How to do your best work: notes from four leadership coaching sessions

Hey 🙂

I recently had the chance to work with a leadership team at an agency — four team sessions, one a month, over about four months. Four hours of coaching in total.

The theme running through all of it was simple: how do you do your best work? Not how do you do more — almost the opposite. How do you become less busy and more effective, and spend more of your time on the work that actually matters.

As we went, I documented everything we covered — every framework and every idea — and pulled it together into one document for the team, so they’d have it all in one place. A quick heads-up on that: it was written for them, as a summary of our four sessions, so as you read it you’ll notice it’s addressed to the team and assumes the context of the work we did together. I’ve shared it here as-is, because I figured some of it might be useful to you too.

You might find something in here if you’re in a leadership role, if you’re working with or through a team, or if you just feel permanently busy and want to get ahead of your work instead of chasing it.

It covers things like:

• Finding your highest-leverage work — the 20% that drives most of your results
• A simple weekly rhythm (the 3-1-3) to finish the week in the “gain” and start the next one already ahead
• Sorting your work into what to eliminate, what to delegate, and what to expand
• The difference between urgent and important — and why living in the “urgent” box quietly makes you the bottleneck for everyone around you
• Delegating properly: owning the what and why, and letting your team own the how

None of this is theory I only read somewhere — I don’t really believe in that. What I believe in is studying something, practising it, making it your own, and then teaching it as part of your own learning. That’s the real test of whether you’ve understood something. So everything in this document is something I’ve been practising in my own work for years — in some cases fifteen or more — and still practise every week. The opportunity here was simply to teach things I’ve lived with for a long time, and getting to share them with a team was a real pleasure.

You can click the link, make your own copy, and do whatever you like with it. It’s yours.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.