How to spend less time managing and more time leading
Would you call yourself a manager or a leader? And what’s the difference?
How much of your time is spent producing work yourself, not even managing or leading?
Your team probably needs you to be a producer, a manager, and a leader. It’s worth taking a few minutes to reflect on how much of your time and energy is going to each of these very different roles.
Let’s start with some quick definitions so we’re on the same page.
Definitions
Producing
The standard way of talking about the leadership progression is “do-manage-lead.” I want to replace the term “do” because you’re doing something when you’re managing or leading, so that term doesn’t help.
Instead, I’m going to use “producing” to signify that this is time spent creating a work product. If you work in hospitality and you have to jump in at the omelet bar, that’s producing. If you work in high tech and you’re debugging code, that’s producing.
In the 3COze team effectiveness process, we use lists of verbs and nouns to focus people’s attention on the topics (nouns) and the activities (verbs) they should prioritize. Here are a few high priority verbs and nouns for producing:
