Archives November 2022

In leadership, subtraction can be its own reward.

I recently received two reminders that less is more from The Wall Street Journal: “Bosses Promise Jobs with a Coveted Perk: Boundaries” by Lindsay Ellis and “Why Bosses Should Ask Employees to Do Less—Not More” by Robert I. Sutton.

Ellis tackles a subject of increasing importance to leaders over the last few years: work-life balance – or, as my Tompkins Leadership colleague Julio Neto calls it “life balance.” Her article quotes numerous leaders, employees and potential employees to respect and enforce work-life boundaries.

This drive by leaders not to burn out their employees is essential. After all, Harvard Business Review reports that employee burnout costs organizations $125 billion to $190 billion a year in healthcare spending, and that doesn’t include the costs of lower productivity and higher turnover.

Yes, many organizations need to worry about The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting. But you and I know that high-performing organizations still attract talent that wants to work, wants to succeed and wants to make a difference. Often, such talent needs to be reminded to take a break – for their own good and for the organization’s future.

For his part, Sutton’s article summarizes a lengthy body of research that shows how humans (bosses and workers) tend to equate adding more – more staff, software, meetings, rules, training – with creating success. Often, more just creates more bloat, bureaucracy, complexity and burnout.

His point is not that organizations need to do less, but that removing the unimportant excess frees your staff to spend more time on complex, important tasks. This is near and dear to my heart because it’s reminiscent of the Pareto Principle, a tenet of my industrial engineering education at Purdue University. In manufacturing (and many other venues of life) 80% of the errors can be corrected by fixing 20% of the causes.

Making sure your staff can concentrate on the vital few instead of the unnecessary many could be the key to success.

So the next time your organization hits a bump in the road, a thorny problem or an immovable bottleneck, the answer, perhaps, is to take a step back, remove some rules, and subtract instead of add.

A key to leadership is how a leader allocates time and resources. In today’s world, the norm of perpetual disruption challenges leaders every hour as competing activities force them to make tradeoffs on how they allocate time and resources for themselves and their organization.

Great leaders realize that focusing on Important, Long-term and Strategic activities will result in the greatest success moving forward, but it is extremely difficult to withstand the call from Urgent, Short-term and Tactical activities. Realistically, few have adequate resources and time to do all.

In addition, the Disruptions of the last few years (VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity – lockdowns, hybrid schedules/remote office) have dealt an unprecedented rate of change to our leadership teams, making them less aligned than ever.

So you face a two-headed Leadership Quandary of capacity and alignment. If you slow down, contemplate and reflect, increasing your team’s leadership capacity is the only lasting solution to this Leadership Quandary.

Therefore, Leadership Development must be your organization’s No. 1 priority. This is an urgent need in a time where all organizations need dynamic, Insightful Leadership more than ever. Only by developing more leadership capacity can leaders handle all the challenges the organization faces while simultaneously harvesting all the opportunities before them.

In my view, internal mentors and internal development resources are inadequate for addressing this two-headed Leadership Quandary. Your leaders need true Leadership Development, not executive management training. Your leaders need coaches who develop their leadership abilities with insightful questions, not mentors who tell your leaders what to do.

Want to discuss this Leadership Quandary further? Amazingly, whenever I spend time with fellow seasoned leaders, we always end up discussing how our proudest, most successful moments in business came from when we dedicated our time to developing leaders and high-performing leadership teams. Happy to share with you more thoughts on Leadership Development, coaching, artificial intelligence coach-bots and more. Send me a message and we can find a time to chat.