Speaker 1: Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of
Speaker 1: performance through strong human relations, team building and GOLA GV.
Speaker 1: This is the seven Minute Leadership Podcast with your host
Speaker 1: Paul Fellavaledo.
Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to the seven Minute Leadership Podcast.
Speaker 2: It's episode six't eighty four. Let me start with something
Speaker 2: that might sound wrong at first. If you feel like
Speaker 2: you need to work more hours to get more done,
Speaker 2: you are already losing. And I say that as someone
Speaker 2: who has worked long shifts, double shifts, disaster deployments and
Speaker 2: everything in between. I know what hard work looks like.
Speaker 2: I respect it. But somewhere along the way, leaders started
Speaker 2: confusing motion with progress. They started believing that longer days
Speaker 2: equal better results. They started wearing exhaustion like a badge
Speaker 2: of honor. And what happens. You burn out, Your team
Speaker 2: burns out, the quality drops, the mistakes increase, the culture
Speaker 2: starts to crack. So today I want to give you
Speaker 2: a better way how to do more by working less,
Speaker 2: not by cutting corners, not by being lazy, but by
Speaker 2: leading smarter. First, you have to understand this. Your job
Speaker 2: as a leader is not to do everything. Your job
Speaker 2: is to make sure everything gets done and those are
Speaker 2: two very different roles. If you were still operating like
Speaker 2: the hardest working individual contributor on your team, you were
Speaker 2: stuck in the wrong seat. You're not scaling yourself, you're
Speaker 2: bottlenecking your entire operation. So the first move you make
Speaker 2: is this, you stop doing work that someone else can
Speaker 2: do at seventy percent of your level. That's a tough
Speaker 2: pill for a lot of leaders because you think, well,
Speaker 2: I can do it faster. Of course you can, you
Speaker 2: have more experience. But every time you say that, you
Speaker 2: were training your team to stay dependent on you and
Speaker 2: you're locking yourself into longer hours. Instead, you hand it off,
Speaker 2: you coach it, you accept that it might not be
Speaker 2: perfect the first time. That is how you buy back
Speaker 2: your time. Second, you need to eliminate fake work, and
Speaker 2: there is a lot of it. Meetings that don't go anywhere,
Speaker 2: Emails that could have been a two sentence text, reports
Speaker 2: that no one reads processes that exist because we've always
Speaker 2: done it this way. This is where leaders waste hours
Speaker 2: every week. So here's a challenge for you. Take one
Speaker 2: day and track everything you do. Then ask one question,
Speaker 2: over and over does this actually move the mission forward?
Speaker 2: If the answer is no, it's fake work. Cut it,
Speaker 2: reduce it, or delegate it, because every minute you spend
Speaker 2: on fake work is a minute stolen from real leadership. Third,
Speaker 2: you need to protect your decision energy. Leaders make decisions
Speaker 2: all day long, and what most people don't realize is
Speaker 2: that decision making is a finite resource. You only have
Speaker 2: so much of it in a day, So if you
Speaker 2: are burning that energy on small, low impact decisions, you're
Speaker 2: going to be drained when the real one shows up.
Speaker 2: This is where systems come in. Standard operating procedures, checklists,
Speaker 2: clear expectations. When you build systems, you remove the need
Speaker 2: to decide over and over again. Think about aviation. Before
Speaker 2: every flight, there's a checklist, not because pilots don't know
Speaker 2: what to do, but because it removes variability. It protects
Speaker 2: focus for when things go wrong. That's what you need
Speaker 2: in your organization. Less thinking about routine, more thinking about risk. Fourth,
Speaker 2: you need to get comfortable saying no, and this is
Speaker 2: one of the biggest unlocks in leadership. Every time you
Speaker 2: say yes to something, you were saying no to something else,
Speaker 2: usually something more important. Leaders who work NonStop are often
Speaker 2: the same leaders who can't say no. They take on
Speaker 2: every request, they attend every meeting, they respond to every problem,
Speaker 2: and they slowly bury themselves. You have to draw a line.
Speaker 2: If it doesn't align with your priorities, it's a no.
Speaker 2: If it doesn't move your organization forward, it's a no.
Speaker 2: That is how you create space. Fifth, you need to
Speaker 2: build leaders, not followers. This is the multiplier. If your
Speaker 2: team relies on you for every answer, every decision, every direction,
Speaker 2: you will never work less. But if your team can think, decide,
Speaker 2: and act without you, everything changes. Now you were not
Speaker 2: the center of every problem. Now work continues even when
Speaker 2: you were not there. And that is real leadership. That's
Speaker 2: how organizations scale. And here's the part most people miss.
Speaker 2: Building leaders takes time. Upfront, you will invest more energy
Speaker 2: early coaching, teaching, letting them fail and learn. But over
Speaker 2: time that investment pays you back ten times over because
Speaker 2: now you are not carrying everything. Your team is carrying
Speaker 2: it with you. And finally, you need to redefine what
Speaker 2: productivity actually means. It's not how many hours you worked,
Speaker 2: it's not how busy you felt. It's the results you produced,
Speaker 2: the problems you solved, the clarity you created. You can
Speaker 2: sit in your office for twelve hours and accomplish very little,
Speaker 2: or you can spend six focused hours making high impact
Speaker 2: decisions that move your entire organization forward. That is the shift.
Speaker 2: Working less is not about doing less, It's about doing
Speaker 2: what matt most and letting go of everything else. Because
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, leadership is not about
Speaker 2: how much you carry, It's about how much you enable
Speaker 2: others to carry with you. So here's your challenge. Take
Speaker 2: a hard look at your day tomorrow and find one
Speaker 2: thing to delegate, one thing to eliminate, one decision to systemize,
Speaker 2: and one thing to say no. To start there, seven
Speaker 2: intentional minutes, that's all it takes to begin changing how
Speaker 2: you lead and how you work. And when you do
Speaker 2: this right, you won't just work less, you will lead better.
Speaker 2: This has been the seven Minute Leadership Podcast and I
Speaker 2: thank you for listening.
Speaker 1: For more Paul Fell of Alito Podcasts, visit paulfellowalito dot com.