Leverage

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Use leverage to achieve more.

"Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the Earth." – Archimedes

To lift a heavy object, you have a choice: use leverage or not. You can try to lift the object directly – risking injury – or you can use a lever, such as a jack or a long plank of wood, to transfer some of the weight, and then lift the object that way.

Which approach is wiser? Will you succeed without using leverage? Maybe. But you can lift so much more with leverage, and do it so much more easily!

By applying the concept of leverage to business and career success, you can, with a little thought, accomplish very much more than you can without it.

Without leverage, you may work very hard, but your rewards are limited by the hours you put in. But with leverage – as we show in this article – you can break this connection and, in time, achieve very much more.

What Are the Levers of Success?

So how can you apply leverage to your career? And how can you achieve more, while – if you choose to – reducing the number of hours that you work?

To do this, you'll need to learn how to use the leverage of:

• Time (yours, and other people's).
• Resources.
• Knowledge and education.
• Technology.

Time Leverage

Using the leverage of time is the most fundamental strategy for success. There are only so many hours in a day that you can work. If you use only your own time, you can achieve only so much. But if you leverage other people's time, you can increase productivity to an extraordinary extent.

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To leverage your own time:

• Practice effective time management. Eliminate unnecessary activities, and focus your effort on the things that really matter.
• As part of this, learn how to prioritize   , so that you focus your energy on the activities that give the greatest return for the time invested.
• Use goal setting   to think about what matters to you in the long term, set clear targets, and motivate yourself to achieve those targets.

To leverage other people's time:

• Learn how to delegate   work to other people.
• Train and empower others (through team building).
• Bring in experts and consultants to cover skill or knowledge gaps.
• Outsource non-core tasks to people with the experience to do them more efficiently.

Providing that you do things properly, the time and money that you invest in leveraging other people's time is usually well spent. Remember, though, that you'll almost always have to "pay" up front in some way in order to reap the longer-term benefits of using leverage.

Resource Leverage

You can also exert leverage by getting the most from your assets, and taking full advantage of your personal strengths.

You have a wide range of skills, talents, experiences, thoughts, and ideas. These can, and should, be used in the best combination. What relevant skills and strengths do you have that others don't? How can you use these to best effect, and how can you improve them so that they're truly remarkable? What relevant assets do you have that others don't? Can you use these to create leverage? Do you have connections that others don't have? Or financial resources? Or some other asset that you can use to greater effect?

A good way of thinking about this is to conduct a personal SWOT   analysis, focusing on identifying strengths and assets, and expanding from these to identify the opportunities that they give you. (An advantage of SWOT is that it also helps you to spot critical weaknesses that need to be covered.)

Knowledge and Education Leverage

Another significant lever of success is applied knowledge. Combined with education and action, this can generate tremendous leverage.

Learning by experience is slow and painful. If you can find more formal ways of learning, you'll progress much more quickly. What's more, if you select a good course, you'll have a solid foundation to your knowledge, and one that doesn't have high-risk gaps. This is why people working in life-or-death areas (such as architects, airline pilots, medical doctors, and suchlike) need long and thorough training.

While few of us operate in quite such immediately critical areas, by determining what you need to know, and then acquiring that knowledge, you can avoid many years of slow, painful trial-and-error learning.

In the same way, it's inefficient if many people in an organization have to learn how to do their work by trial and error. A much better way is for organizations to capture the knowledge gained by the first few in some way and pass it on to others. This is the core of "knowledge management." There's more about this in our article   and Book Insight   on the subject.

The keys to successfully leveraging knowledge and education are: firstly, knowing what you need to learn; secondly, knowing to what level you need to learn it; thirdly, being very focused and selective in your choices; and fourthly, taking the time to earn the qualifications that you need.

Even then, having more education or more knowledge isn't necessarily a point of leverage. These become advantages only when they can be directly applied to your career goals and aspirations, and when they're used actively and intelligently to do something useful.

Technology Leverage

Finding technology leverage is about thinking about how you work, and using technology to automate as much of this as you can.

At a simple level, you might find that all you need to keep you in touch with home and work is a laptop or smartphone.

At a more sophisticated level, businesses can choose from a wide array of software solutions. Some of these can automate or simplify tasks that are otherwise very time consuming.

Customer-relationship management (CRM) databases can bring tremendous benefits for sales and customer service organizations, as can point-of-sale (PoS) inventory systems for organizations that need to track and manage inventory.

Websites can give clients easy access to up-to-date product information, and help them to place orders simply and easily. And blogs and email newsletters help organizations to stay in contact with their customers. All of these use technology to provide tremendous leverage.