Redefining Success Beyond the Quantity of Work

We have been told to define success through the quantity of work we get done in a week. We have been told to work hard, multi-task, and always be available to be successful.

What if it’s not the quantity of work that matters but the quality of work you do?

The work that moves the organization forward instead of the busy work where you’re always available to respond to messages and immediately pass down information to your teams as soon as you receive it from your boss.

When I was in corporate, I gradually ramped up the number of hours I worked as I took on more responsibilities, something many of you have probably experienced.

I started working 70-plus hours a week, and sometimes more. However, there would also be weeks where I was burnt out and I did nothing at all. I would be at my desk, but actually, I did very, very little.

Here's the thing, when I started looking at being more proactive instead of just reactive. I could take my hours down to 30 hours a week from 70 or 80+ AND double my output.

It's about realizing that the majority of what we do in our day-to-day work feels important but doesn't matter as much.

Sometimes as bosses, we are guilty of passing this on. You’ll get this down from your boss as they expect answers fast and you’ll then expect it from your team.

This then causes everyone to be in reactive mode with minimal impact on the organization and worse, causes burnout and an unfulfilling job.

One of my clients was experiencing this exact struggle when she came to work with me and my team.

She was a talented engineering manager in a midsize company when she came to work with us in The Lit Up Leadership Academy. She was known for being highly dedicated and working really hard but she was always doing "busy" work and not quality work.

Whenever she did or said something to her boss, he would respond with: “Well, that's great but I want to see impact in the organization.”

However, he couldn't pinpoint exactly what he wanted from her. This made her feel really frustrated. She was constantly busy juggling all these requests and tasks, putting out fires but her boss was unhappy and he made it very, very clear to her. So much so that she was worried she would lose her job.

When we dug into this, what did we find?

Her workday was consumed by:

• emails,
• urgent requests,
• last-minute changes.

She prided herself on her ability to handle everything in front of her. It was her gold star. And that was how she experienced satisfaction. She was doing everything and stuck hustling. She was working crazy hours and her boss never seemed happy with her.

Most of what she did, did not align with the company's strategic goals. However, her boss couldn't articulate this to her.

Key projects were stalling because of all the reactive work that was going on, which was a legitimate problem. The initiatives that were going to keep the company aligned with the future direction of this industry she was in were falling by the wayside.

Her team mirrored this approach too. They all focus on the immediate tasks and lost sight of the long-term objectives. It even changed their sprint cycles.

The danger when working this way is that even the strategic planning gets pivoted away from the long-term objectives.

We identified:

• a lack of prioritization,
• the inability to push back on non-essential tasks and
• a failure to celebrate progress on the important but slower-moving projects.

So we started working on priorities by having regular one-to-one meetings with her boss where they discussed and prioritized tasks.

She also learned how to push back on everything coming her way and ask for clarity on what was truly important.

Essentially, these meetings gave her boss a really good insight into what he should be passing down to her.

This allowed her to immediately better align her team with her company's strategic goals. Over a period of about a month, my client helped her boss and then her team to recalibrate. She also encouraged her team to push back on swift tasks and taught them how to assess tasks based on strategic importance. She was coaching her team through this and collectively they identified the key projects that they could deliver for the company.

One of the things that always strikes me as undervalued in most organizations is celebrating. This is where she really excelled. I always start every coaching conversation with: "What are we celebrating today?" and she took this to heart.

She was celebrating the small wins and progress on tricky long-term projects. She took the time to recognize and reward her team's efforts in tackling the challenges and of course, morale went up. Everyone stayed motivated and made fewer mistakes. They found that they needed less QA and less quality control.

One of the key things that she did was to focus on teaching first and then coaching. Her team had to learn the tools to analyze how important something was and learn the phraseology to say: "Hey, I think this is something we need to pause on here, and here's why."

Then it was about coaching until it was instilled in everyone. It took a good four months to really get the team empowered to make these better decisions and focus on that high-impact activity. Initially, they thought they knew the theory but embedding it and changing how they operated so they interacted with the rest of the organization took time.

Although we had an almost instantaneous impact, Emily was in this for four to five months. A month for us to diagnose and work through the initial implementation and immediately we saw results but for the long-term change because she had to realign her team.

But here's the upside her team is no longer just busy. They are productive in many ways. She's doubled her team size and is now a VP of engineering. She feels fulfilled even though she's got way more responsibilities now. She's less stressed. She's making a real difference. And she's got a promotion while working fewer hours.

I'm hoping, that through this story, you're learning how tempting it is to be in reactive mode and how important it is to focus on what truly matters and how to make that lasting impact in an organization.

Prioritization, communication, and celebrating true success come from the right work and impact, not just presenteeism.

You can take this and start implementing it today. You can start doing more meaningful work. You can figure out which outcomes are going to be more sustainable for the organization.

Here are some questions to ask yourself.

• Do you have a week for prioritization?
• Do you have clear, achievable goals?
• Do you and your team know how to say no?
• Do you know how to push back?
• Do you coach your team on how to push back? (I love giving people stock phrases for saying: "hey, I need some time to assess that.")
• Does your team know how to demonstrate to those around them the impact that they're making?
• If not, why not?
• Do you know how to demonstrate to your boss the power of not being available for a short period? (Half a day you're not in email or on Slack, and the phones are available only for emergencies)
• Does your team know how to escalate in an emergency if it is genuinely needed?

To conclude: take the time, prioritize, celebrate more, coach your team on time blocking, having similar work tasks in one block, and making sure that those blocks include the strategic goals. Have time every day to deal with communications but in blocks rather than throughout the day. And Lastly, celebrate the work that really matters even the tricky stuff.

I'm a huge, huge believer in quality first, not quantity. And I would love to hear how you're getting on. If you're feeling stuck on this drop me a DM on LinkedIn. I respond to all of them.

And if you need to book a call with me and my team, we will be happy to give you some top tips, and tailored advice just for you. You can book a call with us here .