Take a chill pill
This week: Learning to hold back to aid in learning, enforcing down time, and the contagious nature of crises. Plus, redeeming the growth mindset. Originally published at https://duhaone.substack.com/p/take-a-chill-pill
Leadership Moment: Holding Back
I was riding my Peloton, which has as a feature the ability to watch the output of your fellow riders around the world. In this class, the instructor was alternating high output work blocks with low output recovery times. As usual, I noticed an interesting person, whose average output matched mine (so we were often near each other on the leaderboard), but whose point-in-time output rarely was the same as mine. During work blocks, my output soared over theirs. During recovery windows? They weren’t taking breaks, and they’d catch up and briefly pass me.
I think a lot about folks like that (and maybe they have a reason), and wonder if the competition of the leaderboard is getting in the way of their development. Rather than recovering for a while, to let them push harder during work intervals, they are never taking a break. Hopefully that’s seeing some benefit for them, but I suspect it’s less than they’d get if they approached exercise not as a competition, but as a development opportunity. They’d have a lower output today, but I think their output would grow faster over time.
Teams often have a similar dynamic. If for any piece of work, you always put your most appropriately skilled person on the job, you’ll certainly provide the greatest output you could that day. But you’ll miss the opportunity to develop other people, and to let some of your staff get a break … and in the future, you’ll have a lower output than you otherwise could.
One Minute Pro Tip: Enforce down time
We’ve all had that co-worker who is having an awful day. Maybe it’s personal: someone is sick in the family, or they’re in the middle of a messy divorce, or maybe their basement just flooded. It could be work-related: an important project was killed, or an upcoming deadline is making everyone just a little off-base. Either way, your co-worker’s bad day is actually getting worse. They’re so stressed by their situation that they aren’t being usefully productive, and that’s making them more stressed.
Send them home. Maybe they’re already home because they work remotely, but you get the idea. Have them convert the time they are wasting at work into time they are using to recover and recharge. Help them not dig themselves into a deeper hole. Even if you don’t pick up work for them, just telling them that it’s okay to take care of themselves will help improve their long-term abilities.
Chapter Teaser: Crises beget crises
Ch 54: If you spend all your time fixing crises, you aren’t averting future crises.
When a crisis hits you by surprise (do they hit you any other way?), there is a natural tendency to do just enough remediation work to get the crisis out of “hair on fire” mode, and then return to the urgent work that you were already doing. The fixes, after all, are really easy to spot and slap quick bandages on them.
Sadly, in most modern systems, they are so complex that a crisis happens not because one thing went wrong, but because a lot of little hazards piled up, and everything went wrong or took effect at the same time. We latch onto the hazard we know best (maybe the one we’ve always wanted to get fixed), and drive our energy to fixing just that one problem.
Some time later, the crisis’s younger sibling pops up, and it looks almost the same, with just a few details different. It shares a lot of the same underlying problems, and they’re likely to get ignored. Until an organization takes a little time to study its crisis and identify the commonalities where the same problems keep making things worse, they’re doomed to a Sisyphean cycle of cleaning up after similar crises over and over.
Appearances
March 22, webinar, roundtable: Leading the Charge in Managing Cloud Security Risks as a CISO .
领英推荐
March 28, webinar, host: Master Cloud Cost Optimization .
March 30, virtual roundtable, principal: with TechExecs.
April 11, webinar, host: Creating a Cloud Security Strategy .
April 18, 1% Leadership is released!
April 19, webinar chat: Writing your Cloud Opus: A Deep Dive into Orchestrating your Cloud Security Remediation
At RSAC:
April 24: 10:50 am, Telling Fairy Tales to Your Board
April 24: noon, RSAC bookstore, signing books
April 24: 5-7 pm, Welcome Reception, Orca Booth 527, book giveaway & signing
April 25: 7-9 pm, Orca Security Cocktail Reception, Terra Gallery
April 26: 6-9 pm, YL Ventures & Portfolio Companies Reception, Novela
May 7-12: Tel Aviv
May 16: panel moderator, Cloud Security Live
Behind the paywall: Redeeming the Growth Mindset. (This content is available on substack )
Love this. I schedule in downtime now for recharging my own batteries. Try to empower my team to do the same.
Your comment on crises reminds me of something I see when I'm trying as a vendor to help someone improve their IT outcomes to better support their business - often they are so busy fighting fires that they do not have the time to listen to someone trying to sell them smoke detectors and a sprinkler system.