What do you do when working harder isn’t working?
In school and in our early careers, working harder is often an appropriate response to challenges. There’s a defined amount of work for us, so we can expect to get through all of it if we just apply enough effort. And if we do that, we get promoted, so it’s a tactic that leads to success….until it doesn’t.
If you keep getting promoted, you will gain more scope, and eventually get to the point where you have more work to do than you can get done. You can work harder, and stay up later, but that only delays the reckoning, because if you’re successful, you’ll continue to gain more scope. For instance, I eventually burned out at Google after working too many 100+ hour weeks, leaving my physical and emotional health in shambles.
So what’s the secret to continued success after you can no longer work harder?
I learned I needed to adopt a completely different mindset, what I’m calling the executive mindset. The early career mindset is about me – I will get it done, I will be the expert, I will solve the problem. The executive mindset just cares about results – how can I get the problem solved? Delegation, influence, automation, selective ignorance – these are the skills to get results without doing it myself.
The other key skill is prioritization. Once you reach a certain level, you realize you will never get through the to-do list. There is no “getting it all done”. There is just doing what’s most important right now. It requires a keen sense of opportunity cost, realizing that if you do one thing, that means you’re not doing any of the other valuable things you could be doing with your time. Executives treat their time as a scarce and valuable resource, and deploy it on the most important strategic issues, the work only they can do, letting more junior people handle the work they used to do.
Once you realize you can’t do it all by working harder, then you have to become more thoughtful about what you choose to do with your time and energy.
If you want to learn more about what separates executive success from early career success, join me for a free webinar on Friday, Sept. 6th. I’ll share more about the executive mindset, and the Maven class starting later in September where I’ll be teaching you these skills to be an effective executive.
Sign up at https://lnkd.in/gUiJcgfJ