Leveraging Leadership

How Smart Leaders Prioritize Minimum Effort for Maximum Impact

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 174

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This episode talks about how leaders can get the best results with the least amount of effort, instead of just working harder by default. Emily uses real examples like organizing a high-profile leadership retreat as a Chief of Staff and handling daily emails, showing how to focus only on what matters most and avoid burning out on unnecessary work. She encourages listeners to look for chances to do just enough to succeed, so they can use their time and energy wisely.


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Who Am I?

If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

 

Time Stamps:

01:37 The Pitfalls of Overworking
03:03 Strategic Leadership and Efficiency
05:26 Practical Examples and Takeaways

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What is the minimum effort you can put in for the maximum output? A lot of times we throw hard work at problems or projects or, oh my gosh, we just got this request. Let me work harder. That's the natural kind of response. Like, oh, okay, I'm gonna have to work hard for the next few weeks here to prove myself or to get this thing across the finish line. Sometimes that is absolutely the case, like there's no getting past, put in the hours, put in the reps, put in the sweat equity. More often than we tend to think is asking ourselves, what is the minimum amount for the maximum result, for the highest level result? And if you think about it, if you do anything past the minimum amount, it's wasted effort. So if you do a certain amount to get the maximum result you can, like the highest quality result you can. Why would you do anything more than that? It's a waste of time and energy, so asking yourself that question is. not only more efficient and more productive, but if you think about it in terms of being a higher level leader and being more strategic, the people who are able to, to determine that and to execute against that are the ones who will rise to the top. Because if you think about, Someone going through their day and their weeks, year after year after year, who always maxes out on their effort, who's like, okay, let me like, spend all the hours and all the energy I possibly can on this thing. Well, that's not sustainable, nor is it the most productive or efficient or effective, right? Because you're going over and above like we, like you didn't need to do that. Why did you spend time on that and not something else? Now you're burnt out so that now you have to like go take weeks off to recover from your burnout. Whereas if someone said, okay, What is the minimum amount you can do for the maximum output? A lot of people will use hard work as their natural response to anything. More requests come their way, more work gets put on their plate. Oh, they have this amazing project they got tasked with. Oh, they have an opportunity to be showcased and have visibility to the leadership, to the board. Let me just work harder. Oh, I don't know about this one area. Let me work hard to gain this knowledge. Is there a time and place for hard work? Absolutely. Of course there is. Is there a time and place for like, yeah, you need to know more about the thing, so go spend a weekend and learn about the thing. Is there a time and place for okay. I've optimized and created work streams and, automated as much as I could and now it comes down to putting in more hours to working hard, to working past when I feel like working and putting in this sweat equity, that's absolutely a thing. More often than not, more often than we think. It's about asking ourselves, what is the minimum effort I can put into this for the maximum result, the highest quality, the highest level result I can get. And if you think about that, it doesn't make any sense to do any more. So if it takes you this amount of effort, like let's say this amount of effort is X, so X is the minimum amount of effort that gets the maximum output, why would you do anything more? Why would you do x plus a hundred x plus a thousand x times infinity? Why would you do that? It makes no sense'cause you're already getting the best possible outcome and result that you, that you can. So why would you put yourself and or your team through the extra effort when that extra effort and energy and brain power could be redeployed in other areas? you can think about this in a couple ways. You can think about it in pure production, right? You're more efficient, you're more effective. But you can also look at it like this. A higher level leader, a more strategic leader, will pay attention to these kinds of things. That's where you next level yourself, right? So instead of playing checkers, you play chess. Okay? I'm gonna look at all of what I have in front of me and I'm gonna ask myself, what is the minimum effort? Me and my team can do to get the best possible result and then do that and execute aggressively to that, and then know that that's where you should stop, and then you spread your energy and your time and attention across all the other things you have to do. If you imagine one person going, okay, I am going to go above and beyond and I'm going to run on the hamster wheel and I'm going to, drive and work hard and burn myself out and do that week after week, month after month, year after year, they're gonna be in one spot. And then if you think of someone else who's like, okay, I'm gonna be strategic, I'm gonna work hard. There are times when I have to do peak performance and go above and beyond what I can sustain, but then I go back down. There are times when I take my team and say, Hey, for the next six weeks we gotta all chip in together and do this big thing. And then we go back and rest this person looks across all of the different things. They have large tasks, medium tasks, small tasks, and they say, what's the minimum I can do for the maximum output? And they do that on a consistent basis. Where are they gonna be? In a few weeks, in a few months, in a few years, they're gonna be in a fundamentally different place than the first person. Alright, some examples here. Let's say you are a chief of staff and you have been task with. Organizing and spearheading this onsite retreat for the leadership team. It's an annual onsite. All the executive leaders are flying in from all over the world, and your job is to coordinate the whole thing. So you've got the logistics and admin people and their and the team doing that. You've got, okay, what's gonna be on the agenda? What are the discussion topics? Who's invited? That's a big topic. How do I organize this thing so the information and discussions flow best? How do I have breakout discussions? How do I facilitate that? All of these things are on the table. Is this important? Yes. Does this have a lot of visibility? Yes. Could this be a potential game changer in your career? Potentially, yes. Okay. So. It's not that it's unimportant, it's not the stakes aren't high, but it's also about asking like, what is the minimum amount I can do for the maximum output? The maximum output is a fantastic offsite. Oh my gosh, we got so much done. We got to meet new people. We talked about relevant topics. We're clear on our go forward plan. We have next steps. We have our communication channels. I feel energized and motivated going into this next fiscal year. That is the outcome that you're driving toward. What is the minimum you and your team can do for that?'cause these things happen all the time with chiefs of staff, right? And it comes about once a year'cause it's an annual leadership meeting, so you have the rest of your full-time job to do so. You can't put everything else away and just do this all by itself, although that would be nice. You often have to say, okay, what are we driving at? What is a good outcome? What is the very best outcome for us in this case? And then what is the minimum amount I can do to get us to that outcome? And then redeploy your energy elsewhere. All right. Last example is let's do emails. So emails are a day-to-day thing that we do every day, all day long. And if you think about that trajectory over time and someone. Always spending a little bit too much time or energy on every single email they do over weeks, months, years, that's gonna add up. Whereas if someone's very clipped and sharp and precise and, okay, what's the minimum effort for this particular email? And there's different types of emails, but for this email, what's the minimum I can do to get the maximum result? Are there times to read things more than once, to choose your words carefully, to have someone else look at it? Absolutely. As chief of staff, what I would do, press releases, it was like I would read that thing three or four or five times. I would have different sets of eyes on it. I would make sure it's like grammatically correct, all this stuff is ready to go. If I was doing all hands emails, like I would certainly read that more than once. I would reorder things. I would go, okay. We're talking about a reorg here. This is gonna be under a lot of scrutiny. people are gonna read this email, especially the paragraph about their department over and over again. And like, what does that mean? Or like, what does this mean? So the words I chose and the way I said it was important. And so I spent time there and I had someone else look at it. I was actually notoriously bad for spending too much time on these types of things. I would, read it 14 times instead of three or four times. I would, go back and forth between this word and that word, and it, like, the connotation was so subtle in some of these cases where it's like, are you done yet? And that was something that I had to work on. Full confession. I still have to work on that. So even in like day-to-day, back and forth emails, I sometimes still get caught fine tuning and just like, oh, like chat GBT tell me like 10 synonyms for this word and let me plug in the right. Like, oh, that's the one I want over here. And it's just like, you know. Maybe sometimes that makes a difference with people, but if I am really honest and I'm not in my head about it, it probably doesn't need to take that long. And people probably don't care that much about my emails. so it, like, sometimes I'm like, Emily, you just spent 20 minutes on that fricking email. It should have taken you two. Like, move on with your life. Let's go. And so I have to consistently remind myself of that. Okay, so takeaway for you is to go out into your next week and look for opportunities for you and or your team and or your principal To ask what is the minimum amount for the maximum output, and I'll catch you next time on leveraging leadership.