The three-thirds executive
Over the last decade, as a startup executive, I’ve made countless mistakes. As a computer scientist, my brain tries to abstract the problem to a class of problems. Fixing the symptoms, although it might be the right thing to do and necessary over the short term, it’s not as effective as dealing with the causes.
Reflecting on my executive leadership problems of the last few years, I believe to have found a great framework to be better at the role. It also applies to all executive roles (CxO or VP at a startup, or even a GM, director, or manager of 10–100 people).
The principle is to manage your weekly efforts in three equal parts:
- Your Work
- External work
- Your Team
Your Work
Allocate a third of each week for the thinking and doing. Many executives don’t produce artifacts like code or design. However, it’s likely you are preparing for meetings, writing emails, creating presentations, and defining strategy.
It’s not unusual for first-time executives to focus on this to detriment of everything else they must do. This is their comfort zone. It’s the CTO that wants to code all day, the CMO who keeps writing blog posts and managing Adwords, the VP of Design that spends a whole week redesign the icon set.
External Work
Your external work is a way of saying anything that’s not related to “me-time” or your team. In other words, external people to your organization: The press, investors, partners, customers, candidates, etc.
It might seem this is ad-hoc, but if you are not proactively searching the opportunity to get more candidates interested in your company, finding prospects, participating in meetups & conferences, or managing your partnerships & clients 1:1, you’ll regret it sooner than you realize and it might be too late.
Your Team
The thing to remember is that you are making yourself available to your team, and they use it however they see fit. As an executive, we need to make ourselves available at least for 30–60 minutes a week for each direct-report you have, at least a couple of hours for your direct-reports team to be together with you present, and another hour to your manager (in the case of the CEO, the board).
This “third” is the hardest one to justify. You hire people that are exceptional at what they do, who might be leaders themselves, and you put them in a box expecting greatness to come out without any involvement from you. It simply does not work this way, both up and down. You have to carve out the time for your team, and you have to demand the time from your direct-manager.
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From an engineering jargon, you are avoiding a “thread starvation”. A system that indicates you aren’t giving enough resources for a thread to complete its job. You have three consumers (you, your team, and external) of your time and you must make sure you are not starving any of them.
