TALKS
Jim Schleckser | The 70% Leader
Jim Schleckser has spent decades leading and developing people — as a CEO, father, and Scout leader — and has found the same failure mode in all of them: we wait until someone can do a job as well as we can before we let go. By then, we may have taught them how to follow our path, but not how to find their own.
Schleckser’s answer comes down to a number: 70%. When someone can do a job 70% as well as you can, he argues, that’s often the moment to hand it over and step back. The remaining 30% is where curiosity, experimentation, and a different way of seeing the problem can emerge. If you insist on waiting until someone does everything the way you would do it, you don’t develop people — you reproduce yourself.
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Jim Schleckser is the Founder and CEO of The CEO Project, a CEO peer group network. Previously, he was the division president at Spirent Communications PLC, a global publicly traded telecommunications business. His ideas have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time, CNBC.com, NPR, and other major outlets.. He earned a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware, an MBA in Marketing and Finance from the University of Connecticut, and a Doctorate in Business Administration from the University of Maryland Global Campus. Outside of work, he is a Certified Sommelier, an avid soccer player, a lifelong reader, and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and Machu Pichu. He lives in Kensington, Maryland.
