The Leader’s Greatest Challenge isn’t People or Money. It’s Time Allocation.

I remember once reading a Fortune Magazine profile of Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and being impressed at how deep in the details he seemed to be. There was even an anecdote about how he would scour departmental reports that listed metrics like “BlackBerries per employee” (now I’m really dating myself!) and challenge managers on costs.

While I do think CEOs need to be hands on, deep in the details, and know their businesses really well, I’ve come to believe that it’s too easy to allow this work to dominate your time, make you feel like you’re doing the job well, but ultimately crowd out the critical work that only you can do.

After thinking about this, my conclusion is that most leaders should think about their work in four layers, and strategically allocate time across them. There is no static formula — the allocation depends on your strategy, the puzzles you need to solve, and your current results.

Layer 1: Self-Awareness and Scanning the Environment

It’s way too easy for leaders to get overscheduled with back-to-back meetings, and have no time left to assess where they are, scan the terrain for threats, and figure out how to be proactive.

• Do we still have the right strategy?
• Are our strategic initiatives still the right ones, or do we have early signals that one is off target?
• Are customers signaling anything out of tune with our strategy or product?
• Are competitors doing anything we need to pay attention to?
• Are there regulatory or industry changes that could impact us?

This requires a block of regular time to sit in your office, or stand at a whiteboard, or walk around the building — and think. Your organization is going to live or die by the quality of your decisions, and they will be infinitely higher quality if they are grounded in better awareness of your environment.

Layer 2: Analyzing What That Means for the Future

Once you have a better handle on your situational awareness, you can start using that information to analyze how this is translating into results, and what actions your organization might take to get better.

This involves a lot of re-forecasting — I like to use this time I’ve set aside to cycle through rethinking my assumptions about a bunch of things and then start back at the top of the list again.

• If I extrapolate the current trend and don’t assume improvements, how do our financial forecast and key metrics compare to our plan for this quarter and next?
• If that current trend is lower than plan, who needs to do what by when in order to change that trajectory and get us on track with our plan? (Restating this to yourself and others, even if you already knew it, is a powerful tool!)
• How are our quarterly objectives shaping up? I like to have each leader rate their likelihood of achieving them every week or two. What is my opinion, and how does it differ from theirs?
• How does the current trend impact our strategic initiatives (1–3 year time horizon), and how does it change how I’ve written down (in pencil!) our draft quarterly objectives over that timeline?
• What is the #1 priority of each of the key leaders in our organization? Are those #1s aligned with what we need to do to get on or ahead of plan? Do they know what their #1 priority is, or is this wishful thinking on my part?
• If we are on plan, how can I stress the growth model? What is the limiting factor that would stop us from achieving 110% or 120%? How can I apply some effort to killing those limiters?
• What are our greatest threats? How would I beat me if I was my competition? What could I do to neutralize those weaknesses?
• What discussion topics should this create with my leadership team or in 1:1s with directs?

Imagine how quickly your organization can get back on track if you are cycling through these re-forecasting exercises every two to three weeks.

Layer 3: Working on Top Priorities

Now we get to the layer where CEOs spend a lot of time — actually working on their top priorities. One important tweak is that CEOs should strive to “edit, not write.”

If you have more than 10–15 people, you should be doing less and less creating things from scratch, and more and more editing work that other people have drafted.

Layer 4: Getting into the Details

And finally, we allocate some time to dipping into the details of our business, and doing things that don’t scale so we can stay close to its heartbeat. These are things like…

• Responding to a few customers who answered your NPS survey.
• Asking questions of your people about the details of what they are working on.
• Joining sales calls, or traveling to visit specific customers or partners.
• Spot-checking the budget of an individual team to understand how well your organization is stewarding its resources.

What’s really interesting is that your time spent on details will get sharper, more focused, and more effective when you’ve done the work of Layer 1 and Layer 2 — because you’ll know what to look for, and how to challenge your own assumptions more effectively.

Ultimately, if you allocate the right amount of your time for the first three layers, you will inevitably have some left for diving into the details — but you’ll still be able to see the forest for the trees.