Directing work is one of the four major activities that will consume your leadership capital. Directing work involves planning, prioritizing, and coordinating.

There are four major activities that will consume your leadership capital. They’re directing work, doing work, delivering work and developing people. Let’s look at directing activities, and what doing them right or wrong looks like. The three activities, in terms of directing, are planning, where you’re translating your vision into team and individual goals, prioritizing, where you’re turning individual goals into team priorities, and coordinating, using your position to provide a broader perspective to the members of your team.

Planning

In terms of planning, it should be about team goals, and reviewing those goals. You should be approving the team members goals when they bring them to you. It shouldn’t be about driving individual tactics, drafting their goals for them, or renegotiating those goals on a regular basis.

Prioritizing

Prioritizing is done at the team level. You should be deciding what the top priorities are, and what the things are that you’re not going to work on. Prioritization should be done routinely. It’s not a one-off activity. Prioritizing should not be done at the individual level. That’s up to your team members. You shouldn’t be renegotiating priorities on a regular basis, and you shouldn’t have to re-do your priorities all the time.

Coordinating

Coordinating is about connecting your team members with people outside your organization. This should be for first-time connections and you should play the role of the referrer in those situations. Coordinating is not about relationship management. That’s up to your team members. Coordinating shouldn’t be repetitive. You should make the connection once, and be able to step back. And you definitely should not be the referee in these relationships. Leave it up to your team member to work effectively with the people you introduce them to. Focus your directing time on higher level activities versus individual tactics.

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!

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I’ve seen leaders make three common mistakes when investing in their leadership capital. These mistakes hurt both their efficiency and their effectiveness.

Do you work a 40 hour week or are you working 24/7? How much effort are you putting into your work? How much stress do you experience from the energy you’re putting in? Your time and energy are finite resources. You can squeeze more time out by taking away from other activities in your life but you can’t do that forever. That time isn’t unlimited. If you squeeze out too much, bad things can happen. I’m speaking from experience here. I’ve had two heart attacks because I was spending too much time and energy with my work. Something needs to change.

To reduce the time you spend at work, reduce stress, and improve performance, you need to approach how you spend your time and energy differently. Leadership capital is the time and energy you invest in leading your team. It needs to be invested carefully like any other scarce resource. When’s the last time you assessed where you’re spending your time and energy? Who are you spending it with? How are you spending it? Are you getting the results you want from those investments? These are all questions I want you to consider as you assess how you’re spending the valuable resource of your leadership capital.

3 Leadership Capital Mistakes

I’ve seen leaders make three common mistakes when investing in their leadership capital. These mistakes hurt both their efficiency and their effectiveness.

The Peanut Butter Approach

The first mistake I see is what I call the peanut butter approach. What leaders do is give everyone on their team exactly the same amount of their time and energy. They just spread it around evenly. They do this because it feels fair to everyone. What’s wrong with this approach is not everyone needs the same amount of your time. It’s not fair to those who need less. It feels like micromanagement. It’s not fair to those who need more of your attention. They feel like they’re getting slighted for time.

The Reactive Approach

The second mistake I see is the reactive approach where leaders give people time and attention whenever they ask in the order they ask for it. Just think about a queue of people lined up outside that leader’s door knocking on the door and asking for time and attention and that leader just calls the next number in line. This mistake happens because this approach requires very little thought. What’s wrong with this approach is it fails to prioritize the leader’s time and allocate it to the most important issues. It also encourages team members to constantly take up the leader’s time rather than solving issues for themselves.

The Path of Least Resistance Approach

The third mistake is taking the path of least resistance. Leaders spend more time with people who are easiest or most fun to work with. They avoid team members who give them trouble. Leaders do this because this approach is easy. It avoids conflict. The issues with this approach include not solving issues that need to be resolved and instead dedicating time and energy to low return efforts. Spending excessive time with high performers doesn’t contribute a great deal to delivering outstanding results.

When you look at these mistakes, I’d like you to ask yourself a couple of questions. What would you do if your chief financial officer allocated budget and investment dollars this way? Do you spend your leadership capital this way? Once you know what these common mistakes are, it’s easier to avoid them and instead be more intentional about how you spend your leadership capital to get better results.

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!

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Some people won’t do their dirty work themselves. They’ll align themselves with other partner groups to stall your progress. 

Every organization suffers from some level of political intrigue. Whether it’s hoarding of resources, manipulative tactics, or passive aggressive behavior office politics distract your organization from getting things done. It also makes time at the office stressful and discouraging. Ignoring these dynamics can create risk for you, but you can take a productive approach to dealing with common political issues.

Alliance building

Some people won’t do their dirty work themselves. They’ll align themselves with other partner groups to stall your progress. These people might operate in the background. They can even promise things to other groups in exchange for their support against your ideas and your agenda.

When you encounter resistance from multiple directions, look for common interactions or relationships. You might be able to find out who is working behind the scenes against you. Once you know who is advancing an agenda counter to yours, it’s a lot easier to deal with the concerns they’re raising with each of those stakeholders they’re moving forward. You might have to pay for some support or build alliances of your own to overcome this type of situation.

Let’s imagine we have a senior vice president of sales. He wants resources for his product. He hears that a director of product development is trying to launch her own new product into the marketplace. The senior vice president goes out and he lobbies with supply chain and tells them how hard it’s going to be to launch her new product into the market. He lobbies with finance and tells them he’s not confident in her market estimates for how big that product is going to be. He then goes to marketing and says, you know what, her new product is actually going to cannibalize this really big product of yours. He’s actively working behind the scenes to sabotage her idea. All three of those groups then resist her product launch.

She then has to get them bought in to her idea. The way she can do this is understanding and addressing each of their concerns. She should come at it from a fact-based and data-driven approach. She should use logic and not emotion to understand what their issues are and provide them the data to let them know that her idea is a good one. She might then sit down with that SVP to try and understand what his broader concerns are. If she just ignores him, he’s going to keep trying to advance his agenda against hers. Sometimes the direct approach is the best approach.

If you find yourself in a situation where you’re getting unexpected resistance from multiple different areas, you might have somebody operating in the background. Take a step back and understand who might have an agenda that runs counter to yours. Then sit down with them, understand the concerns, and productively try to resolve them.

Want to learn more about navigating politics as a senior leader? 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!

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If you’re in a situation where somebody is keeping resources from you, help them understand how your agenda supports their agenda.

Every organization suffers from some level of political intrigue. Whether it’s hoarding of resources, manipulative tactics, or passive aggressive behavior office politics distract your organization from getting things done. It also makes time at the office stressful and discouraging. Ignoring these dynamics can create risk for you, but you can take a productive approach to dealing with common political issues.

Resource hoarding

A way to get ahead or maintain positions of importance is to hoard resources and build a kingdom. By pulling more resources like people and budget into your sphere of influence, you gain power in the organization. But building kingdoms can prevent things from getting done. If you need resources, help the person who has them understand how their resource contribution advances their own agenda. Get public commitments of those resources and manage those commitments through project plans. One other thing to realize here is, if you have resources and people are coming to you to contribute those resources to their projects, you need to understand that you need to provide those resources to valid projects. Be a good contributor to the growth of your organization.

I know one CIO who had just joined the company. He was trying to make a name for himself. He knew getting resources was critical for so many of the projects out there, and he held a lot of those IT resources. He made it really difficult for some people to get the resources they needed. He came at this from the perspective of, “I’m only going to allocate resources to projects that make me look important.” A lot of those projects were in a really big business unit. The problem was, there were some small business units that needed those resources too. But he was always saying no.

One project sponsor in one of those small business units was having a hard time getting the IT support he needed. He sat down with the CIO and he said, “You know, I know that big business unit seems like it matters the most, but this small business unit is really the future of the company, and I think you really want to be a part of that growth story. So if you contribute your resources, you’re going to be a big part of that story going forward.” It totally changed the way the CIO was looking at the situation. He immediately allocated a lot of resources to this small business unit. He then went to the senior leadership team and started bragging about he was contributing and really driving the growth of this small business unit. It was a little bit unseemly, but that stakeholder who needed those resources for that small business unit got what he needed.

If you’re in the situation where somebody’s holding back those resources, a great way to free those resources up is to help that person understand how your agenda drives their agenda. If you can make that connection for them, the resources are going to flow your way.

Want to learn more about navigating politics as a senior leader? 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!