How To Get Promoted So Fast It Feels Like Cheating

How do people get promoted? Have you ever had an experience where you're really good at what you do? You're reliable, you're on time, you're always getting your work done, you're focused, and people actually can depend on you. But you see that others who seem less experienced or even less educated are getting promoted faster than you?

I've run four companies and hired over a thousand people. Today, I want to share with you the four secrets of getting promoted that nobody will tell you.

The first habit is to switch from executing to advocating. So, a lot of people don't understand this, but executing is different than advocating for yourself. And when most people want a promotion, they think, "I'm going to execute more, and that's what's going to get me the promotion." But it's not actually more of this that gets you the promotion. It's actually switching to something different, which is learning to advocate.

Let me give you an example. I say this to my team all the time, which is, if a tree falls in a forest but nobody sees it or hears it fall, did it fall? The same goes for doing work. If you do work, you don't tell anybody about the work you do, and nobody sees the work you do, then does the work get done in their minds? From their perspective, no. For you, you might be thinking, "I'm over here working my butt off, why do people not understand what's going on?" And it's because you probably are a phenomenal executor, but you're not yet a phenomenal advocate.

Back when I had my company Gym Launch, I had a director of our coaching program, and he had moved up from being over sales to being over coaching. I saw that he was a phenomenal executor, but I noticed that there were some discrepancies in terms of he was really great at execution, but he wasn't the best advocate of himself. And something that I noticed was I had brought in a CFO, and that CFO, a skill that she had was she wasn't just a phenomenal executor, she was also a phenomenal advocate. And I'll give you some examples.

So, one thing she did was that every time we met for a one-on-one, she always told me, "Here's the things I'm working on." And so she would tell me what she did the last few days, and she would also tell me what she was going to work on the next few days. The second thing that she did is in every end-of-week report, she had, she put in great detail everything she did that week. And so I would look at her end-of-week report, and it was like the longest end-of-week report I've ever seen. Whereas this other guy who was tracking to be the head of the company, he would maybe put three or four things in there.

And this is something that a lot of people struggle with is that they do a lot of work, but they don't advocate for themselves, and so they don't provide visibility for their boss. And this is the thing: people think, "If I do more marketing, I will become a marketing leader." Totally [ __ ] wrong. If you do more marketing, you become a better marketer. If you want to be a better marketing leader, you learn leadership. And so, if you want to be a marketing leader, you start to learn how to advocate for yourself, you start to learn how to communicate. You don't learn more of "how we do SEO, how we do funnels, how we do..." because you're just keeping yourself stuck in the old job.

And so, this is really important to understand. If you want to get better at the current role you're at, you focus on executing more. If you want to move up into a lead leadership role, then you want to focus on advocating for yourself, communicating, and acquiring those skills. More marketing, more operating, more customer service, more finance isn't going to get you a leadership position. And so, more of the same keeps you stuck where you are.

The first level of value that you provide to a company is in the doing. Right? This is where you're an executor, and this is where the vast majority of the workforce is. And this is where most people start off. They start giving value to the company by doing. But the next level, if you want to get promoted, is to move up into the communicator realm.

Now, here's the thing. A lot of people say, "I'm doing all this [ __ ] work, but my boss is just running meetings and talking to people and doing these things." And so they think that the work that they do is more valuable. And get it, I get it, because guess what? Before I had my own companies, I was a phenomenal executor, and I didn't understand this. I didn't even understand why it was that people in management got paid so much more.

Think about this. In order to be a salesperson, you have to know certain skills. You have to know how to persuade people, you have to know how to be on time, you have to know how to sell people, how to pitch people, how to build rapport with people. Now, if you want to be a sales manager, you skill stack. What is skill stacking? That means that you don't just have those skills. You have to learn how to persuade, you have to know how to pitch, you have to know how to build rapport, how to be on time, how to smile on a call. But now, if I want to be a sales manager, I have to also learn how to lead a team, how to train a team to build rapport, how to train a team to persuade people, how to get people to do things, how to train people to be on time, how to get people to audit their calls. So now I've just taken all these skills and then I've stacked these skills on top of it.

And this is why being a communicator is more valued in the marketplace because there are so many more sub-skills that go into being a communicator than there are an executor. The first level is that you learn how to do it yourself. But the next level is you learn how to get other people to do it. And so, a lot of people, and I'll be honest, it's much harder to get other people to do it. If I wanted to go in and go run a sales team, go run my finance team, go run my HR team, I could do it with my eyes closed. What's much harder is getting people to do it the way I would want it done. Because not only do I have to know how it needs to be done, but I have to know how to persuade people and also how to train people to do it in the way that I want it done.

And so, if you're sitting there wondering, "I don't know, I work more hours longer than my boss, and I'm not getting promoted, and I don't know why I'm not valued the same way this person is." It's because you don't have as many skills. We need to look at objectively. People are compensated to the level of skills they have and how difficult it is to attain those skills.

A recent LinkedIn study found that communication is the most important skill for advancing in the workplace. In fact, about 90% of executives attribute lack of communication to be the reason why people don't move up. So, if you're wondering, "Why is my boss not promoting me?" There's a 9 out of 10 chance that's because your communication is not there. Again, more of the same is not going to get you to another level. What got you here doesn't get you there.

Another interesting stat is that employees who consistently advocate and communicate their ideas are 32% more likely to be considered for a promotion. Now, why is that? Let me tell you. As somebody who has been considered for a promotion and also promoted hundreds of people, it's because they don't know that you even have ideas. Seriously. There's a lot of people, so say I have 10 people in my company, and out of those 10 people, none of them give me their ideas. How do I know those ideas even exist? How do I even know they have ideas in their head?

So, if two people out of the 10 give me ideas, one, I immediately pay attention to those people. Two, I see they have communication skills. Three, I see that they have the ability to manage stress because they're coming to me and bringing me ideas. That's telling me that they're pushing themselves, they're pushing themselves out of their comfort zones. And then those other eight people, I don't know. Do they have the communication skills? Do they have ideas? Do they think about their job in their free time? I have no idea.

And so, that is why people who speak up, they advocate for themselves, and they communicate are more likely to be promoted. Now, I will say this: as a boss, I look at people who are quiet, and I try to, what I say is like, use pull management to pull things out of them. But I will tell you, you will make it a hell of a lot easier on yourself and your boss to get promoted if you push it to your boss rather than expecting them to pull it from you.

To sum it up, you don't need more technical skills to move up. You need more soft skills. So, the question is, what can you do to show that you advocate for yourself? It's not about working more at your current job. It's about working towards the next.

So, here's what I want you to do. Trade doing more for talking more. I call this executive presence with my team, and I have these conversations all the time because it's a very frequent thing that people go through, which is, you're great at doing your job. Do, do, do all day. I know how much you're doing. I see how hard you're working. But what you lack is executive presence. What does an executive do? What did my CFO do that you don't do? She spoke up in meetings, she provided with me with transparency, she told me what she was working on, she constantly shared ideas, she constantly asked me questions, she was constantly putting herself in the line of fire.

And so, what I tell you to do right now is to not put more energy towards the doing. Continue doing what you are, but to put your discretionary effort towards communicating. And so, here's what I would tell you to do. Do you have a meeting that you attend each week with your boss? Do you have a one-on-one that you attend with them? Do you have a report that you turn into them? I want you to put triple the effort into it this time. So, if it's a meeting, I want you to challenge yourself to speak up three times. If it's a one-on-one, I want to challenge you to come prepared, to prepare ahead of time, and to give them visibility into everything you did between that one-on-one and your last one-on-one. And if you're really going for it, this is what I tell people that are a little more advanced. They've already got down the meetings in the one-on-ones. I want you to offer to do a presentation for the team. What you're doing is you're putting yourself in a situation where you are learning those skills that leaders have.

And here's the thing. Everyone asks me, they're like, "Lea, how do I become a leader? How do I get better at being an advocate rather than just an executor?" By freaking doing it! You don't get better by reading more [ __ ] books about hard conversations and presentations. You get better by putting in the reps. At first, you're going to suck. Then you're going to be okay. Then you're going to be good. Then you're going to be great. And then one day, you can [ __ ] excel. But it all starts with being okay sucking. Guys, look at my first YouTube video I ever made. Dog [ __ ]. And that's after running a company for 8 years. It's kind of frightening. But I said, "I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to give up. I'm going to keep going." You have to put in the reps. And I'm telling you, the only way to get these skills to move up in the company is by doing it. And you're going to suck at first, but that's okay. Because one day, if you keep going, you will be amazing.

The second habit you want to build to get promoted in the workplace is to switch from operating in just the now to operating in the now plus tomorrow. If you want to grow in your role, what you want to learn is how to pull the future into the present.

I want to give you two stories and examples of people that came into my last company. I brought in a financial leader. This person came in, and the first thing that she did was she built out, "This is the vision for the department. This is what we need to be in 18 months. Here's the people I'm going to need to hire. Here's what the roles look like. Here are the processes we need to have in place. And here are the outcomes we need to drop." And she called this her "North Star Guiding Document." And so she used this every time she was making a decision, every time she was planning the quarter, and every time she was deciding to do something for a department. This document was about 8-9 pages long, just how I make a vision document for my company, showing us this is where we're going. It was that for her department.

On the other hand, I brought in a systems leader about the same time, and that gentleman came in. The first thing that he started doing was just doing work. He started saying, "I'm just going to start doing the work." He started taking on the work that was there. And then I said, "Where's the department going?" And he wasn't really sure. It was very clear, about 4 months in, there was too much work for just him. And he said, "Do you think we should hire someone?" And I was like, "I mean, yes, but what's your hiring plan? Do you know what the team needs to look like? Like, where are we going? What are we going to need? What are the systems? Do we have processes?" And he couldn't answer any of those questions.

What was the difference between those two leaders? The difference was that my financial leader was proactive, while my systems leader was reactive. The best leaders are constantly operating in the proactive. Successful leaders anticipate challenges and opportunities and then they guide their teams towards those future goals rather than just reacting to whatever is coming their way.

The reason why so many people don't get promoted is they cannot make it out of the execution spiral. They don't take enough time to think, to get themselves above the problem, and they just do, do, do, do, do. Every problem gets solved with doing more, fixing, fixing, fixing, reacting, reacting, reacting. And so they never take themselves out of their bubble. I call it like the bubble of execution. To get above the bubble of execution and go into the bubble of planning.

I think that the best leaders know how to operate within these two places. Something I've had to learn over time is when I need to be in my execution bubble and when I need to be in my planning bubble. The issue is that many people can only be in one or the other. And you might know this if you're thinking of your colleagues or maybe Lee hired, which is like, you have some people who it's like they can think, think, think, but they [ __ ] suck at doing anything, and they never get their hands dirty. Half the team resents those people, and they're like, "That [ __ ] doesn't do [ __ ]." Whereas the other side, there's people who are like, "Doing, do, doing. People like, man, they get so much [ __ ] done. Such a beast." All stuff, but you're like, "You know, I think if you just took like a day, you might be able to like prevent a lot of the problems you're fixing."

And here's the thing. I have talked to so many people, interviewed so many people who tell me about how they're in a job where they feel burnt out because they're just doing, doing, doing, doing, doing all the time. And I've brought those people into my companies, and what I've found is that they have trained themselves to be constantly doing, doing, doing, and never getting above the doing. This. And so, it's not that the job burned them out, it's that they burned themselves out. They burned themselves out because they don't realize that thinking is part of the job.

In order to get promoted, you have to make time to think and get ahead of the department. Because think about it, if you are not ahead of the department, how does the department grow? And if you're not growing the department, who's growing the department? It becomes your boss's job. I can tell you this because I've had many leaders who come in, and when I have one of those reactive leaders who's in this doing spiral, I have to do half their job. I have to do their organizational planning, I have to do their hiring forecasting, I have to suggest what systems we use, I have to tell them the things that they're not thinking about, I have to do their strategic planning for them. And then I recognize usually when I'm getting caught up, "Oh, this isn't my job. It's actually that they have a lack or a deficit in theirs."

What I've recognized is that until somebody can pull the future into the present and create that compelling vision for their department and really forecast and plan, then they're not ready for that leadership role. Because the reality is, if they spend all their time reacting, where's their team? Their team is going to follow their cue. And so they're going to create this execution spiral on their team, which I don't want. Because I don't want people who feel like they're constantly reacting, things they're constantly not able to predict their work, and they're constantly in this state of like, almost on the edge of burnout.

The thing is, you set the pace of the team. And so, if you are behind, consequently, the rest of the team is behind. And if you're ahead, the team consequently is also getting ahead. Your job as a departmental leader, or a leader of a function, or even of a company, is to bring the vision to life. You're constantly making hard calls and prioritizing to make sure that you're focused on doing the right things. The definition of industriousness, which is one of the core things I look for in a leader, is somebody who can work very hard on the right things. It's not that you just work very hard. Lots of people work very hard, but they work very hard on the wrong things.

Have you ever felt like that where it's like you're constantly working super hard, but nothing is moving forward? It's because you're not taking the time to decide if you work on the right things in the right order. And that, my friend, is the definition of strategy.

Here's the thing: if you're proactive, your emphasis is on preparing. And if you're reactive, your emphasis is on repairing. And so, if you find yourself constantly repairing in your job, I want to take a second to ask you this: Do you think if you took two days where you blocked your calendar and all you did was plan, and all you did was think, "How could I get ahead and strategize and prioritize all the things that you're doing?" Do you think it would make your life and your team's life easier? If the answer is yes, you should do that all [ __ ] day. And by the way, I do this all the time. I put time on my calendar. I did it this morning. I blocked three days in the next two weeks because I knew that I'm getting close to an execution spiral, and I need to get ahead of the things I'm doing to prioritize and prune my list so I can make sure that I get ahead.

The best leaders schedule their priorities rather than looking at their schedule and asking, "Where do I fit my priorities?" Your priorities should be represented on your calendar. And so, this is a great place to start. If you look at your calendar and you think, "Wow, I'm not moving anything forward this week," guess what? [ __ ] move it, because that's what leaders do. They move things forward. And so, if you want to get promoted to be a leader, you too learn to move things forward. It's really like instead of making 100 decisions, you think 100 times about one decision. And that is the essence of pulling the future into the present. It's being more proactive, it's being more mindful, it's being more thoughtful.

Listen, when I first started in business, I didn't do any of this [ __ ]. Okay? I was just an executor. I was doing. And then what I realized is that I spent all my time fixing mistakes that if I had just taken a little bit of time to think about, I would have been able to prevent. And so, what I was doing when I was constantly in the repairing mode is I was giving my team whiplash. It was like, problem over here, problem over here, problem over here. We're going this way, then that way, then this way. It's like they were also in this like frenetic energy bubble that I'd created. And until I was able to get myself out of that bubble, I couldn't get them.

So, here's what you can do if this resonates with you, and this is what I suggest people do when they're trying to move up in the company, which is audit your time. And what you do is, I want you to take a week, or take a month, is even better. Guys, I swear to you, I still do this. And I want you to color-code your activities. Are they tactical or are they strategic? And so, what you can do by that is say, you make tactical green, and you make strategic blue. And then you can visually see how much time do I spend thinking, prioritizing, strategizing versus doing and executing. And often times, what you'll find is if you're feeling very reactive, is that you need to be able to say no to some of the fires that are popping up in order to say yes to growing your department.

Here's the third habit to get yourself promoted: Management of time comes before management of self, and management of self comes before management of others. And so, if you want to manage others and you want to get promoted, learn first how to manage your time.

I'll give you an example of this. I had a head of HR. And this woman, when she came in, I suggested, "What kind of way do you manage your calendar?" You know, she's stepping into this role, it's a lot more demands. And she kind of shrugged off my suggestions. And so, what ended up happening was, what I noticed is that her mood started going like this over time, and it was like very erratic. One day she was showing up great for the team, the next day she was like pretty mean, the next day she's like acting like a total, I don't even know what. And so I looked at her calendar and I said, "You have, where's your gym time? Where's your family time? When are you eating? Why are you taking 14 calls a day?" And she said, "I'm just, I'm just trying to get everything done. I want to, blah, blah, blah." And like, and she was this ball of frenetic energy.

And so I told her, I was like, "Listen, in order for you to move up, it's not about doing more with your time. It's about being more strategic with your time and being more thoughtful with your time. Because if you don't manage your time, then you don't manage yourself, and then you don't show up for your team." And what happened because she wasn't showing up for her team is I had people coming to me and they're saying, "Do you know what's going on with her? You know, I don't want to tattletale, but on this meeting, she kind of yelled at me. She kind of snapped." And I'm thinking, "[ __ ] what's going on?" And then when I looked at her calendar, I was like, "Of course you're not showing up well for your team because you can't even show up for yourself."

This is something that I did not understand when I first got into leadership. I used to overbook myself. I used to overschedule my time. And I thought that managing my time meant getting more done than other people. But managing my time as a leader actually means being more strategic with my time than other people. And so, what I recognized is that part of leadership is to influence everyone on my team. And how I show up for them influences how they show up for themselves and for their peers. So, if I'm a ball of frenetic energy, they're balls of frenetic energy. If I don't manage my time, they don't manage their time. If I show up mad and frustrated, they're probably all not going to have the best day.

And so, if you want to learn how to manage others, you first have to manage yourself. Because nobody wants to work for a leader who shows up their worst self every day. The thing is, you have to let some fires burn so you can tackle the bigger ones. To impress upon you the importance of this, don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same amount of hours in the day that were given to Helen Keller, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. So, if you can't manage your time, it's very unlikely that you can't manage yourself.

Listen, we all have the same amount of hours of the day. It took me a long time to recognize this. It's that a lot of us have other reasons why we can't manage our time, which then means we can't manage ourselves, which then means we definitely can't manage others. Those who master managing their time and themselves can teach others how to manage their time and master themselves. You remember what I said in the first part about skill stacking? If you manage time, you stack that onto managing yourself, which stacks with managing others, but it comes with managing time. If you don't manage your time, you don't manage yourself, and then you definitely can't manage other people.

If you can't even stick to your calendar and keep your commitments, then what makes you think that you will be able to move up into a company where you are responsible for other people managing their own calendars and managing their own selves? If you can't do it, then what makes anybody think that you can help others do it for themselves? It's like seeing something on the internet, and they're talking about how to build a company that's worth nine, 10 figures, whatever it might be, but they've never had a [ __ ] company of nine or 10 figures. I can't tell you how much that drives me [ __ ] mad because I'm like, "Dude, how are you supposed to teach people something that you've never done? You don't know."

And so, here's the thing. The reason this is so important is because it takes a lot more energy to grow a company than it does to maintain a company. And if you want to move up into a leadership position, it is essential to know time management because you're expected not just to maintain things how they are today, but to grow things, to move things forward. And if the leader of the department is not moving things forward, who the [ __ ] is?

Here's the thing: the people who are the busiest in the company are not moving things forward. In fact, a lot of people who move things forward are not the busiest, because what they do is they outsource the busy work so that they can strategize and pull the future into the present. The activities that I do that drive my company forward, they're not in the busy work. That is not where they are found. The things that I do that drive the company forward are done on my days where I have the most time to work on things in silence. They're done in the moments when I put a lot of effort into a presentation that I'm going to present to the team. They're done in the moments where I've worked on something for the last two months and I'm finally going to bring it to my team to launch a new division, to launch a new product, to bring on a new company. It's in the hard work that takes time, it takes thought, and it doesn't do well with frenetic energy or mismanagement of time.

And here's the key to doing that: the key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. This is the root of managing yourself. When people say, "You know what? I just don't have time for that. Like, I really want to lose weight, but I just don't have time to do it in my day." Honestly, [ __ ] you. It is not that you don't have time. Michelangelo, Helen Keller, [ __ ], Kobe Bryant, Oprah Winfrey. If you wanted to [ __ ] lose weight, you would make the [ __ ] time. Your schedule is a reflection of your priorities, whether you want it to be or not. And whether it's because you're afraid of moving something, you're afraid of saying no to somebody, either [ __ ] way, what that means is that you, people-pleasing, is a bigger priority than you losing weight, than you growing your company. Where your time goes is where your priorities are.

There are so many times where I have to tell people, "You know what? I'm so sorry, but I have to cancel this meeting. I have to move this. I can't meet this week." It's not because it's not important. If you want to be a leader of a department, if you want to move up in a company, you have to be the kind of person that can make [ __ ] happen. And the first thing that you have to do to make [ __ ] happen is you have to be willing to move [ __ ] around. The only way that I make [ __ ] happen is I am completely flexible day to day. I consider myself a chameleon. I will wake up in the morning, and I will look at my calendar, and I will say, "You know what? Yesterday I thought these were priorities. Today I realize they're not. This is actually more important for me to focus on." And I will ruthlessly do that day after day after day. If that hurts some people's feelings, that's okay, because my job is to make sure this company keeps growing so that I can make sure everyone here has jobs. And so I have to look out for my time because nobody else is going to do it for me.

Great leaders have a clear vision and strategy for the future, whether that be an entire company or one department. They know where they want to take the department and they have a plan of how to get there. They take that and they communicate that vision and that plan to key stakeholders and people all around them. They can give the utmost clarity for everybody else.

How do you do this? My number one suggestion is doing something I call Monday Hour One. And this essentially is scheduling your priorities each week, not looking at your schedule and thinking, "Where the [ __ ] do I fit this in?" Being the master of your schedule, being the one who determines what's on your schedule. Every Monday, and I would actually suggest Sunday, so it's for me, it's Sunday Hour One. Is I go through, I look at all of the things I have, what happened last week, what's happening next week, where do I need to focus based on am I on track or off track with where I need to be with the entire company? Now, for you, this might be a department, it might be a function, or it might just be your job. But the thing is that each week I use that time to make sure that I'm tracking towards success. And if I'm not holding myself accountable to tracking towards success, the likelihood I get there is basically none. And here's the thing, I actually made a video on how to do this. So, if you want to know more about how to schedule your calendar in this way, go ahead and check this video out right here.

Here's the next habit to getting promoted: you want to remove friction. You want to become a lubricator in the business rather than somebody who is a stopper in the business. You either create friction or you reduce friction. People who reduce friction get promoted.

So, think about it like this: if you take a lot of time from your current manager, and they do not get a lot back from the time they've spent with you, meaning the return on their time was low, the likelihood you get promoted is low. People who get promoted do more with less. If, for example, you take two hours a week from your manager, but you give them back 20, you are worth more than somebody who takes two hours from them and only gives them back three hours. You either create a positive or a negative ROI for your manager and for the whole company.

People who get promoted are not only the ones who reduce the amount of effort and friction their boss is putting towards a certain function, they also look for opportunities to reduce friction in all ways for all people in the entire company, even if it's not within their job description. But they are people who seek out other ways that they can reduce friction. They're constantly pulling things from their boss. They're looking at what their boss is doing and thinking, "How can I grab something from them?"

One of the tips that I give people all the time when they're trying to get promoted is I say, "You know what you should do? Go look at your manager's calendar." And I just want you to go ask if you could take something off. When I was in the process of selling my company and I had a COO in place, one of the tips that I gave her, and something that we put into place, was that every week I asked her, before the week started, to look at my calendar and tell me what she could take from me. And this was probably the best practice that we could have had because one, it was a very positive experience for me because I was like, "Wow, this is amazing. You can take all this stuff off my plate." Two, she was elevating herself and learning by that process. And then what we had time to do because she would let me know the things is then we could sync ahead of time, and I could walk her through some of those things. So, what's happening is that she might take six hours of things off of my calendar, and it might just take a 15-minute touch base with me so I could debrief her on those things. So then she could take those six hours away.

And so, if you're trying to get promoted, one of the best things you could do is constantly calendar grab. Calendar grabbing is where you're like, grabbing up all the items on your manager's calendar and seeing what you can take on your plate. And so, by doing that, not only do you reduce friction, you also create a higher ROI for your manager.

And so, if you're sitting here wondering, "I wonder if I add or create friction?" Simply ask your manager these questions, okay? One, "Do I make your life easier or harder?" It's a real question. I can tell you right now, there are some people who I'd have to think about it. Whereas there's some people where it's like a complete no-brainer. You're like, "Totally make my life easier. It's a home run. They're a complete positive ROI." The next question that you could ask is, "How hard would you fight to keep me?" Meaning, if you said, "I'm out, and I want to leave tomorrow," how hard would you fight to keep me here?

Those two questions will tell you: are you in the negative? Are you in the positive? Are you reducing friction or are you creating friction? And so, if you're not aware of where you sit with your manager, those are the two questions that I would use to ask that person to have a real conversation so you can actually calibrate where you're at. And if you're recognizing and listening to this right now and thinking, "You know what? I actually don't take much off of my manager's plate. I don't take much. And I think that though I reduce friction by having my job, I'm not like constantly pulling things." My suggestion is, go, go look right now at what they have on their calendar next week. Find at least one thing you can take off. And then, for the first time, ask them permission, "Can I take this off your plate?"

Here's the thing: just because it's not your job doesn't mean it can't be your responsibility. And the best leaders in the company, guys, they don't look at themselves as the leader of marketing, the leader of sales, the leader of customer success. They look at themselves as a leader in the company, and they take everything personally. And they recognize that not everything fits perfectly into a job description, and they're okay with that, and they're willing to take things on when they have the time and they have the skills to do so. And the best leaders look at themselves as advocates of the company rather than leaders of a function.