“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Archimedes

He was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor who lived in Sicily about 250 years before Christ. Some of his inventions are still in use today. But Archimedes thoughts on leverage should change the way you spend your time at work.

Obviously, there’s no lever and fulcrum that would allow an ancient Greek genius to move the planet on which we live, but the idea behind the quote is pure leadership genius. There are certain activities that you can engage in that will have an out-of-proportion impact on your organization. 2200 years after Archimedes, Gary Keller wrote about it more practically in his book, The One Thing. He posed the question –

“What’s the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”

Gary Keller

In other words, what activity has the highest leverage?

We regularly experience the “tyranny of the urgent”. Employees have an unsolvable problem, customers have a serious complaint, vendors have a quality issue, and equipment breaks down at the most inopportune time. Each of these screams out for someone to intervene and to do it right now. We might have arrived at the shop, office, or factory with the intention of doing some high-leverage activity, but one of these urgent problems throws the business version of a temper tantrum and demands we attend to it immediately.

Building an organization that can effectively deal with the tyranny of the urgent has been the topic of several of these posts, so I won’t discuss that here. Instead, let’s talk about high-leverage activities. What is today’s “one thing”? What about tomorrow’s?

Here are several high-leverage activities that will help you create a business that’s built to last and built to grow.

Build and Perpetuate a Healthy Culture – The best plan, product, or promotion is dead on arrival when it’s released into an organization with a toxic culture. Conversely, organizations with healthy cultures are self-healing. Employees look out for the good of the organization and the good of fellow employees. They get close to the customer and know how to create and deliver products that customers want. They effectively manage company resources. Spend time strengthening the culture and some downstream problems will evaporate.

Develop a Succession Plan – Who’s ready for their first supervisory role? What tools and experience does your best middle manager need to make the jump to the executive team? Who will take the reins when you’re ready to step down? There’s no better way to spend your day than investing in your next generation of leaders.

Develop Employees – Is everyone in the organization committed to personal and professional growth? More importantly, do they have a plan to grow and a mentor to help them? There are tools that belong in every employee’s toolbox – basic financial literacy, problem solving, outside-in customer communication, conflict resolution. Make sure there are mechanisms in place to make this development happen.

Create a Policy or Streamline a Process – If you want to make sure every product is made correctly and every service delivery is made as if you were delivering it yourself, create processes. A process is a recipe that an employee follows to make sure things conform to the same standard every time they occur. It reduces defects thus improving quality and makes consistent customer experiences thus improving loyalty. It’s also required to scale. Policies are for those situations where there’s a bit of wiggle room, but they provide the philosophical framework from which an employee can make an informed decision within the guardrails of the policy. Any time invested in creating or streamlining processes and strengthening policies has an enormous ROI.

Review the Customer Experience – Spend some time understanding what it’s like to be a customer of your company. Work from the outside in – what’s it like to call your customer service department or interact online, what’s it like to start the sales process and move through the pipeline, what is the onboarding experience, is it easy to get an invoice and pay? Time invested here might help you identify barriers to growth.

Survey the Marketplace – I’m not a fan of obsessing over everything your competitors do. Some of the stuff they do might be stupid. It’s also not healthy to get ulcers over every negative customer review. Some customers have unreasonable expectations and won’t ever be satisfied. However, it’s never a bad idea to understand the competitive landscape and it’s imperative that you are close to those customers that really belong to your tribe – the people who share your values.

Remake Your Organization from Scratch – Knowing what you know now, if you could remake your organization from scratch, how would it look different from the way it looks now? What people would be gone and who would take their place? What products would be superstars and what products would be retired? What processes would be radically changed? How would the messaging be changed? The answers to these questions and others like them probably constitute the strategic initiatives for your next few quarters.

Identify Data-generated Information You Should Act On – Every organization is awash in data – sales, service, financial, operational, social media, online – the big question is, what metrics derived from this data are indicative of organizational health? The second question is – what opportunities lie in the data? Can I find demand for additional products that should be developed? Operational failures that are causing downstream financial consequences? Customer interactions that are putting customers at risk for defection?

Decision Making – All of us are imperfect decision makers. Even the most level-headed succumb to confirmation bias. We love our own ideas and are skeptical of everyone else’s. Any time spent honing your decision-making skills will translate into improvement in every area of the organization. If you want a thought-starter, read this chapter on decision-making from my book.

Identify the Changes You’d Make to the Organization if You Were Getting Ready to Put it on the Market – I love this exercise because it makes you ask the all-important question, “What would need to change to make this organization run without me?” Leaders that scale an organization create one that can run without their daily intervention. That frees them to focus on organizational health and growth, not on the inevitable crises that surface daily.

Identify Potential Partnerships and Strategic Alliances – Who could you work with that would allow you to bring more value to the people you serve? Is there a company that provides an adjacent product or service – e.g., if you’re a plumber, can you offer HVAC or electrical by partnering with another company that provides those services? Are there outsource vendors that provide a service that would allow your billing, payment, and collection to be easier for your customers?

Identify Potential Acquisition Targets or Acquirers – Mergers and Acquisitions aren’t just for Fortune 500 companies. Is there a new, capable competitor that might be undercapitalized? They might be an attractive acquisition target. You’ll be consolidating market share and maybe gaining some new, valuable intellectual property.

Imagine the Organization Five Years from Now – None of us have a crystal ball. We don’t know with certainty what the world (or our competitive environment) will look like in five years. But one thing is sure – without deliberate effort from you as the leader, inertia will carry your organization along mostly unchanged. You might get lucky and success now might translate into success later. But, just as easily, your organization could become irrelevant. The value of this exercise is the discipline of planning. General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower said, “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” The value of thinking five years down the road is not that you’re going to perfectly envision the future state of the organization, but that you’re going to ask “what if” plenty of times. The answers to that question will push you to make changes to products, people, process, equipment, messaging, and more. Those changes will make it much more likely that you’ll have an organization that’s ready for the world five years from now.

Spend a Day Out of the Office – Spend time on the factory floor, visiting your best customer, visiting your most recently defecting customer, with your best salesperson, or with your CFO or CIO. Getting a status report in staff meeting is a poor substitute for a full day of “boots on the ground” experience. And, while you’re doing it, ask lots of questions and listen to understand.

Spend Another Day Out of the Office – This time, devote the time away to becoming a better leader for the organization. Spend it by yourself reading, thinking, and writing. Or spend it with industry peers, learning from one another. Or spend it in a workshop or seminar, deepening your understanding of a new discipline. Or join a mastermind roundtable of other business leaders. It’s never a waste of time to invest in your personal and professional growth. “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four sharpening the axe” – Abraham Lincoln

In the Bible, the New Testament writer Paul encouraged his readers to “buy back time”. High leverage activities buy back time. Each hour invested by you translates into hours of benefit for your employees, customers, and shareholders.