3 Strategies Leaders Can Deploy When They're Overworked and Understaffed

 

When managers are overloaded as many are now, the usual leadership advice is to delegate more. But what if you’ve delegated everything you can and you still have too much work? If your team is drowning too, delegating more work simply means shifting the overload. This is not a sustainable option.

I’ve seen this situation many times working with leaders and teams. Fortunately, there are three key strategies you can use to reassess and reconfigure the work you do to free up your limited time and capacity.

1.   Redefine “good enough.” Not every task requires an A+ effort. Set clear expectations around what “fit-for-purpose” quality looks like—for yourself and your team. That means intentionally assessing what level of effort makes sense for a given piece of work. Do you discuss what is “good enough” for specific assignments with your team members? Or what corners should be cut? 

     If you and your team are too busy, it’s essential to take time to figure out how to work differently. 

     Ask yourself and discuss with your team:

Where could you do B-quality work, cut corners, or streamline processes to save yourself time and energy? For example, can you shorten weekly updates? Can you send bullet points instead of narratives? Do you really need a full project plan if the situation is simple?

What agreements could you make with your boss to simplify or reduce deliverables and processes? For example, could you tell your boss that it would be helpful if you could send simpler or fewer communications? Will a rough draft suffice instead of a perfect document to get the information across? Can a decision-making process be streamlined?  

Clarify where you can simplify or cut corners without sacrificing impact.

How can AI support you and your team in reducing time required for “good enough” work? Ask your team what apps they are starting to experiment with and encourage them to do more. For example, meeting summary apps have gotten really good. First draft writing apps are also helpful. 

When managers and teams step back to assess if there are tasks on which they can lower the bar strategically, the answer is almost always yes, and encouraging “good enough” work energizes the team.

2.   Eliminate low-value work. Hidden, habitual tasks often waste the most time. Ask your team: “What would we stop doing if we lost a workday each week?” Go beyond surface-level cuts. Reassess reports, approvals, and processes—many are more about tradition than value. And remember that if a change doesn’t work, you can always reverse it.

We all know it’s important to eliminate low-value tasks, however, in coaching leaders I've sees that many low-value tasks have become unconscious habits, hidden in plain sight. Even teams that have worked on streamlining stop too soon and miss opportunities. There are many more hours to be saved if you look deeper.

In my experience, it consistently takes two rounds of “looking” to get people to identify all of the tasks they could offload or reduce.

Here is a simple offloading process you can use with your team:

• Ask your team, in advance of an offloading session, to think of all the tasks that could be eliminated. In the actual session they will often first come up with things that other people can stop doing. That’s fine. It gets them warmed up.
• Then ask them to go deeper and think about what work they themselves could stop doing if they had one day less per week to work? This is when I've typically seen breakthroughs.
• Of course, you need to make sure that eliminating work does not negatively impact customers, colleagues, or finance.

3.  Strategically reduce your availability. Always being accessible increases your team’s dependence on you. Step out of projects where your presence isn’t critical. Shift to check-ins or on-request advising, reduce meeting time, and explore asynchronous updates. Freeing up your time empowers others to step up and lead.

Many leaders think they should always be available. But too much availability creates more interactions and makes team members more dependent on you than necessary or ideal. With a bit more space, your team members will experience more room to act and this frees up time for you too.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What projects or initiatives are you too involved in now? What could you step out of completely?

• How could you scale back your involvement and still provide colleagues with what they need?

• Are more asynchronous updates possible?

• Can you attend only the relevant parts of meetings? Or only key decision-making meetings?

• Could you try 15-minute catch-ups with direct reports or colleagues instead of longer meetings?

Be creative in removing yourself where you can (and helping your team do the same), and tell colleagues why, so they understand your motivation.

When you are overloaded and delegating more to your team isn’t an option, there are still ways to free up capacity. Now is the time to reassess and be intentional about what you do and how you do it. Working in a fit-for-purpose way that matches appropriate effort with true need, removing habitual low-value work, and being strategically unavailable will enable you and your team to free up vital time and energy for what matters.

PS. Many managers don't delegate properly. Click here to learn what you can do to develop the capacity of your team with delegation.

To your greater success and well-being,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement ? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile:323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, energy storage, facility services & maintenance, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

 

 

Delegating to Build the Capacity of Your Team to Achieve Greater Results

 

 

 

 

 

Delegation is an essential skill that most of the leaders I've taught and coached over the past 30 years have struggled with in varying degrees. Think how much more your team could do if you became an effective delegator and developed your direct reports to become as capable as you are. 

Think of the important work you could do if you could delegate more things to your team members. Think about how much more energy you could put into leading your team to the next level if you could clear your plate of some of the work you have now.

One of the biggest tools you have for development is delegating. It’s important to think about delegating not just as assigning work, but as a technique for teaching, developing, and building capacity in your team.

The only true way to develop a potential successor is to delegate parts of your job so that someone else can practice doing it. By delegating tasks and projects to someone as though you were developing them as a potential successor, you are actually maximizing that person’s development. 

Think about getting a couple of your high potential employees (HPE) ready to step into your job. What could be more impactful to increasing the capacity of your team? This is relevant at every level of leadership. 

Here are three important ways to use the succession idea as you delegate for maximum development.  And if your goal is in fact to develop a successor, these are still the right things to do:

1. Let them practice your work.

The first part of someone learning your job is about the work. You need to give them opportunities to practice working at your level.

A lot of times we think the way to motivate our employees is to have them work on the most fun or interesting projects or the less important things. That works to a point, but it does not do anything to help get a high potential employee ready for your job. Face it, how much fun work do you get to do?

You need to give them opportunities to practice the difficult, mind-numbing, controversial, boring, unsupported, no-win kind of work you deal with every day when you wake up. 

What is the hardest and most distasteful thing you own? That’s what you give your high potential person! You give them the benefit off seeing what it is really like to be in your shoes. 

They get to suffer like you do. But they get to work on bigger stuff. They get access to your network and stakeholders. They have the chance to do something creative and heroic to get this done.

2. Let them practice your relationships.

The next part of getting someone ready for your job is to make sure they are practiced and comfortable with the social requirements at the next level. They need to be someone that your peers feel comfortable with and want to include personally. They can’t stand out like a sore thumb as the junior person in the room, who has no basis for being there

You need to give your employee a chance to practice these relationships. Give them opportunities to present for you. Arrange one-on-one meetings with them and your peers. Send them as your delegate to your boss’s staff meeting when you are out of town. (Go out of town if this never happens.) If your  employee does not develop personal relationships with your boss and peers, they will not be capable of stepping in for you to free you up—because they will not be given the chance.

3. Let them practice your decisions.

Okay. Here is where the rubber meets the road. You need to give someone  a chance to practice making the decisions that you make. If you never delegate important decisions, you are fooling yourself that you are truly developing someone.

Think about the next few months of decisions you need to make: priorities, partnerships, product road map choices, mar­keting strategies. Give your HPE the task of owning the project and making the decisions. 

Let them feel the pressure of owning the outcome fully. Let them get the experience explaining, defending, and selling their choices. Let them get the experience fixing it if it goes wrong.

Is this scary? Yes. Might they choose wrong? Yes. Might they choose better than you? Also yes. The point is, if you never let them own and make key decisions, you are cutting off the single most important training you can give your successor. They will  never be ready for your job without owning key decisions.

Warning! Failure is the Key to Delegating 

 "Delegation requires the willingness to pay for short term failures in order to gain long term competency." --Dave Ramsey

Delegating some of your decisions opens up the risk of people getting it wrong. This can be scary but it is one of the most powerful ways that we all learn. There is no learning as great as that which comes after failing. 

Many managers treat delegating exactly the opposite, as if it is their role to prevent failure by watching closely, jumping in and taking over, and fixing or modifying if it is not going well. If you think about this from a learning perspective, what you have just done is to ensure that no real learning occurs. 

By always averting failure personally, you inadvertently take away the person’s motivation, need, ability to learn and ultimately, real psychological ownership.
 
It’s kind of like teaching a child to ride a bike, by holding on and running alongside—and then never letting go—ever. For the rest of your life, you’ll be running alongside, holding on to prevent the potential fall. Think how much farther they could ride, and how many new things they could discover, if you weren’t still hanging on, running alongside and slowing them down. 

So what happens if someone fails?

Well, when you fail it feels bad. It is embarrassing. It causes business problems,  It causes trouble for other people—so it becomes  a big personal motivator to fix it! Real learning occurs when you not only see  what you did wrong, but need to live with and deal with the consequences of what you did wrong.

By creating the safety net and filling in all the hard parts for them, the person never really learns and never gets to truly experience what it means to succeed. But if you let a bright person fail, they will figure it out. Isn’t that how you got good at what you do? By doing it—trial and error, feedback, trying again. A capable person will learn how to really do it well if you give them a chance.

Also, if you always swoop in to save the day, you are ensuring that they will never get any better at the task than you are. You are putting an artificial cap on their development. Why not give them the chance to get even better at it than you are?

Check out two related posts:

Emotional Intelligence and the Fine Art of Failure. (5 min read)   

More Yoda, Less Superhero (5 min read)

I've delegated things that I thought I was pretty good at, and had my employee blow me away with their ability to exceed my capabilities. This, to me, is one of the best parts of leadership—when you can say, “Wow, that’s amazing. You did that better than I ever imagined it could be done. Bravo. Thank you. Look at this new capability my team now has!”

To your and your team's greater capability,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, energy storage, facility services & maintenance, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services,  real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

How to Transform Your Life During Times of Great Uncertainty

   

A mentor of mine has been following a disciplined mindfulness practice for more than 15 years. He says it has helped him stay calm, clear and focused on the present moment.

It shows. Although he has a mountain of responsibilities, I’ve rarely seen him looking stressed out or anxious.

I thought he was onto to something. So, I began a mindfulness practice myself. I've be doing mindfulness exercises for 12 years and found them to be beneficial on many levels.

 

Why is mindfulness practice so helpful?

Because the present moment is really all we have. There was never a time when your life wasn’t not now, nor will there ever be. Your life is and always be “this moment.”

The odd thing about this realization is that it is both bone-crushingly obvious and, at the same time, seldom acknowledged.

Each day we’re caught up in our own personal dramas. We struggle to meet the deadline, finish the project, make the appointment, pick up the kids, drop off the car, stop at the bank, visit the folks, plan the dinner…driving around, we are swept up in the recollections of the past or more likely, endless planning and worrying about the future.

By living in a state of distraction, we deny ourselves the only time we have to be fully present. Right now.

Trust me, you cannot savor your Asian chicken salad with the water chestnuts and sliced tangerines (Or a deep-fried pork sandwich and a side of curly fries) if you’re worrying about next week’s budget meeting. Nor can you enjoy your afternoon by the lake with your grandson if you’re talking on your device or fuming about something you saw on a news feed.

You can only appreciate the good things in your life when you’re fully present. Doing this allows you to minimize your negatives, too.

All of us face situations that are depressing, frustrating, or maddening. Yet, more often than not, our anxieties are the result of our own faulty thinking. It may be tough to admit, but it is our mindset—rather than the situation itself—that creates the negative emotions.

As Shakespeare wrote, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking make it so.” Truly, it is our thoughts that torment us, not our problems.

Some may disagree. After all if you have a child with a serious drug addiction or a parent that is dying of cancer, the problem isn’t in your mind. It’s real.

But there are only two kinds of bad situations in the world: those that can be solved and those that can’t. If you have a situation that can be solved, get busy fixing it. If you have one that can’t, get busy accepting it.

After all, your thoughts determine your happiness. The good news is that you can control them. That’s the power behind Reinhold Niebuhr’s well-known Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can; and Wisdom to know the difference.

Incidentally, while Niebuhr wrote this prayer roughly 85 years ago, there is an Irish rhyme dating back to 1695 that expresses a remarkably similar sentiment:

For every ailment under the sun,

There is a remedy, or there is none:

If there be one, try to find it;

If there be none, never mind it.

But when something truly sad or tragic happens, how do you keep from minding it? There is no easy answer to this one. Some wounds only time can heal. But returning to the present moment can help.

As Eckhart Tolle wrote in The Power of Now, “Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems—most life situations are—but find out if you have any problem at this moment. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now. Do you have a problem now?”

Tolle says it’s impossible to feel troubled when your attention is full in the Now. You have situations that need to be dealt with or accepted—yes. But only worries about the future or regrets about the past can turn into personal quagmires.

Skeptics may argue that altering your thinking doesn’t change the problem, just your perception of it. But that’s the magic of it. Higher awareness is often that prelude to a solution.

Tolle says, “Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept is as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, no against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.”

How do you get started? Ironically, by becoming conscious of your lack of consciousness—something the majority of us never do—you take the first step toward an elevated state of mind. Your ability to enjoy your life, and deal successfully with your problems, increases the moment you become fully present.

Beware though. I found that living in the present moment means abandoning your old ways of thinking. In the present moment there is no judging, cherishing your opinions, or nurturing discontent.

It means slowing down. Relaxing. Focusing on your breath. Listening to the breeze. Or just taking a good look around.

You have the opportunity to enhance your life simply by choosing where to direct your attention. Where should that be?

Right here. Right now.

“The past is history, the future’s a mystery, today’s a gift, that’s why it’s called the present.”

Check these related posts: 

 

7 Way to Boost Your Focus in Culture of Distraction. (2 min read)

 

Build Resiliency Against Stress By Managing Your Inner Dialogue (5 min read)

 

To your greater success and equanimity.

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, energy storage, facility services & maintenance, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services,  real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Moving the Needle When Participating In A Company-Sponsored Learning Event

 

 

 

 

 

What is your goal when you attend a company-sponsored Summit, leadership training, conference, seminar, or webinar?

Is it a life-changing idea or insight, or something else?

I have experienced the big aha-moments in all those settings, and that is wonderful. But that is a high bar.

I’ve also heard people be a bit cynical after and even before a session saying things like “I knew most of that material,” or “there wasn’t much new here.”

Light-bulb moments are wonderful. But attending learning events focused only on the big, new ideas will keep you from getting the most from those opportunities.

Focus on moving the needle. Learning and growing by 1%.

Going from 0-60 is great but moving the needle from 40 to 45 and creating a new average or base line is more realistic and can have a huge impact on your long-term performance and success.

The big insight is a bonus, but moving the needle to a new level – even if the change is small – can change everything.

Look for the little gains. When you look for them, you are more likely to find them – and added together, they will change everything for the better.  Small differences accumulate into significant competitive advantages.

Whether during a leadership training class or just going through your workday – look for ways to move the needle today.

Check out two related posts:

 The Two Most Important Lessons Every Leader Should Learn  (5 min read)

The Ability to Shift Your Mindset is A Superpower (3 min read)

Stay curious, stay hungry,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT

 

Take the Next Step...
Interested in learning how to develop your organization's leadership capability, culture, and employee engagement? We begin with a collaborative discovery process identifying your unique needs and business issues. To request an interview with Peter Mclees please 

contact: Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  or  Mobile: 323-854-1713

Smart Development has an exceptional track record helping service providers, ports, sales teams, restaurants, stores, distribution centers, food production facilities, wealth management services, facilities and energy management,  real estate services, nonprofits, government agencies and other businesses create a strong culture, leadership bench strength, coaching skills and the teamwork necessary for growth.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.

Having worked with several companies throughout their growth cycle, we have valuable insights and strategies that would help any late stage startup, small or medium sized company achieve sustained growth and prosperity.