Leadership Lessons from the Road, Part 1

I live and work in an RV, traveling the US, with my two kids, ages 8 and 4, my husband, and a 100-pound Golden Retriever. I’m sure that statement stirs up all kinds of thoughts … about what it means to live and work in an RV, and questions about how we haven’t killed each other yet…

In 2019, we made a big decision to sell our house in Raleigh, NC, and relocate to Sacramento, CA. Instead of going directly there, we thought it would be a cool experience to buy an RV and take our time getting out West.

I’ll spare you the drama of how we hurriedly packed the past 10 years of our lives just as a pandemic stay-at-home order was enacted, not saying goodbye to our friends and neighbors we knew for the 18 years we lived in Raleigh and Durham, and delayed the RV trip to quarantine with my Dad in Alabama for 3 months.

Through all the twists and turns that the COVID pandemic brought, we finally left Alabama in our RV in July 2020. Our six-month trip turned into 14 months and we’re still on the road. We’re looking for a place to settle down, but we haven’t found that place yet (Sacramento is still on the list but not #1). Honestly, we’re not in a hurry.

This tremendous journey has brought many insights. I’ve learned a ton not only about RV’ing but also about myself. I’ve also learned that RV’ing has some parallels to the business world.

I'll start with that first lesson -

“You can do anything, but not everything.” David Allen

There’s so much to see in our beautiful country that it’s easy to get worn out trying to see it all. In fact, after driving 15,000 miles through 24 states, we ARE worn out.

We recently realized we had two options.

Option 1 – Travel constantly, see a lot of places but only see the surface/tourist things, feel rushed, and get exhausted.

Option 2 - We could pick some places as priorities, stay there longer, and get to really know it, and having some downtime along the way.

Ultimately, we had to start prioritizing for our own sanity.

What I’ve noticed while working with many companies is that they are running their business like we were in year one of our RV trip: trying to do too much and exhausting themselves and their employees in the process.

Employees are drowning under the amount of work they have, the back-to-back meetings, the last-minute requests, a senior leader’s pet project, etc. When one more thing is piled onto an employee’s plate, they spend a lot of mental bandwidth wading through the request to figure out where it falls into their priorities. Because it’s all a priority!

These two quotes from a recent resilience training have captured a theme of overwhelm I’m hearing from employees.

EVERYTHING in our dept is a priority. We talk about the need for balance but then try to launch a variety of initiatives on top of everyone's day jobs.

Everything is a priority (at least in the mind of senior leaders).

This takes me back to when I was sitting in a department meeting, excited because the leaders were going to tell us the annual priorities. Guess how many priorities there were? Ten….and that was just one department out of many.

Look, I get it. There are a lot of possibilities, customers to be served, money to be made.

But to make a business run effectively, leaders need to stay crystal clear on what’s essential to the sustainability of the business AND the vitality of the people.

From a corporate goal-setting perspective, here's one idea to consider - add an employee-centered goal. In essence, frame the goal in terms of what needs to happen to grow the business financially while also ensuring that employees’ wellbeing is intact.

I’m not talking about just participation in a wellbeing program but an organizational wellbeing assessment. Or if it’s not employee wellbeing, it can be employee retention, the employee value proposition, etc. Just some measurement of the employees and how they are doing and feeling that is directly connected to a business goal.

Remember – not only does the workload and their leaders' actions impact employees’ work lives, but their personal lives are impacted as well. When work drains them during the day, they don’t have energy for their loved ones on their off time. This is not a sustainable formula for success.

From a leadership perspective, it takes discipline to prioritize and say no to work outside of the core company goals. Leaders may think a request is an easy one, but they generally have no concept of how long a project or task takes and the level of effort required. Also, leaders forget that when they off-handedly make a request, employees add it to their existing workload to make sure it’s done first because a leader asked.

Leaders, to help you take a step back among your own busy-ness, here are a few questions to consider:

• Are you clear on what your team is striving for??
• Are you saying yes to projects to the detriment of your team?
• What are key priorities? What can be pushed to the side?
• When you give someone an assignment, can you tell them when it needs to be done?
• Can you ask your employees how they feel about their workload? If they are overloaded, can you get some clarity about what’s on their plate?

Employees, I know it’s easier to just say yes instead of thinking through how to say no without making yourself look bad. You may need to have uncomfortable conversations and who wants to have those? When your boss gives you an assignment on top of an already heavy workload, here’s my favorite response:

“I would love to get that done for you. Which of my other projects can be sidelined while I work on this one?”

Experts keep talking about taking mental health days, which is awesome, and we need to keep that up. But employees are coming back from their mental health days to work that is piling up and they are quickly getting overloaded again. If we are going to address mental health in the workplace, we can’t avoid one factor – the work itself.

Next week, I’ll share my next leadership lesson from the road – Resilience is a critical skill.