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The normal situation in your career as a team or organization leader is “We don’t have enough people/money/whatever to comfortably do everything we’d like to do, or are asked to do.” 

There will be plenty of times when you need to run on lean.  In fact, I encourage you to develop the ability to excel while running on lean resources.  You should be trimming unproductive fat from the program – that’s simply smart management.

The reason why a trained runner only needs the calories of a Wendy’s Triple burger to run a sub-3 hour marathon is that her body is highly efficient.  From the mitochondria up to organ systems and total cardiovascular capacity, every calorie of fuel is burned efficiently. 

I suggest you apply strategic allocation to the portfolio of your team’s work that turn into results which measurable help the organization.  This distribution is not at an individual level, but the overall team.

70% of the total team effort needs to go to imperatives (must-do’s) and high ROI initiatives which you will happily feature in the end-of-year summary. 

20% of the total team effort should go to a rich mix of wins.  Include some work to develop new capabilities and streamline existing capability to improve productivity.  There is undoubtedly some run-maintain work that is necessary to avoid a future crisis.  Identify areas of growth and innovation, too, based on what you can anticipate about future organization needs.  Not all this needs to be visible to the world; there are plenty of high ROI projects which are foundational and enabling phases of work.  But nothing in this 20% should be embarrassing to discuss.

10% of the total team effort should go into capability & capacity development.  New business and technical skills.  Improved people skills.  Investment in relationships with other groups.  Onboarding new hires.  Better documentation and cross-training.

Why 70-20-10?  Every time I’ve seen a group let one of these 3 get too large, or too small, bad things began to happen.  This distribution isn’t magic, and still requires disciplined execution for success, but it’s a proven pattern you can replicate.

At this point you’re probably saying, “But…” and I’m sure you’re half-right.  Only half.  Push your work into these three categories.  Check at least quarterly to see if the team is still on track. 

I like being around smart people.  One of the best things about the R&D group I work for is that I’m rarely the smartest person in the conversation.  Years ago I got in a rough spot and seriously considered shifting to a different industry.  My smarter-than-me beloved wife pointed out that I would be less happy to work in an environment where I was nearly always the smartest person in the room.

Yet, it’s not an IQ thing.  It’s about people who consistently do hard things.  That’s the real value of an excellent peer. 

Those hard things can include:

Solving difficult multi-dimensional technical problems

Skillfully navigating emotional situations and egos

Being professional and doing a job well, even the parts you don’t like

Sacrificing your immediate interests for the good of others

Being faithful in a marriage which is not exciting and loaded with struggles

Resisting deep-but-wrong desires

Parenting toddlers and teens and young adults

Reading hard books

Mastering new crafts and new skills

Learning to be content

Fighting for joy amidst painful losses

Leading people through crisis and change

You and I do well to surround ourselves with people who consistently do hard things.  These are the people who seek wisdom and have earned wisdom to share.  These are the deep people. 

They’ll be your biggest encouragers, too, because they know.  Their challenges might not be exactly like yours, but they know. 

It’s useful, and necessary, to think about these two questions simultaneously:

Am I thinking big enough?

Am I thinking small enough?

I observe that most of us, most of the time, aren’t thinking big enough.  Our views about God are abysmally small.  (Helpful hint:  Read Your God is Too Small by J.B. Phillips.)  We have doubts or wildly incorrect views about our individual potential.  Though we overestimate what we can do in a short time, or by ourselves, we usually underestimate what groups can accomplish over time.  We were made for big things, serving an infinitely big God.

We were made for small things, too.  The smallest kindness and courtesies are valuable.  Creation is beautiful and marvelous at every scale, and much hinges on the tiniest organisms.  Every thought has power.  Every breath is precious.  Every look and word between people has meaning.  Every journey begins with a single step.  Our entire life is a blip on the geological or cosmic scale – what significance do we truly deserve?

Thinking big and small is a good strategy to keep us humble yet aligned with our great purpose.

Appreciating the limits of your predictive power is crucial to being a wise person.  Consider the track record of predictions made about

Tomorrow’s weather, next winter snowfall, and the number of hurricanes

Costs for commodity products like oil, grain, and copper

Outcomes of political elections

Which geopolitical events will drive the news

Who gets cancer or has a heart attack or stroke

We should humbled by our miserable ability to accurately predict the future.

You know those scenes in Star Trek and Star Wars where Spock and C-3PO calculate the odds of successful whatever (e.g., navigating an asteroid field)?  Great fun, helps drive the plot, but impossible.  They can’t calculate the odds because they don’t have enough information.

The realistic approach when you don’t have enough information is to run simulations many times.  We know these simulations are based on incomplete information, so they’re inherently “wrong but useful.”  We can get some idea of the range of possibilities, rather than a specific number.  We can see where our “gut” response might be wildly off, or relatively aligned.

Confidence is a key factor when you’re making a presentation, persuading someone on an idea, or making a sale. 

There is your internal confidence level.  That’s built and reinforced through preparation and practice.  Preaching to yourself helps. 

The other side of the confidence coin is whether your audience or prospect has confidence in you.  How you dress, your physical presentation, smiling, standing tall, the sophistication of your slides or handouts, etc. – all play a role in how people perceive your credibility.  There’s a reason why someone chooses a $1200 suit over the $125 suit, or why taller and attractive people succeed in certain roles. 

Savvy leaders polish both sides of the confidence coin.

“That makes no sense.  No sense at all.  Why would they do that?” 

If you believe the universe is nothing but a bunch of particles randomly slamming into one another on the long path to eventual heat death of the universe, then curiosity isn’t valuable, because there is no meaning behind what you observe.

That’s not my worldview. The instinctive drive to create a story out of what we observe tells me that no one has a purely material worldview by default. 

When you see something crazy, odd, strange, and (to you) senseless, remind yourself that people make decisions and behave in certain ways because it’s logical or rational to them.  Even if it’s just the least problematic way to live.  No one is consciously irrational. 

There is a Why in there somewhere.  There are usually multiple reasons.  There is “schtuff” below the visible waterline.  There is history. 

Dig deep for these when you need to understand why something is the way it is. 

The status quo inherently trends to mediocre.  Excellence requires pushing past the status quo. 

This is deeply uncomfortable.  We like being comfortable and safe.  Most of the time we prefer reading about adventures rather than tackling them on our own.  These factors are what give the status quo its weight, it’s gravitational pull. 

Understanding this is the first step in conquering the status quo.  This is the below-the-waterline enemy you’ll fight when leading change. 

One of the reasons why existing systems tend to crash and shatter before they can be reformed is that the people with the power to change a system benefit from the status quo. 

Plenty of legislators have vowed to simplify taxes.  What’s one of the biggest levers of power that legislators have and use?  The power to write tax law that favors some over others.  A flat tax with almost no line-item deductions is anathema to virtually every lobbyist. 

I’m sure you can think of other examples where change is slow-to-never because everyone has figured out how to benefit from the status quo.  Health care. Judicial systems. The local school system. The family reunion.

Another reason why big changes are difficult is that someone, inevitably, has to say, “I was wrong about X and we should change it.”  That’s a big ask. 

Ptolemy of Alexandria popularized the idea that the earth was the center of the universe, and everything revolved around it.  Practically everyone thought this way for about 1400 years until Nicolaus Copernicus convinced people that the sun was the center of the solar system.  (Sorry, Aristarchus of Samos, most people never heard of you, even if you beat Copernicus by 900 years.)  Many people were still struggling with heliocentrism for about a century after Copernicus – it was simply hard to believe smart people were so wrong.

There’s a similar story about canals on Mars. Right up to 1965 when Mariner 4 did a close fly-by, the conventional thinking was a civilization existed on Mars because of all the straight lines you could see in telescopes of the day. 

I’m sure there is something we’ll discover in the future which unseats something we all believe firmly today, and it will be hard to accept.

Recommended questions to ask your mentor:

“I’m in [this situation].  What am I not asking, or not seeing?”

“What have noticed are blind spots for people in positions like mine, at this stage in my career?”

“How do I _______?”  [Must be something that you can’t Google an answer for.]

You can often follow-up good responses and insights with “What else?”

It’s easy to stumble on Jesus’ command in his Sermon on the Mount:

“Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:58)  How can we be commanded to be perfect?

The Greek word we translate as ‘perfect’ is teleios (pronounced tell-ee-oss).  It means ‘complete,’ ‘brought to fullness.’  Teleios is being all you are meant to be.

Not all blessings are easy and light.  Paul wrote to the Corinthian church “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” (2 Corinthians 4:17)  Struggles are a blessing because they’re a means to growth, to our teleios.

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Our real work is work that only we can do.  

Read that again:  Our real work is work that only we can do.  

Our real work is self-ish in this way.  Not our low, muddled, miserable selfishness, but our higher self.  Our teleios calls us forward. 

Let’s be frank — we’re going to do a lot of work which is not our real work.  There are things that need doing.  No one is above the meanest service.   This work shapes our character, too, and is valuable to our families and communities.  

You might think, “But many people do something just like what I do.”  Yes, but only you are doing it for the people in your sphere of influence.  Many people are accountants, nurses, drivers, teachers, managers, etc., but they bring their uniqueness to a unique set of people.  Many people write blogs like this one, but there are people reading this blog because it resonates with them.  

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We live in a world rich in signs and meaning.  There is a steady stream of signs and insights that we can use — when we’re paying attention.  You’re not special; this is true for all of us.   These signs are both for us and to shape us to better become what we’re meant to be on behalf of others.

My current hypothesis is that we’ll do better when we pursue whatever our interests are, running down trails that make us curious.  The process of exploring has its own virtue.  In time we figure out how all the bits come together.  It’s very difficult to project the path forward, but looking back we see how all the dots connect.