Ten Pounds of Crap in a One-Pound Bag

“Change is hard because people wear themselves out … what looks like laziness is often exhaustion.” —Chip Heath

 Busyness Doesn’t Equal Productivity

We live in a world that promotes and celebrates busyness. Think about it. How many times have you heard co-workers brag, “During my day off, I ran 20 miles!” Or, what about the people who repeatedly boast about how little sleep they get because they are so busy? While on the surface, busy looks like an effective metric for productivity and success, it can do more harm than good—yet it is consistently and positively reinforced in society.

 In most cases, people feel pressure to multitask in order to meet their work and leisure commitments. However, studies show that (for the majority of us) our brains are actually incapable of multitasking, especially when it comes to the types of activities required of knowledge workers. In addition, when people don’t have time to focus, it is hard to find the discretionary effort required to learn about and adopt new changes. As a result, many opportunities and returns on investments are never realized.

 The most successful leaders connect people to purpose AND ensure their team has the time required to do the job right. Otherwise, frenetic environments promoting the trivial many will result in overwhelmed team members who resist change and hate going to work.

 So, now that we’ve adequately defined the time challenge, how can change leaders enable their people and organizations for success? In my experience, there are really only two logical solutions: 1) Ensure people are focused only on the critical elements (“The Vital Few”) of the business and nothing more; and/or 2) Accommodate the needed time (i.e. backfills, schedule time) to adapt to and adopt a new change.

 The Vital Few

In mathematics, the theory of optimization basically says one thing will come at the cost of another. There is a technique called linear programming, which is used to find the best solution with limited resources to maximize profit or minimize cost. The key to both points is this: when you manipulate one variable it changes the impact of other variables. This isn’t an assumption, it is MATH! Yet, when allocating their people’s time to work efforts, leaders often ignore it. And unfortunately, this leadership approach often results in over-extended and exhausted team members.

 As Greg McKeown brilliantly points out in his book Essentialism, “The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality.”

 I’m an ardent believer of the “Vital Few,” which comes from the Pareto Principle: 80% of the return will come from 20% of the effort. When leaders build a “Vital Few” discipline into their culture, they provide clarity and prioritization. This frees their team members time to focus on the new Thing or change that means the most to the organization. There are some fairly easy and straightforward techniques for identifying the “Vital Few,” but I’ll save that for a future blog.

 Accommodate the Needed Time

Maybe you and other leaders in your organization feel your teams are already working on (only) the highest priority projects and tasks. Yet, you keep hearing people say they just can’t keep up, let alone take on any new work. So, how can you really know it’s time to put less crap in a bag? One way to know is by completing a time and motion study. Leaders usually see this practice as an overwhelming task, unless they happen to work in manufacturing or have strong industrial engineering support in their business. While it’s absolutely the best way to understand what is required of people to manage their jobs effectively from a time perspective, I recognize very few companies and leaders are willing to take this step.

 In lieu of doing this kind of industrial engineering work, leaders can perform an easy, high-level analysis of the incremental effort required by a new change initiative. I call the outcome the Capacity Index, which is detailed in The Nitty Gritty chapter at the end of my book, People Before Things. The Capacity Index can be used as a relative measure to understand how heavy (or light) a change will be from a time commitment standpoint—relative to other changes being implemented in the organization. This information is pretty powerful at an individual change initiative level, but even more helpful at a portfolio level.

 A given leader may only be responsible for pushing a major change or two throughout the course of a year. However, the impacted team members may be receiving dozens of changes during the same period of time from other leaders. Having a macro view of those changes and being able to provide a monthly Capacity Index roll-up will help leaders prepare for the times of year which may be more heavily weighted with change than others. Said another way, when implementing a new Thing is VITAL to the business, it may make sense to clear the decks of other new Things to ensure the total team is doing a great job with the vital one.

 This approach doesn’t have to be an all or none proposition. However, the closer you get to offsetting the time and effort required to take on a new change, the more likely you will achieve your expected outcome(s).

That’s what enabling people for change and leadership is all about: It’s about taking action in the best interest of your team. And it’s about putting their needs in front of unrealistic expectations of discretionary (and heroic) effort.

Chris Laping is the author of the newly released book, People Before Things. He is also the Co-Founder & CEO of People Before Things, LLC, a company focused on helping leaders create the conditions required to support large-scale, disruptive change. His blogs and book explore the connection of human experience to the outcomes of change and transformation and the role leaders play to pave success. To join the conversation, follow @CIOChris and @pplb4things on Twitter.