Stay in Your Lane

I was asked to do a really big presentation to hundreds of people; the topic was right in my wheelhouse. Sometimes we will get asked to speak on something that we haven't done a bunch of keynote talks on, and it would take several planning meetings. But this one was right down my lane. I was excited to give it and knew it would be easy to prepare for it.

I already knew where the talk would go, so I thought I'd help out my go-to person on the marketing side of the team. Instead of giving her an outline, I started putting together a PowerPoint just to save her time. In my mind, I was being thoughtful; I would avoid an extra meeting for us both.

I didn't spend much time putting the PowerPoint together. Maybe 25 or 30 minutes. Then I sent it to her so she could do the finishing touches.

Within a day or two, she had the most beautiful, professional, and sharp-looking presentation. It was not 90% better than what I did; it was 9,000% better. No joke. 9,000% improvement. Before she showed it to me, she jokingly said, "This is why I do what I do, and you do what you do. Next time just give me an outline."

After she showed me the difference between my PowerPoint shell and her final product, I laughed so hard that joyful tears came to my eyes. It really was funny. The comparison looks like a literal fourth grader tried to put together a presentation, and the developer who invented PowerPoint received the shell and reswizzled it. The difference was that drastic. My PowerPoint shell was horrible, the size of the slides was off, the photos were very low resolution, and we don't even use Powerpoint. Basically, she had to redo the whole thing.

I thought I was being thoughtful by taking 25 minutes to put a (junky) PowerPoint together, but I should have taken 5 minutes to write out a super brief outline. That's all my teammate would have needed to create her magical final product.

You can sit there and say, "Well, it was only 25 minutes."

But I could've accomplished the same intent in 5 minutes, and I would've had 20 minutes back in my life that I could've devoted to another client or another task.

Let's take this a step further. If I make this mistake two or three times a week, that's an hour of poorly utilized time. Multiply this hour by four weeks; now it's four hours of wasted time. For a year? That's forty-four hours that I could've had back in the reservoir to devote to something of way higher value. That, in short, is an entire week of work that could be billable, helpful, and/or serving something or someone else.

That's why she does what she does, and I do what I do. I know my lane, she knows her lane, and we know where we need to intersect for the collaborative elements.

I think we do this really well on my team. BUT it's not perfect. Think about it: We both could have saved time if I had stayed in my lane instead of trying to go into hers to create the PowerPoint. 

This concept of "owning and knowing your lane" is such a great leadership principle and has been in my "leadership playbook" or "leadership philosophy" for over a few decades. This is the gist of it:

Own your lane, and know his/her lane: Simply stated, instill a mindset of accountability, attention to detail, and reliability in your people. Each person is responsible for themselves and their responsibilities on the job, and, of huge importance, how those responsibilities dovetail and impact the rest of the unit or organization. This is where an autonomous spirit coalesces with collaborating teamwork.

So the question is, do you know your lane and how it intersects with everybody around you on your team? Do the other people on your team know theirs as well? Are you avoiding duplication or unnecessary tasks? Are you truly maximizing your time?