Executives are busy.
That statement is so universally accepted that we rarely stop to question it.
Of course the CEO’s calendar is full. Of course they’re working after hours. Of course they’re moving from meeting to meeting while trying to keep up with email, make decisions, manage stakeholders, and find some uninterrupted time to think.
They’re the executive. That’s the job. Isn’t it?
At Prime, when we work with executives on effectiveness, one of the most useful questions we can ask is also one of the simplest:
What should only you do?
Not: What are you responsible for? What’s on your calendar? What are your highest priorities?
What are the things that, because of your position, relationships, judgment, or authority, only you can do?
The list is usually shorter than you might think.
Being responsible for something doesn’t mean doing it
Executives ultimately hold responsibility for an enormous amount of work.
A CEO may be responsible for the strategy, the leadership team, the culture, financial performance, key stakeholder relationships, and the overall direction of the organization.
But responsibility and activity are not the same thing.
The CEO can be responsible for ensuring the company has a strong strategy without participating in every meeting about it. They can be accountable for organizational performance without being involved in every operational decision. They can care deeply about culture without attending every employee initiative.
And yet, over time, executives accumulate work.
A meeting gets added because their presence seems helpful. A decision gets escalated because it’s faster to ask the CEO. A stakeholder becomes accustomed to having direct access. An executive continues doing something they did when the organization was half its current size.
Individually, none of these decisions seems particularly consequential.
Collectively, they can consume an executive’s most valuable resource: their time.
Executive time is organizational capacity
If a CEO spends three hours on work that someone else could reasonably own, the cost isn’t simply three hours of the CEO’s time.
It’s three hours they weren’t spending on something only they could do. Perhaps that’s thinking about the future of the organization. Developing a critical relationship. Coaching a senior leader. Making a consequential decision. Seeing around a corner the rest of the organization can’t yet see.
This is why an executive’s calendar is more than a schedule. It is an allocation of organizational capacity. And organizations should treat it accordingly.
Delegation isn’t enough
The traditional answer to an overloaded executive is delegation. But sometimes executives remain involved not because they’re unwilling to delegate, but because the organization hasn’t been designed to operate without them.
Information isn’t getting to the right people. Decision rights are unclear. Leaders don’t have sufficient context or authority. Meetings exist because there isn’t another mechanism for coordination. The executive has become the connective tissue between parts of the organization.
Telling that executive to “delegate more” doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It simply asks them to behave differently inside a system that still depends on them.
The better question is: What needs to change around the executive so they no longer need to be involved?
This is where the Executive Office matters
A well-designed Executive Office doesn’t simply make an executive’s existing workload easier to manage. It helps determine what that workload should be in the first place.
That means understanding the executive’s priorities and responsibilities, but also examining how information reaches them, how decisions get made, how meetings are structured, what can be anticipated, what can be delegated, and where the organization unnecessarily depends on executive involvement.
The Executive Assistant, Chief of Staff, technology, processes, and operating rhythms surrounding the executive should collectively create leverage.
Not so the executive can fit more into the day. So the executive can spend more of the day doing the work that only they can do.
The question changes as organizations grow
Here’s another thing: The answer to “What should only I do?” isn’t static.
A founder leading 25 people may appropriately be involved in decisions that would be absurd for the CEO of a 2,500-person organization to make.
But organizations often grow faster than executive behavior changes.
Work that once required the executive continues to find its way to them simply because it always has. That’s why executive effectiveness needs to be revisited as an organization evolves.
What only you could do three years ago may be something someone else should own today. And something only you can do today may become increasingly important as the organization grows.
Protect the irreplaceable work
There will always be more an executive could do.
The better measure isn’t whether they can squeeze it all in. It’s whether their finite time and attention are disproportionately going toward the contribution the organization cannot get from anyone else.
So rather than starting your next calendar review by asking, What can I eliminate? try starting somewhere else: What should only I do?
Identify those things first. Then design the calendar, the team, and the Executive Office around protecting them.
Because executive effectiveness isn’t about helping an executive do everything. It’s about making sure they’re doing the things that matter most for them to do.
Photo by Mizuno K
