We just spent a couple of days with a leadership team, and I came away so worried about the state of things. The people around the room are brilliant, experienced, and fully committed to being the leaders their organization needs—the raw materials are great.
But their lives are ridiculously over-stuffed with travel, meetings, emails, and all manner of issues and crises. The result is that it’s nearly impossible to keep the right perspective and time horizon. It’s too easy to slip into action mode just to survive the week.
Urgency Begets Expedience
When your body and your brain are simultaneously exhausted and stressed, you kick into survival mode. Not physical survival mode like keeping your core warm or protecting the major organs (although some of that primal threat response might be triggered). Instead, it’s management survival mode. Your focus narrows to what you have to do to get to the end of the day, what could kill you in the next 24 hours.
The bias in management survival mode is toward action. What do we do next? Who’s on point? What do you need from us?
It’s the expedient path.
Expedience is perfect if it’s a situation you’ve seen before.
Expedience is wonderful if the variables are well-understood.
Expedience is great if what you’ve done before will work again now.
But look around. How much of what you see is a world you’ve seen before? How much of what’s around the corner can you see? Which of your playbooks are still relevant?
The sense of urgency from too much to do and too few opportunities for rest and reflection is driving you into a problem-solving mode that is not up to the task of handling the ambiguity you’re facing.
You need to create quiet amidst the din.
You need to make space inside the clutter.
You need to slow the pace despite the torrent.
But, HOW????
You need to change how you behave in the eye of the storm.
Insist on space. Block the hour in the morning. Defend the lunch hour. Protect the breaks. Then, if something urgent comes up during your day, look at the other agenda items and decide which of those will be skinnied down to make room. In the meeting this week, at least three agenda items had long presentations that could have been cut in half without affecting the quality of the insights. Got that?? Sacrifice story time, not rest time!
Buttress with process. When your body is vibrating with urgency, you’ll probably skip parts of the process that are necessary for quality decision-making. This is a good time to have a tried-and-true process you follow. Instead of skipping straight to “what,” first work through why, how, and who. Better answers to those questions ensure you solve the right problem, go from abstract strategy to a concrete plan, and stop to consider how you’ll win people’s hearts and minds. They save you from running off in haste and only later realizing that no one is behind you. Processes, rituals, and habits will save you in times of overwhelm. Make sure your team has them.
Don’t let it happen again. When the crisis comes, take it as an opportunity to not only fix the immediate problem but also to solve the underlying issue. There are myriad reasons why you get into crisis: your objectives weren’t clear, your direct reports don’t have the capability, your system is propagating a kludgy process. Whatever it is, I’m fine with leaders getting in the weeds; just maintain the mantra: “What can I do now to ensure I don’t have to do this again?”
If you can’t rise above the sense of urgency in the moment, if you take the expedient path, there will be more crises to come. The good news is that you can make different decisions today that will position you (and your team) better tomorrow.
Ask Yourself
What is going on in my body? Am I in threat mode? How can I get back to a more thoughtful state?
Where is my time to rest and think today? What action can I condense to protect time for reflection?
What are the most prevalent causes of ongoing fire alarms? What one improvement would create the greatest benefit in reducing crises, rework, and wasted effort?