People are asked to update the operating systems on their phones all the time. What if leaders applied that same kind of polishing and bug fixing to themselves? McKinsey research shows that executives who periodically review and revise their priorities, roles, time, and energy tend to be more productive, work more consciously, and drive change more effectively. In this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Senior Partner Arne Gast joins McKinsey Editorial Director Roberta Fusaro to discuss how leaders can tune up their own personal operating models.
The McKinsey Podcast is cohosted by Lucia Rahilly and Roberta Fusaro.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
What’s new on McKinsey.com
Roberta Fusaro: Hello, Lucia.
Lucia Rahilly: Roberta, hello. What’s new on McKinsey.com?
Roberta Fusaro: Next year, the United States will celebrate its semiquincentennial—marking 250 years since its founding. In honor of that, we’ve published seven articles that aim to help America’s leaders chart their course within the world’s longest-lived constitutional democracy.
Lucia Rahilly: And we also have the latest in our ongoing series about tariffs and their economic impact on business and global trade. And now, for anyone who needs a refresh of how they operate at work, we have Roberta’s conversation with McKinsey Senior Partner Arne Gast.
What is a personal operating model?
Roberta Fusaro: What does it mean to have a personal operating model?
Arne Gast: Our phones continually upgrade when there’s something wrong or when new features are available. I like to think about leaders’ personal operating models in the same way. When something is not working or they find themselves in a new situation, leaders need to upgrade their personal operating models.
Roberta Fusaro: It seems intuitive that I should change things if my ways of working don’t seem to be working anymore. So why doesn’t that happen more often? What gets in the way of leaders updating their personal operating models?
Arne Gast: We all are creatures of habit; we do things a certain way. Sometimes we are too tired to change our ways, or we don’t reflect and think about, “What’s the new world? Let’s do it in a new way.” And when you get into new roles, it’s time to reflect and think, “What is the new operating model?”
When COVID hit, people needed to ask themselves, “What should I do in person, and what am I going to do through the screen?” Instead, we just pumped in more time and energy. We pushed through, but in the end, it’s less effective.
Roberta Fusaro: We all want to push through and think we can solve any problem. Let’s talk a little bit about the elements of the personal operating model. What do leaders need to understand about priorities and how they set them?
Arne Gast: Priorities are number one. Working with many leaders across the world in leadership programs or in high-stakes transformations, we started devising work into three parts.
The first part is, “What is your real mandate?” Do you really know what your mandate is? And my question often is, “Do you think you know it? Do you hope you know it? Or do you truly know it?” Let’s list the stakeholders and really think through, “What do they expect from you? What is the minimum and the maximum they expect from you?” And until you know that, you don’t know what your maneuvering space is or the bar you need to meet.
The second is, “What are the most critical moments for you coming up?” If you can visualize your top five or ten moments or the upcoming critical conversations, you can script them and really think them through. That’s where we can make an outsize difference.
And the last part is to decide what it is you’re quitting. We’re all engaged in so many things. It’s the meetings you shouldn’t be in. It’s the nonprofit board that you should have quit three years ago. Maybe it’s relationships, such as with leaders who are holding on to you, or you’re holding on to them.
Intuitively, you know there’s stuff that crowds your calendar. It’s not adding to your energy. It’s not adding to your impact. Make the cut and clean the slate. It’s going to give you extra time back, extra energy back. But you need to make the decision.
Roberta Fusaro: What are some of the things that leaders have done, in your experience, to successfully let go of tasks?
Arne Gast: We are all often excited about new ideas, but we should be cutting them back, and only do the top three instead of seven, which is hard. Why? Maybe you really love numbers four, five, and six. Or you love the person who came up with numbers four, five, and six. Or you’re afraid the three ideas you’ve chosen might not pan out well. I suffer from that, too.
All leaders suffer from that. It’s mostly an internal thing and sometimes a relationship thing or an ego thing. It’s nice to be on that committee or to be asked to give a speech for students. It’s nice to be in an interview. But does it really add value? Because it’s extra preparation, an extra hour. The leaders I work with say that making a list can be completed pretty quickly. You just have to make the time to do it and take time to do it gracefully. And it will free up time.”
How to free up time
Roberta Fusaro: One of the other elements of the personal operating model is about managing time, which is a huge deal for leaders. In what ways can leaders manage time better?
Arne Gast: The first thing to do is to set your boundaries but see it as an experiment. Set boundaries like, “These weeks I’m going to work. These weeks I’m fully off because of “X.” Or “You can call me anytime from eight in the morning, seven in the morning, or nine in the morning.” But it should first be an experiment. If you need more time, or if people complain about it, or if people want something else, you can always adapt it. But set your boundaries clearly by defining it: “This is the box.”
The second thing is to think about your time. What is your rhythm throughout the day? What is your rhythm throughout the week? Or what is your rhythm throughout the year? Look at your current calendar to assess if you’re doing the right things in the morning. Do you want to do deep work in the morning, or do you want to get all the important calls in the morning?
Or do you want to have this very important meeting always first thing Monday morning? Or do you say, “No, I am better on Thursday at 4:00 p.m.” Think of what feels better to you. For some meetings you’ll say, “I don’t need them every week. I need them every two weeks or every month.” Don’t see it as cast in stone, but play with it. To schedule meetings well, think of the rhythm you want throughout the week, the month, and the year.
In the end, we spend so many hours in meetings. See how you can be the architect of your meetings. Try to diagnose meetings like a doctor would: What meetings are OK, healthy, and vibrant, and what meetings are sick and ailing and at the end of their lifetime, for which you might need a different solution. Just give up and say a prayer to end the meeting, “Thank you very much, RIP.”
Try to diagnose meetings like a doctor would: What meetings are OK, healthy, and vibrant, and what meetings are sick and ailing and at the end of their lifetime.
Sometimes we know these meetings just don’t work. We then reorganize them or redesign them. What are the meetings you really like, and how can they be vibrant? For instance, I was working with a CEO who said, “I’m not doing one-on-one reviews anymore. I find it more effective if I have two business unit leaders together while I review them because one also learns from the other one.
“And second,” he said, “I don’t need to be the spark in the wheel. I can be the connector between them. If I hear something cool from one person, I don’t need to say it to the other one. So let’s do more group reviews.” That’s one element of design.
Another CEO I worked with said, “I do meetings differently. I make it very clear if it’s a problem-solving meeting or a decision-making meeting. And people know that in a problem-solving meeting, they have to come up with ideas, input, and whiteboard stuff. But in decision-making meetings, it’s clear I expect a memo. We define the problem, look at three options and their pros and cons, and decide next actions. We also define the risks we need to keep in mind. By scripting your meetings, people know the game plan. And with that, you can increase the effectiveness of a meeting. You then need fewer meetings, have more output, and that’s how you free up your time.”
How to stay energized
Roberta Fusaro: This is so valuable. I think meetings are a pain point across the board, so this is incredibly helpful. Energy is also an important component of personal efficiency, Arne. Besides the usual stuff—getting regular exercise, eating healthier, getting sleep—what else can CEOs do to protect their health?
Arne Gast: In their daily jobs and especially during big transformations, high-stakes situations, with competitors coming, and geopolitical crises, we’d better build “presilience.” If you’re only starting to build resilience, it’s almost too late. You need to be ready for what is coming. Are you training, eating, and sleeping enough so you have extra energy in the tank in the moment when it is needed? But there is always one extra thing I add to that. People often forget about their friends. Research shows that people who are healthy and live longer have a small group of friends around them.
But many executives I work with have been so busy. They’ve moved across many countries; they’ve got children and parents to take care of. They take their friends a little bit for granted. Talking with friends is safe; it’s good, and it can give you some perspective because your old friends can say things like, “Hey, is what you’re doing right?” They often have an ethical perspective on it. They can ask, “Are you still being true to yourself?” Talking to friends is an energizer and a longevity tool, but also a reality check.
And the last one in the energy bucket is around your purpose or your “why.” I think when people work on a transformation, a change program, a merger, or a big turnaround that feels like burdensome work, and you’re near a cliff. The moment you know why you’re doing the work, what you’re building, why you love doing it for your customers, why you love doing it for society, why you love doing it for the people in your building, and it’s a little bit of your own learning school, and you love the learnings you get out of it, and you see things you can get better at, then it’s not so much just a job, but you have more energy to do the work.
Talking to friends is an energizer and a longevity tool, but also a reality check.
When that intent is there, you can stay more resilient, and you have more energy to go through it. Sometimes reflecting, “Do I actually like what I’m doing?” Trying to articulate that feeling and seeing how all the things come together can be very helpful to get the energy needed to do the work you need to do and pick up tasks in the schedule you design for yourself.
Roberta Fusaro: And to your point about connectivity, if you’re still connected with friends or colleagues from when you first started out, maybe they can help remind you what your initial sense of purpose was, because we all have those ideas when we start out in our career. “This is what I really want to do.” And then it changes. Maybe friends and connections can help you pick up that thread along the way.
Arne Gast: I fully agree. People I’ve worked with have what they call a circle of friends, or their mini board, where people keep you honest, and say things like, “Arne, last year you said you were going to do A, B, C. By the way, a year has passed.” I might say, “Yeah, I was busy.” But the response I get could be, “But you’ve been working in this job for five years. When is the moment going to come? If you cannot do this now, when is it going to happen?” They have friendly but hard mirrors. Now that I’m living in the Netherlands, it’s even easier because we are pretty direct. It helps to keep you real.
Roberta Fusaro: How hard or how easy is it to update our personal operating models? In thinking about these elements, is there a way to attack it? Should I start with one section first and then incorporate all the other elements? Does it need to be done all at once? What’s your guidance here for folks who want to do this update?
Arne Gast: There are two different schools of psychology. There’s one school that says to change your mindset first. You think hard about your from–to and then start showing new behavior. There’s another school of thought that says, “Start doing it. Fake it until you think about it.” I like that last school because some things you just need to do, see it as an experiment, see how it works, and then adapt it.
For example, for one project you might say, “You’re highly talented, you’re going to run it. If it doesn’t work out after a month, you can always change it.” Or you might say, “From now on this meeting is going to be once every two weeks instead of once a week. Let’s see how it goes. It’s an experiment. It’s a scientific thing. If it doesn’t work, we’ll change back, or we’ll find something else.”
I think that’s a playful way to look at your schedule and to optimize it. It’s the same as building a new app. Something works, something doesn’t work; through A/B testing, we make it better. That way you’re optimizing all the time. That’s the mentality to step into this operating-model work.
Something works, something doesn’t work; through A/B testing, we make it better. That way you’re optimizing all the time.
Sharing is caring
Roberta Fusaro: I love that active approach because otherwise things just don’t change. You can wait and wait, as we were talking about earlier. Can this approach to achieving personal effectiveness be scaled? Can a leader who updates their own personal operating model then share this approach with others? The question is: Can it have organizational benefits?
Arne Gast: Leaders sharing with leaders or leaders sharing in a group their personal operating model is one of the last taboos we have to break. Often, when we talk about transformations and leadership development, we ask leaders not to come as the boss but as a fellow human being. We ask them to share how they get all the work done. People start sharing: “Every Friday morning, I do this.” Or “I work through my emails like this.” We have all risen to a certain level because we have mastered certain routines and habits. We have our tricks. Sharing them among one another helps everybody become effective.
I work with a company that has a big leadership development program. Everything we do in the program, in the end, comes back to the leadership model. When we ask leaders for fireside chats so they can share, it’s about their strategy, their inspiration, and their purpose.
But it’s also about, “What is your operating model? What are your tricks? And what do you want to learn for your operating model?” That becomes a body of knowledge of how to run the place—what leaders can learn from leaders about how to become more effective and focus on the right things.
Roberta Fusaro: It’s such an incredibly effective system, looking at all the elements in tandem. How have you applied this system to your own personal effectiveness?
Arne Gast: The first thing I always think about is the mandate. I find that’s the hardest because we are often underplaying our potential. I always ask: “With all the resources I have, with all the connections I have, with all the work that needs to be done, what is my real mandate? What could I create? Let’s sit down together and ask if we’re doing the right things. Are we thinking big enough? Are we thinking bold enough?”
If you make it more purposeful, there’s a question we can ask about the future: “What do the children of your grandchildren want us to learn right now?” And then you get into, “What’s the real mandate? What can you create?” The second thing I struggle with in my own operating model is the thing that happened during and after COVID: the time spent on Zoom or Teams.
Before COVID, when I would fly from Kuala Lumpur, where I lived then, to Thailand, that full day I would be in Bangkok. I would speak to clients, work with the team to solve problems, have some coffee, and have a chitchat. It would be a full day focused on that one client, and I would have time in between.
Now with Zoom, you get scheduled left, right, and center. It’s way more fragmented. You focus less, and you don’t see the whole picture. I’m optimizing all the time to be with clients more in a room and not have all the other Zooms going on so I can be there the full day.
The last thing I find hard to balance is life as a parent. I have four amazing children, and they all need attention. They all do great stuff, so I need to visit them and work with them. It’s really inspiring what they do.
As a parent, it’s often hard to take time for your health because you always prioritize a school session over a gym session. At least that’s what I often did. So I’ve been trying to balance that more during the past six months. It’s paying off. I really like it. I get energized. I used to do a lot of sports, but now it’s harder to fit it in because, to me, it feels a little bit self-serving when I make time for that. But, in the end, it might probably be better to take care of myself. Otherwise, I cannot take care of others. I always have a little bit of a “helper” syndrome—to help others before doing stuff for myself.
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