Most of us have way more work coming at us than we can possibly keep up with. We scramble to respond quickly to that email from our boss, to get that presentation ready for Monday, to fix that customer issue, and to unblock anyone who might be waiting on us, only to have the next urgent issue arrive before we finish dealing with the last one.
Getting off the hamster wheel
If you’re like me, you sometimes feel like you’re running as fast as you can without really getting anywhere. Some people call it the corporate treadmill – evoking images of sweaty gruelling exercise. Since I love what I do, and since hamsters are more fun to visualize, I like to call it the hamster wheel instead.
A hamster wheel probably isn’t the best analogy. When I pause to look back, I can see that I’ve made progress in at least some areas, but it seems like I’m still spending a good amount of time running without enough real progress to show for it.
As they say, recognizing the problem is the first step to solving it. It’s easy to get caught up in the busyness of responding to each new request that comes your way. It’s easy to solve lots of point problems without pausing to think about the broader picture. It’s easy to fill every minute of your day with tactical things (pebbles and sand) and never get to the really important strategic things (big rocks).
Truly effective people create slack for themselves. They make time for creativity and strategic thinking. They take continuous improvement to new levels, not by just focusing on how to be more efficient, but by continuously asking themselves how they can be more effective.
Looking for patterns
Annoyance and frustration can be great motivators. Sometimes it’s all too obvious that we’re seeing the same problem or answering the same question over and over. We recognize these things, and sometimes we decide to do something about them. We put up FAQs and How-To pages to head off some of those questions; we suggest a product change to make things easier for users and to head of some of those support calls; we create some automation for that repetitive manual task.
Other times, even though we recognize a pattern, we resign ourselves to the way things are. We tell ourselves that it’s just part of our job and to suck it up. Maybe we think that it isn’t worth the time – or we can’t afford the time – to create that KB article or to automate that task. Or we tell ourselves that we’ll get around to making things better later, but later never comes. The advice here is easy: don’t just suck it up, don’t settle, and don’t complain either. Deliberately take time to improve things. Make a habit out of it.
Checking your assumptions
It’s easy to assume that there’s nothing more you can do. For example, let’s pretend you manage an IT operations help desk team that can’t keep up with incoming tickets. You’ve asked for more people, but the budget and current revenues just won’t allow it. Nothing more you can do, right? Just try to get the highest priority things done first, apologize for the rest, and keep reminding everyone that you’re under staffed. But are there other options? Here are some questions that might help you get started:
- How can you reduce the amount work coming in?
- What work is your team doing that could be self-service?
- Can you make it quicker and easier for people to do more things themselves – or to get help from a peer – than to open a ticket and wait for your team to handle it?
- Can you train some experts outside of your team (deputies) to handle certain types of requests and divert work to them?
- Can you head off requests with more, better, and easier to find (automatically displayed) knowledge base articles, FAQs, and training?
- Can you fix (or get fixes for) the root causes of common problems?
- How can you increase the amount of work getting done?
- Are there ways to make your team more effective and efficient?
- Can you automate more of their regular tasks?
- Can you provide training, tools, checklists and procedures to make it easier for them to handle tickets more quickly?
- Can you identify bottlenecks and invest in improving them to the point that they are no longer bottlenecks?
- Can you challenge and encourage your team on a regular basis to dream up and take action on ways to be more efficient and more effective?
- Can you reserve time for your team to make improvements?
The point is that you shouldn’t assume that the obvious solution – hiring more people to add capacity – is the only solution. Try to look at things from some different angles. Be creative. Brainstorm. You might come up with some options that are better than you could have first imagined.
You’re more powerful than you think
Some people think that they need a fancy title and a bunch of people reporting to them to make a real difference in an organization. I’m not going to say that these things aren’t helpful, especially in more hierarchical organizations, but you can absolutely be a leader and make a difference without them. You’re also much more likely to find yourself promoted later – if that’s something you want – when you demonstrate leadership from whatever position you happen to be in.
Demonstrating leadership doesn’t mean taking control or bossing people around. Manager Tools – an excellent series of podcasts that I highly recommend – talks about 3 types of power in organizations: role power, relationship power, and expert power. Of the 3, role power – the power given to you based on your job description and title – is described as the weakest form of power. Great leaders, regardless of their formal titles, are strong in one or both of the other sources of power. You can increase your influence and ability to effect change much more by cultivating your relationships and your expertise than by directly pursuing a promotion. One of the best ways to increase your knowledge and to improve your relationships is to be helpful and always willing to lend a hand.
Give me a lever long enough
I love improving things. I get a wonderful sense of mastery and achievement from finding and helping others to find innovative solutions to problems that initially seemed impossible or prohibitively expensive to solve. I love turning new ideas into reality and seeing progress over time.
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
— Archimedes
The lever quote from Archimedes is inspirational because it highlights the power of people to make a difference with the right tools, the right approaches, and the right mindset. There are many ways to approach any problem. The trick is to find the lever that gives you the best results.
Save the cheerleader, save the world
In Heroes – a TV series that first aired in 2006 – Hiro Nakamura recognizes his unique powers and leaves behind his ordinary cubicle-dwelling existence to become a hero. He’s determined to learn how to harness his powers so that he can make the biggest difference he can, and he never shies away from danger. Over time, his path, his mission, becomes clearer – crystallizing with a message from his future self:
Save the cheerleader, save the world
— Hiro Nakamura in Heroes
Saving the cheerleader is his lever. If he can achieve this one thing, he’ll save the whole world.
I like to think that we all have our own powers – that we can all be heroes in our own way and that we can all find levers that we can use to make a real difference. Though our efforts and our ingenuity we can help to improve our companies, our communities and our families.
Chance favours the prepared mind
Adopt a mindset that any problem can be solved with enough persistence, effort, and ingenuity. You might be surprised how often solutions present themselves. If you’re always on the lookout for new levers to apply, then you’re sure find some.
One of the best ways, I think, to prepare your mind is to be curious and to develop the habit of asking yourself and others good questions. A good set of questions can help you and others to see the bigger picture. Questions can reveal new avenues to explore, and help you and others to recognize unconscious and limiting assumptions.
Asking others questions when you don’t know the answers is a great way to foster collaboration and to get feedback and suggestions. Asking others questions when you think you do have an answer is a great way to help others to learn and come to their own conclusions – and often for you to learn some great alternate ideas and solutions that you may not have considered before. Asking yourself questions is a great way to help you to reflect and continually focus on what matters most.
The right environment
The practices, mindsets and beliefs that I’ve mentioned in this article are some the most powerful ones I know for helping to improve yourself and the organizations and communities that you’re a part of. You won’t be able to reach your greatest levels of achievement and happiness though if the community or organization you are working with doesn’t want to improve, is change-averse and doesn’t value innovation, or has values that simply don’t align well with your own. To be happy and engaged in an organization, I believe you need two main things:
- The ability to make empowered and appreciated contributions to things you believe in. This requires that you and your organization are well aligned in terms of values and direction, and that your organization values continuous improvement and learning.
- To belong to a community and culture that you enjoy. For most people, this means a helpful, friendly, fun and productive work environment where people genuinely like each other and treat others with kindness and respect.
If you’re working in an organization where you are missing one or both of these things, you need to seriously consider your options. There are many great companies, and a company that’s a great fit for one person isn’t necessarily a great fit for another.
In closing
When I started this article, I was expecting it to be short, but the more I wrote the more it brought to mind so many lessons I’ve learned from great books, articles, and podcasts over the years. Do you have some key lessons you’ve learned on how to be happy and effective that you’d like to share? If so, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section.