. even. Even if they haven't done it specifically like that, you know there's always a buffer that they've added. I would always respond to this with three words. That's too slow. Just like that. That's too slow. If it was something important that I thought needed to be delivered faster, that was it. And they'd say, well, Marty, we've done the estimates and that's how long it's going to take. To which, of course, I'd reply, okay, I get that. But it doesn't change the fact that it's still too slow. What would we need to do to deliver this faster? And then I'd hear all about their constraints. They're constrained by budget. They're constrained by people. They're constrained by not having enough assets. They don't have enough time. They don't have enough money. And that's when I would say, okay, let's suspend our disbelief for just a paper. If we decided we did want to do this faster, what would it take? What we have to do to deliver this sooner? Now that immediately takes them out of the, you're putting pressure on me space. And it puts them into the innovative problem solving mindset. So what would we have to do to deliver this faster? What would it take? It's amazing how many creative ideas people can actually come up with. And that gives you choices. It gives you the ability to say, for example, okay, if the only way to speed this up is to invest another $2 million, I'm not up for that. Let's leave it as it is. But what I will say is that I reckon, I don't know, probably 80% of the time when I'd send someone away to do some unconstrained thinking, what would it take to do this faster? They generally come back with a way to make it go faster that required no additional investment of resources. That wouldn't have happened unless I pushed them into creative mode. Okay, last question for today from Luke. He's just below senior level in an organisation he describes as political and bureaucratic, accountable for outcomes without much agency. It's a tricky one. In this environment, Luke asks, can you still make a difference? Well, yeah, totally. But it comes back to the three Bs. Biggest bang for buck. Always be thinking in terms of the biggest bang for buck. This is one of the core principles behind leadership beyond the theory. We say to leaders at the start, you're probably going to find maybe, I don't know, 50 things that you might want to change to improve your leadership capability and how you lead your team. 50 ways to change the performance and lift it. But you're not going to go after 50 things. If you try to boil the ocean, you will get nowhere. So pick the one or two things that you know are going to give you the most traction based on your circumstances, your people and your culture. And go after those like a maniac. Like go hard, be relentless, go like stink. Those are the things that will make the most difference. So when you talk about changing your own blind spot so that you can have a broader organisational impact, it's exactly the same solution. Where could I apply myself to get the biggest bang for buck in any change? You can't change everything, but you are trying to create an island of excellence. If you try to change too much at once, the culture may chew you up and spit you out. I call it the white blood cell syndrome. The white blood cells in the organisation are going to come for you and try to eradicate you because they see you as a threat, a foreign bacteria invading the body which they're trying to protect. So biggest bang for buck it is. Always go after that and prioritise and rank your own efforts just as you do with the team's value rank work program. All right, let's just recap. Value isn't about hours. Value is about outcomes. If you reward hours, you're paying for the wrong thing. So before you decide your underperformer is slow, go and look at what you've actually got them doing. There's a fair chance they're flat out on work that shouldn't exist. And you're the only one who can change that. The full replay of this workshop is in the show notes. Two hours and it's going to be up there until Friday, 25th of September. Tomorrow, blind spot number five. I'll tell you about two executives who inherited exactly the same mess and how one of them took the lead. I'll tell you about two executives who inherited exactly the same mess and how one of them took the lead. I'll tell you about two executives who inherited exactly the same mess and how one of them took the lead. I'll tell you about two executives who inherited exactly the same mess and how one of them took the lead. I'll see you then.
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