Top-Grading Your Bandwidth

It’s very easy to see the twig in someone else’s eye rather than the log in our own.

As leaders, we often think about the people in an organization who are not doing their share of the lifting. Too often, we don’t apply that same critical eye to ourselves, our calendars, or how we are allocating our precious bandwidth—our time, energy, and attention. A good strategy for improving our leadership lies between focusing on the organization and looking at ourselves.

Whether you call it “top-grading” or “up-leveling,” businesses consistently apply “processes” to be more effective and impactful. Top-grading, a practice started by GE CEO Jack Welch, who was known as "Neutron Jack," focuses on maximizing chances for success and minimizing risk by putting employees through a process that includes interviews, scorecards, research into their job history, and coaching. Employees are then categorized into those with the chance for high performance, those who might require more work to be successful, and the bottom 10% who would be fired. While this ranking, known as a vitality curve, has become controversial, it can also serve as a lesson in personal prioritization for managing your energy, time, and resources.

We should all be top-grading our attention to focus on the best use of our bandwidth and eliminate our least-effective approaches. I once worked with the C suite of a top-10 academic hospital. The CFO was considered the weakest link by the team and someone who was frequently the bottleneck. She was terrific at developing talent—so much that they were often stolen away to other organizations. Yet, she consistently held the executive team back because she was so behind. Hospital management audited her calendar and noticed she had too many meetings with her colleagues.

In our work together, we looked at the meetings she could cut out, those she could align with peers, and those she could delegate to her colleagues. We determined that through micro meetings, she could align or engage from a particular perspective. She started these briefings with her colleagues before and after the big meetings, and soon she had more bandwidth and less stress, which helped her become a more effective leader.

Too often, we don’t focus on this idea to adapt and up-level ourselves. Doing so can improve your productivity and your relationships with the people you work with, whether you’re a corporate leader or an entrepreneur.

How to Top-Grade Yourself

From the perspective of personal effectiveness, the bottom is the work that is not in your “zone of genius,” which is the place where you’re performing at your best. We all crave bandwidth, and when we don’t have it, we risk becoming too reactive and letting external factors drive our actions.

Do you find chaos enticing, if not addictive? Many of us get pulled into the chaos that a culture of urgency creates and simply fail to see the costs. It can lead to acting overly tactical and making poor decisions without considering all the essential data. Workplace cultures fixated on urgency often report lower levels of productivity. Constant urgency can also result in lower-quality work and errors because people are focused on productivity rather than outcomes and impact. Personally, it can lead to adrenaline fatigue, which can lead to a higher risk of burnout.

Cutting out the work that others can do better and for less money helps you free up time for the more fulfilling, lucrative work. "Instead of saying 'I don’t have time' try saying 'it’s not a priority,' and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation,” says Laura Venderkamp, author of Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters.

Effective leaders preserve their bandwidth (time, energy, and attention) for what is essential, not just what is urgent. This allows them more capacity to lead by thinking in a deeper and more strategic way, which will improve the productivity of the organization as well as your personal goals. For example, many of us naturally focus too much on work, productivity, outcomes, and efficiency, and fail to invest in our relationships. It’s counterintuitive, but building relationships helps us become more productive and efficient.

5 Hacks to Gain Back the Time You Need to Better Manage Your Time

Step 1: Ask yourself some key questions. Take a big step back to get perspective or “altitude,” as I call it. This is when you step away from the urgency to become more strategic. At first, it takes some preparation work and requires a few scheduled meetings to evaluate and create a plan to work on priorities. Questions include the following:

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• Where are you spending your time? Make a list of what takes time, energy, and attention.
• What are you most focused on?
• What is consuming most of your energy, time, and attention?
• In an ideal state, where would you be spending your time?
• What would you be most focused on?
• What would be consuming your energy, time, and attention?
• Who will be impacted by the changes you need to make to build bandwidth?
• Whose support do you need to engage? Build bandwidth management into your routine.

Ask these questions regularly and consistently to be successful.

Step 2: Imagine your zone of genius. In this “step back” time, imagine the circumstances that nurture your best approaches and talents. Questions include the following:

• What are you going to stop doing?
• Who are you going to engage and enroll in doing this?
• How do you avoid “over”-committing?

Step 3: Choose the right altitude. Once you have a better understanding of your zone of genius, it’s time to choose the right altitude. Leadership is about adapting to engaging and aligning people, priorities, and strategy. To do this effectively, leaders need to be focused on the right issues, at the right time, and from the right perspective or elevation. Flying too low, you might miss the context (lack perspective) and be unable to get to the root of the problem. Flying too high, you might miss critical details.

Step 4: Aim to ride the wave. I like to use a surfing analogy when making adjustments to focus less on the chaos and achieve your personal best. When a surfer is trying to catch a wave, sometimes they have to scramble through the churn of the wave, unable to choose their next move, which leaves them with less energy. Riding the wave, or being in flow and enjoying an energetic zen rush, means you’re living your best life. You’re alive, engaged, growing, and inspired, and, ironically, this zone can feel effortless.

Step 5: Make bandwidth management a habit. Schedule regular checkpoints (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) and enlist a partner to help you with accountability and candid feedback. Sometimes it’s easier for others to see you than it is for yourself. They will help you with what brings you energy, what costs you energy, and how to bring more altitude to your situation.

Take these steps as an investment into the long-term benefits of building bandwidth.

With more time, energy, and attention, you’ll be able to take on new challenges, pursue new opportunities, digest complex information and conflicting data, and reflect and take a perspective. Altogether, this translates into working and leading in a smarter way.