Bill Ringle describes how a leader named Tom was spending 8-10 hours monthly editing a newsletter he enjoyed but that kept him from strategic work. By listing Tom's responsibilities and finding a capable project manager to take over the newsletter, they freed him for higher-impact activities like one-on-one calls and event planning.
He had grown up, he had built the organization around this newsletter, and he was so proud of editing it. Yet it took 8 to 10 hours a month to assign the articles, to review them, to proofread them. And I said, Tom, what if we just added a day a week to your time? What would you be doing differently? And, you know, he started, he blinked a couple times, and then he said, there's so many things that we could be doing differently. We could, you know, start to invite people more in advance to some of our events. And we could— I could have more time to make personal one-on-one calls that only I could make. And so I said, let's make a list of things that you're doing now. And we started to categorize them. And sure enough, the newsletter rose to the top. And he had on his staff one of his project managers who had an English lit degree, who was perfectly capable of running the newsletter. But it never occurred to him to delegate that because it was what he'd always done.
