TME vs ROI
Is it worth it?
How many times have you asked yourself some version of this question, or had it asked of you? A few months into a new relationship, and some red-ish flags start to show up. Do you continue to invest in the relationship? Several weeks with your new hire and they just aren’t getting up to speed. Do you persist in trying to train and develop them? Your job continues to ask for more and more from you, yet refuses to reevaluate your pay. Do you continue to over-deliver in hopes of an eventual pay-off? Ultimately all these kinds of scenarios come down to one question – is it worth it?
As important as this question may be in your personal life, it is even more critical in your professional life. Decisions have outcomes, actions have consequences. And not deciding or not acting are often way more costly in the long run. As discussed in my previous OODA Loop piece, making good decisions quickly and then pivoting over to the next issue to do the same, are stairs that lead directly to the C-Suite. A handy way to cut through noise in these moments is to look through the lens of TME vs ROI and see how things look from that perspective. Put in simpler terms, is the juice worth the squeeze?
In this equation T = Time, M = Money, and E = Energy. Sometimes people prefer to use E = Effort here, but I prefer the broader term of Energy as that captures the “carrying costs” of rumination, stress, and other forms of ongoing passive engagement. Time is listed first as that is often the most important of these resources for busy Executives looking to optimize this equation. The point is that each of these things all have real value, incur real costs, and should be considered as real investments or expenditures of finite resources. Your resources, to be precise. How much of your resources across all these domains are you spending into the situation at hand?
On the other side you have ROI, or Return On Investment. I’m sure you’re all familiar with this term and use it quite a bit in your work, especially in all the usual financial and investment realms. However, as you can see from the left side of the equation, we aren’t just looking at money here. The Time and Energy elements broaden things out considerably and reflect the need to look more globally at your total “costs,” including the emotional, mental, and even existential ones. Back to our initial question, what is the total ROI you are getting out of this situation when you compare it to the previously mentioned TME costs? Is it truly worth it?
Upping your total Leadership Effectiveness Quotient (LEQ) is critical to your future success in the ever complexifying business landscape. An often hidden aspect of this score is your ability to judiciously track your ongoing TME vs ROI across the full spectrum of your day and the things that fill it. Success is often not just about doing more, getting up earlier, or being more efficient. Instead it is about knowing when to pivot away from low ROI situations and how and where to deploy your limited TME more wisely into more interesting opportunities.
