I’m back and boy do I have a lot of fodder for my blog. I spent the last 2 weeks in mainland Ecuador and on a small sailboat cruising the Galapagos Islands. During this time:
I had no access to the internet
My cell phone didn’t work
Except for a couple of days there was no TV
It was HEAVEN! There are times when we all have to get away. Far, far, away. I have learned that I need to make myself completely unavailable during my vacations to really disconnect from work. If I can check e-mail, I will. If I can be reached by phone, someone *will* call me. I’ve received ship to shore phone calls when I’ve been on cruise ships. I’ve gotten late night wakeup calls when I’ve been in different timezones. Now, I make sure to avoid the possibility altogether. I try to fall off the face of the earth.
I think that we all know some people who refuse to get away. They just can’t fathom leaving their work behind, not even for an instant. They are worried that that work world will fall apart without them. The fact is that nobody is indispensible. It’s a fantasy to think that work can’t go on without you for a couple of days or weeks. It will. It might not be quite as efficient, but it will.
The other problem with refusing to let work go is that it becomes all consuming. Eventually it will burn you out. Without a break, you lose all ability to have perspective on what really is important in the world. Going out and connecting with people from different cultures who speak different languages and finding out that underneath all of the differences people essentially are the same provides me with the perspective that I need. Everyone wants to be loved, everyone wants to be respected, everyone wants to be heard. Those lessons can be applied to the work world as well.
So how do you get away and not worry about work? Well, first of all you need to be able to designate a backup. If you’re doing a good job of developing your team, this won’t be hard, you should have a few people in your organization that you can trust to take over when you’re gone. Determine who will back you up based on the company needs at the time. Sometimes when work is really going smoothly, you can choose a backup who is junior and needs to gain confidence. Other times, when things are fast and furious, you need to designate someone who can really take charge, someone that you trust to close the deal, press toward the milestone, or deliver the product.
The next step is to make sure the person you designate is prepared for the job. Give them a good description of what you need them to accomplish. Be very specific. Make sure they have a list of the items to really watch out for that concern you. Ensure that they have someone to turn to for help if they need it.
Get away. You know you need to. Don’t let your life pass you by without taking the time that you need to recharge your batteries, no matter what that entails for you. Nobody at the end of their life wishes that they worked more.
Leading others has always been likened to herding cats. Individuals have their own free will and their own motivations. Getting an entire organization aligned and effectively executing requires constant attention. This is especially true in the weeks leading up to a critical milestone. Focus must be maintained. Distractions must be minimized. There is absolutely no reason to slip a milestone by a day or even a week. Those time frames are recoverable through proactive management. If you are going to slip, slip a month never slip a day.
This is the time where you have to keep an eye on exactly what is going on. You need to keep your trusted lieutenants even more accountable than usual. Normally, a weekly status meeting is sufficient for keeping on track. If you do that you’ll know well in advance if you have completely borked the estimated timeframe for the milestone and you will be able to adjust and remove unessential work to meet the milestone.
Once you get to within a few weeks of a major milestone it is time to start assessing risk. It also may be time to ramp up the frequency of those status checks. Ask the hard questions, look out for discrepancies or “squishy” information. When staff gives you hand wavy answers, ask for details. About two weeks out, ask your team what they think the major risks are for making the milestone. Listen carefully. Figure out if the problems are caused by anxiety or if they are real. Anxiety based issues can be resolved through empathy. Real problems need recovery plans. Herd those cats!
The next step is to get a final commitment from your team to meet the milestone. Ask them if they think the milestone is possible. Have them listen to their intuition. If the leaders are committed and the milestone is achievable (I didn’t say easy), their staff will work as hard as possible to make it happen. Everyone wants to be successful.
About a week before the deadline, shift to daily status. Right now you need to run fast. Meetings need to be quick – if everything is on track – get everyone back to work pronto. If something is falling off track, this is the time to rally the troops to figure out how to punt the issue or get it resolved as soon as possible. Give your staff the chance to make that determination and let them come up with the solutions. They are closest to the issue.
A week or so before the milestone make sure that everyone on staff knows what they need to do. They need to know exactly what they need to finish. They need to know the processes to follow in the end game. This information can be passed on through your leadership team, or directly through you to motivate the team. This information has to been disseminated. People need clear goals – targets to shoot for.
Engineers by nature have to deal with uncertainty. If there is a species that always can come up with a worst case scenario, it would be the engineer. That is what we do for a living. Build something, and then figure out what can break it. Next, determine a contingency plan. All good engineers do this. We can’t help it. Normally this is a really good thing, unless the anxiety it provokes prevents you from being able to do your job successfully. Just remember, there are a lot of people out there who don’t ever think about what can go wrong. Sometimes those people are meandering through life without a plan, sometimes they are going through foreclosure on a house or a car they didn’t realize they can’t afford, and worst case they are in jail wondering what the heck happened. If you are anxious about the negative possibilities you are much less likely to have them happen to you.
What do you do if your anxiety over the worst case scenario paralyzes you? This is a hard thing to overcome, but in order to really be successful in business there are times when you have to just go with your gut feeling. You need to make sure that you don’t over analyze everything. If you do, you can spend more hours worrying about what can go wrong and rejiggering your plan than it would take to actually get the job done! Sometimes it is necessary to just give yourself an arbitrary deadline. After so many hours (or days) you just need to choose a direction or make a decision. Usually providing a self-imposed end date will be enough to motivate you to do what is needed to figure things out, without spiraling down into fearful scenarios and worry. Eventually you will learn that making a decision – any decision – is better than wallowing in indecision for an extended period of time. Worst case you can always change direction if things aren’t working out quite as planned. Getting that experience, figuring out what isn’t working can be quite invaluable. Yes, it takes extra time, but so does not making a decision in the first place.
Some of you might be thinking – well – what if my worst fears come true? So what? As long as you aren’t endangering life how bad can it be? Seriously… You’ll just need to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and try again. I’ve started companies that didn’t quite get off the ground like I had hoped. I’ve gone without a salary for a year. I’ve taken on positions that I was completely unsuited for and that caused great personal stress. I’ve missed critical deadlines. What happened? Well, I am still here and I am a whole lot smarter than I was when I started in my career. Everything that I didn’t succeed at the first time was a terrific learning experience for me. In retrospect surviving failure and really crummy times has reduced my anxiety level.
If this is the first time that you are faced with this type of situation it might feel overwhelming. The first time you are afraid that you will really mess something up and fail is a stressful situation. Do your best to realize that it *will* get better. The maturity that comes with hardship is key to your personal and professional growth. No one succeeds at everything they try. If you expect to, you are just setting yourself up for a really rough experience psychologically.
The nonprofit VIA Institute on Character was founded to create a scientifically rigorous classification of character strengths (the VIA Classification) and a way of measuring them (the VIA Survey).
I recently took this survey based on a recommendation of a speaker at the IGDA Leadership Forum. I found it quite interesting and not exactly what I was expecting. Let me share my top two character strengths with you as they are described:
Curiosity and interest in the world – You are curious about everything. You are always asking questions, and you find all subjects and topics fascinating. You like exploration and discovery.
Perspective (wisdom) - Although you many not think of yourself as wise, your friends hold this view of you. They value your perspective on matters and turn to you for advice. You have a way of looking at the world that makes sense to others and to yourself.
Needless to say, I was surprised that these two ended up on top. However, upon further reflection I have to agree. I have always been interested in all sorts of things. Some of them are “normal” others are oddball. I guess what always is most important to me is discovering something new and having new experiences. I love to travel and I love to play and learn new skills. I guess that all of that curiosity has given me a slightly different perspective on the world than others might have.
A key facet of my curiosity is my desire to learn more about myself. Give me a test, give me a survey or a personality inventory and I am excited to dive right in. This one isn’t my favorite, but from an overall perspective it gives a lot of information across all parts of my life and lifestyle. It is not purely a work style related questionnaire.
Sometimes you find that one of your employees just doesn’t want to be responsible. By this I mean a repeated inability to drive projects forward, through to completion. It’s a terrible feeling when someone comes into your office near a project deadline and says – “We’re not going to make it.” Or, “I’m not worried about the schedule. Nobody ever meets their schedule”. These kinds of pronouncement are just another way of giving up. At this point you can take over and drive it yourself. However, you can’t be personally responsible for everything, you’ll just drive yourself crazy. You need to be able to delegate something to your staff and know that it will get done.
The question is – how do you get someone to take on additional responsibility and reliably finish things? Well, first of all there has to be a desire on their part to do this. If you have someone on your team who likes to experiment, come up with some cool new ideas and then turn over the job of finishing it to someone else – you have the wrong person. If that person is good at coming up with ideas that are useful for the business, you need to nurture that. If they are someone that just wants to play and what they are interested in isn’t business relevant it is time to have a long conversation about their place in the organization. They might be a great person to have: in another company or another department where they can follow their passion. Having the expectation they will be a finisher will only end in disappointment for both of you.
If the person you are dealing with genuinely wants to drive projects to completion but hasn’t be successful you need to determine why. They might not have the tools to do it successfully. They might need to improve on their attention to detail. They might need some help in project management and estimation. They might need to learn how to identify when a situation is spiraling out of control and to ask for resources before it becomes a problem. They might just need encouragement or a good old fashioned kick in the pants to get them started. You also have to be careful and make sure that the reason they aren’t able to finish isn’t because your expectations of what can be accomplished are unreasonable. Take a look at yourself and your demands first. Second, figure out how best to motivate and coach your employee. All advice tells employees to modify their style to suit their manager’s in order to get ahead. Here is the time where you need to modify your coaching style to suit how your employee learns best.
Hi -I'm Linda Bonanno and my blog is all about business leadership and management. Occasionally I'll give you a little insight into my personal world as well. Hopefully you don't mind the diversions.
