Are You Spending Your Time and Energy the Right Way as a Leader?

The better you understand who’s consuming your leadership capital and how they’re consuming it, the easier it will be to change their behavior and yours as you work to become a more effective leader.

Assessing who’s consuming your leadership capital helps you understand how and where you’re spending your time and energy. To conduct this assessment, list out the 12 activities under the four major ways you spend leadership capital: directing, doing, delivering, and developing.

For each person on your team, ask yourself if you’re investing more time and energy in this person than you should for that particular activity. This is a subjective call. For situations where the answer is yes, you’re spending more time and energy than you should, put a yes in the box and give it a score of one. For times where it feels like you’re investing an appropriate amount of time and energy, answer no, and that gets a zero. If the total is seven or higher, this person is a high consumer of your leadership capital. Below seven makes them a low consumer of leadership capital.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say Jim is on my team and I’m going to look at at Jim across all of the leadership capital consumption activities.

Directing 

In terms of directing, I’m spending an appropriate amount of time planning and prioritizing his work, so I answer no to both of those questions. However, in terms of coordinating, I’m doing a lot more coordination than I should. I’m making too many introductions for him and he’s asking me to be in the middle of a lot of those activities, so I would say yes, I’m investing more time and energy than I should in coordinating activities.

Doing

In terms of doing, I don’t have any problems with Jim making decisions, so I answer no. But I find myself constantly motivating him and clearing obstacles for him, and these are obstacles he should be able to clear on his own. I answer yes to both motivating and clearing. On delivering the work, I’m investing a lot of time and energy in Jim, way more than I should. I’m constantly having to monitor his work and his tasks. I’m correcting work all the time and I find myself a lot of times repairing damage after he’s caused it. I would answer yes to all three of those areas.

Developing

On developing, I’m spending a lot of time training Jim on tasks he should already know. I also have to invest a disproportionate amount of time in coaching him.

Promoting

Now in terms of promoting him, I’m not having to put in too much activity there, so I answer yes to training and coaching and no to promoting. When I add up all those scores, I get a score of eight. Jim is a high consumer of my leadership capital. These are subjective ratings based upon my assessment of how Jim should be performing, given his skills, tenure, and background.

You should conduct this assessment for all your team members. When you go to populate the leadership matrix, these scores will be one of the major inputs into that analysis. The better you understand who’s consuming your leadership capital and how they’re consuming it, the easier it will be to change their behavior and yours as you work to become a more effective leader.

Want to learn more about leading effectively? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to navigate politics as a senior leader. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!