I had a chuckle the other day, when during an afternoon walk, one of our team members noticed a large bunch of Big W catalogues dumped in the bushes alongside a road. Joining the dots here, it appears some unmotivated delivery boy or girl (let’s give this person the unisex name of ‘Sam’), incentivised by getting rid of all the catalogues given to them did just that; got rid of all their catalogues in the shortest AND shoddiest way possible.
The reason it made me chuckle was that this is something we can all perhaps relate to (or it’s even similar to somethin we have done ourselves at some point in our life!) This is the paid equivalent of shoving all our toys under the bed in place of cleaning our room, or blowing all the leaves in our driveway into our garden instead of picking them up and disposing of them once and for all.
But what was actually going through Sam’s noggin? Why did Sam choose to take the easy path?
Well, most likely because Sam was paid to empty his or her to-do list. The quicker Sam disposed of his or her bundle of catalogues, the sooner Sam could relax. Their measurement of what they did was simple but obviously somewhat flawed. I would also hazard a guess and say that Sam hadn’t really bought into the overarching goal of what he or she was doing. They couldn’t see the point in doing the right thing and had no buy-in to anything greater than the relatively simple task asked of them.
Now this REALLY got me thinking… don’t you think this mentality is much more common than we realise? How many people in your team or business come to work, do what’s asked of them and then skip home having done what was thrown at them (i.e. their daily to-do list)? At least compared to Sam, the people in your team are hopefully satisfying the minimum requirements of their job. But is simply executing a list of tasks on a list what is most beneficial for your business? Often, the answer to this depends on what’s on the list and in my experience, employees tend to focus on the ‘urgent’ rather than the ‘important’. Put another way, they let circumstances dictate their workflow rather than having a ‘birdseye view’ of what is the most valuable use of their time each day.
Harking back to the Industrial Revolution, this is the way the world has programmed us to work. Traditionally, we were all part of a factory, our role was narrowly defined and our job was to do what we needed to do and then pass it on to the next person in the production line. In an era where ideas, problem solving and collaborative execution are the new norm, ask yourself:
- Does this traditional way of thinking provide the best outcome for your business?
- Does thinking this way provide the best outcome for the personal development and personal fulfilment of your team members?
In most cases, I believe the answer to both of these questions is a resounding ‘No’.
To explore this a little further, think of what having an empty to-do list could affectively mean:
- “Other than what is happening right now, there’s not much going on in our business”
- “I’m not an overly important part of ‘the other stuff’ happening in our business”
- “I can’t see a bigger picture that I’m part of, hence these daily tasks are all that’s important”
Whilst having an empty to-do list can be liberating and at times important when our main goal is reflection and relaxation, having nothing to do can’t be a long-term goal for those who want tomorrow to be different from and more fulfilling than today. In life (and in business) we need to look at everything we do differently. The comparison of ‘journey vs destination’ is a common one, but is a lot easier to get our head around when we realise there is no end game. As soon as our to-do list is empty it is either going to be filled up again, otherwise we’re no longer an important part of our team (or our business is no longer important to anyone!). When I ask people how their work is going and the response I get is “I’m so busy!”, I feel like saying “Great… you should be. That’s the whole point of work, actually doing heaps of stuff now for the purpose of something better happening tomorrow”. After all, business is only one letter away from busyness. People often lament at how busy they are because they can’t get to the bottom of their list of tasks. Yet in a thriving business, your to-do list should never be empty and hopefully never will be!
But honestly, can you blame employees for thinking this way? Employees are driven by what they believe they are being measured on. And in the absence of formal measurement, we often take it upon ourselves to decide what we believe is of most importance. We gravitate towards the urgent, not the important, because it’s much more noticeable when something urgent slips through the cracks. The pay-off for doing the important stuff isn’t immediately recognisable but is in most cases, exponentially more valuable than the day-to-day stuff. Spend too much time on the important long-term stuff and your clients or customers won’t be happy, but spend too much time on the short-term day to day stuff, and things won’t be much better in the future than they are now. So the challenge for most teams is to find the happy medium between balancing the daily roles they have been asked to perform and the bigger picture projects that they NEED to be a part of.
And for this, I place part of the onus on the managers and leaders of businesses. We are making our teams feel that the quantity of their output is more important than theimportanceof their output.
We see this all the time with our clients… their teams experience a quasi-guilt when working on projects that don’t have an immediate, tangible benefit to the business. Not only that, but it’s also hard to focus on these projects when the phone is ringing, the emails are piling up and the pressure of our daily to-do list can become almost unbearable. But more to the point, there is a perception that projects that relate to the long term growth and direction of your business as opposed to the hour-to-hour operation of it are less important. If you want your business to be relevant tomorrow, this perception needs to change.
But there is also another factor at play which we can’t ignore, and that is FEAR. The fear of doing something that is perhaps undefined, a little fuzzy and outside of the comfort bubble of our day-to-day jobs. Often we can pretend that this email is urgent and has to be dealt with now but realistically, it is often easier to deal with this scenario because we have done it a million times before. Compared to scripting and recording a video for example, it’s a walk in the park.
So what is the solution?
There is an undeniable need for your team to work on longer term projects of importance without feeling the guilt of doing so. They need to understand the importance of these projects but not only that, they need to engage in them in a manner which actively reduces their fear.
What I propose is you formalise the execution of important projects during a dedicated time each week. In fact you are reading the result of this strategy right now!
As I write this, I am in the middle of The Social Adviser’s “Content Creation Camp”, a three hour period every Wednesday morning where we don’t check email, don’t check Facebook and don’t “sweat the small stuff”. The idea here is to focus on creating content whether that be for our Top Tip newsletter, our blog or one of our educational platforms. Quietness is encouraged as is discussion and collaboration with other team members, as long as it is relevant to the creation of content for The Social Adviser and our community.
Before you go down the path of dismissing this by saying that “yeah, but our business is different”, you need to realise that we have clients, we have meetings, we have a non-stop flow of emails and questions, and our phone rings off the hook. Whatever business you are in, those things will hopefully never go away! But how you choose to spend your time today will dictate whether all of these things continue to happen tomorrow. Perhaps the reason you THINK we’re different from you is because we have made this happen by design, prioritising the creation of assets or systems which will benefit us and our community for an extended period of time.
But aside from just ‘deguilting’ these important things, our three hour block also reduces fear, as we are all in this together. This is a point I can’t stress enough; seeing people around you do the things you are trying to do inspires you to push hard to be like them. And in a culture of collaboration and open idea sharing, this also means that people know where to turn if they get stuck.
As a business, it draws an important line in the sand. It sends a message to the team that content creation (or whatever it is you choose to prioritise during this time) is important, and if you are spending half a day a week working on it, we expect you to be pushing ahead and producing a bank of content over time. This is reinforced through our staff review and evaluation processes.
Content creation may or may not be your thing… the point is that there are bigger picture projects your business should be considering, and a team of people who are vital to the realisation of these projects. You need a mechanism for raising the importance of these projects whilst simultaneously removing the guilt and fear associated with their execution.
So what do your bigger picture projects look like?
In order to answer that question of how you SHOULD be filling your to-do lists, ironically I believe the answer lies in (temporarily) emptying your current to-do lists!
In the minds of your team, take away the daily tasks and the operational activities. Have a session with your team where you discuss and decide on how things need to change and specifically what things need to change. If you could empty your team’s diaries and to-do lists right now, ask they what they would enjoy doing and what their priorities for the business would be (the assumption here is that they WANT to work in some capacity at your business!)
The answers to these questions can lay out the projects your team need to chip away at over time. The result is a list of “things” that the business actually needs and the team wants to do. By actively setting time aside to do these things every week, it addresses the issues of employees driving the best outcome for the business, as well as fuelling their personal development and personal fulfillment. Adding these things to their to-do lists, followed up with appropriate measurement and accountability will make your team and in turn your business, infinitely more valuable. You’ll also be doing your team a favour by realising that their task list should never end, so you may as well enjoy it! Sounds like a win-win to me.
And therein lies the great irony. It is in the ‘mental emptying’ of our to-do lists that we can actually fill them back up with meaningful and important things. In a roundabout way, we should be incentivising and supporting our team to fill their to-do lists with meaningful stuff, and prioritise what’s on their plate accordingly.
So my advice today; don’t be afraid to temporarily throw your catalogues in the bushes. But unlike our friend Sam, only if you can find a better way of delivering them next time.
Now I want to throw it to you; how do you get your team to prioritise the important and not just the urgent? Let us know the best strategies you have come across in the comments box below