Leveraging Leadership R&D

With increasing demands in our time, one of the challenges that leaders continually face is that of productivity. How do we get more done with less? Clearly, one solution is to have highly engaged team members that are aligned and pulling together behind the same shared vision.

However, with only 13% of the global workforce highly engaged at work (Gallup 2016), we are obviously not doing a great job at this. Combine this with the fact that Deloitte 2019 Human Capital Survey cites that 80% of companies don’t think they have the right leadership capability in place to address this, then we obviously have a leadership crisis on our hands.

Nothing frustrates me more than the amount of time, energy, and resources that we waste on a daily basis simply because we are not effective and productive and don’t have efficient, aligned business practices in place.

This week it has seemed like I have not been in control of my schedule. I fell victim to reacting to everyone else’s agenda rather than pro-actively leading my business, and the result is that I’ve been left feeling frustrated that I have not achieved all the things that I wanted to do. My productivity index has plummeted as I have navigated the uncertainty of all the events conspiring around me.

Being a proactive leader of your business and grabbing the reins is so important to ensure success. When you feel in control of your day, and it shapes out as you planned, the health benefits are significant as you feel less stressed. Yet there are times when life seems to take over and you feel tossed into the roller-coaster of life.

That’s what happened this week when my hosting company took down my website for nearly 30 hours, just when I was in the middle of a launch!!! Exasperated does not begin to describe how I felt. Now they acted in good faith because my site was being hacked by bots that were impacting the performance of other website on the server, but still, that didn’t help me.

Remember R&D

So, faced with having wasted loads of time sorting out this issue, I found myself up against a few tight deadlines to get work completed. It was then that I remembered that old trick that really successful and productive people engage in daily. They practice R&D!  No, not Research and Development, but rather Replicate and Duplicate.

When you replicate and duplicate, you become super productive as you leverage all the work that you have done before.

By simply repurposing old content, you can instantly create new products and services.

For example:

• If you have a talk you deliver frequently, turn it into a book.
• Convert a book into a workshop.
• Take a workshop and develop a coaching programme around it.

In this way, one piece of effort leads to at least three new offerings.

And of course, you can take content from two or three sources and combine them to create something brand new. That’s what I’ve done this week to enable me to create an article for a magazine by their deadline. I’ve re-purposed and re-packaged some of my earlier work. And I have to say the end result is pretty remarkable.

How can you maximize your efforts by building new products and services based on what you are already doing?

As a leader, how can you leverage your resources to deliver more with less? What systems and processes can you put in place that, once designed, can be duplicated and used time and time again?

In my own business, I have processes for everything from client proposals to onboarding, creating engaging social media content, and designing workshops. As a business that typically designs customised solutions for my clients, having a set bank of content that I use and then being able to tailor this for each client means that I am continuously replicating and duplicating material. This makes customising programmes very simple, as all the key components are already available, so I can quickly turn round work and leverage my valuable time in the process.

How will you use R&D to leverage your time, money, and energy today?