PEr Chronicles: Focus on results, not activities

Wordle - six tries to guess a five-letter mystery word in a similar manner as the guess-the-color game Mastermind. On Nov 1, there were 90 playing it. By the end of December, there were 300,000. During the month of January, the number swelled beyond 10 million. The New York Times recently bought Wordle for over $1 Million.

In Wordle, as in business, having laser-focus increases your odds of success.

Stuff’s not getting done. You’re on the verge of saying, “Screw this.” Before you hit eject, ask yourself this: “Are you going to be part of the Great Resignation?”

Yes, work has been overwhelming lately, and you’re lost touch with why you’re doing what you’re doing. But you can’t quit, right? You have a couple of kids, or 17 years left on the mortgage. Or you just fundamentally like what you do, but it’s a slog to actually get it done. Even thinking about work leaves you exhausted. Unenthusiastic. You’re crispy around the edges. You’re fried.

What to do now: bringing yourself back from being fried is about adjusting how you think and what strategies you use to prevent yourself from getting all burned up again in the future.

98% of the blame is on the workplace. Donald Sull, Charles Sull and Ben Zweig put it this way: “A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of attrition and is 10 times more important that compensation in predicting turnover.” True employers have cut people and left you to pick up the slack, so there’s no way you can shut your laptop at 6pm. The safety net’s full of holes and there’s pressure from up top, and everything has just gotten faster and more expensive. Still, that’s only 98%.

You need to ask yourself, “What’s my 2%?”

Maybe it’s that you can’t say no to anyone. Maybe it’s that you treat everything on your to-do list as equally important, so you’re in the pressure cooker all the time. That’s the stuff that’s going to travel with you from place to place and burn you out again and again.

Meaningful work can burn you out just as much as meaningless work. What you really need from a job isn’t “meaning”; it’s to feel that you have autonomy and competence. It’s the act of deciding how you’re going to apply your skills to gain mastery, for example – that creates meaningful work.

Success only comes from delivering measurable impact. But everyone in business thinks they’re too busy. It’s practically right there in the word itself: busyness. But most people, most of the time, might be less busy if they started to focus on results – and results only. Not meetings. The monotony of sitting through an uninspired staff meeting or conference call would have to rank right up there with the most painful activities of business culture. Not hard work and long hours. Not activity. Not effort. Not reports and presentations. Not writing sales action plans.

Just results.

People often find excuses to not focus on results: you might not hit your goals. And let’s face it, it’s easier to prove that you’re doing a lot of work than it is to show you’re having a lot of measurable impact. But don’t fall for the trap of feeling good about working hard on a lot of different things.

There can’t be more than three or four priorities for any given quarter. If you have more than that, energy will be diffused. But prioritization is notoriously hard for leaders, who can quickly draw up a long list of projects that need to be tackled. I once asked a team to share with me its priorities, and there were 172 items on the list.

To be sure, adopting a “less is more” mindset also can be hard for ambitious executives, who often feel a sense of urgency to accomplish a lot quickly. You simply can’t do everything. There were times I would walk into a new job, and my eyes would be huge and I would feel like a kid in a candy shop. I’d think, Let’s just get after it, instead of “OK, let’s pause. What’s the most important thing to really get after?” Being able to say “no” or “not now” were important lessons for me.

You’ve got to keep control of your times, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life. After all, the art of leadership is saying No, not saying Yes. It is very easy to say yes.