Leadership is quite often an exercise in facing reality. I (Jim Rohn) used to say, “Liars shouldn’t lie.” What I’ve since learned, and what you need to know, is that pronouncements like that are a waste of energy. Liars are supposed to lie. That’s why we call them liars. You wouldn’t expect them to do anything else. If you did, we’d call you naive. And you would be especially naive if you let it upset you.
Somebody cuts you off on the freeway, so you go chasing after him shaking your fist. You don’t think he should have cut you off on the freeway? That’s what he’s supposed to do. He is known as a “cutter-offer” on the freeway. And if you say, “Those people shouldn’t cut me off,” we’d call you naive. Come on!
Here’s a perspective that saved me a lot of agony and a lot of anguish. I can now avoid those sleepless nights I used to experience pulling my hair and wondering why there were liars and people who cut me off on the road. I gave up on all that when I finally understood the 80/20 Rule. Let me give you some of my insights on the 80/20 Rule, and explain how it applies to you as a leader and manager. Here is the first tip: learn to spend eighty percent of your time as a leader with the twenty percent who deserve it.
There are plenty of examples to show how this 8/20 Rule applies across the board. Ask the minister of the church, “Who donate the most money here?” He’ll answer, “Probably twenty percent of the people donate eighty percent of the money.”
So what do you do with the other eighty percent of the people? You learn to deal with the situation and not try to solve it. It’s like trying to figure out the laws of nature. You don’t figure out the source of those laws, you learn to work with them. They’re all set, just like this 80/20 Rule is all set. The key is to learn to work with things the way they are.
Part of the task of leadership is learning to spend eighty percent of your time with the twenty percent who are doing eighty percent of the work. We would call that good leadership sense. If you wondering how you can possibly do that, here’s one answer: spend individual time with the twenty percent and group time with the eighty percent. This is an important aspect of skillful leadership.
However, guess who wants your individual time! The wrong group–the eighty percent. But that’s what life’s all about. So now you’ve got to be strategic; and you’ve got to be diplomatic. Diplomacy and strategy are two key words for the effective leader to understand.
Here’s the diplomacy: Mary comes and says, “I’ve got a question.” You say, “Mary, bring your question to me Saturday morning. I’m going to meet with everybody and cover it then.” It might not always be that easy, but you need to follow the strategy of dealing with the eighty percent in groups and talking to the twenty percent individually. That might be difficult because the pull is in the opposite direction, and it always has been. Just as gravity is a downward pull, life is a struggle in the opposite direction.
Even if you’ve built a terrific team, this 80/20 Rule will apply. It’s inevitable. But if you learn to work with it, your bottom eighty percent can raise their competence level dramatically. And that will push your top twenty percent even higher. They will be simply exceptional. You will have a true high-performance team.
* Source: Leading an Inspired Life by Jim Rohn