One of the most common questions I get when I am working with managers who are trying to make a shift in how they lead themselves and others, goes something like this: “How am I supposed to do all of this other leadership and people stuff when it takes all of my time just to get my daily tasks accomplished?”

It’s a valid question as long as your perspective is that leadership means doing more. The question goes away when you think about leadership as not what you do, but how you do it. What that common question sometimes illustrates, is a completely different perspective on what great leadership looks like.

Changing your perspective

I often like to put the answer in a little different context. Does Michael Phelps stop swimming in order to focus on winning the race? We all know the answer to that question. Clearly he’s not focusing on the mechanics of his movements when he’s trying to win a race with his team. He’s thinking about the next flip or the next lap and then moving his body those thoughts in mind. Becoming a better leader doesn’t always mean that we change the things we do. We simply change how we do those things by focusing on different things while we do them.

It may not mean that we spend more time in meetings, on calls, or in one on one conversations, but it does mean we get more engagement from others and better results for the time we do spend. We may not write fewer emails, but the emails we write will cause others to think differently about challenges and learn to tackle them on their own.

Don't change the things you do, change how you do them

Here’s a tangible example. I was working with a leader who received some tough feedback from his team about how he was conducting meetings. The team felt that it had little value for them to spend time on innovation or creative ideas because the leader had a clear set of actions that he wanted executed. Anything that departed from that would usually get shot down in a hurry. He focused on his agenda and designed the meetings to help his team understand and execute that agenda. As a result, people simply started waiting for instructions rather than creating solutions.

I asked him to take me through the process he used to prepare for meetings. As he described the steps, I asked him to tell me what he focused on as he went through this preparation. He responded that he was thinking about all of the things that needed to get done. I then asked him what he thought might be different if he planned his meetings with a focus on all of the things he needed to learn from his team in order to lead the practice more effectively. Sometimes, with a little luck, you have the opportunity to help create moments that truly change perspective and in that one instant, he understood the source of the humbling feedback.

His leadership challenge was not doing more things; it was doing the same things differently.

Leadership, when you take into account all of the things that are part of doing it effectively, looks hard and appears as if it would take an enormous amount of time. But most of us are already spending an enormous amount of time working anyway. The question is not about time; it’s about what we focus on while we’re spending it.