Leadership and Learning

Posts Tagged ‘work-life balance’

I don’t know if it’s running anymore, but there used to be a great ad campaign for Duracell batteries that featured the Energizer Bunny. This wind-up rabbit would parade through the scene, beating a drum and just kept going and going and going.

That was the point. The bunny, fueled by the batteries, kept going and going and going.

Starting to sound familiar? Maybe hit close to home?

Here’s a contrast to consider. Today I was on a conference call hearing about a particularly fascinating leadership development topic (the stages of adult development), while an email came in from a colleague attending a conference, where she was having a great time, learning lots and feeling good. She called it awesome.

Many leaders we work with report never having the chance, or to be more accurate, taking the opportunity to step back from going and going and going to restore, refresh, rejuvenate and re-engage themselves. And a week in Cancun once every 365 days doesn’t cut it or count – it has to be more regular than that.

Many leaders I’ve worked with report endless days, inhaling their lunches at their desks, multi-tasking during meetings (which means only partial attention and impaired focus – sorry to tell you), not taking vacation days, thinking about work while talking to their kids, checking email right before going to sleep and right when waking up.

They are clinically burned out. (It is amazing how much information you can glean within a fraction of a second when sitting down to coach someone. Always good to check out and validate, but people who are burned out usually look it, and are usually pretty immediate about admitting it. The body never lies, as Martha Graham said.)

This blog could go on for many pages describing the deleterious effects of all this — most notably, crowding out time for reflection — but I’d prefer to make the pitch. You decide if it works and is worth it.

I believe it is really important for leaders – and everyone else, actually – to intentionally set aside time to renew and restore. I don’t care if it’s learning about something that excites you, working the lathe in your basement woodshop, walking in a nature preserve, volunteering, gardening, cooking a really nice meal, singing, or anything else. The key is that your emotions will tell you if whatever you are doing is helping you to balance the work ship, which is dangerously close to capsizing for many people I know.

I’m also not going to go into the brain and body benefits this brings to work, let alone your life and relationships. Instead, I’m just going to ask you to give it a shot. What is something that fascinates you that you would love to be able to do? What really stands in the way? Could it be your priorities?

I once coached a client who decided to haul his bicycle out of deep storage, clean it up and ride. Somewhere along the way he rediscovered himself.

I recently served on a grand jury, which is definitely some experiential learning. It allows one to discover many facets of the community that may not be encountered so regularly in the course of everyday life.

The way a grand jury works is that you hear many, many case summaries, each of which takes anywhere from less than a minute to just a few minutes. The grand jury only decides if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a trial, not guilt or innocence.

With dozens of cases to hear, the question came up: Should we work through lunch and get out early, or take a break and stay later?

In my experience, almost everybody today advocates for “let’s go faster and get done earlier” under the relentless pressure of the clock. “Hurry up, compress cycle time, be just in time” and “now” seem to be the words of the age.
There was an immediate — I would say almost unconscious — push toward “Let’s get it over with.” So I had to say something.

Having recently read the phenomenal book “The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working,” and knowing what would happen at least to my attention span, energy, blood sugar and focus on an empty stomach, I had to push back.

And so I said, “We could work through lunch, but I think we would feel it later this afternoon. And I don’t think we were brought here to be fast. We were brought here to decide whether many people would be indicted by a grand jury. I think we owe it to them to give our best thinking and decision making.”

The room was quiet for a second. I was ready for pushback, but somewhat surprisingly, they all agreed.

I had a steak and cheese sub. (I know. This was not the best choice, but it was a small sub.) We reconvened after an hour and I would like to think we gave our best effort. We asked lots of questions, had high-quality discussion and worked productively as a group.

It wasn’t our fastest effort. Just our best.

There’s a difference.

It is time to put something in writing that is at the very heart of an unbelievable amount of organizational angst, confusion and turmoil. I hear it in practically every group I work with, and it is extracting a huge toll on employees. Without question, it is worsening.

To kick this off, let’s imagine the prototypical scene when you see an incoming on the work radar, are already juggling multiple priorities, and you ask your boss, “What’s the priority?”

When I ask groups what they hear when they ask their bosses this, the room always answers in unison: “It’s all a priority.”

As my teen daughter would say, “Let’s review.”

First, the root of the word “priority” is “prior.” It means something comes before something else. I don’t know mathematically how everything can come before everything, but then again, I was never very good in math. Maybe it’s just me.

But second, try explaining this concept to anyone managing triage in an emergency room, or to an air traffic controller. It doesn’t make sense.

Third, I can share that when I have worked with effective leaders, there were times when I noticed things not working well in their organizations. Maybe customer service was weak, or IT fragile. When I would bring these to the attention of these leaders, they would quickly acknowledge the situation (rather than denying or blaming). What they also said was where they were currently focusing effort and energy. They said they could not get to these problem areas until other initiatives were finished. Maybe next quarter, or next year. But right now, the focus was being held.

This is discipline, clarity, and more than anything, strategy. This leads us to the next major point.

Michael Porter’s conception of strategy is that it represents the essential choices – the big bets — the organization places in order to succeed. What will happen that operationalizes the best hope the organization has of succeeding? The crucial, vital, unambiguous part of his definition is that this careful choosing is done against the constraint of limited resources. Since the organization can’t do everything, hard choices must be made.

Effective strategists don’t try to be all things to all people all the time. They don’t diffuse and confuse the strategy with efforts that are not aligned. They truly decide what’s a priority and – here’s a new word for you – a “posteriority.” A posteriority is what comes after.

Ever notice how often you hear the word priority, but never posteriority?

But posteriorities are the key to strategy. They represent what the organization is going to say “no” to, at least in the current time period, so that the organization can really embrace what matters.

The next point is about what is called the productivity frontier. The productivity frontier is the maximum output available given the (limited) resource inputs. It is a curve that slopes up and to the right. More resources equal more outputs, but in a non-linear way.

You might be able to violate the productivity frontier in the short run, but it will come back to bite you in the medium and long term, as we shall see. (Another nonsensical expression is working “110%.” If on the perfect day you can only do that amount of work, then that is capacity. That’s all you can do, and that’s 100%.)

The point about all these people trying to do 110% is that they are burning out, and from a sustainability perspective, it is not pretty. Employees virtually everywhere are fried, tired, toast, spent and running on empty. This is not just classroom and dinner party anecdotal evidence. Look at what has happened to the tightened labor force in corporate America, hours worked and productivity levels. In much of the federal government, workloads spiked after the delayering of management in the 1990s, and after 9/11. The squeeze is on.

Further, there are real questions about quality emerging – in products and services, customer service, and everywhere else. Many employees are desperately trying just to respond to everything on their plate, and anything that complicates the transaction becomes a big problem. Minimalist compliance, token efforts and hit-and-runs become commonplace.

If organizations can’t compete without overworking employees, they have a strategy problem.

One problem that prevents an awareness of this is the unidirectional nature of feedback. While managers are trained to give feedback downward, rarely does feedback float up. Organizational, engagement and climate surveys are slowly bringing the problems described above to the fore, but the research is incontrovertible that the higher up in an organization one goes, the less feedback he or she receives, and the less accurate it is.

I hear employees very often talk about the goals that have been set for them, oblivious to the impact those goals will have on them. For example, after another round of layoffs, the existing, remaining staff is simply expected to shoulder the additional workload. It culminates in a story I heard recently. A woman was lamenting a project she had just been handed that required her team – right after her team was reassigned to another area. A crisis had happened elsewhere, but her manager did not want to hear that the project she had been handed couldn’t be done without the vanishing project team. (“Make it happen, Just do it, or “Make the pain go away,” are other crude expressions of non-strategic demands.

Effective leaders don’t make the mistake of trying to do everything. They forge strategy. Telling employees they should do everything makes no sense.