3 Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder

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Chelsea, an executive coaching client, came to a session dismayed after receiving feedback from her 360 review that said she needed to work on her “strategic contributions.”

This is not an isolated case. Many executives get hooked into "action bias" or "doing" mode at the expense of carving out time to reflect on whether their actions and approaches are taking them where they want to go.

In my role as a coach, I’ve noticed that many women leaders (in particular) are intensely overstretched, both at work and at home—so the idea of carving out special time for “slow, effortful, and deliberate” reflection feels counterintuitive. Yet, while getting things done is important for leaders, reflection is vital for visioning, strategizing, innovation, learning, impact, and advancement.

Here are three ways to expand your learning, leverage your action, and enhance your success strategy to achieve the results you want for your team and your career.

1. Rework Your Ratio

Nancy Kline reminds us: “The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first.” Your contributions are determined not only by your actions but also by the quality of your strategic insights. This means ensuring that you spend enough time thinking about how to connect knowledge and experiences in new ways, unpack complex challenges, build shared understanding, and find innovative solutions.

Chelsea strongly adhered to an unhelpful dichotomy that prioritized "doing" over "thinking." We needed to reframe reflection as an important leadership competency, underpinning key tasks such as visioning, innovation, relationship-building, and execution. These are equally important for developing and leveraging your networks and visibility, as part of managing your career and having more impact. For Chelsea, this meant setting an intention to be more mindful about cultivating and presenting strategic contributions and scheduling time before a meeting, so that she did not “literally run into the meeting out of breath.”

For yourself, think about the following:

• What is my current thinking:doing ratio?
• How does this support me to work smarter, not harder?
• What would it mean for my visioning, innovation, strategic contributions, and career if I increased my reflection time by 10 percent?
• What is the cost to me/my team if I don’t prioritize time to reflect?

Reflection helps you see, even create, the big picture, and how you and your work shape and fit into the overall scope. It also invites you to reflect on how you want to show up as a leader and intentionally choose activities that will advance and make visible the work that you’re doing.

2. Prioritize, Prepare, and Improvise

When I first started coaching with Chelsea, she shared her belief that “thinking isn’t real work.” There were a number of assumptions to unpack here, beginning with what it means to add value as a leader.

One reason why many women leaders fall into constant doing/delivery mode is stereotype threat: the fear that if they don’t do everything possible—and do it better than everyone else, including male leaders—they will be perceived as less competent and less valuable. This often manifests in “over-efforting,” or endless proving themselves—which all but ensures there is no time for strategizing or reflection. Ironically, it can also lead to women investing most of their resources in work that’s less strategic, less visible, and less impactful for their leadership.

Correcting course requires that leaders prioritize reflection as a strategic practice and actively carve out space to do this work. For Chelsea, this meant owning her goal of moving into a bigger role and exploring how to be seen as providing more strategic contributions. We reviewed how she could prioritize high-level strategy meetings to leverage her experience as a guest editor for an industry journal sharing nonproprietary industry trends and insights. To make the most of this, Chelsea would need to identify how this intelligence added to the conversation in her company.

For yourself, think about the following:

• What meetings and events are important for my work and where I want to go? Which events can I delegate to others?
• What kind of contribution is important to make—for the organization, for my work, and my career?
• How do I want to show up at these events?
• What do I want/need to plan, and what can I improvise? What do I need to prepare in advance to make this happen?

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Chelsea’s desire to lead bigger, coupled with her already charged agenda, meant that she had to redefine her relationship to prioritizing, preparing, and improvising to make the best use of her time and resources.

3. Make It a Practice

Try scheduling 10 to 30 minutes a day into your calendar for intentional, innovative brainwork and thoughtful reflection. If this feels like too much to start with, begin with 10 to 30 minutes a week.

If this is new to you, give yourself some written prompts. For example, add some words or phrases in your calendar entry to pinpoint a few specific things you want to think more about or reflect on, such as “Yesterday’s exchange with Mark / Imposter syndrome at VP meeting / How to be more visible in meetings.” Another approach is to use a meeting, encounter, or even your entire week in review, as cognitive fodder. What went well? What would you like to do differently? What did you learn?

Some tips:

• Leave any canceled meetings on your calendar—and use that time as reflection time.
• For every three meetings you schedule with others, schedule 30 minutes for yourself to reflect.
• Once you’ve made this a dependable habit, expand your reflection to include company-wide issues, such as vision, strategy, and/or trends.

Without reflection, it's very difficult to set a direction, be strategic, or innovate. It’s also hard to learn and grow, lead, and manage our careers.

By recalibrating our thinking:doing ratio, we can be intentional about how and where we invest our resources. We thereby create opportunity, leverage our learning, and expand our leadership and success strategy so we are working smarter, not harder.