delegate aggressively so you can spend time on these questions
Almost every leader I’ve coached has needed strong urging to give more (even most) of what they’re doing now to others in the organization. They often wonder what I’m expecting they should spend their time on instead. Here’s a short list of evergreen questions executives should devote time and attention to:
Compare your current results to the outcomes your mission promises and ask, "Could we be doing this better and faster?" Another way to put this is “re-evaluate your strategy.”
“What’s the best data from the external world, from the market, about how things are going? What do human sources of data say about the future of the market?”
"I’m imagining that I doubled our returns, whatever those may be in my sector, over the next two years. Looking back, how did I properly do that?"
Obstacle analysis. “What is preventing me from doing the thing that would double our returns?” Maybe the answer is: I can't really trust the mid-level leaders in this organization. If I could wave a magic wand and make them all trustworthy, that would be good to do. Of course, a magic wand won’t do it, but there are lots of ways people do achieve this with investments of time and energy and money. Those ways wouldn’t have occurred to me or felt available when I was shoulder-deep in frontline work. Now I can pursue them or mobilize the team to do so.
-ben
