Warning Signs?

Shortly after the new year, I found myself driving down the beautiful Newton B. Drury Scenic Byway in Northern California. It was off-season, cold, and quiet. We had a break in the rain and stopped for a short hike that I had read about online. It was a surreal hike, starting in majestic giant redwoods, and finishing on the beach.

On the way back, I passed this sign. “Wait a minute. Tsunami?! Leaving the hazard zone? How did I miss the ‘entering tsunami zone’ sign?”

A few weeks later, I was talking to a colleague about some challenges she was facing getting to know a new team. In the course of our conversation, I thought back to that tsunami sign. A couple of the situations she was encountering struck me as warning signs that I’d seen during my forty working years. While not perfect predictors by any stretch, I thought about a couple of the warning signs she may have picked up on. Perhaps you’ve seen these too.

Talking about how busy you are. Hey, we all do that at some point. Most of us really are really busy. Covid has just taken this all to a whole new level. I’m not talking about the occasional exasperated comment in a moment of exhaustion. I’m not talking about someone that is near the breaking point. I’m talking about someone that seems to bring up how busy they are in virtually every conversation.

In Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson talk about how busyness has become a sort of currency at work. They describe ‘sludge’ as disparaging people based on how many hours people put in at the office. I think most of us have seen this play out at work, at least before Covid sent us all home. Now nobody sees how many hours you’re putting in, when you show up and whether you leave before the boss does. Thank goodness for small favors.

What hasn’t changed as much is busyness as a sort of currency.

Let’s stop here for a check-in. Frequent comments about being overloaded should be taken seriously. People are overwhelmed, especially in 2022, after two years of covid insanity. I’m not suggesting that people who complain about being overworked should be shunned or ignored; we absolutely need to be empathetic and thoughtfully explore the situation to see how we can help.

In my experience, unfortunately, the people that are really exhausted and pushing themselves to the breaking point are often very quiet about it until there is a breakdown.

What I’m talking about here is someone that brings it up often and over an extended period. I have seen leaders extend this to their entire team; so-and-so is too busy to respond to you, nobody on my team has enough time to meet our deadlines.

In my experience, this is a warning sign. It can be an indication of many things. It can be a sign that the person is not going to work out on your team. Why? Well, that may be a whole other blog, but here are a few possibilities: superhero complex, politics, power, low self-esteem, victim mentality.

It is usually difficult to discuss and resolve. The behavior is ingrained, and the response is defensive. After all, the person is busy. The feedback isn’t that you’re busy, it’s why you feel the need to talk about it so much. That’s where it becomes a difficult message for the recipient to take delivery of, let alone open the package and really look at what’s inside.

Instead of talking about how busy you are, can we talk about why? Are we understaffed and taking on too many projects? Probably. Is that because we’re stretching or are we being unreasonable? How do we find a better balance of challenging that pushes us toward mastery without being too stressful or not challenging enough to drive productivity, learning and engagement?

How efficient are you and your team? There really is something to working smarter. In Engineering school, one thing we learned early and often is to define the problem we’re all trying to solve. Too often, we just start working. After a lot of time and effort, we get together and realize that we’re not all working on the same problem.

How well do we listen to really understand what our customers are asking of us? This means internal and external customers, colleagues up, down and across from us. How carefully do we scope out what we’ve been asked to do and have we considered how to prioritize the work?

I can think of many times that I just dove into the work only to find out that I really didn’t need to do it. Or that it wasn't the priority I thought it was. How frustrating it is to discover that I was off-track, and now I have even less time when I started. Or when I think I’ll just bang out a simple task, I realize too late that it was much more time consuming than I thought.

Time truly is precious, yet we often spend it like Monopoly money. Often poor planning is at the root of being too busy. Yet how often do we truly acknowledge that and try to correct it? For many, it’s just easier to chalk it up to having too many things put on your plate. And viewing it that way leads us to a discussion about victim mentality etc. If you truly have no say in what responsibilities you accept, I encourage you to think on that long and hard because that's not a place where you can be at your best.

Talking about being busy is a warning sign we often just accept as annoying. Inside, most people just think ‘yeah, join the club’. How often do we really stop and think about why we are so busy and try to change the situation for the better? How do we encourage people to truly consider their role in this and work together toward a better situation?

Concern about title. I’m not talking about someone with a healthy desire to advance themselves and their career. In my experience, the people I want on my team are the people that focus on creating better versions of themselves and taking their responsibilities to the team very seriously. Do they want a promotion? Yes. They just don’t spend a lot of time talking about it. And often, they are humble about it when it comes to them.

The person my colleague and I were talking about was using his need for a certain title to hinder the team. He saw an opportunity to advance himself during a critical organizational moment. The team should always come first, especially during a formative moment. Whenever anyone puts themselves ahead of the team, it’s a warning sign. When a leader does that, for any reason, it’s a big warning sign.

Politics is about power and I’m not a big fan of power when it comes to thriving organizations. Titles are politics. They are artifices of organizational structure. They should mean nothing. But they have become status symbols of great importance, like a very expensive suit or car. Clothes don’t make the man, titles don’t make a leader.

This weekend I met a fellow traveler who shares my belief that an organization made up entirely of leaders would be a wonderful place to work. Sure, there needs to be a ‘chain of command’ in some form, some way of making difficult decisions, but the traditional form of omnipotent leader at the top telling everyone else what they need to be doing is a myth that needs to die a quick death.

Great leadership is about service to others and putting the greater good of the stakeholders above your needs or the needs of any one individual. Titles often devolve into power – clawing your way to the top so you can decide how everything works. And oddly enough, often those desperately seeking to find themselves at the top often look to fill their own needs ahead of everyone else’s.

In my experience, once you find yourself at the top, you pretty quickly realize that you aren't the best person to make most of the decisions. You have responsibility and authority, yet exercising those because you can often doesn't end up so well for you and everyone else around you. Ironic huh?

In my entire working life, I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone that was very concerned about their title that turned out to be a great leader and teammate. I’m guessing that most people who read this will agree – that warning sign is clear.