Discovering and Focusing on Your Highest Value Add Activities as a Leader

You are almost certainly spending most of your time on work that does not require you.

This is not an insult, it’s almost certainly just a fact. And the time you spend on low value work means you’re not spending time on really high value work that only you can do. You can probably fix this, if you actually want to (but you might not actually want to, as it’s often rewarding in other ways to do the lower value work).

This is not a new observation. Peter Drucker and Stephen Covey have both riffed on it. Drucker said that effective executives must ask: “What can I and only I do that, if done well, will make a real difference?” Covey explored adjacent territory with his distinction between urgent and important activities.

But knowing this isn’t the challenge. Many leaders know this stuff. Doing things differently is the challenge. And the doing is hard because the reasons leaders get trapped in low-value work are psychological and emotional, not intellectual.

We’ll try and explore helpful ways to think about all of this and how to move things “knowing” to “doing” in the coming paragraphs

Not All Activities Are Created Equal

The activities a leader performs vary enormously in the value they create. Some activities, setting strategic direction, developing key relationships, coaching high-potential team members, making decisions that only someone in your position can make, create outsized value precisely because they cannot easily be done by someone else. Other activities, processing routine approvals, attending informational meetings, reviewing work that a competent team member could finalise independently, answering emails that could be handled by a colleague, are necessary tasks that could be performed by any number of people at various levels of the organisation.

The distinction is not between important and unimportant. Many of the low-value-add activities on a leader’s calendar are genuinely important to the organisation. Expenses need approving. Status updates need reviewing. Routine decisions need making. The point is not that these tasks do not matter. The point is that they do not require you. When you, as a leader, spend your time on work that anyone could do, you are simultaneously failing to do the work that only you can do.

The Pareto Principle Applied to Leadership

The Pareto principle, the observation that roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes, applies well to leadership activities. A small minority of your activities generate the overwhelming majority of your impact. The strategic conversation that reframed a team’s approach to a problem. The coaching session that helped a struggling manager see their situation differently. The decision to prioritise one initiative over another. The relationship-building meeting that opened a door six months later. These are the 20% activities, and they are typically buried under an avalanche of the 80%: the routine, the habitual, the reactive, and the comfortable.

It’s worth doing some diagnosis: track your time for a week or two, categorise each activity by the value it creates and whether it requires you specifically, and look at the distribution. Lots of leaders who do this are surprised to find that the proportion of time spent on genuinely high-value, leader-specific activities is consistently small.

Urgent Versus Important: The Eisenhower Connection

Covey’s flex of the Eisenhower (urgent / important) matrix provides a complementary lens for this analysis. The critical insight of this tool is that urgency and importance are not the same thing, and that the human tendency is to prioritise urgency over importance because urgency has a built-in alarm system and importance does not.

Covey central argument was that effective people spend the majority of their time working in the important-but-not-urgent space, because that is where proactive, high-leverage work lives.

Unfortunately, life often leads us to have many urgent-but-not-important activities that consume our days with their noise and their deadlines and their false sense of necessity. This feels like progress, but it is just an infinite loop, a treadmill of standing still. Your calendar is full, you’re busy, but your most valuable work is perpetually deferred to a tomorrow that never arrives.

Your Zone of Genius

Gay Hendricks, in The Big Leap (2009), introduced a framework that pushes this thinking further by distinguishing four zones of activity. The Zone of Incompetence contains activities you are not good at and that others can do far better. The Zone of Competence contains activities you can do adequately but that others can do equally well. The Zone of Excellence contains activities you do extremely well, often better than most people around you, and for which you are frequently praised and rewarded. And the Zone of Genius contains activities that draw on your unique strengths and passions, that produce outsized results, and that create a state of flow and deep engagement.

The trap, Hendricks argues, is the Zone of Excellence. Activities in this zone are seductive because you are genuinely good at them, because they earn you recognition, because they feel productive, and because other people want you to keep doing them. But they are often not your highest contribution. They are simply the things you happen to be very good at, and being very good at something is not the same as it being the best use of your time. The Zone of Genius, by contrast, is where your truly unique contribution lives: the intersection of what you do better than almost anyone, what energises you, and what creates the most value. Most leaders spend the vast majority of their time in the Zones of Competence and Excellence, and almost no time in their Zone of Genius.

Drucker’s question, the Pareto principle, Covey’s second quadrant, and Hendricks’s Zone of Genius all point to the same conclusion: a small number of activities represent your highest and most unique contribution, and the primary obstacle to doing more of them is not a lack of time but a failure to stop doing everything else.

How Leaders Get Trapped in Low-Value Work

The forces that keep leaders trapped in low-value activities are powerful, emotionally satisfying, and often largely invisible to the person experiencing them.

Comfort and habit. Many of the low-value activities on a leader’s calendar are things they have been doing for years, often since before they were in a leadership role. They are familiar, predictable, and require relatively little cognitive effort. The spreadsheet you have been maintaining since you were an individual contributor. The operational meeting you have chaired since you managed a team of three. The report you compile because you have always compiled it. These activities feel productive because they are tangible and completable. You can tick them off a list. The high-value activities, by contrast, are often ambiguous, open-ended, and cognitively demanding. Strategic thinking does not produce a deliverable you can email to someone. Developing a team member’s leadership capability does not generate a status update. The gravitational pull of the familiar and completable is powerful, and it draws leaders back towards the low-value work every single day.

Identity. For many leaders, their professional identity is bound up with specific technical or operational skills. The marketing director who still writes copy. The engineering manager who still reviews code. The finance leader who still builds models. They do these things not because nobody else can but because these activities are who they are, or at least who they were when they earned their reputation and their promotion. Letting go of these tasks feels like letting go of their identity, and that is a genuine loss, not a trivial one. It’s been noted that leaders frequently overuse their strengths, leaning into familiar capabilities long after those capabilities have stopped being their most valuable contribution, precisely because those strengths are central to their self-concept.

Being needed. There is a deep and rarely acknowledged satisfaction in being the person who solves problems, who has the answers, who is indispensable. Every time a team member comes to you with a question and you answer it, every time a crisis erupts and you step in to resolve it, every time someone says “we could not have done this without you,” you receive a small but potent dose of validation. This is the addictive quality of low-value work: it makes you feel important. The high-value work, by contrast, often involves making yourself less central, less needed, less visible. Developing your team so that they can handle problems without you is, by definition, a process of making yourself dispensable, and that is existentially uncomfortable for people whose sense of worth is tied to being essential.

Micromanagement as anxiety management. Some leaders stay involved in low-level operational details not because they enjoy the work but because they cannot tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing what is happening. Staying close to the details is a form of anxiety management: if I can see everything, nothing can go wrong without my knowledge. The problem, of course, is that the time spent managing anxiety through operational involvement is time not spent on the genuinely high-value work that would reduce the need for that anxiety in the first place. Building a capable, trusted team is the actual solution to the anxiety. Micromanagement is the symptom masquerading as the cure.

Lack of trust in the team. Some leaders do not delegate because they genuinely believe their team cannot handle the work. This is sometimes accurate and sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the leader does not delegate because they do not trust the team, the team does not develop because they are not given responsibility, and the team’s lack of development confirms the leader’s belief that delegation is too risky. Breaking this cycle requires the leader to accept some short-term risk, to hand over work that might be done imperfectly and to treat that imperfection as a development opportunity rather than a catastrophe.

Auditing Your Activities: A Practical Process

Theory is useful, but what do you actually do? Here is a practical process that if approached honestly can be helpful. Again, you might not want to stop doing all those lesser value add activities that feel good and that’s just fine, it’s your call.

Step 1: Track your time. For one or two weeks, record how you actually spend your time. Not how you think you spend it, not how your calendar says you spend it, but how you actually spend it. Include everything: meetings, emails, ad-hoc conversations, operational tasks, thinking time, administrative work. The purpose is to create a factual baseline. Most people skip this step because they believe they already know how they spend their time. They are almost always wrong, and the gap between their perception and reality is where the opportunity lives.

Step 2: Categorise by value and uniqueness. Once you have the data, assess each activity on two dimensions. First, how much value does this activity create for the organisation, the team, or the people you serve? Second, does this activity require you specifically, or could it be done by someone else, perhaps with some development or support? This gives you four categories. High-value, requires you: this is your highest contribution, your Zone of Genius, Drucker’s “what can I and only I do.” High-value, does not require you: this is important work that should be delegated to a capable team member, possibly with coaching and support. Low-value, requires you: this is rare but worth examining; if something genuinely requires your involvement but creates little value, question whether it needs to be done at all. Low-value, does not require you: this should be delegated, automated, or eliminated.

Step 3: Be honest about the emotional attachments. As you categorise your activities, pay attention to the ones where you feel resistance to letting go. The task you enjoy doing even though it is not your highest contribution. The meeting you attend because you like being in the room even though you add little. The operational detail you monitor because it makes you feel in control. These emotional attachments are important information because they reveal the psychological forces that keep you trapped in low-value work. You do not have to act on every one of them immediately, but you do need to see them clearly. If you decide you want to maintain these emotional pay-offs, that’s all good.

Step 4: Build a transition plan. Identify three to five activities that you are currently doing that should be delegated, and identify who could take them on. For each one, think about what support, training, or authority that person would need to succeed. Think about what your role becomes: not the person who does the task, but the person who develops the person who does the task. Set a realistic timeline for the handover, and accept that the transition period will involve some discomfort, some imperfection, and some things being done differently from how you would do them.

Step 5: Protect the reclaimed time. When you delegate activities and free up time, that time must be deliberately allocated to your highest-value activities. If you leave it unprotected, it will be consumed by the next wave of urgent-but-not-important demands. Block it in your calendar. Treat it as non-negotiable. Use it for the strategic thinking, the relationship building, the team development, and the creative work that represents your genuine highest contribution.

The Connection to Delegation and Team Development

Shifting towards your highest-value activities is inseparable from delegation and team development. You cannot spend more time on the work that only you can do without spending less time on the work that others could do, and that means handing work to other people, which means those people need to be capable of doing it, which means you need to invest in their development. This is not a sequence of independent actions. It is a system, and the components reinforce each other.

When you delegate thoughtfully, several things happen simultaneously. You free up your own time for higher-value work. You give your team members the opportunity to develop new skills and exercise greater autonomy. You build the capacity of your team, which reduces your need to be involved in operational details, which frees up more of your time, which enables more delegation, which drives more development. The virtuous cycle is real, but it requires an initial investment of time and trust that many leaders are reluctant to make because the short-term cost (things being done less perfectly, the need to coach and support, the discomfort of letting go) is immediate and visible while the long-term benefit (a more capable team, more time for strategic work, less personal bottlenecking) is deferred and distributed.

This is also, we should note, the connection to developing your successor. A leader who spends all their time on work that anyone could do has made themselves busy but not important. A leader who spends all their time on work that only they can do, but never develops anyone else to do it, has made themselves indispensable but also irreplaceable, which is a problem for the organisation and, eventually, for the leader themselves. The truly effective leader does the work that only they can do and develops others to the point where the list of things that only they can do gradually shrinks. This is not a contradiction. It is the long arc of leadership development, and it is what succession planning looks like in practice.

Making the Transition: The Emotional Difficulty

We’ve said it a few times, but letting go of activities that are not your highest contribution is emotionally difficult, and it is difficult in ways that are specific and worth naming. It really might not be for you, and that’s fine.

It is difficult because some of these activities are things you are genuinely good at. You built your career on them. You enjoy them. You receive recognition for them. Stopping them feels like giving up something that works, and the replacement, more ambiguous, more strategic, less tangible work, does not provide the same satisfying sense of completion. There is a real grief in letting go of the work that made you who you are, even when you understand intellectually that it is no longer where your highest contribution lies.

It is difficult because it changes your relationship with your team. When you were the person who solved problems and answered questions, you had a clear, valued role in every interaction. When you shift to developing others to solve problems and answer questions themselves, your role becomes less visible and less immediately gratifying. You are trading the satisfaction of being the hero for the slower, quieter satisfaction of watching other people become capable. That trade is worth making, but it does not feel like it in the moment, and the emotional transition takes longer than the intellectual one.

It is difficult because it requires you to sit with uncertainty. When you are doing the work yourself, you know how it is going. When someone else is doing it, you do not, or at least not with the same granularity and immediacy. This uncertainty is uncomfortable, and the temptation to check in, to review, to just quickly look over what they have done, is a gravitational force that pulls you back towards the low-value involvement you were trying to escape. The discipline is not in letting go once. It is in letting go repeatedly, every day, when the pull to re-engage is strong.

It is difficult, finally, because other people may not want you to change. Your team may be accustomed to bringing you problems. Your peers may expect you to handle certain tasks. Your own manager may have built their expectations around your current pattern of work. Shifting your activities means renegotiating these expectations, and some of those renegotiations will involve friction. The person who has been bringing you their problems may not initially welcome being told to develop their own solutions. The peer who has been relying on your operational involvement may not appreciate your withdrawal. These are real costs.

A Smaller, Alternative Starting Point

If this all resonates with you but you wanna start somewhere smaller, ask yourself Drucker’s question at the beginning of each week: “What can I and only I do this week that will make a real difference?” Write down no more than three answers. Then look at your calendar and ask how much time is actually allocated to those three things. If the answer is less than a quarter of your week, something is structurally wrong, and you now have a concrete diagnosis of what needs to change.

Then pick one activity, just one, that you are currently doing that does not require you and that could be handled by someone on your team with appropriate support. Have a conversation with that person. Explain the task, explain your expectations, explain the support you will provide, and hand it over. Accept that it will not be done exactly as you would have done it. Accept that you will feel uncomfortable. And use the time you have reclaimed for one of the three things on your list.

That is it. One delegation. One reclaimed block of time. One shift towards your highest contribution. It is not a transformation. It is a beginning, and the beginning is the hardest part because everything after it builds on the evidence that the world does not collapse when you stop doing work that was never yours to cling to.

Learning More

To go deeper, explore these resources on people-shift.com:

• The Eisenhower Matrix
• Time Blocking
• The Hedgehog Concept
• The Skill / Will Matrix
• The Ease / Benefit Matrix

The People Shift View

At PeopleShift, we find ourselves returning to this topic repeatedly, not because the principle is complicated but because the execution is genuinely hard. And if we’re honest, we’re pretty bad at it ourselves. There are things we all just like doing because they feel good, even though they’re not the most differentially useful things for us to be doing.

These are all great conversations to have with leaders but, like us, many leaders aren’t great at making these change. We suspect that on some level we don’t really want to change, and we guess some leaders are the same. What really is our motivation in work? If we’re looking for the payout of feeling good at things and valued, then maybe that’s more important than creating better outcomes for the org. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe it isn’t, we’re not really sure.