Podcast Ep 97 | What Time Period Should Your Role Be Focused On?

This week on the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast, Kevin and Brad dis­cuss the time hori­zon that each role in a com­pa­ny should be focused on. How should lead­ers spend their time?

Dif­fer­ent roles in an orga­ni­za­tion should be focused on dif­fer­ent time peri­ods. Each per­son in each role should know what time hori­zon they should be focused on, and cre­ate pri­or­i­ties rel­e­vant to that peri­od. If you are focused on the wrong hori­zon in your role, you will not be as effec­tive as you could be.

In order to lead your com­pa­ny well into the future, you have to be think­ing a lot about that future, and lay­ing the foun­da­tion. And if you keep get­ting sucked into the day-to-day or week-to-week tasks, it might say some­thing about the peo­ple who are report­ing to you, and account­abil­i­ty that they need to have.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Hi there, and wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing that we talk about is build­ing endur­ing, great com­pa­nies. Kevin, Hel­lo, how are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:32

Great, Brad. Always fun putting togeth­er these shows and tak­ing our dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences and per­spec­tives and com­ing up with one kind of uni­fied per­spec­tive on a top­ic. And I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to the show today.

Brad Giles 00:45

It’s a friend­ly arm wres­tle, isn’t it that we have?

Kevin Lawrence 00:47

That’s the thing. We have dif­fer­ent views. If we both thought iden­ti­cal­ly, it’d be bor­ing for us too. So yeah, it’s great.

Brad Giles 00:54

Each week, we like to start with a word or phrase of the day, Kevin, what might you have in store for us today?

Kevin Lawrence 01:15

I was think­ing about this one. And, you know, there’s always so many, you know, dif­fer­ent things. But the, the tough the one today is tough deci­sions, or calls. And, you know, they say it’s, it’s, it’s what sep­a­rates the men from the boys, and also sep­a­rat­ing, you know, the lit­tle girls from the women, ie about grow­ing up and becom­ing a bet­ter ver­sion your­self. But it’s tough deci­sions. You know, I have a client that had to make a very tough deci­sion last week. And it was excru­ci­at­ing for them and a num­ber of peo­ple involved in this deci­sion. And it’s just inter­est­ing watch­ing the build up to it, mak­ing the deci­sion and watch­ing it unfold after­wards. And yeah, and as we know, in busi­ness, if you don’t make enough of those tough deci­sions, you will get smoth­ered under the bur­den of your organization.

Brad Giles 02:12

Well, each week, you like to stitch togeth­er the two. So I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing you stitch in that with this. Ah, my word is actu­al­ly a book. It’s called Small Giants by Bo Burling­ham. Yeah, this is the orig­i­nal. And the best, I would say it’s such an excel­lent exam­ple of com­pa­nies across Amer­i­ca who have built com­pa­nies that aren’t sole­ly focused on becom­ing big, they’re focused on becom­ing great. And I’ve had the oppor­tu­ni­ty a few times to reflect on that in the last week.

Kevin Lawrence 02:51

Yeah, it’s the tough deci­sion to not be big, right? There’s this tough deci­sion to be a small giant, which is hard in our cul­ture because it’s always about big­ger and bet­ter. And it’s, it’s many ways, it’s almost like the Zen min­i­mal­ist view of things. How do we keep it sim­ple and amaz­ing? And yeah, that’s one all right. Oh, so hard bread. Tough deci­sion to be a small giant.

Brad Giles 03:21

And what are we talk­ing about today?

Kevin Lawrence 03:23

You know, it’s, it’s a top­ic we’ve talked about before, it’s a real favorite for me. And it’s basi­cal­ly, you know, it’s almost like, you know, we’re in a world of rac­ing cars, it’s Wher­ev­er you look, you go. So if you’re going around a cor­ner, and you start slid­ing side­ways, you look at where you want the car to go in the end. And with prac­tice your hands auto­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect and gen­er­al­ly take you there. Same thing, if you’re slid­ing in the snow, and you’re in a car drift­ing around in the snow. Hope­ful­ly, you’re doing it for fun, not because of an inci­dent. And you just point the car, we want to go mash the throt­tle, espe­cial­ly if it’s all-wheel dri­ve, it takes you there. And it’s the same thing when it comes to lead­er­ship. It’s about what­ev­er you focus on, you get, you know, if you’re run­ning a marathon, or a race, and you’re star­ing down at your shoes while you’re run­ning, it’s prob­a­bly not going to go very well, because you’re going to go down you’ll face first into the ground. So this is about where do you focus as a, whether you’re a front­line work­er, a man­ag­er, an exec­u­tive or CEO, where should you be look­ing? And where should you be spend­ing your time? So it’s basi­cal­ly no more Yeah, more eyes up, but how far up where should you be look­ing as a leader?

Brad Giles 04:38

Yeah, it’s, it’s real­ly inter­est­ing. I had a chat with one of the teams that I work with recent­ly and the CEO, they’re grow­ing quite fast. They’re grow­ing real­ly fast. And he’s kind of he can see the pain in the team and he said to me, Look, I’m I’m I just want to bounce it off. You I’m think­ing maybe I need to spend some time doing the job, like, I got to get out there, these, the team needs help, I need to get on to the front­line and help. And it will be the bold and brave thing to do. They’ll all feel like I’m doing the right thing and so forth. And no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that is not a good idea. Let’s just put it into a ship anal­o­gy, right? So you’re there instruct­ing the per­son who’s steer­ing the ship, and you’re say­ing to me, I need to go and climb the masks and hold the sails. And then we’re and then I’m gonna go down to the engine room and go and work on the rud­der, or the or the pro­peller, if it’s an engine pow­ered boat, yes. No freak­ing sense.

Kevin Lawrence 05:40

And lead­ers do it all the time. Because in the moment, they they’re just try­ing to be help­ful, but they don’t real­ize now they’re tak­ing their eyes off the hori­zon. Now, they’re not think­ing about the next moves. Basi­cal­ly, they’re, you know, as a CEO, if you’re, if you’re spend­ing a lot of time on the day to day, you’ve got seri­ous prob­lems now, whether the prob­lem is you and your lead­er­ship style, your man­age­ment style, or your team or your busi­ness. CEO should­n’t have to spend on very lit­tle time on the day to day, because that it’s a bad sign. It’s a real­ly bad sign.

Brad Giles 06:27

Yes, yes. Because you’re doing oth­er peo­ple’s jobs. This is the prob­a­bly the key theme that I wrote in my book Made to Thrive. As a leader, you need to do your job and do it well and not do oth­er peo­ple’s jobs. Because as soon as you start doing oth­er peo­ple’s jobs, it’s tak­ing away their auton­o­my. And it means that no one’s doing your job.

Kevin Lawrence 06:50

Exact­ly, it means your role is vacant, you know, it also in my book, I had a chap­ter as well called Make Your­self Use­less. Yeah. And your job as a leader is not to have any­thing to do your to sup­port your peo­ple make them so strong they can do with­out you. So you can be eyes up focused on what’s next. Now, if you’re, you know, run­ning a team on a fac­to­ry floor, what’s next might be think­ing about next week’s pro­duc­tion or enhanc­ing pro­duc­tion. You know, if you’re a CEO, it’s about, you know, the future. So what we’re going to dig into, and it’s, it’s, there’s a lot of vari­ables that go into being able to do this. And I’ll say, one of this, this, this came up for me recent­ly, when I was talk­ing with one of my CEOs about enhanc­ing and I talked a lot of the CEOs about enhanc­ing their abil­i­ties. And we talk about for CEOs, and even C suite about becom­ing the strate­gic CEO. Yes, strate­gic CFO. And I’ve worked with many the year over the years to make this tran­si­tion. And even if we take the CFO role, you know, there’s the CFO who’s basi­cal­ly like the senior accoun­tant, get­ting the num­bers, right, work­ing the sys­tems. But a true strate­gic CFO is focused on the future, there along­side the CEO look­ing 1 to 3 years down the road, and build­ing the mod­els and help­ing to make the deci­sions to take the busi­ness in that direc­tion. But if they’re an oper­a­tional CFO, they don’t have time, nor the think­ing time, or the band­width do that kind of same of the CEO. I call it the cap­i­tal C CEO, or the strate­gic CEO. Yeah, that is the per­son who’s tru­ly doing that CEO job. And you know, in our first one, we’re talk­ing years, the CEO, CEO should have a big por­tion of their time on three to five years in the future. They should be look­ing at enhanc­ing the strat­e­gy, they should have a lot of think time, a lot of think time think­ing about things, talk­ing to peo­ple explor­ing mod­els, maybe they’re look­ing at acqui­si­tions, maybe they’re spend­ing some time on future prod­ucts, or under­stand­ing future needs of cus­tomer who knows what it is, but they’re work­ing on things that real­ly have a pay­off and an impact that are three to five years in the future.

Brad Giles 09:06

But that’s a real­ly big pay­off. Let’s be clear. So I’m going to just bounce that back to you for clar­i­ty. Now, because this is the this is the kind of the head­line that we’re say­ing here. The CEOs focus pri­mar­i­ly for a huge part of their time should be focus­ing on three to five year peri­od, focus­ing on the strat­e­gy, exe­cut­ing strat­e­gy, becom­ing defer­ring the mar­ket, main­tain­ing the gross mar­gin, mak­ing sure that we if we need to make acqui­si­tions or what’s hap­pen­ing in the mar­ket, not so much. If some­thing hap­pened in the fac­to­ry yes­ter­day. That’d be nice to know.

Kevin Lawrence 09:49

Maybe they do and maybe they spend a few min­utes on it. Maybe they have to lend a hand once a while when some­thing comes up. But it’s gonna be wrong num­bers 50% of their time. focus­ing on though and dri­ving those things in the future.

Brad Giles 10:03

Yeah. And that’s hard. All of those things in the future need work to be done to get there, like, you need to do some­thing this quar­ter, and the fol­low­ing quar­ter, and then the fol­low­ing quar­ter. So under­stand­ing that com­mu­ni­cat­ing it to the team, and con­tin­u­ing to think on that is a huge part of the focus of a CEO.

Kevin Lawrence 10:25

Which is basi­cal­ly not involved in the day to day almost at all. And a lot of times, it’s build­ing rela­tion­ships you talked about in your book, The ambas­sador role, it’s build­ing rela­tion­ships with key peo­ple, it can be, you know, being involved in recruit­ing key tal­ent, maybe they know that they’re going to expand into anoth­er coun­try or anoth­er ver­ti­cal of the indus­try, and they got to go and find some heavy hit­ters, you know, maybe they need to find some siz­zle, basi­cal­ly, three to five years out a lot of time to think and enhance their under­stand­ing and devel­op, because if not them who every­one else is fight­ing fires doing this, it’s a key part of their job is to lay the track for the future.

Brad Giles 11:05

A quick exam­ple of this. Yes­ter­day, I was speak­ing with a CEO. And he is he’s the own­er of the busi­ness look­ing to put a CEO in to his role in a three to five year peri­od. He’s look­ing to hire a key exec­u­tive who maybe can come into that role. And a lot of the work that we were doing was around ana­lyz­ing the can­di­dates and under­stand­ing who is the per­son that has the best chance of being able to take on that role. So this is not only about the strat­e­gy, it’s about all of the things that are going to hap­pen and get clear on the vision at that point.

Kevin Lawrence 11:43

Yes, all of the things that gen­er­al­ly have a three to five year pay­off. Inter­est­ing. Brad, I had anoth­er con­ver­sa­tion with one of my CEOs last week on the same thing. Yeah, we went through did a tal­ent review of all of their direct reports, look­ing for their suc­ces­sor, because they want a suc­ces­sor in place prob­a­bly in about five years. And at least being devel­oped. So that you know, in 10 years, then they can step up over that role. And goose egg, there was­n’t a sin­gle per­son on their team, we’re now going to go look, cou­ple lay­ers, the lay­er under­neath it to look for can­di­dates. Same thing I did two weeks before that with anoth­er CEO. We went through their team, there’s one that could don’t know, they don’t know if that per­son would want to know, but there’s one that could, but if not as the con­ver­sa­tion is, you know, if you have a whole team, and there’s no one that could be your role, you prob­a­bly need to do some swap­ping, and get some­body else work­ing with you direct­ly that could take your job. But again, that’s a but that’s your replace a CEO is a mill three to five year project even longer some­times to do it right, espe­cial­ly in a an endur­ing company.

Brad Giles 12:58

So as the CEO, yeah, go ahead and say, three to five years. So what hap­pens when we step a lay­er down? So now we’re look­ing at the key exec­u­tives or the peo­ple who report to the CEO. So they should be spend­ing their time with their head in the 90 day to one year peri­od, exe­cut­ing the annu­al pri­or­i­ties, the annu­al bud­get and the quar­ter­ly pri­or­i­ties in the quar­ter­ly budget?

Kevin Lawrence 13:29

Yeah, and no, it’s not that it’s some exec­u­tives will spend a bit of time with the CEO on some of those longer projects. But it’s not their core respon­si­bil­i­ty. Let’s just say, you know, for round num­bers, the CEO spends 50% of their time on a three to five year hori­zon or more. Yeah, the exec­u­tive is going to spend 50% of their time or more on that 90 day to one year time hori­zon, mak­ing and then they might put some time, short­er term might put the longer term, but they real­ly own deliv­ery of the annu­al and quar­ter­ly plans.

Brad Giles 14:00

And they have big things, the big rocks that you see plans, the big, you know, what are the top three to five things for the whole com­pa­ny? What are the for the year? What are the top three to five things for the quar­ter, and for the depart­ment? All of those things are big, and they’ve all got these exec­u­tives name against them. So exe­cut­ing a lot of these things as well as exe­cut­ing the bud­get with­in those timeframes.

Kevin Lawrence 14:28

The big crit­i­cal job is basi­cal­ly mak­ing sure the com­pa­ny is runs. Basi­cal­ly, they’re run­ning the com­pa­ny suc­cess­ful­ly. Yeah, that’s, you know, which is, you know, we mea­sured, so that’s pret­ty, pret­ty straight­for­ward. We’ve dropped down to the senior man­agers know in some, some in the West, we call them direc­tors can be senior man­agers, all kinds of dif­fer­ent titles, but this would be the, you know, the peo­ple that would report to an exec­u­tive like, you know, and if you’ve got a CFO as an exec­u­tive, this would be like your con­troller or your oth­er rolls like that that report­ing. And they’re basi­cal­ly mak­ing sure that their teams are real­ly suc­cess­ful­ly this week get­ting what they got to get done. Yeah. And all the way up to 90 days, they kind of meet the exec­u­tives at that 90 Day piece, where they’re focused on deliv­er­ing that plan. And again, now they don’t focus oth­er places. But senior man­agers are basi­cal­ly this week to this quar­ter. And they’re not real­ly think­ing about the rest of the year, they’re just try­ing to make sure all that crit­i­cal work is get­ting done.

Brad Giles 15:31

So the senior man­agers focused on one week to 90 days, the senior man­agers build­ing or own­ing the 90 day plan that’s exe­cut­ing the bud­get and the pri­or­i­ties for that depart­ment. Okay. But then the man­agers are focused on each of those 13 com­po­nents 13 weeks of that quar­ter­ly plan? Yep.

Kevin Lawrence 15:57

Pret­ty straight­for­ward. Yep. And then we’re dropped down to what you would call a man­ag­er or a super­vi­sor. And this could be, you know, an HR man­ag­er, it could be, you know, some­one, some­one lead­ing an account­ing team, this could be a man­ag­er of a cer­tain prod­uct, it could be a ful­fill­ment man­ag­er, all kinds of dif­fer­ent roles man­ag­er in a fac­to­ry floor, what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. And the man­agers and super­vi­sors who are gen­er­al­ly over­see­ing front­line staff, they’re think­ing about today in the week, they’re not think­ing about three years, they’re there, they’re not even think­ing about the year, they’re just try­ing to make sure that every­one has a great pro­duc­tive day. And all the crit­i­cal stuff is get­ting done today, tomor­row, the next day and next day.

Brad Giles 16:40

Yeah, yeah. And get­ting the team mem­bers who report to them to be pro­duc­tive in that week to exe­cute that week’s plan to exe­cute the num­bers that they need be at sales or out­put or what­ev­er it is mak­ing sure that these peo­ple this week, every­thing at that lev­el between the senior man­agers and the team mem­bers, for the man­agers and super­vi­sors, every­thing is about this week. And then we step down to the team mem­bers, the front­line staff, for them, their pri­ma­ry focus is about today. And if you speak to them, it prob­a­bly is. Their focus is we’ve got to get this done by the end of the day. And that forms a part as we begin to go back up words, what they’re doing on a dai­ly lev­el that forms a part of the plan of the man­agers and super­vi­sors, which forms a part of the senior man­agers, which forms a part of the exec­u­tives and ulti­mate­ly even­tu­al­ly formed part of what the CEOs plans up.

Kevin Lawrence 17:47

Yeah. So if we real­ly break it down, every­one has a dif­fer­ent time hori­zon, what’s their pri­ma­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty, and peo­ple might focus longer term or short­er term depend­ing but for just a think­ing mod­el, it’s basi­cal­ly where at least 50% of their ener­gy is ded­i­cat­ed. And tru­ly, when you get down to the team mem­bers of man­agers, it’s prob­a­bly 90% of ener­gy isn’t that time hori­zon? So team mem­bers is today man­agers is today to a week, senior man­agers is a week to the 90 days in the quar­ter exec­u­tives is the 90 days in a quar­ter to a year, and the CEO is three to five years plus, right and real­ly dri­ving the longer term. And the key thing is, you know, these are guide­lines, the main thing is step back and Zoom Out is are you spend­ing enough time on your core respon­si­bil­i­ty, ie for a CEO? Are you spend­ing enough time think­ing about and work­ing on that three to five year time hori­zon? And if not, what are you going to do to cal­i­brate it to get it there? Because in order to lead your com­pa­ny, well into the future, you have to be think­ing a lot about that future, and lay­ing the foun­da­tions for that future.

Brad Giles 18:58

And maybe what­ev­er lev­el you’re at, if you look and think I can’t think that lev­el, I keep get­ting sucked into the day to day or the week to week, maybe it says some­thing about the peo­ple who are report­ing to you, and account­abil­i­ty that they need to have.

Kevin Lawrence 19:15

Right or how you’re inter­act­ing with who knows what it is, but it’s a great think­ing mod­el. All right. Well, thanks for lis­ten­ing. This has been the Growth Whis­per­ers Pod­cast. I’m Kevin Lawrence. This is my great part­ner, Brad Giles for the YouTube ver­sion. Go to YouTube and the growth whis­per­ers search for us. You’ll find us there if you want to watch the video for to get a hold of Brad and for his awe­some newslet­ter evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au And for myself, and my, I think, awe­some newslet­ter we share the best insights we can. We’re here to help. Lawrence and co​.com Hope you have an awe­some week and good luck putting your right focus on the right timeframe