Ways to leverage your work and increase outcomes

There are many ways to leverage the work that you do with systems and habits to get the most from it. Most of my articles focus on getting started. The difficulty exists for most in the early stages of learning to use systems to improve. Once you get the hang of it, you can transfer that insight into many other areas of your life.

But some people get stuck after they form the right habits. They want to get more out of them. They want more bang for their buck. What they want is to leverage what they have done to get even more value from their processes.

Leverage is an important aspect in life. We use it in business. We use it with our money. We use it by networking and growing our career. How can we take the concept of leverage and apply it in other areas?

Years ago, while working with a company looking to scale, we came across a problem. The problem was that it took a long time to train someone new. The company needed experts in certain areas. But this skillset was one that couldn’t be hired. They had to teach it to employees and it took a long time.

We tweaked the onboarding process. We worked with trainers to develop a better training program. We worked to hire more skilled workers. But we needed a quicker, more efficient way and it took a long time to get an employee to this level of expertise. The company was seeing an influx in business but to capitalize we had to quickly figure out how to get more done.

We started to dissect the process. What we found was that most people could quickly and easily be taught certain aspects of the process. But other elements of the job took a long time to learn.

So, we split it up. We created a whole new process where we took our experienced employees and had them focused on the part of the process that required their expertise. For the easier elements, we used newer employees. That allowed them to step in right away and help us work through our backlog. But it also meant that they could slowly gain experience. In time, they could transition to the higher-level roles.

In essence, we leveraged the skills and experience of those employees who had the most knowledge and expertise. We didn’t bog them down with the tasks that almost anyone could do. We gave those to the employees that were still learning.

In this instance we completely the changed the way the company operated. For almost 30 years it always worked the same way. But seeing this leverage point, we were able to change that and create a better process with better outcomes.

This isn’t the only way to use leverage to help get more from the work we do. If you are an expert at running your small business but have trouble selling, you can hire a sales manager. Or you can outsource parts of the business that bog you down. If you are an attorney, you can work with a specialty firm such as Elite Lawyer Management to take over tasks that we aren’t as skilled at. You focus on what you do best and let someone who is an expert at other aspects of the business run those.

In our personal life we can look to hire someone to complete mundane tasks that we dislike. Tim Ferriss talks about doing this in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek. He promotes the idea of hiring a personal assistant, so you are free to work on more important parts of your life.

I have a friend who started exercising and realized that the knowledge he gained to get himself in shape is valuable to others. So, he started selling that knowledge by becoming a personal trainer and helping others improve their health.

Leverage is a very important part of the systems and habits approach to improvement. It isn’t used as much during the beginning stages, but once you develop solid systems and habits look for ways to leverage what you do to get maximum return.

Soon you might find that tasks can be given to others to complete or you can hire experts in areas that you don’t have time to learn. Whatever it is, make sure you look at the best ways to continue to grow and improve and use leverage whenever you can to get the most out of your efforts.