I have too much work – Part 4: Boundaries and deciding whether to walk away

Photo by liu yi on Unsplash

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• The problem: You are drowning in work and don’t have enough team members to get it all done.
• Why it matters: Your strong work ethic isn’t enough to help when you just have too much to do. You need some deliberate strategies for a re-set.
• The solution: In the concluding part of this series, we’ll explore how to practise taking pauses before accepting more work, learn the art of saying no, and explore when it may be time to leave.

This last article in my series for apolitical.co is about trying to protect your commitment to your core work after you have finished your analysis as well as a reminder that, unfortunately, not every situation can be saved.

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Before you take on more, practise taking a pause

To protect your gains on confirming your core work, you may have to give yourself permission to pause and not give an immediate answer to requests to add more work to the pile. 

This may be a shift from your regular, quick-fire ‘on it’ approach to your work and you may have to signal that you are changing your ways. Specifically, you may need to say something along the lines of, “I know I normally come back to you really quickly, but I need a bit more time on this one to sort out how it fits with other things we have on our plates.”

Useful pauses come in many forms, including the request to come back with a response/assessment on something later in the day or week. You can also honour the request while asking for more time to ponder:

• “That’s a great idea – I’d like to take it back to the team to see how we can make it happen.”
• “I agree that that could be useful. I’d like to confer with my colleagues to see how to get what you are looking for.”
• Or simply – “Let me come back to you on that.”

If you really can’t buy a few hours or days, you most certainly can buy a few seconds – at a minimum, you are sending the signal that this ask is worthy of some focused deliberation. 

Consider if you can say no to more work

More boldly, you may need to try to start saying ‘no’ to additional work. Many years ago a coach suggested that I read the book The Power of a Positive No by William Ury and I refer back to my notes often. We often avoid saying no when we need to by being accommodating (a victim of success), or we say no poorly by attacking. Maybe your ‘no’ won’t be accepted and you’ll need a plan but Ury suggests that you try a ‘positive no’.

A positive no has three components – a yes, a no and a yes. 

You say yes to a value that is important to you – “I want to do a good job on this”, “We have committed to honouring Ali’s extended leave to care for his dad after his heart surgery.”

A positive no has three components – a yes, a no and a yes. 

This is followed by a ‘no’ or a ‘not right now’ with politeness, a reliance on facts and explanation of shared interests. 

And then ends with another yes on what you can deliver: “We think we can deliver the outline for Friday,” or “We can give the raw material to Laaraib’s group to give them a leg up, etc.” 

Not every situation can be saved

You may have been in the trenches diligently trying many of the strategies from this series and more and be no closer to your goal of being on top of things. It may be time to depart as elegantly as you can. Maybe the work culture is one where long days, late nights and weekend work is part of the mix. Maybe you could pull this off at one point but now you have a small kid, an ill parent or are managing your own health issues. 

I return to this article on The Guardian many times a year about the top five regrets of the dying to ground me about what matters in the long term. Of the five regrets on the list, a few may resonate if you are sitting with the go/no go decision:

The most common regret of all: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

As well as, for men especially: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard,” including missing children’s youth and a partner’s companionship. 

If you need to depart, feel confident that the efforts you made most likely improved the situation and your successor will inherit a better situation than you did. 

This is the last in a four-part series (here is the apolitical landing page) about strategies to help you if you are drowning in work and short-staffed. With luck, you found something within it to support you in your particular situation.

Here are the other parts re-posted to this blog:

Introduction

Part One: Diagnose why you are here and buckle down for the journey

Part Two: Assess capacity and decide if you need to re-set

Part Three: Asking for help and seeking out additional tools

I have too much work – Part 2: Assess capacity and decide if you need to re-set

Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash

This is the second blog in a series for apolitical.co on how to cope when you have too much work.

In part one of this series, we discussed diagnosing why you think you are in a pickle, clarifying mandate and ‘must dos’. Now we will discuss trying to ‘right-size’ your existing commitments, assessing capacity, and finally, if needed, making the pitch for a re-set. 

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You’ve assessed the ‘must dos’, now move to assessing capacity

Once you clarify the mandate and the must-do list, and have clarified musings vs. taskings, next you can also assess if the core work must be completed in the way originally envisaged. 

Take a step back: I have found engaged public servants ruthless about getting the job done as well as their pursuit of taking their products to the top level. This is a testament to the calibre of our workforce and their work ethics. That said, when you are underwater, this might be the moment to take a step back and see if expectations can be re-calibrated.

Firstly, think about whether you can rescale one or more of your projects. Assuming you still need to deliver, think about how to make (and show) progress while re-considering your original level of ambition. 

Showing progress versus completion: I remember one time in my career when the big boss made several requests around advancing the implementation of a large project and my stress level was rising. He was making reasonable requests but we needed more time to do the detailed mapping that he was requesting. I began to wonder if we could do just as much to assuage his asks by trying to address an underlying concern and entering the ‘reassurance’ space by showing progress versus completion. In the end, I was able to engage another team that had specialisation in managing projects to ask if they could help us mock up an implementation tracker prototype for us to show to the big boss. Though the prototypes were not filled with actual project information, the big buckets of work were there and he could see the plan to fill it in. We would then shortly have access to instant, detailed updates on the big project. In the end, this decision to show our progress, was enough to satisfy the short-term asks. 

Less but as good: Can you meet the deliverable with less – not lower quality but a shorter paper? A proof of concept? One slide infographic instead of a full presentation? An oral briefing rather than a PowerPoint? 

What’s the delta between work and capacity?

After you have clarified your core tasks, you may now be able to do an audit of what a reasonable work package looks like for each member of your team given their level and experience. With luck, this can be mapped out fairly easily. 

Then you’ll have some idea of the delta between work and capacity at this point. This means that you’ll have some sense of whether you have enough staff, enough money in the budget to have enough staff (if only you could find them), or whether you need to make a case for additional staff. 

You may also realise at this point that you have a mismatch between your staff and the skills that you need for your core work and a developmental conversation with staff members may be needed. 

In other cases, one tier of the organisation has grown without consideration of the capacity in the corresponding management layers. This can be called the ‘span of control’ for a manager. Simply, do you have too many direct reports for you as a manager? In general terms, operational units may have larger spans of control. Possibly your classification group in HR can support you in understanding an appropriate span of control for your group. If not, you may be able to examine other units in other departments doing similar work for comparison. 

After going through some of these exercises, you may indeed see that you are short on resources to deliver on your work. The next section is about making a pitch for a re-set. 

Making a pitch for a re-set

Making the case for more funding: After you have completed your assessment of work vs. resources, it may be time to make the case for more funding. Some organisations have special pots of money set aside for temporary salary or operations budget pressures that you can access. In other cases, you may have to seek new permanent funding through an appropriate funding mechanism. If neither of these avenues are open to you, you may have to go back to your MoSCoW analysis and make the case that you need to stop doing something. 

How to make the pitch: It is difficult when you feel you have to give some difficult news or fight an uphill battle and you think you don’t have enough credibility or influence to succeed. 

Attunement: I am a big fan of a writer called Dan Pink who wrote a book called To Sell Is Human. Pink reminds us early in the book that we are all selling – even your dentist is selling you on why you should floss. One idea he recommends is that you connect with ‘attunement’ to the needs of others. In this case, think about what your boss cares about (what do they mention a lot?) and see if you can tune into that when you make your pitch for where you think you should focus versus things to push out to a later date. In addition, think about how you are going to present your pitch so that it will land for that person. If your boss is a numbers woman, pull out those metrics – she may be surprised and interested to hear that your customer service mailbox is now receiving 400 emails a day even though last year it was only an average of 150 per day. 

Find allies: It is unlikely that you are alone in having too much work. With luck, your manager colleagues can support you in your aim to align work with resources by chiming in from their own perches.

Here are the other parts of this series:

Introduction to the series

Part I – Diagnose and buckle down

I have too much work: Part 1 – Diagnose how you got here and buckle down for the journey

This is the first part of a series of articles for apolitical.co on managing when you are understaffed.

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• The problem: You are drowning in work and don’t have enough team members to get it all done.
• Why it matters: Your strong work ethic isn’t enough to help when you just have too much to do. You need some deliberate strategies for a re-set.
• The solution: To begin tackling the problem, start by examining the ‘why’ of your position, then figure out your ‘must do’ tasks.

The first question: What is your best guess at how you’ve found yourself in this difficult situation?

• Are you a victim of success? Specifically, high-performing teams who deliver tend to attract more work. “I gave it to your team because I knew you’d find a way to deliver.” You may also realise that the ground has shifted and that a star performer who was actually punching above their weight (to the tune of working as much as two people), has left the building.
• Is scope creep happening? Did a core mandate creep up over time to something less manageable?
• Did some pot of money start and stop? This can happen too – you got money for a special project that ended but the work didn’t end.
• Could your work habits do with a tweak?

This diagnosis may lead you to some answers for the path out.

Unfortunately, most strategies out of your predicament involve more work as a means to an end. I remember trying to give a family member a pep talk on a big clear-out of their house. My main message was, “This may get harder before it gets easier.” And the response was: “Was that the pep talk?” Touché.

The other bit that may be hard to stomach is that, in general, in my career, during the years that I have had to build/rebuild a team while delivering on file-related work, I got some of my lowest performance ratings. It led me to the unfortunate conclusion that building a strong team may not carry the weight of going over and above on core work deliverables. Is it frustrating? You bet. Is it better to keep your eyes on the prize of building the foundation for a well-resourced team that can hit it out of the ballpark in future years? Yes, I think it is.

Identify the ‘must dos’

If you are a victim of success or scope creep, see if you can find a place where the core mandate of the section is written down. Then, conduct your own audit of what you must do/should do/could do (Called the MoSCoW method) against the mandate of your group and the list of commitments that are already baked in, such as written in your Minister’s Mandate letter. I have also worked with teams on ‘value propositions’, which though more common in the world of marketing, can also be interesting to consider in government. Essentially, what is your team best placed to do?

The trick may be to really challenge what stays in the ‘must do’ category. In my world that is fairly clear:

• The minister needs their speaking points for a meeting on Friday and we are the experts for that stakeholder group.
• We have to prepare our senior executives for an appearance at a parliamentary committee.
• We are launching a programme for which we have already made a public commitment to do so by a certain date.

That said, a lot of material gets thrown into the ‘must do’ category that might be gently challenged. Sometimes the reasons for pushing ahead are more like, “We said we’d do this so we must”, or “It’s on the division priority list”. As we’ll touch on later, it might be time to show your own humility and ask if this commitment could be altered or pushed out after some deliberate consideration.

A lot of material gets thrown into the ‘must do’ category that might be gently challenged.

So, the first order of business is whether you can get agreement on the ‘must do’ list given the mandate of your group.

Hold up – was that actually a tasking?

This work audit is also a good time to clarify what I will refer to as ‘musings’ vs. ‘taskings’. Sometimes senior executives unwittingly unleash major projects by simply saying “It would be nice if we knew…”, “It would be great if we had…”, etc. But, when clarification is sought, the intention was never to displace core work or push the team into buckets of overtime in the short term – merely to make a suggestion for longer-term work. If you have any doubts about where things fit on the priority roster, it won’t hurt to ask for clarification of what and when things are needed.

You’re smarter than you think

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

I am a person of average intelligence with above average industriousness. Here is my latest article from apolitical.co about strategies to get rolling when you are feeling stuck in first gear.

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• The problem: Sometimes you just have no idea where to start to understand an issue or solve a problem.
• Why it matters: No one expects you to have all the answers but you will want an array of strategies to help pull you through.
• The solution: If you go back to first principles and keep an open mind about accessing creative solutions, you may find what you need.

I recently took a course where I wanted to do well but felt behind the eight-ball from the get-go.

My performance on the course was solid in the end and the experience gave me a chance to reflect on what worked. I realised that having a few strategies in your toolkit to help you advance is useful to remind you that you are smarter than you think. 

To start: Gather information but don’t try to drink the ocean

It seems difficult to believe that the internet was created only in 1983. That said, when you are trying to get up to speed on something, its creation may feel like a curse because it is overwhelming to find specific information. Yet your existing skills at finding credible information are already solid – just lean in (but not too far). 

You can start by:

• Finding a few recent key materials including annual reports, departmental plans, recent speeches from the Minister, budget documents etc; and
• Doing a small survey of other relevant material. As an example, an advocacy body putting out white papers criticising government policy is a good stakeholder perspective.

As important though is to consider ‘time boxing’ your research or putting yourself on a ‘research diet’. It may be better to do an outline with your material with limited research so that you can then figure out where to focus your research efforts. You don’t want your strength in research to become a weakness. 

Remember that you are already resourceful and will be able to advance with some strategies.

Now narrow: Once you have material, decide how to hit your marks

In many cases, you already have some information and you need to figure out what is most important. 

In my course, I received lots of good material and in the mix, I received an evaluation grid on which I could focus to help me understand how to deliver my final presentation. It ended up being my checklist to support my planning. Similarly, my friend was an award-winning chef and won two silver medals in ‘Gold Medal Plates’ in Canada due in part to studying the judging criteria and adapting her plates accordingly. 

Some other examples:

• In job processes, the job poster is your roadmap. What competencies are they evaluating? If you’re not sure how they are defined, find a competency guide like this one from my department.
• When writing a memo, find a template. Maybe there is even an explanatory version that explains how certain sections should be constructed as well as page limits, approvals needed etc. Check out this excellent document about converting research to policy which has an appendix with a template for a policy brief in it that supports you down to how many words you should include in each section.

Still stuck? Now what?

So maybe you are really stuck and none of the usual strategies are working. Maybe you are trying to research a group that doesn’t share its information widely or you have to do a presentation on a truly novel concept. You will still be able to get the ball rolling if you keep an open mind and get a bit creative. Here are a few other ideas that may support you when you are feeling at a loss: 

• See if you can borrow from another industry best practice (e.g., I just applied to renew my Ontario health card and driver’s licence at the same time – what can we bundle?)
• See what other countries are up to (e.g., did you know that 99% of Estonia’s public services are available online 24/7?).
• Consider non-work settings for inspiration (e.g., what did you do as football team captain or head of your condo board?).
• Don’t forget that you can ask for help; just be strategic with the time you request from your colleagues. Ask them to confirm what you know, point you to key products and people or ask them to help you get a view of the whole board.
• Like the idea above to ‘timebox’, embrace your constraints – sometimes it will bring your blood pressure down to remember that you only have a page or two to write. Even better, many people believe that accepting your constraints will even lead to more creative solutions.
• When you feel you may have lost your way due to nerves, fatigue, overwhelm etc., you may wish to re-read the brief.
• If you are flailing, you may want to stop working on your problem even for just a bit, switch gears to something else that will relax your mind in a way that occupies your brain in a different way and let your subconscious mind chew on things. [Edit – this book on creativity from John Cleese makes the same point in fine fashion].
• When you are really stuck, just jot something down to get started – remember that “all good things must begin”.

We’ve all been stuck in starting gear or hit a wall on a problem we are trying to solve. No need to panic or consider walking away. Remember that you are already resourceful and will be able to advance with some strategies.

There is enough to go around

credited to blackbrando on twitter

I like to be generous and am buoyed to be even more so as I read the research that supports that you can almost never be generous to a fault.  I don’t generally keep a mental scorecard on things I do, waiting for the return as a “matcher” might do and see more and more that being generous is truly generative and makes others more share and give more to you.

That said, I have work to do on overcoming some of my own remaining scarcity thinking as I reflect on why it persists in some areas and limit the growth and maintenance of a healthy work culture.

In a nutshell, scarcity thinking is the idea that there just isn’t enough to go around.  Not enough money, time, recognition.  The result is that anything you take, I lose.  Scarcity thinking can be especially damaging when paired with “downward spiral” thinking as discussed in “The Art of Possibility.”

Consider this scarcity thinking paired with downward spiral thinking.  I have a friend who is a creative, award-winning chef and is asked for her recipes and gives them freely.  I can hear some of your reactions to this.   That’s as bad as people stealing the recipes. They could then make the food and would stop coming to the restaurant.  They could open their own restaurant.  What if they do better than her restaurant and hers closes?  But what’s the reality? Having a recipe is nothing close to cooking the food yourself.  Once you see the ingredient list and the work involved, the odds of you cooking the dish may go down significantly.  You may realize that you are just curious as to how it’s done and grateful that someone with a well equipped kitchen bothered to think this up and create if for you.  What’s more, food tastes better when cooked by someone else. And there is no denying that a certain meal in a lovely restaurant with friends will not necessarily taste the same when you re-create the recipe at home.

In another recent experience of struggling with scarcity thinking, I was debating submitting my ideas in an exercise where we were asked to submit innovative ideas at work with the best/most popular ones getting resources allocated to see them realized (we don’t personally get money just help).   So I wanted to talk about the ideas and share the proposals to “kick the tires” but a nagging idea started in the back of my mind that maybe I shouldn’t share them because someone else would present the same idea but only better.  But, in end I knew I would need help to implement solid ideas so decided that the more people who considered these projects, the better.  And in government we don’t own ideas anyway.  So I shared my ideas with several colleagues and the ideas got more refined and I gave more strongly reasoned and more polished products as my final proposal (with a shout out to my brainy colleagues).

What about more objective things like time? That really is a scarce resource for most people so this should be an easier argument to make.  In the past few years I have challenged myself to really look at  how actual time unfolds to reality check my own hard-wired panic about lack of time and my hatred for being late for things.  While a certain percentage of the world wants to polish and perfect, I tend to continually stress about all the things I have to get done and would rather see progress and completion than break into a cold sweat because things are late.  I also hate being late because it disrupts the plans of others and seems to imply that my time is more important than the person left waiting.   That said, I have now concluded that, in general,  there is usually enough time if we wade in mindfully.

So how to embrace an abundance culture in the workplace?

Give more of what you need

I would start by saying, take a general leap of faith to believing that things often work out and prime yourself for that possibility. Some simple ideas that follow from this mindset: I like the idea from a recent piece which sounds counterintuitive but has the power to improve work cultures immensely – give more of what you need. You feel your work isn’t getting recognized enough? As an example of what I have experienced, I have tried to bend over backwards to be civilized/polite and friendly in many work emails and I can see language I used mirrored sometimes.  It costs no time to say “have a good evening” or “good morning” in an email though it sometimes appears that people have forgotten this is an option because they feel they don’t have time.

Remember to play the long game

Scarcity thinking has also be characterized as extreme short term thinking (with a focus only on the negative thing in the present moment). Though bumps and even significant losses can be devastating, avoiding risk and getting consumed when we get derailed can ignore the research that says that we are generally more resilient than we think we will be when confronted with bad events. The long term effects of most of our losses and worries are overblown in the present moment.

When researchers checked with both lottery winners and persons who had been through a catastrophic event (e.g. someone who lost both legs in an accident), they both returned to their original base levels of happiness with a year.

On a practical level, you might consider using the 10/10/10 rule.  Ask yourself if the issue you are fretting about will matter in ten minutes, ten months and ten years.  This has been a powerful one for me.  For a stretch I made a mental commitment to checking in with myself to really examine the long term outcomes after a period of great worry or actual loss either professionally or personally.  Leaving aside extremes (sudden deaths), I would be hard pressed to find more than a couple of examples of things that really really mattered even after the ten month period.

Be a “time stretcher”

One of the managerial styles that I most admire and have tried to emulate is “time stretching” bosses who have really do have limited time and may start meetings late but will make you feel as if they have time for you.  Result being that you are not rushed, you think clearly as you are making your points and the meeting actually takes less time than it would if you were getting cut off and panicked about your briefing.  Does that mean you won’t adapt ten minutes of presentation material to the five you have available? You absolutely will need to but you don’t need to have your words clipped to remind you that time is limited.

I apply this thinking when I am tutoring young kids to improve their reading. I have a deep interest and commitment to literacy but minimal training as a tutor.  And the greatest gift I can give a kid learning to master their letters or read better may just be time.  Puzzling out words is gruelling and though I can offer strategies, I probably offer more spaces to think and scan the page than actual talking.  I think that the quiet space may also function as a confidence giver to tell the seven year old that he already knows lots already to help puzzle this out without my continual commentary in the background.

And for the instances in my life when I really didn’t have enough time – sudden deaths in my immediate family would be the prime example – I still rely abundance thinking as my solace for these difficult passages.  I want to commit even more to reframing my mind to think abundance in the moment and be present for the time I have with people I care about including the people I love to work with.

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The Art Of Letting Go: How I Learned To Stop Procrastinating | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

A good short article on one person’s strategy to let go of procrastination.  The things I found most powerful were the suggestions of thinking of the pain it would cause in the end to keep avoiding the real work and the challenge to think about whether the trade off to give in to  distractions were worth it to avoid the difficult work that would precede a satisfying outcome.

via The Art Of Letting Go: How I Learned To Stop Procrastinating | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

Why you need to stop bragging about how busy you are

Why you need to stop bragging about how busy you are

Some good reminders here about how longer hours doesn’t produce the best work or the best workers.

Those who produce brilliant work work hard for short stretches (90 minutes is the rule cited in The Talent Code and Be Excellent at Anything) and take breaks or even naps to restore.  With this approach, thinking becomes sharper and innovation is supported.

And I wholeheartedly agree that the boss has to leave first to set the tone for the culture of balance.

Winning When the Troops are Tired – Let’s Grow Leaders

(c)steven_the_spamkid

An important piece for me to have read this year – I work with a hardworking and understandably tired team.

The best bits in my opinion:

“Help your team understand what matters most.   Be frank about what can be lost without sacrificing your mission.  Candor strengthens resolve.  Empowering “less than perfect”, energizes the front lines.”

“Provide a little leave:  “Your highest performers won’t complain.  They’ll take on more, and work longer hours to get it done.  You may not even know they’re tired.   Initiate the conversation.  Establish regular check-ins.  Make it okay to politely question your asks.”

Manage your own stress:  Stress rolls down hill.  Get a grip.

via Winning When the Troops are Tired – Let’s Grow Leaders.

Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance – Ed Batista – Harvard Business Review

A good piece from the HBR that suggest we re-set the term work/life balance with boundaries.  I have heard some senior executives say that they have found their own definition of “balance” and I think that this approach would fit with that statement – basically as long as you can draw clear lines between work and the rest of your life, whether you spend much time devoted to the personal sphere is your own choice.  This author offers a few different ways to slice these boundaries:

Time boundaries – where you exclusively devote time to non-work pursuits.

Physical boundaries – where you take a break from the office in all its forms.

and my favourite as a think today about redoubling my efforts to get to a regular mediation practice, the cognitive boundary – a place to stop thinking about work.

via Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance – Ed Batista – Harvard Business Review.

Go the F*** home

As the title reveals, this rant on work/life balance isn’t G-rated so you should watch it with that warning.

I appreciated the following reminders:

–  As managers, we’re being watched for the signal to go home.

– Productivity nosedives when you work overtime

That said, the tone is more cynical than my own would be.  She reduces workers to “business assets”  when many, including public servants in particular, have chosen career paths that support a passion or interest.   She also talks about “escape plans” where I’d prefer to focus on what we are running to:  supporting a life outside of work that honours our other personal values including connection to our communities and creativity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBoS-svKdgs