Stop Working Harder — Start Designing for Leverage
Working harder isn't the goal.
Making a bigger impact with smarter systems is.
If you're serious about scaling yourself, your team, or your mission, you need to stop measuring effort and start designing for leverage.
Leverage is how you move from doing more to achieving more. It's how you stop being the bottleneck and start building outcomes that outlast your direct involvement.
It's not just about building more efficient workflows. It's about building better systems of trust, communication, and execution. It's about setting the conditions for lasting impact—the kind that doesn't need your fingerprints on every moving piece to work.
Let's get tactical. Here’s how you start designing for leverage:
1. Build Your Leverage Map
If you don't know where your time goes, you can't reallocate it.
Spend a full week auditing your time in detail. Write down everything you work on, big and small. At the end of the week, map each task into one of three buckets:
High-leverage work: Activities that create exponential impact. (Examples: strategic planning, coaching leaders, creating repeatable processes.)
Low-leverage work: Activities that are necessary but maintain the status quo. (Examples: attending recurring meetings, status updates.)
No-leverage work: Activities that add noise but no real movement. (Examples: endless email chains, "quick" meetings with no agenda.)
Patterns will emerge. Notice where your energy and time actually go versus where they should go.
Most leaders are surprised to learn how much time gets eaten up by "low to no" leverage activities—often because no system has been built to offload or improve them.
Actionable next step: Identify the one low-leverage activity you’re going to delegate, redesign, or eliminate first.
2. Delegate to Build Trust, Not Just to Unload
Real delegation is not "task dumping." It's leadership development.
When you delegate, you are not just removing work from your plate—you're investing in the judgment, skills, and decision-making abilities of your team.
Delegation that creates leverage looks like:
Sharing the why behind the work, not just the what.
Setting clear expectations on outcomes—but giving autonomy on execution.
Coaching for judgment, not micromanaging for perfection.
Delegation done poorly creates bottlenecks, resentment, and rework.
Delegation done well builds resilient, confident leaders who can run independently.
Actionable next step: Choose one project this quarter where your goal isn't just "getting it done," but "growing someone through it."
3. Audit Your Rituals
Meetings, 1:1s, standups, planning sessions—these can either be leverage accelerators or time and energy drains.
Ask yourself:
Is this ritual creating alignment, clarity, and momentum?
Or is it just creating motion without meaningful progress?
High-leverage rituals:
Create shared context quickly.
Move decision-making forward.
Clarify ownership and next steps.
Low-leverage rituals:
Rehash status updates that could be async.
Leave outcomes or responsibilities vague.
Drain energy instead of focusing it.
Actionable next step: Audit your top 3 recurring rituals. For each, decide: Keep it, redesign it, or retire it.
4. Design Asynchronous Work That Actually Works
Async work is not just "sending more Slack messages" or "dumping everything into a doc."
True async effectiveness requires:
Clear, concise documentation that answers "what, why, how, and when."
Defined decision rights: Who owns the decision? Who needs to weigh in?
Deadlines with teeth—even in an async environment, urgency still matters.
When async is structured well, you:
Empower deep work.
Cut down on unnecessary meetings.
Create a transparent record of decisions and thinking.
When async is unstructured, you:
Create communication chaos.
Breed confusion and missed expectations.
Burn out your team silently.
Actionable next step: Pick one recurring meeting to pilot an async-first version of. Design the doc, deadlines, and ownership clearly before canceling the meeting.
5. Protect Your Highest Leverage Asset: You
Scaling yourself doesn't mean grinding harder. It means investing your best energy into the highest-leverage activities you can uniquely influence.
This means:
Protecting deep work windows from shallow demands.
Saying "no" more often, more strategically.
Prioritizing personal recovery with the same discipline you apply to project delivery.
You are the asset. Protect accordingly.
Final Thought:
Designing for leverage isn't about working less—it's about making the work you do matter more.
It's about shifting from being the engine of everything to being the architect of something greater.
Because leadership that scales is leadership that builds beyond itself.
When you build for leverage, you don't just scale your work. You scale your leadership, your impact, and your legacy.
Thanks for reading. If this sparked ideas for your own leverage strategy, I'd love to hear how you're applying it. You can always reach out here—or forward this to someone who's ready to stop managing effort and start designing for meaningful impact.