Using Data is Not Just About Numbers — It’s About Knowing Yourself
Know yourself and you will win all battles.
— Sun Tzu, 544 BC – 496 BC
As Seen on Orlando Business Journal’s website!
Like most people these days in organizations of all sizes, you probably wear many hats. Donning a Viking helmet in combination with a construction hard hat borrowed from the Village People over various layers of baseball caps and a bowler hat for good measure is certainly a bold fashion statement to behold. Not just anyone can rock that look the way you do.
But recognizing the need to let others wear some of this headgear will help optimize your personal performance as well as your team’s accomplishments. Sure, skill sets and budgets are always factors in the decision of who you are able to share your hat collection with. But keep in mind that if you can’t share your hats today, then you need to plan on how you can share them tomorrow. Eventually, you will be able to wear one or two select hats that best fit your style, personality and, of course, function.
Know Your Strengths
There are many articles about the metrics you should monitor to run your business successfully, including goals, key performance indicators (KPIs) and micro-metrics. However, you need to know other layers of information to be a successful CEO, manager or leader. They are all about you and your team.
Collecting and making decisions from this information can help make your job more fulfilling and effortless, as well as increase productivity and reduce stress.
Knowing how you and each member of your team uses energy, and how much, at different steps during a project is essential. Consider that every individual has a finite amount of energy for work. Once that energy runs out, work can feel tedious. The law of diminishing returns kicks in, and people are no longer giving their best. Frustration or bitterness can occur.
The Kolbe A Index
Companies and business leaders need to perform critical self-reflection regularly. We assessed ourselves and our team with the Kolbe A Index, which measures the intuitive ways a person takes action. It was developed to help managers and relationship professionals see how team members align and support each other.
When we first took the assessment, we could see our distinct approaches to arranging and designing a project and the amount of structure we each prefer. We learned that each of us tends to calculate risks at different times in our projects.
After we both get specific in our fact-finding, Dr. Jack starts weighing the risks, and Patti jumps into deciding on the process. This difference used to cause a little head-butting. But now it’s good for us as a team. After we allow time for independent thinking and present our thoughts, we operationalize our perceived differences. This setup saves time and helps create a better project.
We also know that once we’ve done the research for a project, built out the processes and managed the risks, we finish the work in its rough draft. We then hit our finite energy point. We’ve already solved the problem and elaborated on creating a solution. Now we have to build out the presentation. That sounds exhausting.
This is where knowing your team’s Kolbe Indices helps identify people to help fill in the gaps. Some on our team don’t have the energy to go deep into the research part of a project. Some prefer to follow a strict scope of work for a project instead of what we call “living in the gray.” They do, however, have the energy to manage the final product and give it their all to see it through to completion.
We have also witnessed fellow team members trying to live against their Kolbe Index. They ask for projects that don’t match their energy needs, or they fight against their strengths because it’s not who they have been programmed to try to be. This misalignment leaves them exhausted and frustrated with themselves.
Today, we always acknowledge people’s Kolbe Index and use it as a way to harness the strengths of each team member, including ourselves. We assign each team member’s scope of work based on the individual’s method for operating.
We also noticed the Kolbe Index is not an absolute; it’s more like a guideline: There are some types of projects that may be out of alignment with a team member’s natural tendencies. But personal interests in the subject matter revitalizes their energy levels, although to a lesser degree.
The Eisenhower Matrix
The next-most-important data set to review is the tasks on your to-do list. Many leaders either have a very long one or don’t have one at all. There isn’t an in-between.
Either way, you can quickly become overwhelmed with your day if you haven’t properly classified your tasks in order to determine priority. There are three different ways we classify our tasks in order to truly see the picture of what should be a priority and what should not.
The first is the traditional Eisenhower matrix. Because the late Dr. Stephen Covey added this technique to his book and teachings on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, President Dwight Eisenhower’s method has become a ubiquitous methodology.
But it’s always good to have a reminder. In four boxes, you can determine what needs to be done, who needs to do it and what can be ditched. Here’s how it works:
Each task is classified into one of four boxes:
- Important and urgent
- Important but not urgent
- Urgent but not important
- Not important and not urgent
The lowest tasks, those classified as not important and not urgent, should either be ditched or saved for an intern to work on. Tasks that are urgent but not important could be done by an assistant or another teammate who would help just get them done and not tax your own brain. The same can be said for tasks that are important but not urgent. That leaves you to handle work that is both important and urgent.
In the Zone
There are two other ways to look at a task to really know whether you should be the one handling it or not. Just because it’s important and urgent, that doesn’t mean the task is in your Zone of Genius or Zone of Excellence. These zones, as well as the Zones of Competence and Zone of Incompetence, were created by Gay Hendriks. He wrote about them in The Big Leap, a book that outlines “a philosophy of life aimed at maximizing your potential.”
A third way of classifying your tasks is a prioritization method Patti learned while attending a conference on project management. While presenting different methodologies for prioritization, one speaker introduced a system that classifies tasks on levels of $10, $100, $1,000 or $10,000.
There are two ways to use this classification for deciding which tasks you should handle. If the task is something only you as the CEO, owner or leader can do, and the task is a $10 task, lump all of those tasks together and do them at a time in the day when you’re at your low point, like when you’re digesting after lunch … or on a Friday afternoon when it’s raining so you can’t get in the pool early (or is that just how Patti works them in?).
But if someone else can do it, it’s worth your time to delegate them. The same goes for $100 tasks. These are usually more thinking-based tasks and should still be batched, but if there’s any way someone can do the initial research for you, or get it started so you can come in and polish it later, delegate it.
The $1,000 tasks are those that are directly related to your business making money. These are important, but if your organization is big enough that you have high-level managers working for you, then let them handle these.
The goal of the CEO or owner should be to focus on the $10,000 tasks. These are tasks that can scale and improve your business. These involve the high-level thinking that helps you win more business. These incorporate thought-leadership activities that help get your organization the recognition it deserves for the work it’s doing.
To Do or Not to Do
Now, for some examples of how all three classification strategies can work together:
- Paying your quarterly payroll tax is an urgent and Important activity, but as the owner of your business, is it worth your time to do it or should someone else? You can easily do it (Zone of Competence), but will it help you make money or scale your business? No. Therefore, you should delegate it.
- Monthly maintenance on your bookkeeping helps save headaches and keep problems from building up, so it’s important. But is it urgent, and must you do it right now (unless you’ve let it build up)? Even if you own an accounting firm, is attaching receipts to the line item in QuickBooks your Zone of Genius? Depending on the size of your business, this could still be a $100 task, but if it takes you away from creating a new offering or writing that article in the trade journal that could get you a speaking opportunity to promote your organization’s services, is it worth it for you to do? No. Therefore, find a bookkeeper where this is at least that individual’s Zone of Excellence.
- Being a project manager requires seeing the project forest, the task trees, and the path and milestones to get there on time and in good shape. These skills should really be someone’s Zone of Genius for that person to do a good job and not get overwhelmed. Is it yours? Maybe. Perhaps helping put the project management software in place and building out the policies and procedures for how work moves through your organization is a $10,000 activity because it will help your business scale. But the day-to-day running of that system? It is still a $1,000 activity since it’s tied to your final work outcome, but the activity drops from being in your Zone of Genius to either your Zone of Excellence or even Zone of Competence. Delegate!
What else do you hold on your plate that isn’t allowing you to focus on the most urgent and important, Zone of Genius, $10,000 scalable tasks out there? What money are you leaving on the table for not classifying your tasks?
Who’s on First?
Of course, if you’re just starting a business or taking over as the leader of an organization, you might be wearing all the hats. But how do you know you have enough business to support more team members, and where would you start hiring first? The last layer we’ll talk about is labeling and understanding the people’s needs of your business and then planning accordingly.
We fell in love with the book E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, by Michael E. Gerber. We most especially liked the chapters on identifying all the roles and responsibilities required to run a successful small business, creating the organizational chart on how those roles interact with each other, and prioritizing filling the lower entry-level positions first.
Right now, in our company, Dr. Jack is the Co-CEO, Co-CFO, COO, VP of operations, product R&D co-manager, product manager and project team leader. Patti is the Co-CEO, Co-CFO, CMO, project R&D co-manager, sales manager, sales assistant and advertising/research manager. Guess which roles we’ll be able to start to fill first as we grow our firm?
Because having the assistants and team leaders would help us do more of the $1,000 and $10,000 tasks (and have a life), we’re currently developing our system’s procedures for handling those roles. As our business grows and we start to see a role taking a designated percentage of our time, we’ll quickly look for help.
Think Like Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu, the Chinese military general known as the author of The Art of War, argued for the importance of knowing yourself as a means of gaining strategic advantages. Though his purposes were just a little different than ours, there is a clear message to be learned about knowing who you are in relation to your cohorts.
The Kolbe assessment allowed us the opportunity to learn more about ourselves and where our strengths dovetail together and where they don’t, in addition to ways to operationalize those personal insights for greater strategic advantages. Likewise, the Kolbe assessment may shed new light on your organization and team dynamics. Or possibly you may want to stare down a Mongol army, circa 500 BC, with the same confidence Sun Tzu had. We don’t judge.
Secondly, in learning how to know yourself, dig deep into the personal zones of yourself and your team members (i.e., Zone of Genius, Zone of Excellence and Zone of Competence) and gain an appreciation for each other’s personal strengths, especially how energy use varies from person to person based on the task in relation to personal zones.
Apply the $10, $100, $1,000 or $10,000 task principle to leverage your team’s optimal performance. Factor the 80/20 principle in as a little buffer. While you can certainly perform at high levels, there are times when you may want to perform in sub-optimum zones, too — perhaps to complete a project where your team may be behind schedule, to redesign a process, or even to answer questions to educate yourself.
However, the caveat is to think of working in a subpar zone as an opportunity cost. Once you recognize and define your zones, in addition to your team’s zones, it is easier to make the decision where your time should be optimized. Your team members will thank you for it, and so will your bottom line.
