Impossible Deadlines Are Better Than Doable Deadlines. Here’s Why.

Welcome to Leading Disruption, a weekly letter about disruptive leadership in a transforming world. Every week we’ll discover how the best leaders set strategy, build culture, and manage uncertainty all in service of driving disruptive, transformative growth. For more insights like these, join my private email list .

“Charlene, bad news. We need you to redo your presentation.”

The event organizer was apologetic. Turns out, the speaker before me had prepared the same exact topic, so I needed to change my presentation.?

I’d been looking forward to enjoying some downtime in a really fun city, but now I had less than 24 hours to revamp my presentation. Yikes.?

What do you do when you’re facing an impossible deadline? Do you stress out and pull out all the stops to get it done? Or do you pause and think, “Okay, what do I do now?”

On Tuesday’s livestream , I shared why I chose the latter—and how you can use impossible deadlines like this to your advantage. You can also find more about the importance of working in the growth zone by setting impossible deadlines in our lastest research on a new way to lead .

But first, let’s talk about:

Why we need to rethink deadlines

No matter how you feel about deadlines, they are essential to our lives. I know I'd never get anything done if I didn’t have deadlines! I’d keep expanding the possibilities and exploring and pushing that due date back further and further.

Unfortunately, unrealistic deadlines have become a standard management and leadership technique, which is a detrimental way to lead.

Why?

Because they undermine trust.?

We’ve all had a manager say, “We’ve only got one week to get this done.”

Everyone on the team drops everything to meet the aggressive deadline. And they do—but the deliverable isn’t perfect, and everyone is stressed out and exhausted.

That’s when the manager says, “Okay, we’ve got another week to perfect this.”?

What?! They never shared the actual deadline with the team! Suddenly, they’ve created a ton of conflict and mistrust. But if they’d just shared the real deadline, the team would have done it right from the beginning and never lost trust in leadership.

That’s what happens when you have a growth mindset , instead of a demoralized approach, around deadlines. You can use deadlines in a positive way!

Impossible deadlines drive innovation

Let’s say you have a project that would normally be done in ten months. What if you had only eight weeks to do it?? How would you approach the project differently? What compromises would you have to make? Would there be any cost increases??

Usually, if costs and time are constrained, the scope also has to be constrained. You can only deliver on the most essential parts, and asking yourself questions like these helps you get clear on what’s really important—and focus your efforts there. An impossible deadline gives you insight into what’s really important and forces you to get creative when time and resources are limited.?

So instead of thinking of deadlines as absolutes, try seeing them as a thought experiment at the beginning of a project. View them as an opportunity to say: How can we think about this in a creative way? What if we had less time? How would the scope have to change?

Because when you can focus and prioritize and create alignment around what's truly important, you create trust, which is where innovation, ingenuity, and disruption happen.

How to make impossible deadlines possible

Let’s be honest: When you’re up against a tough deadline, something has to give—the time, the cost, the scope—because trying to deliver the same thing in the same amount of time with the same amount of resources is, well, impossible.?

So how can you think about setting possible deadlines that still drive ingenuity? Here are three things to keep in mind:

• Take care of yourself. We’ve all been there. We get an impossible deadline and we skip lunch, we stay late, we go in early. But you have to take care of yourself and focus on your well-being. If you don’t eat, sleep, drink water, and get plenty of sleep, you won’t be at your best. Once you have those constraints in place, then you can ask yourself, “How much time can I devote to this? How much effort can I realistically put in?”
• Focus on the essentials. You know the 80/20 rule: 80% of the value is created with 20% of the effort. So it makes sense to focus on that 20%, right? Ask yourself, “Is there anything we can strip out? How do we change the scope? How do we work with the existing time constraint and the resources we have available?”
• Pull in resources. It’s easy to think the entire project falls on your shoulders. But you don’t have to take this on alone! Other people can help, so think about what resources you can tap. Who else can you involve?

When I looked at the constraints of my impossible deadline, I realized I knew exactly what the audience needed so I focused on the biggest takeaways I could share. From there, I created a presentation that delivered on that. And I gave myself a little kindness. I prioritized going out to lunch and taking a walk, which (counterintuitively) gave me even more focus.

That’s exactly what I’ll be talking about next week: the role of kindness in leadership and why it’s so important if we want to be disruptive leaders today. I’ll see you next Tuesday, June 21 at 9 am PT !

Your Turn

During the livestream, I shared how impossible deadlines actually drive the innovation and ingenuity that create disruption. So I’d love to hear how you use deadlines to drive disruption. Do you set impossible deadlines? What have you learned from them? Please share your experience in the comments!?