Leadership is Leverage: When Leaders Become the Bottleneck

You're listening to Leadership Blueprints, the podcast where we explore the art and science of leading yourself, inspiring and empowering your team, and project leadership in the architectural, engineering, construction, and development industries, and beyond. I'm your host, BJ Kramer, president and CEO of MCFA. I hope you enjoy today's show. Welcome back to Leadership Blueprints, everybody. I'm your host, BJ Kramer.

And today, we are going to talk about leadership and leverage.

I talk about leaders are levers, and therefore, leadership is leverage. Let me start with the idea of leadership first. I think it's pretty interesting when you boil it down that leadership is the idea that one person, the leader, through a combination of vision, communication, judgment, maybe wisdom, talents, discernment, inspiration, brings together a group of people to accomplish something that no one person could accomplish alone, and even that group likely could not accomplish without the leader, and the leader could not accomplish without the group. Hopefully, that makes sense, but it is the idea that leadership is injecting... Sometimes it's a group of people, a leadership team, but it's injecting this idea of leadership into a group, into an organization, into a team of a bunch of individuals to bring them together to accomplish something.

None of them could alone, but leader could not alone, and without each other, not likely to happen. So MCFA, I talk about leaders are levers. We are in the project leadership business. We we deploy project management, construction management, owner's rep, planning, project development services throughout the the project life cycle, mostly in and around the built environment. And our job, the way I look at it is our job is to be a lever for our clients.

So a client hires us. They hire MCFA, and we are a lever to help them get things done better, smarter, faster, and more effectively. That's the idea leaders are leverage, and leadership is leverage. And this hit me this week. I was at a project site visit where we are being invited in, not just into the project as a consultant like we typically are, but potentially as investors or partners in addition to providing our services, maybe providing some capital and some additional know how.

And I have read a few books. So on the flight home, I kept thinking about this idea of leverage. And I think it shows up everywhere. It shows up in business. It shows up in projects.

It shows up in careers. It shows up in finance and how we buy houses through mortgages, and it even shows up in how we design our weeks. And the older I get, more experience I get, the more responsibilities I have in my life, the less I can rely on just transacting with my time. I really have to be intentional about how I use leverage in my marriage. I have certain gifts and skill sets that my wife doesn't, and she has certain gifts and skill sets that I don't.

How we deploy our talents and our time together to run our household, run our family, grow our life together is another form of leverage. When I think about leverage, I believe I would start with two simple questions, and and I'll go to the mortgage to start. What is it that I have to offer to buy this house? And then what can I leverage? Well, what I have to offer is usually the money I have in the bank and then what I can borrow from the bank.

And when I bring those two things together, I get my buying power. That's leverage. But if I'm somebody that's very, very handy and I know that I can fix things up, well, maybe I can reduce the cash I need because I don't need to buy the talents to fix up the place. I can do it myself. That's the idea of sweat equity in real estate.

So that's a form of leverage. But we start with what do I actually have to leverage? And I think we could leverage our time. We could leverage our money. We could leverage our talents.

We could leverage our network or our relationships. Oh, my neighbor knows about somebody that's getting ready to sell their house, or my brother in law's mom is a realtor, and she has a pocket listing. That's leveraging relationships and network. Leveraging experience, I've seen this before a 100 times. Therefore, it's not gonna cost me as much time to solve the problem because I've done it before.

So that's leveraging experience and leveraging credibility is because of my rapport, because of my reputation, because I've delivered this for somebody before, I might be able to leverage credibility to go in work. So all of those are examples of what I actually have to leverage. And then second, and I think this is the more important one, I I think doing that kind of survey of what you have to leverage is important, but I think the more important one is what is the highest and best use of that leverage? People talk about being overleveraged sometimes. Real estate developers, you've probably heard about over...

They overleveraged themselves. Business owners overleveraged. That typically means that they stretched their finances, their time, their business. They stretched it too far. Leverage without discernment and wisdom turns into burnout, overextension, anxiety, or I think the worst one, using people instead of developing them.

You become very transactional versus transformational. And to me, that's not leadership. That is extraction. And I've interacted with people that claim to be leaders that were trying to transform people. In every tactical experience I had from them, it felt like extraction.

So that is my view. And I look at this. Look. I'm a business owner. I've dabbled in real estate.

I love the business of business, but I'm a leader, and I believe deeply in developing people. You hear me talk about this all the time, helping them become the best version of themselves professionally, helping them grow into who they are capable of becoming. That to me is the leader and coach inside of me. On the other hand, I'm... I am a business owner.

I am an investor, and I am a systems engineer who learned pretty early on at West Point about the Pareto principle and the idea of the eighty twenty rule that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of inputs. So a simple example of that is 80% of your income is probably tied to 20% of your job description or 20% of the things that you do. So when I look at that, if that is true, and I I do. When you look around the world and you can you can study the Pareto principle, that idea is the idea of leverage. And I think leadership requires us to constantly ask, where am I spending time that someone else could grow into?

Where am I spending time that I might be able to delegate to somebody that may be more junior or less expensive or a outsource because it's easier for me to lease it fractionally than to buy it fully. Where am I holding on to work that's preventing scalability? Where might I be confusing activity with impact or results? So those are where am I spending time that someone else could grow into? Where am I holding on to work that's preventing us from scaling?

Where am I confusing activity with impact? So I mentioned that I've read a couple books on this concept of really the leverage of time. And the one book that really shaped this was The One Thing by Gary Keller, and it's... The subtitle is The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. So Gary Keller owns Keller Williams, or is the founder or one of the original partners of Keller Williams, a huge real estate brokerage franchise system that you're probably familiar with.

And that he's he's notorious for kind of his systems thinking and really creating an ecosystem of training and helping realtors become business people. He... He's inspired a number of ideas for me. But the core idea of the book is this question. What is the one thing that only I can do such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?

What's the one thing only I can do such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary? So you could think about that from a fitness standpoint. What's the one thing I could do that if I just did that, everything else would become unnecessary? You might say, well, counting calories might be it or 15,000 steps a day might be it. I don't know what the one thing is.

I don't know what your fitness goal is. In finances, it might be the one thing you could do is hide 30% of your paycheck from you so that it goes somewhere else. This is trying to simplify this idea. But if you take the the next part, it really comes down to time is the only resource that you can't get more of. So when it comes to being a leader, leveraging your time, scaling yourself, leaders don't manage their time.

They have to protect it. Just like investors don't manage money, they protect it. So if I'm spending my time on things someone else could do at 80% as well as I could do, and they're more junior, and that is their opportunity to grow, I don't... I'm not being humble by doing that work. I'm actually being selfish and robbing that person of growth.

So that... I'll go back to the one thing is really about how we deploy our time and what are the what are the things that only I can do such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier. The second lens is this idea, and I started bleeding into it, that I got from a book. I think the author is Dan Martell. It's called Buy Back Your Time.

And this idea is, I'll call it, more of the idea of investing dollars to reduce your workload. So not... We're not talking about... I I guess it's similar, but I'm not talking about just my time trade off. It's also the time and money trade off.

So the idea here isn't about making more money. It's about using money intentionally to buy back your time. Not to do nothing, but to then go reinvest that time into higher value or higher leverage work. So if having a leadership conversation with one of my direct reports requires two hours, but I don't have that two hours because I am still doing the books, I am trading a lower leverage task for a higher leverage task. So can I hire a bookkeeper that can help me manage the books so that I can then go spend that two hours having that leadership conversation?

So higher value work, he talks about leading people, thinking strategically, building systems, deepening relationships. And the distinction I wanna make is that responsible leverage is how you buy margin, buy clarity, buy capacity. Irresponsible leverage buys you stress, fragility, and sleepless nights. And John Nelson and I think... We we may have talked about this before.

The idea of fragility is being overleveraged means that a small mistake can take you out, and you do not want to be irresponsible with your leverage. If leverage costs you peace, it's not leverage. Because as soon as you are losing sleep, you you become ineffective. So I talk about time and money. The third...

And I think, you know, back to the systems engineer in me, the most interesting one is the idea of systems. So the third lever is systems. A system is what allows certain things to become repeatable. Good systems should be reducing decision fatigue. They should be preventing any one person from feeling like they have to be heroic or from being heroic.

They protect people from burnout. They allow leaders to lead, and they allow subordinates to grow. Now I rage against systems when they become bureaucracy. So bad systems, bureaucracy is bad systems, and I'm not talking about government. I I...

We could we could get into a debate about all that. I'm talking about systems in general. Any corporation, any business probably has some systems that were well intentioned in the beginning and then created some level of bureaucracy or inward facing noise that was originally intended to create less friction, was to create more value, was to create more freedom or more time, but then actually just became kind of an inward facing clunky system. Bad systems create bureaucracy. Good systems create freedom.

If I know that every week in my house, I order the same amount of groceries, the same type of groceries, and I can systematically order that through Amazon Fresh or something like that. And the supermarket charges me, let's call it, $10 more than if I went. But I just saved gas. I saved time. I saved sinking.

I saved being out of peanut butter when it's time to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That system just created so much freedom. If every time I need to get peanut butter, I have to be the one to run to the store because my kids can't drive yet or they're at school or whatever, everything relies on me. So if your organization or your family relies on your heroic effort to function, you don't have a leadership problem. You have a systems problem.

Alright. Back to the idea of leadership and people leverage. I wanna probably kinda close out with this last idea. People are not leverage. Them getting experience under your direction leads to their growth.

Their growth is the leverage. I've talked about delegation and empowerment before. Delegation without development is not leadership. It's abdication of responsibility. So when I hand something off to somebody, if I don't give them guidance, if I don't give them training, if I don't give them standards or expectations, if I don't give them the lifeline to check-in with me the first couple of times they do this, I'm not leveraging them.

I'm just throwing them to the wolves. So just because you hire somebody, put them in a seat and say, hey. These are your responsibilities. If they don't know how to operate inside of your system, you're actually not creating any leverage, and you're only causing pain to them and to you. True leverage, and this is truly our philosophy at MCFA and and my personal philosophy, true leverage is about multiplying leaders.

False leverage, back to what I had said earlier, is about extracting output. That's the difference between transformational and transactional leadership. True leverage multiplies leaders. False leverage extracts output. So if people don't grow under your leadership, then it is my belief that whatever you are trying to build won't last.

And that that is a business philosophy. That's a team philosophy. That's a family philosophy. If people don't grow under your leadership, then whatever you're building won't last. So it's kind of an introduction to the idea of leverage.

It's it's kind of top of mind to me as we head into 2026, thinking through where are we investing time, where are we investing money, what priorities this year are we improving in the business that give us the most impact, the most growth. So my challenge to you is... This week is ask yourself three questions. Number one, what am I doing that only I can do? Number two, what am I doing that someone else should be growing into?

And number three, what leverage am I avoiding because it requires trust, training, or patience? And that last one, sometimes we hold on to stuff because we just love it. Sometimes we hold on to stuff because we're great at it. Other times, we're great at it, but it's not the highest and best use of our time, and we don't wanna take the time to trust, train, and have patience in somebody else developing. And to me, that is probably the biggest leadership failure we can have is being the bottleneck or the roadblock to other people growing and developing.

And I understand it. Trust, training, and patience all require the right mindset. Alright. So leadership isn't about doing less. The idea of leverage might sound like, oh, you just wanna do less.

It's not about doing less. It's about doing the right things at the right level for the right reasons so that you can be a leader and allow others to grow and the mission over time to endure and sustain. Otherwise, you're just trying to be the hero. Leverage done right might make life a little easier, but the more important part is that leverage done right actually makes it more meaningful because you are leading and you are bringing people with you. That's it for today.

Thanks for listening to Leadership Blueprints. Get out there and figure out where you can deploy leverage responsibly, where you can multiply your leadership to make an impact in your business and on other people and in the world. Have a great week and a great weekend.

Hey, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to Leadership Blueprints. I hope today's episode gave you some valuable insights, a chance to reflect, and some practical tools you can start using right away. If you enjoy the show, I'd love it if you took a moment to leave us a review. Your feedback helps us reach more leaders like you and keep bringing you the content that matters most.

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