Let’s say you’re planning to work on your roof next Spring. You call a supply company for roofing tiles and tell them you need some. They ask you when, and you demand to have them nine months before you plan to begin working.

Then, the day before you start, you inspect the tiles and find some things you don’t like about them. You call the company, asking them to fix the error and send you more tiles by tomorrow, because that’s when you’re starting, and you ordered these tiles nine months in advance just to avoid this problem.

Do you see the problem here?

You can ask for things whenever you want, assuming you and the other person can make an agreement. But time is precious, and when you’re asking for it from other people, use it well.

Let’s say you have a budget of $300 for the month. That has to cover all your needs – your food, gas, etc. You’re budgeting very tightly; there are no dollars to spare. Then you discover a local vendor is selling five-dollar bills for $4 each. Given your tight budget, how many should you buy?

The answer is all of them! Obviously! Buy 75 immediately, and then use all that money to buy even more, and repeat until the vendor either stops selling them to you or raises the price above five dollars.

It’s insane that I would even have to say that, but there are plenty of people who don’t seem to grasp the concept. Some expenditures of money (or time, or juice of any kind) give you more back than you spent. There are almost always diminishing marginal returns, but until you hit that point, you should absolutely buy those things.

If you’re a fisherman and you catch fish by hand to sell them, then buying a net is obviously a smart call. Buying ten almost certainly isn’t, because you probably can’t use ten. That’s the diminishing marginal return. But if you don’t buy even one because you “can’t afford it,” then you’re a really terrible business planner.

It’s like saying you don’t have time to assemble your bicycle, because you have to start walking across the country and it’s going to take you weeks if not months. The amount of time you spend assembling the bike will clearly pay itself back many times over!

Don’t be one of those people. If there’s a five-dollar bill for sale for four dollars, buy as many as you can.

You wouldn’t put a blacksmith in charge of an army, even though he knows a lot about weapons. You wouldn’t put an accountant in charge of a sales team, even though she knows a lot about revenue. You wouldn’t put a baker in charge of a restaurant supply chain, even though they know a lot about food.

Subject matter expertise isn’t the same as scope, philosophy, and people management. It’s great to have both, but in a pinch, skip the subject matter expertise. Smart people can learn and rely on experts, but it can be nearly impossible to make a general out of a blacksmith.

If you think someone is going to give you an order, but they haven’t yet – what do you do?

Some people instinctively bristle. They start putting up the walls before the order even comes down. Other people start obeying the order they think will come before it even happens.

I’m much more naturally in the former camp, though I don’t actually think there’s a correct way to be all the time. Context matters – what the order is, who’s giving it and why are all important considerations.

But I do think there’s an important point to think about. If you think the order you’re expecting is a good idea, why haven’t you already done it? Why wait until you think you’re going to be ordered to? Your reasons for obedience matter. Make sure they’re valid.

I can tell an effective leader from an ineffective one from one interaction. One single behavior will predict whether the person I’m observing will be an amplifier of talent or hinder it.

When confronted with unsatisfactory behavior, do they jockey for status or do they get to a solution?

It’s simple when you boil it down – you can let the other person “know who’s boss,” or you can get the actual behavior and results you want, consistently and in the long term. You can’t do both.

If an employee delivers work that doesn’t meet specifications, you can let your ego drive. You can make sure they know how disappointed you are, how bad their work was, and how it could jeopardize their job. You can disrespect them professionally in this way, and it will certainly establish who has the higher status in that moment. Of course, it won’t do a thing to improve the actual work in the long term, and in fact even in the short term, the best-case scenario is just someone who takes less initiative. More likely, that employee now has one foot out the door.

The true leader skips all that. They immediately identify the gaps between the delivered work and the desired work and look for ways to close them. They coach, guide, and support. They don’t care if the employee “feels bad” about their prior work – why would they want that? What they *want* is a happy employee who delivers good work consistently. And they know that the way to get that isn’t to dress them down and disrespect them.

That one mentality underpins everything else about leadership. If an employee’s failure to meet a goal threatens your ego to the point that your first instinct is to defend your status, you shouldn’t be in charge of anyone.

Celebrate all milestones. Don’t let them get old. Gather your friends and family unto you and make up any reason at all to be joyous. The joy runs out quickly enough; there’s no reason to let it go quietly.

It is difficult to get accurate, helpful feedback as a leader. In almost all work, your work serves someone else; that’s the nature of our society. It’s a good thing – we help each other, and we work hard to get better at serving each other.

But if you’re a people leader, then the people you serve – the very people that your efforts are supposed to help – also have a lot of reasons to lie to you.

Without a positive, constant feedback loop it’s nearly impossible to improve at anything. And people leaders very rarely have such a feedback loop. Which explains why “bad management” is so endemic.

If you want to wield authority effectively, you have to recognize it for what it is. In the context of professional work, it’s a service job. Your role is to be a coordinator, a force multiplier, a coach, and a supporter. It’s not to be a monarch. If you try to be the latter, you’ll never be the rest – and no one will ever tell you.

They’ll just quit.

You are already good at managing via delegation and objectives! You just might not realize it. But believe it or not, you already know every step to setting a SMART goal, delegating it to another professional who you give absolute trust and autonomy to, and then evaluating the Key Results against the Objective of the goal.

You’ve done it hundreds, probably thousands of times, in fact.

Every time you order a pizza.

When you order a pizza (or whatever), you communicate a Specific (your order), Measurable (size and quantity), Achievable (you ordered from the menu, right?), Relevant (you’re hungry and this will fix it!), and Time-Bound (45ish minutes) goal. You set an Objective – get dinner to my house. And then you trusted a professional to deliver those key results to you with *no further input* from you. You don’t watch them make the pizza and correct their cheese distribution. They don’t come to you and ask you where the oven is. They’re the experts, even if right now you’re the boss.

And you’re comfortable evaluating them on the RESULTS! If the pizza isn’t good, you can give that feedback, leave a review, or simply not order from them again. At no point does it cross your mind to keep ordering from them, but get “more involved” in the process of making your food. The results drive the process.

So whenever a manager tries to lead their team through micro-management, especially when the people on their team are subject matter experts with more specific expertise than the manager has, there’s really no excuse.

Just order the pizza.

Never start with the details. The details are poison. The same “Big Rocks” concept that applies to time management applies to ideas as well; if you can’t put the big ideas into the concept first then you’ll never be able to fit them in. Whenever you set out to do something, make sure you can see – and describe – the big picture first. If you can’t, all the well-executed details in the world won’t help you.

How do you prepare with no agenda? How do you remain ambitious if there’s nothing you want?

I don’t mean there’s nothing I want. But there’s nothing specific in this moment, that I want from this opportunity. It’s just an open door, an all-you-can-accomplish buffet. And while I strive to maintain a general state of readiness for such things, it’s also good to go into a room without any desire to take anything back out.

It means I can have fun.