The 90/10 Rule in Leadership

It was my first week as a new CEO, and I remember being faced with new decisions to make and challenges to overcome. That week, a leader I trusted told me something I have never forgotten:

“Alan, the firm pays you 10% of your salary for 90% of what you do and 90% of your salary for 10% of what you do.”

The reality is that leaders are put into seats (and compensated accordingly) for the 10%: the hard stuff that happens to be the same stuff that drives progress and leads to results. As I reflect on my leadership journey and my experiences hiring other leaders, I’ve continued to find this to be true. The 10% is what matters most.

As leaders, the 10% is where we should focus our attention and efforts. It’s the stuff that might not feel urgent, but it’s critical to driving and enabling growth in our organizations.

Here are the 5 things I believe make up the 10%:

1. Set the strategy

All roads lead to and from strategy. Every action, decision, and internal system must point toward the organization’s strategic goals.

Plans and tactics are not strategy. They are the means to an end. Strategy is the overarching framework that defines the end itself, and it is not about what one partner or another wants to do. It is about what the organization is setting out to accomplish as a collective whole.

As a leader, setting strategy (the north star for your organization) is critical.

Who do you seek to become as an organization?
Who is your target client?
What are the value-added solutions you’ll provide?
How will you grow?

Strategy is the great enabler. It enables speed in decision-making, and when done well, it enables results. Designing, documenting, and distributing a strategy is the job of leadership.

2. Change mindsets

Knowing what to do has never been the hard part in professional services. Getting people to buy in and actually do it is the work, and every stage of a growth journey hinges on aligning people around a shared strategy and altering mindsets to enable it.

People never adopt progress as quickly as the people designing it. In the middle of an organization-wide transformation effort, I remember when a team member said to me: “Alan, it’s not where you’re asking us to go that is difficult. It’s what you’re asking us to leave behind.”

Human nature is undefeated! We're wired to stay in predictable environments and not push into the unknown. Well, your job as a leader is to be able to gain buy-in, shift mindsets, and move people out of their comfort zone. You achieve that by:

• Doing things WITH people instead of TO people

• Being willing to approach objectors with curiosity and seek to understand them

• Never stop communicating WHERE we’re headed, and HOW buy-in helps us get there

Professional services is a people business. It’s the people who at times keep me up at 1:47 am mulling things over, and it’s also the people who are the most rewarding and enjoyable part.

3. Connect the dots

I’ve written before about getting off the dance floor and heading up to the balcony. The dance floor is where we accomplish the work, and the balcony is where we think strategically. Staying down in the weeds keeps a leader in operator status, but they are blinded by the bodies in front of them. The balcony provides a different vantage point, one that’s critical to your impact as a leader and your success as an organization.

But the balcony only works if you have been collecting something worth looking at, which means every conversation is data and every interaction is input. It’s why I get on planes when I could hop on a Zoom call. I want to fist bump people, share a meal together, get a sense of culture, and hear the question one office asks that I know three others are asking too.

So the act of leading is about spotting the patterns. Find the things that repeat. When I can start to see those patterns across the organization, I begin formulating hypotheses on larger organization-wide initiatives that address them.

That only happens when you spend intentional time on the balcony, out of the day-to-day work, so you can think more strategically.

4. Move before it’s clear

Sometimes we have to communicate and act before things are clear, or before everyone else sees what we see. I once told a leadership team we were going to nearly double company revenue in a few years without a step-by-step plan for getting there. People’s jaws were on the floor. But I was confident in our strategy and our ability to get buy-in, so I knew we’d get there (btw, it worked, and we achieved our goal, 2 years ahead of schedule).

Leadership is about being unafraid of ambiguity, and being willing to design something from scratch when you see signs that change is needed.

I once moved a talented operations leader out of a role where he was crushing it because the work didn’t use his strengths and wasn’t pointed where he wanted to go. It left a hole I had to fill, but either it was going to happen then, when I decided, or later, when he decided to leave on his own.

There is a delicate balance between being informed and allowing more information to become a never-ending trap that stalls decision-making. Part of leadership is thinking a few moves ahead and acting without all the information.

5. Enable others

I often talk about the concept of one-to-many. If your day-to-day is focused on production (doing the work), then what you produce is a reflection of what you alone can do. While there is value to that, there is even greater value in enabling others to produce more than you could alone. This is the work of one-to-many.

In my career, that has meant taking a Partner with a large book of business, assigning them a new role overseeing others, and enabling the collective to produce more than the individual Partner could on their own.

Enabling others is about teaching, coaching, and removing roadblocks so that others can perform at their highest potential. Enabling others happens in 1-on-1’s, before and after client meetings, and finding intentional development opportunities that align to team members’ strengths and goals.

When you enable others, you allow the collective to accomplish more than any individual could on their own.

The bottom line

The challenging thing about leadership is that none of these 5 things may ever feel like the most urgent thing on your desk, which is exactly why they are the 10%. But it’s in this 10% where leaders make their mark and drive organizations forward.

Don’t get caught up in the 90%.

With intention,

Alan Whitman
CEO at Nichols Cauley

ps… of these 5, which one is hardest to protect time for in your seat right now? Would enjoy hearing from you, and we can all get better by discussing things with other leaders.

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