Kristiana Corona
So many of us were never taught how to manage our time strategically. We stumbled into these habits, and we think that more scope equals more work, 'cause I didn't need to just work harder. I needed to direct my energy towards what mattered most and then protect it. Ever feel like everyone else has leadership figured out and you're just making it up as you go?
I've been there. I spent two decades leading design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and for years, I looked like I had everything pulled together on the outside, but on the inside, I felt burned out, overwhelmed, and unworthy of the title leader. Then a surprise encounter with executive coaching changed my life and dramatically improved my leadership style and my results.
Now I help others make that same shift in their leadership. This podcast is where we do the work, building the mindset, the coaching skills, and the confidence to lead with clarity and authenticity, and to finally feel worthy to lead from the inside out. Hey there, Christiana here. Welcome back to the Worthy To Lead Podcast.
This is part two in my short series on leadership lessons I learned while leading at Amazon. And this one, it might be the most impactful one for me because it changed the way that I showed up every single week as a leader. So if you are a leader. Stuck in a swirl of meetings, feeling like your calendar owns you instead of the other way around.
Stay with me. This one's for you. Let's start with the core insight. When your scope grows, your leadership habits have to grow with it. You don't scale by working longer and harder. You scale by distilling, by delegating, and by tending into your time. Like it's a living thing. When I started leading in corporate organizations, I had dozens of stakeholders to align with every week, a large team that I had to guide, and a relentless stream of meetings that were more than I could possibly attend.
If I didn't make space intentionally to, I would end up double or triple booked every single day. On Sunday nights, I would open up my calendar for the week, and I would look at the sea of meetings and feel my stomach drop. How am I gonna make this work? How's it gonna get done? It wasn't that I didn't wanna do the work, I loved the work, but I felt buried by it constantly.
Here's the lesson that I learned, the hard way. You cannot leave your time unattended. You have to think of your calendar like a plant. If you water it and you prune it. And you give it sun and you give it space, it thrives. But what happens if you ignore the plant, if you let it get overrun with weeds, and you don't water it and you don't give it space where unfiltered meetings and demands just continue to creep in like weeds, it starts to wither.
And so do you at Amazon. This wasn't just a productivity tip, though. This was a survival skill. I didn't just have dozens of partners, I had hundreds of people to interact with potentially. Here's the thing about Amazon: the pace and the complexity won't stop, and if you don't get intentional and disciplined with your time, you'll feel completely overwhelmed by it.
And I know you might be thinking, I can't just carve out big blocks of my time. I have too many stakeholders. They have too many demands. My plate is overflowing, and you know, this all sounds nice, but it's not gonna be possible for me. Well, you know what? If that's you, you're not alone. A recent Gartner report found that over 70% of middle managers and leaders feel stressed and overwhelmed and burned out by their workload, and over 30% of them are actively looking for new jobs.
Now, and that to me is heartbreaking, but it's also revealing because so many of us were never taught how to manage our time strategically. We stumbled into these habits. We maybe picked up tips here or there, but mostly we learned through exhaustion and trial and error. And we think that more scope, whatever I take on equals more work.
I just need to hustle that much harder. Here's where Brendan Burchard's book High Performance Habits really hit home for me. He has this concept that he calls prolific quality output or PQL, and here's what it is: high performers don't just do more. They do meaningful work consistently and over time, and as Brendan says, they don't come crashing across the finish line of success.
They don't burn themselves to the ground to meet a deadline. They're steady and they're focused. They regularly beat expectations, and then they become known for it. And that was a light bulb moment for me because I didn't need to just work harder. I needed to direct my energy towards what mattered most and then protect it.
So here were some practices that helped me to do that. Number one, I started doing a two-week calendar review. Every Friday, I would scan the weeks ahead and ask what conflicts can I clear and who are three of the most important people that I need to connect with in the next week, and do I have time with them?
Where do I have time with people that don't require my time or energy on this project? And where do I have deep work blocked? Because if you don't have deep work blocked on your calendar, as we all know, it doesn't exist. Number two, I created firm boundaries around not working nights and weekends. Sure there were some exceptions, like we all have to write a promotion doc or write a quarterly review, but each time I invested more hours or had to surge into a project, I would also dedicate time to pay myself back.
And I love my former leader, Lexi Spiro strategy on that. The third thing is I audited recurring meetings. I asked myself, does this cadence still serve me? Where was I taking old habits or old behaviors? Like maybe I had a weekly or a biweekly with someone, but now we didn't need that close of connection because we had moved on or we were on different projects.
So where did I need to assess the cadence, and which of these relationships needed the most investment of my time right now? Number four. Occasionally, I would just do a deep work sprint, and that meant that I would cancel. Almost everything. Everything that I could for an entire week. And I would just focus on the project, the strategy, the vision, and that kind of work.
And I know that may sound extreme, but it was always worth it. And here's the thing, I didn't need to ask for permission to do that, and neither do you. People will respect you when you respect yourself and plan your time effectively. In fact, they may secretly admire you. And wish that they could do the same thing, and suddenly you become a role model for others.
And guess what? They can do it too. But here was the real game changer. I started leveraging my coaching skills to build a stronger and more independent team. And the more I coached my team, the more they grew into confident, strategic thinkers who could own their work fully. They didn't need me in every decision.
They didn't need me in every meeting. They knew when to pull me in. And when to run with the ball. And the ripple effect of that is that I had more time for the things that mattered. Vision, innovation, connecting and building broader relationships with leaders, and growth. So here's a pattern that I want you to see.
If you zoom in on the tactics, it looks like this: taking out your tools and doing the intricate work within your garden. Blocking off the time for deep work, weeding your calendar regularly, if not on a weekly basis, maybe even a daily basis, and delegating or canceling meetings that are not leading to that prolific work output that Brendan talks about.
And then if you zoom out a level to the strategy layer, it looks like this, coaching your team. Clarifying what the priorities are and designing how you want to lead. And both of these things matter because leadership is not just about doing more, it's about choosing what matters and following through consistently over time.
So if your calendar feels like an overgrown and unintended garden right now, here's your homework. Block 30 minutes and do a calendar audit. Where are those weeds that need pruning? Then pick up a copy of Brandon Burchard's High Performance Habits book, if you haven't already. His concept of prolific quality output, or PQO, might be exactly the thing that you need to shift your energy and your time.
And finally, download a free copy of my 15-minute coaching guide at worthytolead.co. It'll walk you through how to coach your team into greater ownership so that you can lead with more freedom. Less overwhelmed. You are not meant to run yourself into the ground. You are meant to lead and to grow and to design a life and a career that's actually sustainable.
Thanks for listening, and as always, keep showing up and keep choosing the work that matters and keep leading like you're worthy to lead because you are. Bye for now.
