Time is your most precious resource. If you’re not mindful about how you invest it in your team members, you won’t be happy with the “returns” you get. Being more effective requires you to look at your time in a new light.

Do leaders work, or do they sit back and supervise others? Where you stand on that issue depends on where you sit in the leader-vs.-led relationship. From the bottom up, leading doesn’t appear to involve much work. The “real” work happens at the bottom of the organization chart—on the front lines. The higher you go in the hierarchy, you’ll see less “real” work and more talk about real work.

If you’ve led people, however, you have a different perspective. Once you’ve been in a leadership role, you realize leadership doesn’t magically happen. A leader’s work can be thought of as a range of “leadership services” provided to team members. Providing these services takes time and energy. The same way organizations don’t have unlimited financial capital to invest, leaders don’t have unlimited time and energy to invest in leading their teams. That dynamic requires leaders to be deliberate in their approach to allocating this limited “leadership capital.”

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