October 2026 | The Glasshammer

Resource Like a Leader: Optimize Your Energy and Time

As a leader, managing your time and energy expenditure is essential. But when it comes to the capacity equation, not all time holds equal value—particularly, your ability to discern how to allocate energy in a way that is impactful and fulfilling matters.

Sometimes, a workplace drains you because you’re simply in the wrong job for your personality and skills. If you thrive in varied, interactive, and fast-paced environments, then a role based on autonomy and structured routine work will not stimulate you. Likewise, if you need order, clear rules, and practical goals, you are going to be stressed in a context of spontaneity, frequent change, and vague directives.

But inside of any current leadership role, there’s also the subtler calibration of motivation and impact within how you spend your days. Being a leader involves making increasingly discerning choices on where you pour your own energy and where you draw upon delegation and support.

Your Time Is a Non-Renewable Asset

In the book Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Time, and Build Your Empire, Dan Martell advises entrepreneurs on applying mindset shifts and systems that enable them to move from a do-it-all-yourself approach toward focusing primarily in high-value work that brings them energy and fulfillment.

Because no matter whether you’re an entrepreneur or a leader, trying to do everything yourself inhibits your ability to lead and cultivate growth. According to Martell, time is the only non-renewable asset, and you can’t afford to spend yours unwisely.

As an entrepreneur, this means that you reach a certain point where you are wise to “buy back your time” by hiring others to do routine and repetitive work so you can reclaim more freedom and energy for the high-value work you excel in and enjoy. When you free your time, the energy you have to pour back into the work increases.

As a leader within an organization, buying back your time may look different than to an entrepreneur, but the same principles apply. The question is how do you know what high-value work you both enjoy and excel at?

What Are Your Areas of Working Genius?

Assessment tools are priceless when it comes to gaining insight and self-awareness around your working style, such as The 6 Types of Working Genius from Patrick Lencioni, which is one tool we use for executive and organizational coaching.

While every work area is essential for any endeavor in the office, some will come more naturally to you and be more enjoyable. The six types of working genius are:

Wonder: identifies the need for improvement or change
Invention: generates new ideas or solutions
Discernment: assesses the merit and workability of the idea
Galvanizing: generates enthusiasm and action around the idea
Enablement: initiates support and assists in the implementation of the idea
Tenacity: commits to ensuring that the idea or solution gets completed and that desired results are achieved

For each of these working areas, you have a certain level of natural proficiency and extent to which these tasks give you energy or drain you, relative to others.

Working Geniuses – The two areas in which you are most naturally gifted and from which you derive energy and joy.
Working Competencies – The two areas in which you are capable and don’t mind doing for a limited time, as they neither give you energy nor drain you.
Working Frustrations – The two areas that do not come as naturally to you, and tend to drain your energy and steal your joy.

If you spend all your time on working competencies, you’ll eventually grow bored and restless to apply your more energizing capacities.

If you spend a good deal of time on working frustrations, you’ll be highly dissatisfied and weary with your job.

Ultimately, you want to play to your working geniuses as much as possible, so that both your impact in the work, and your energy behind it, will be expansive.

Discerning What to Prioritize and What to Delegate

Knowledge is power, and when you know what areas light up for you, it’s instructive for guiding what roles and environments you choose, how you lead yourself, and how you develop and organize within teams.

There are many reasons why we don’t delegate, such as a fear of losing control or fear of losing quality. But, stop to consider the opportunity cost of spending a lot of time on working frustrations and working competencies—it’s more costly than you realize.

Martell suggests the DRIP matrix for evaluating how to re-organize your energy and time to prioritize the enjoyable work where your impact (or income) is increased.

Delegate (D): Delegate what tends to drain you and has low-value impact. These are often administrative tasks which can effectively be handled by another.
Replace (R): Some tasks are high-value impact but personally drain your energy. While you may have to do these to begin with, you’ll eventually want to find others, who are energized by these tasks, to support you. If you can overcome the hesitation to let go, replacing will serve your ability to hone your impact.
Invest (I): For those areas which are low-value in immediate impact but still nurture and energize you—such as fun work tasks, time with family, or exercise—you will want to invest time. It will motivate you, help with burnout, and one day, it will pay off.
Produce (P): When it comes to high-value tasks that energize you and that you also enjoy, this is your impact zone—which you protect by delegating and replacing other tasks. You want to expand the time you spend in this realm.

For every entrepreneur or leader, the DRIP process can be difficult and requires trust. But slowly and iteratively loosening your grip on the work you could be doing less of may be one of the most powerful professional decisions you make.

Crossing DRIP With Areas of Working Genius

Knowing your working geniuses (take the assessment here) can really inform how you apply the actions of the DRIP matrix approach at work.

Your working frustrations are where delegating (D) and replacing (R) may make all the difference. You’ll want to delegate chasing invoices (Tenacity) and perhaps you can seek out an ally to bring the entire department on board (Galvanizing) if these skills are working frustrations for you.

With freed up time, your working geniuses are going to be your high-value production (P) zone, where you focus on owning and expanding. So if your working geniuses are Wonder (sensing what’s missing or could be better) and Invention (generating new ideas), you’ll want to focus on and expand opportunities to explore new visions and evaluate big strategic ideas.

Working competencies may increasingly fall into the delegate territory, or replace territory, as you step higher in leadership. Just because you can do them well enough doesn’t mean you should still be doing these tasks in your current position.

The more you advance, the more it matters to invest (I) in what sustains you, as it will help build energy for your geniuses/production zone.

You’ll want to elevate the application of your working geniuses as you rise—if one is Enablement, can you focus on enablement in strategic partnerships while others manage some of the team-level enablement of individual members?

Beyond self-awareness, the key is also knowing other’s working genius areas in your teams. Believe it or not, someone actually enjoys and is energized doing the work that drains you. The most effective team dynamics play collaboratively on everyone’s complementary geniuses.

Leading With Your Time and Energy

As a leader, one of the marks that you’re on a path of growth is your willingness to divest your energies from where they no longer are as valuable or effective.

It’s another step to know what you’re truly gifted at as a leader and to put the weight of your leadership behind it. But it’s this very career move that may reward you the most, both professionally and personally.

By: Aimee Hansen is a writer, facilitator, and co-author of This Book Is a Retreat. She has contributed to The Glass Hammer for over a decade.

October 22, 2026/by The Glass Hammer

Allison Lurton: General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer of Futures Industry Association

People, Voices of Experience

By Jessica Darmoni

“As a lawyer developing policies, we bring meaningful change to the market, but it has to be logical and the new rules need to move our markets forward,” says Allison Lurton. “Everyone in this market is a steward of it, and we want to make sure that any change we introduce drives responsible innovation.”

Lurton looks at how rule changes and new market structures may impact the capital markets ecosystem in her role at the Futures Industry Association (FIA). However, she wasn’t always involved in policy and advocacy; Lurton started her career in product liability litigation. She held roles in the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Her litigation experience proved valuable and paved a journey crossing law, policy, regulation and financial markets.

Learning the Markets from the Ground Up

Lurton learned early in her career that moving forward sometimes meant stepping into unfamiliar territory. Her first role put her on a large litigation team representing cigarette manufacturers, but an opportunity through a friend who had moved to the DoJ gave her the chance to take on greater responsibility.

She joined the DoJ in 1999, gaining trial and case-management experience before making another significant move in 2003, this time to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). She arrived with strong litigation skills, but little familiarity with the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) or the intricacies of commodities markets.

“The CFTC had been using magistrates but were looking to hire people with experience in federal court and litigation,” she says. “At the time, there weren’t a lot of school or academic courses focused on commodities trading so many of us were unfamiliar with the CEA. We were learning the markets from the ground up.”

For Lurton, that meant learning directly from the people operating within them. She interviewed traders and market participants, learning about commodities markets, their structure and complex cases along the way. One investigation involving natural-gas market data and alleged fraud provided an especially intensive education when Lurton found herself learning about arbitrage strategies while interviewing traders.

Litigation vs Advocacy

“I had started as a litigator but found myself drawn toward policy and advocacy,” she notes. “They require different skills. Litigation can be highly adversarial, while policy work requires listening to different perspectives, understanding the broader system and finding a way forward.”

After leaving the CFTC, Lurton returned to private practice in 2011. She worked on issues surrounding the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act, and swap execution facility rules.

In 2012, one of Lurton’s mentors and colleagues, the former Acting Chair of the CFTC Walt Lukken, joined the FIA as CEO and Lurton joined in 2013 under his leadership. She currently oversees all legal aspects of the trade organization. This includes examining how government rules affect FIA members and the broader cleared derivatives industry as well as managing all the legal needs of a global company

An Interdependent Ecosystem

Lurton’s work requires her to think beyond individual rules and consider how changes affect an interconnected market structure. Clearing, exchanges, intermediaries and technology providers all form part of the same ecosystem. It is this view that has shaped her perspective on responsible innovation.

“I like structures of clearing rules now because they are interdependent. A change in one area can have consequences elsewhere” she explains. “It is really important that the industry is making sure that one small change will not impact the overall system.”

For Lurton, supporting innovation does not mean resisting regulation or standing in the way of new ideas. The challenge is finding ways for new asset classes, technologies and market structures to fit responsibly into an existing framework while preserving the parts of the system that are essential to its stability.

Lurton leans on her past work when drafting comment letters for the FIA.

“I consider not only what the industry wants to say but how those arguments would hold up if the issue was litigated,” she says.

Combatting Career Doubt

Lurton’s leadership philosophy extends beyond market structure expertise. She acknowledges that self-doubt is something leaders can experience at any stage of their careers. Her answer is to recognize that leadership is not an individual exercise.

“The best outcomes come from a group of people expressing their views,” she says. “You do not have to know everything in the room to have something valuable to contribute.”

Lurton emphasizes the importance of appreciating the expertise of colleagues and contributing what you know to a larger discussion. This message is particularly important for women navigating industries where they may sometimes feel they need to prove themselves before speaking up.

“Take up space,” she advises. “Take the seat you want in a meeting without hesitation.”

Her advice for future leaders is straightforward:

“Even experienced professionals walk into rooms where they are encountering something new. That should not be a reason to remain silent. Instead, it can be an opportunity to ask questions, share a perspective and learn from others.”

Lurton has not moved forward in her career by having every answer from the beginning. She continued to learn, adapted to new opportunities and grew the confidence to take her place in the room.

October 13, 2026/by The Glass Hammer

Executive Presence: Four Communication Hacks To Improve Your Leadership Impact

Career Advice, Career Tip of the Week!

Let’s argue you are already well-versed in effective communication skills as a leader. You’ve cultivated self-awareness and emotional intelligence. You listen actively. You are mindful of body language and nonverbal cues. You consider different perspectives. You ask open-ended questions to encourage dialogue and paraphrase to ensure understanding.

You begin with clear communication objectives. You know your audience and your context and hone your communications strategy. You lead with the point rather than bury it. You are clear and concise, as well as conscientious of tone. You substantiate your argument. You bring in storytelling. You anticipate questions, challenges, and counter-arguments.

You cultivate psychological safety. You set clear objectives, priorities, agendas, and roles. You steward the conversation and invite and encourage feedback through different avenues. You ensure all team members are clear on decisions, actions, responsibilities, and timing.

So far so good, right? Undoubtedly, you can witness areas where you could improve your command of these skills. And let’s go further. Because powerful communication also involves how effectively you convey leadership, including how you shape the quality of conversations happening around you.

1. Leverage the Pause

One of the quickest ways you can diminish the power of your voice or your stance is to steal the space immediately after you made a point. Because truth needs room to land.

There is leadership gravitas in the pause that can happen before, between, or after your words, but too often we are the first to steal it out of discomfort with silence. Let your words land. Holding your presence through the pause conveys being grounded in your leadership without seeking immediate validation, slipping in caveats, or rushing to move on.

If you’re opening the room for questions, a ten second pause (far longer than may feel comfortable) can even activate engagement. It shows executive composure and provides processing time for others to formulate better thoughts.

Equally, practice letting the words of others land for you. That pause before response conveys emotional intelligence and has the potential to improve decisions.

2. Cultivate the Language of Candor Around You

“As you arrive to a real senior level, you will start to understand that people are going to have a hard time disagreeing with you. They tend to give you filtered information,” advised Geline Midouin. “If you know that, you can be much more deliberate and intentional in terms of how you ask questions, to make sure that you’re getting the real story and understanding different perspectives.”

Not everyone has the guts to speak truth to power, so as you rise as a leader, try to become aware of how others edit themselves around you. Who used to challenge you and no longer does? Who no longer shares their half-baked ideas? What assumptions are not scrutinized?

Recognize that people may contort in subtle ways to stay in your favor. At this juncture in your journey, you have an opportunity to elevate communication to improve the quality of ideas, thoughts, and opinions that circulate in your presence.

In HBR’s “How the Best Leaders Shape Conversations,” authors Alison Wood Brooks and Andy Atkins iterate the importance of building an environment that invites candor: “Leaders play a critical role in creating the conditions for candid conversation. They model intellectual humility, invite disagreement, acknowledge uncertainty, and respond thoughtfully when others raise difficult issues.”

As a leader, you set the norm for asking questions that draw out unvoiced perspectives, dissenting points of view, and concerns brewing beneath the surface. Equally, how you respond to difficult and challenging perspectives matters.

Responding with curiosity sets a tone that invites people to raise and share diverse or controversial viewpoints: shutting them down or responding with defensiveness discourages the sharing that leads to fertile friction.

“The most consequential leadership failures are often not caused by bad ideas—they’re caused by important truths that never get voiced,” writes Brooks and Atkins.

Example phrases to encourage disagreement or candor may include:

“What viewpoints are we missing?”
“What would be a contrary point of view?”
“What evidence would change our current approach?”
“The risk I would see with that approach is…”
“Can anyone make a counter-argument against my recommendation?”

3. Become Aware of Your “Sender” and “Receiver” Tendencies

No matter how good of a speaker or listener you may perceive yourself to be, and listening skills are one place where we often overestimate ourselves, here’s a newsflash: nobody (yes, nobody) comes to communication from a neutral place.

At the very least, you are oriented to the tendencies and biases of your particular behavioral DISC profile, which may alter by context. You may be prone to decisiveness and impatient for the punchline. You may be socially expressive and driven by relationship influence. You may be inclined to avoid confrontation and seek harmony. You may be oriented to prioritizing details and analysis.

You are most likely a mix of qualities, but your prevalent tendencies have both strengths and pitfalls, both as a speaker and equally—if not more crucially as you rise up the ranks—as a recipient of incoming information. For example, perhaps you are inclined to dismiss a good idea for the way its packaged, and that’s a blindspot.

Becoming self-aware of your behavioral profile and communication style, and knowing how your inclinations intensify under stress, is critical for leaders who oversee team dynamics.

Try out these receiver challenges:

When someone says something you disagree with, don’t formulate your response until you can state their argument in a way they’d say is fair.
Next time you hear what you perceive to be a bad idea, ask what value could be harvested from the thinking.
When you receive criticism you don’t like, ask whether there’s anything useful to glean

4. Demonstrate the Difference Between Influence And “Airtime”

The most powerful contribution in the room is not always the one that dominated the conversation or occupied the most airtime. In fact, as you rise in leadership, your success depends more on your ability to listen, to distill, to discern, to diffuse, and to direct. Steering the dialogue and drawing out necessary viewpoints from the team is an art.

While it should arguably always be so, the value of your voice in the room is not measured by how much you contributed to a discussion, but what changed as a result of your contribution. Communicative effectiveness is not about performance but impact.

How well did you set the objectives and parameters to stay on topic? How did you provoke thought? How did you elevate the quality of the conversation? How did you steer through conflict and complexity to innovative thinking and solutions?

Questions are helpful to gather information and insight, but they can also be leveraged as a leadership instrument. The ability to formulate a powerful question is invaluable to steering teams, and indeed can even become part of your leadership brand.

Examples of questions that may open and redirect:

What would have to be true for this idea to work?
What assumptions are we making here?
What potential outcomes are we not considering?

As you rise in leadership, your communication sets a cultural tone and model for others, not only in how they approach you, but in catalyzing how conversations unfold all around you.