Mind Boxing: How Leaders (Should) Spend Their Time
The 6 Box Framework (PDF Worksheet Included)
In this issue:
The Three Verticals of Leadership
The Two Layers of Leadership
Bringing it together: The 6-box Framework (Mind-box)
Applying the Mind-box
Common Mistakes You Should Avoid
Download the Mind-boxing Worksheet!
Complementary Frameworks and Other Resources
Final Thoughts
✨
What’s the most precious resource you have as a leader?
It’s not your budget.
It’s not your team.
It’s not even your vision.
It’s your ⏳ time.
If you’ve ever reached the end of a chaotic day feeling like you’ve achieved nothing that truly matters, you’re not alone. Many leaders are caught in a whirlwind of tasks, firefighting, and back-to-back meetings that leave little room for the big-picture thinking their role demands.
During my 20+ years in large corporations, I’ve been there. Several times over.
Leadership is complicated. Every leader is different. They have a unique style, a unique background, and a unique approach.
Add to that the different levels of leadership. You may be a front-line manager, a middle manager, or a senior executive.
With all that added complexity, it can feel daunting for you to go about doing your job, and to prioritize what matters most in your role.
In this article, I’ll share the 6 Box Framework, a practical tool I’ve developed to help leaders align their time with their priorities. This framework is about more than managing your calendar—it’s about managing your impact.
Ready to reclaim your time? Let’s get started.
The 3 Verticals of Leadership
Regardless of your role, division, or industry, as a leader, you need to focus on three over-arching aspects of your role. I call these the ‘3Ps’ of leadership: People, Process, and Product.
People
People form the building blocks of any organization. Without the people, the organization is empty.
“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.” — Helen Keller
As a leader, you should pay attention to the people who make up your organization, both within and outside. You should strive to provide an environment of trust and belonging to your teams while ensuring that you derive maximum value from your organization towards the business goals.
Depending on the situation, you may need to put on various hats as you work with your people, including coach, mentor, taskmaster, and problem solver.
As a people leader, some of the pertinent questions you should be asking yourself are:
How can I provide an environment of trust and belonging?
What factors can help my teams put in their 100%?
What training and development opportunities can I provide to my teams so they can continue to upskill and grow?
How can I ensure differentiated performance in my organization, where the highest performers are being rewarded higher and grow faster?
How can I build a high-performing team?
How can I hold my teams accountable for their roles and expectations?
Process
If you want to know how an organization functions, look at the processes they have in place. I almost look at processes as the ‘X-Ray image’ that helps you to peek into the inner workings of an organization.
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” — Peter Drucker
As a leader, you need to play with the two levers — efficiency and effectiveness. You need to ensure that your operations are optimal, that you are using the right resources for the right job, and reducing wastage.
At the time same, you need to ensure your teams are heading in the right direction, and that they have their goals defined. You need to help them to prioritize and refine as they march forward. There are multiple paths you can lead your team towards your business goals, and it is your job to help them find one that is optimal.
Some of the pertinent questions you should be asking yourself are:
Am I utilizing my resources in the most optimal way (resources include human, capital, cash, time, etc.)
Does my team know what they need to accomplish, and what will drive the maximum value for our business?
Are there roadblocks and red tape that might be coming in the way of efficient execution for the teams?
Do we have the necessary automation in place to maximize efficiency?
Do we have mechanisms to monitor our efficiency and performance through KPIs, metrics, and dashboards?
How can we make decisions efficiently to move forward faster and with greater impact?
Product
As a business, your ultimate goal is to build and deliver a product, platform, or service to potential customers. I will use the term ‘product’ here more broadly to refer to any of those.
“Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.” — Jeff Bezoz
As a leader, you should always be thinking about how you can build the best product possible, a product that will solve a real need. You need to be tuned in to your customers or potential customers, what their needs and wants are, and continue to innovate. You need to stay informed about the opportunities, the threats, and your competition.
Here are some questions you should be asking yourself:
Who are our primary customers?
What are their needs and wants?
How can we provide the value that our customers are looking for?
How can we measure success in meeting those needs?
How can we beat the competition, and be a leader in the market?
How can we provide the best experience for our customers?
How can we grow and retain our loyal customer base?
How can we deliver value faster, and better?
How can we innovate and be ahead of the competition?
The 2 Layers of Leadership
Now that we reviewed the 3Ps — or the three verticals — of leadership, let’s turn our attention to the two (horizontal) layers of leadership.
Every leader has a specific role in their organization, and they are at a certain level in the hierarchy. The level determines their scope of work, their influence, and their overall impact on the organization.
Broadly speaking, every leader operates in two “layers”, and the time they spend in each layer is correlated to their level in the organization: Tactics, and Strategy.
Strategy
This is by far the weakest point for most leaders I have met. Many leaders tend to get trapped in the day-to-day tactics, and do not pay enough attention to the strategic contributions they can make as leaders.
As a leader, you should always look ahead and think strategically about where you want to take your organization. You need to look at the long-term goals, measure your team’s strengths and weaknesses, and keep an eye out for opportunities and threats that might come your way. You need to ensure your team has a roadmap and a path forward, and your decisions should always be driven with the long-term approach in mind.
This is especially true as you grow into more senior leadership roles.
Some of the key questions you need to ask yourself as a strategic leader are:
What is the resource strategy for my organization? What is the location strategy?
What skill sets am I missing, or do I need to build over the next few years?
What roadmap should we be building for the coming years?
How can we improve the overall efficiency of our organization in the long run? What steps can we take now and in the medium term?
How can we build on our team’s strengths, and reduce the gaps on the weaknesses over the next year?
What innovation or new experiments can we run today to help us be better prepared for future technological advances and customer behavior?
What steps can we take in the immediate to medium-term to help us reach our long-term organization goals?
Tactics
Fundamentally, your job as a leader is to get the job done.
No matter how smart you are, and how innovative your organization is, if you are not able to deliver the results then you are not performing your job.
Tactics is about the current, and the day-to-day execution.
This is your bottom line.
You need to ensure you are delivering against the goals that you had set for yourself and your teams. In particular, front-line and junior managers spend the majority of their time doing just this.
But this is not just limited to front-line managers. As a leader, you need to be aware of the situation, the stresses, and the bottlenecks your teams may be facing in getting the job done. You need to step in from time to time to help unblock them, to provide direction, and to help them succeed. You cannot keep a blind eye towards what’s happening, and expect everything to function flawlessly.
Some of the key questions you should be asking yourself as a tactical leader are:
What are the current top priorities that I need to focus on today?
Are there customer escalations that need my attention?
Are there decisions that I can take today to unblock the team or my stakeholders?
What information do I need today from the team, and where can I find it?
What information do I need to share with my team today that will help them with their tasks?
Which dashboards do I need to review today to track our business KPIs, metrics, and system performance?
Are there team conflicts or situations that need my attention today?
Bringing it together: The 6-box Framework
Now comes the fun part: putting together the three verticals and the three layers of leadership into a single grid - the 6-box - that I like to call the ‘Mind-box’.
As you can tell, this 6-box brings all your pieces together nicely into a grid. It captures your role by dividing it into six boxes and provides you with a bird’s eye view of everything that you are responsible and accountable for as a leader.
In summary, the six boxes are:
People-Strategy: your resource and talent strategy: how you build and grow your talent and make sure you have the best team to deliver on your vision.
Process-Strategy: your process and operational strategy: how do you ensure your organizational processes are always adapting and stay efficient as technologies and processes advance.
Product-Strategy: your product/platform/service and brand strategy: how do you stay ahead of the competition, and lead in your market.
People-Tactics: day-to-day people management: how do you manage your people, their expectations, and make sure they remain motivated and productive.
Process-Tactics: day-to-day operations and practices: how do you streamline your processes, and makes sure there are no bottlenecks in execution.
Product-Tactics: day-to-day execution and release management: how do you ensure your team is delivering results, and handle escalations and fires promptly and efficiently.
So, now that we have understood the nuts and bolts of the Mind-box framework, let’s get our hands dirty and learn how to apply it.
Applying the Mind Box
Okay, now that we have a solid understanding of the framework, let’s turn our attention to making this framework work for you in your role as a leader.
Doing this methodically will help you to increase your productivity many-fold and, in turn, multiply your impact on the business.
Next, we will:
Discuss a simple three-step roadmap you can use to apply Mind-boxing in your role as a leader
Review common mistakes you should avoid while using this framework
Make it real: Put the power of this framework into practice with the Mind-boxing worksheet, which includes step-by-step prompts to guide you through the application process
Review some complementary frameworks that work well with Mind-boxing
Review additional resources to further your understanding
Close out with some key takeaways
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