Coaching practices for Leverage Points with My Team

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Leverage Points with My Team, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I’m forever fiddling with the surface
• My team only ever gets the leftover scraps from me, and it shows
• I’m at my best when I’m getting a room aligned and fired up
• By the time I hear someone on my team was blocked, it’s already festered into a real problem
• I keep pouring effort straight at the spot where the problem shows up, grinding away for results that barely budge

Practices that may help

1. Leverage Points
   Leverage points are places in a system where a small change can produce large shifts in behavior. Donella Meadows ranked them by structural depth in her widely cited 1999 paper: numbers and parameters are low-leverage; feedback loops, goals, and the rules of the system are medium-leverage; and the paradigm from which the system arises is highest-leverage of all. The counterintuitive finding is that people’s intuition about leverage is often backwards.
2. Identify high-leverage points rather than effort-intensive low-leverage ones
   Most productivity interventions target low-leverage points; find the structural places where small changes have large effects.
   Systems Thinking for Personal Productivity
3. Use delegation as a development tool
   Assign Q3 tasks to team members who are ready to stretch — and treat the learning curve as the point.
   The Eisenhower Matrix and Delegation
4. Lead from the influencing domain — take charge, speak up, make sure others are heard
   People strong in influencing sell the team’s ideas inside and outside the organization.
   Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
5. Run a daily team huddle
   Hold a brief daily standup to sync on what’s happening and surface stuck points before they become crises.
   The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus
6. Find the high-leverage intervention point
   Look for the structural change that produces large effects for small effort.
   Systems Thinking
7. Map your team’s genius coverage
   Check whether all six activities are covered by someone who finds them energizing.
   The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
8. Identify your vital 20%
   Map your activities to outcomes to discover which 20% of efforts generate 80% of your results.
   The Pareto Principle: 80/20 for Personal Productivity
9. Use the time to remove blockers
   Ask what’s in their way and then actually clear it — this is your highest-leverage move.
   Effective One-on-Ones, Made Practical
10. Strengthen corrective loops and weaken runaway ones
    Find the balancing loop that should be correcting the problem — and ask why it is too weak.
    Leverage Points

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