Maximize Your Leverage: Why One Well-Targeted Action Beats a Hundred Small Ones

During a crunch period at an engineering firm, a project manager named Lila faced a mountain of requests: review designs, approve expenses, mediate a scheduling snafu, and jump into meetings. Most were firefighting—important to someone, but not game-changing. She felt stretched, but output hadn’t improved.

Quietly, Lila listed all her tasks for the week and, next to each, estimated how many hours or people would ultimately be affected. She realized that writing new onboarding materials, if done right, could make dozens of future hires more productive and reduce repeat questions for all team leads. Meanwhile, reviewing a single invoice, though urgent, only helped one stakeholder.

Lila dedicated focused time on the onboarding guide. Within a month, team satisfaction scores rose, and new hires reached full speed a week earlier on average. Her emails dropped, former bottlenecks resolved themselves, and her reputation improved not because she worked more, but because the right effort compounded throughout the department.

Behavioral science research on leverage shows that time spent on actions with multiplied effects—those that help many people, endure over weeks, or unlock key resources—deliver the majority of a leader’s value. The challenge is learning to pause, step back, and deliberately pick these actions over the urgent but isolated demands.

Think about how your day's work spreads influence: before you launch into the nearest loud task, pause to check which projects could make other people's lives easier, remove future bottlenecks, or solve a pattern rather than a one-off. Devote your best energy to these high-leverage actions, even if they're less exciting in the moment. Over time, you'll notice stress dropping and results improving, not because you did more, but because what you did mattered to more people for longer.