You can’t just do nothing – can you?

I’ve been working with a number of leaders, and a number of leadership teams, this month – and one pattern keeps popping up:

• Notifications, emails, messaging is all out of control
• “Have you got a minute?’-ism is out of control
• More results, more quickly pressure is mounting from the top
• More ideas (orders?) are coming down from above

If you can deal with the pop ups, provide ‘the just-a-minutes’, text your boss back urgently 10 times, sit in 8 hours of back to back meetings, reply to all your emails, and still produce that report by COB, you’re either an actual unicorn or you’re living in denial.

Gartner says that managers have 50% more work than they can handle and I believe that.

100% of the leaders I’m working with right now feel that they are in an unsolvable spiral.  Are you feeling it too?

So what is going on?

I’ve got a theory about what is going on, and I’d like your take on it:

1. Teams appear to be upwardly delegating more at the moment – they are stressed and uncertain (“have you read the news, have you read the annual report, did you hear about layoffs…?”).  That’s shutting down their typical levels of resourcefulness, and replacing it with upward delegation where they – by default – come to you for the answer.

2. Middle Managers seem to be dipping down more at the moment.  They are stressed and uncertain too, and where better to retreat to than the things you used to be brilliant at when you were an individual contributor?  It’s like a warm fluffy blanket sometimes; we love the boost to our confidence (it’s nice to remember how good you were at this) and the simplicity of task-driven work (no-one messing things around: just you and the task – bliss).

   But the arm fluffy blanket means we neglect our manager workload – the influencing and thinking work that only we can do for our teams.  And then what happens?

3. Executives sense the vacuum that you’ve left while you’re dipping down, and they fill it with assumptions, decisions and directions that are often not operationally sound – because you weren’t in the room to influence that.  And guess what?  Now you’re somewhat on the hook to deliver it.

Cue the cycle getting worse.  Thus the team gets more stressed, you get more stressed, and your executive gets more stressed.  

Because it’s a cycle, not a process, it can start anywhere – point 1, 2 or 3.  It might not be starting with you, but it needs to end with you – or it will keep spiralling.

So here are my ideas to tackle it – and I’d love to hear yours too.

DO NOTHING

If upward delegation has been happening for even just a week, your team is entering a new habit with you – you have the answers, so they don’t have to work them out themselves, so they will default to asking you from now on.  

Doing nothing achieves three things:

• Gives you a nano-second back in your life – take it, you need it.
• Gives them a pause, where the answer is not instant so they might ask a colleague instead.
• By the time you respond (if you do), there’s a good chance they’ve worked it out themselves.

More efficient for you, more development for them, better culture for everyone.

Simply by doing nothing.

That’s got to be worth an experiment.

IS THIS WORK THAT ONLY I CAN DO?

Are you finding you are wrapping yourself in the fluffy warm blanket of your expertise?  You might be making excuses like:

• They’re busy, so you’ll just do it for them this one time
• It’ll be quicker to do it yourself than brief them
• I know how I like it so I’ll do it myself

Take a moment to ask yourself: is this work that only I can do?

You might convince yourself that the best thing you can do is pitch in with your team.  The only time that’s true is when your own work is done – and as you have 50% more work than you can manage, when is that ever true?  You’re either reverting to an old habit, or hiding in your fluffy blanket to avoid doing something harder.  I understand – I do it myself – but it’s not logical and it’s not leadership.

If you’re doing their work then who is doing yours?

LEAN INTO THE CHAOS

If your executives are spiralling, you’ll spot it:

• Repeat requests for the same thing, just in different ways
• Failure to read past 2 lines of an email
• Coming up with odd ideas or beliefs at odd times of day and night

Don’t put your head down, step back, wait for it to pass – the emails and texts will just come thicker and faster into the vacuum you’ve created.  

Instead, lean in: pick up the phone or book a meeting to talk it over – putting their requests on an agenda will give them a few little rewards which might adjust their behaviour:

• You’re listening to them – they can stop asking
• You’re progressing the idea – they can stop pushing
• They can be in charge of when they make the time – they can stop panicking

Responding with a level of certainty, control and constructive thinking is exactly what they are momentarily lacking, and it will calm them down enough to give you the information and the time you need to respond to whatever pressures they are reacting to.

3 experiments that might be worth a shot.  

I’d love to hear any other ideas to stop this particular spiral!

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Rebecca is Australia’s pre-eminent advocate for B-suite leadership – the expert in developing hi-impact B-Suite leadership at both a team and individual level.

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