What should you do when your boss keeps asking for things?

What should you do when demands pile up so high that you and your team are constantly over-booked and the work just keeps coming?

I always talk about how you need to rise above the tactical workload and be more strategic — but what do you do when it’s your boss that is causing the problem?

I have been the annoying boss in this story!

When I was running a $1B software organization, I was the one who was guilty of doing this to my staff.

The disconnect

There is a built-in disconnect that I find very interesting:

When you are working in the business, generally speaking, your job is get work done.

But when you are running a business, generally speaking, your job is to go out into the world, learn things about the customers, the competition, and the market and figure out new stuff to do.

Then you come back all excited about what you’ve learned, and share your ideas with your team about how to improve the business — and they are exasperated. You see it as great new ideas. They see it as more work, changing direction, or fire-dirlls.

There will always be a disconnect between what the boss thinks up and what the organization can deliver.

The secret

Here is the secret. Your boss wants you to push back. Your boss is expecting you to think through the business strategy and the workload an offer advice – not to just try and do everything.

“Oh, no. She’s back…”

I know that when I would come back from a trip, my staff would brace themselves and think “Oh, no, she’s back. Now what? What else is she going to want us to do? We are already too busy, why does she keep piling it on?”

As the boss, I wanted my team to listen and internalize what I had learned. But I did not want them to treat all ideas and requests equally and immediately.

I did not want my team to just try and take on all the work and have it kill them. I did not want or expect them to do everything.

What I wanted was for them to catch all the work, analyze it, make judgements about business priorities and come back to me and negotiate.

Advise your Executive

Big Idea: You need to catch all the work, but not do all the work.

I wanted them to stay focused on the strategic stuff we were working on, but be aware that key triggers were occurring in the market.

I wanted them to think it though and recommend to me how we could stage out all the work. How could we keep focused on the right strategic stuff, but then also come up with a way to prioritize the new ideas and take some of them on over time?

I wanted them to suggest ways of streamlining or stopping things to make room for something new.

I wanted them to debate with my about what is most important and why, and suggest how to re-work the plan to do the most important things first.

Who stands out?

The people who would come back to me with a thoughtful proposal for what to do, in what order, that would be good for the business, and do-able for the team were the ones that stood out as high performers.

The ones who didn’t just accept all my ideas and requests, and helped me think through the strategy and priority stood out as high performers.

The ones who tried to take on all the work and do everything, resulting in everything slipping were not so impressive.

The ones who simply ignored my inputs, kept their heads down, and did not step up to the strategic thinking and debate were not so impressive either.

How to negotiate the workload

• Keep a list of everything your boss asks for
• Keep a list of the top strategic priorities you are working on
• Have regular meetings with your boss where you take out these lists
• Make recommendations about what to prioritize based on the context of business and the content of these two lists.

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When you show your boss these lists several things happen.

• They get embarraseed not realizing they have aksed for so many things. When they see it spelled out right there in front of them, they can see it’s unreasonable.
• You win lots of credibility for keeping the list, catching everything, and not dropping anything. You make them comfortable that you’ve got it covered. They trust you.
• You can ask them “Is this still important”? You will find they have forgotten about several of the requests and have decided that others don’t matter anymore.
• You will realize that you are not beholden to everything on the list!
• You will be able to negotiate timelines and suggest priorities.

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Your boss forgets

There is a tendency to treate all requests from the boss equally.

You need to resist this because they don’t intend them all equally.

They can seem equally excited or serious about a wide range of ideas. Some are vitally important, others are just musings. It’s hard to tell. They will often forget things that asked for, or change their mind without telling you.  You need to check.

They need you to help them with their thinking.

You are being paid to judge and decide, not just to do everying you are told.

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The big idea…

If I could offer one idea that will have a huge impact on your success and your satisfaction with work, it would be that you give yourself time to think.

(you can stop reading here if you accept that point!)

When do you think?

I work with so many executives that tell me they would be so much better at their job if they had more time to think.

Think about a typical day, week or month in your work.  How much time to you spend in uninterrupted, quality thinking time?

I know when I was a corporate executive I had the same problem.  My calendar was fully booked.  If I tried to schedule time for myself it would get over-ridden with urgent customer problems, staff crises, or emergencies from my boss to deliver something to his boss.

My personal, thinking time got wiped out.

So I needed to work differently.  I have written much on the topics of defending your time and energy, making more time, delegating better, and many other topics which help you use your time more strategically.

But today I just want to focus on this one idea:

Give yourself time to think.  Schedule it.  Protect it.

This will have a bigger impact on your success than almost anything you can do.  If you are giving yourself this time, don’t ever feel guilty about it.  If you are not, start taking it.

Key point: Remember, your job as a leader is to build capability underneath you, so your team can handle more work, and so you can apply yourself to solving higher order problems.

Enable your team to do the work

• Let your team handle the customer escalations, you need to create the quality program that reduces them.
• Let your team handle the marketing events and deliverables, you need to create the market-changing strategy.
• Let your team handle the product development.  You need to create better processes to deliver more, faster.

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You will never do any of this if you don’t give yourself time to think.  You will get caught up in a sea of activity and reacting.

Think about it this way:  If you stay overwhelmed with activity you are not doing a good job.

Schedule time to think and HIDE

Try it for 2 hours.  Tell everyone you are at the dentist.  The world will not come to an end.  Hide. The hiding part is important. The activity knows where to find you.

Think about how you can improve all of this chaotic, reactive, repetitive activity and do something better.

Then give yourself 2 hours a week to think.

Don’t feel guilty

I can’t tell you how many teams I work with where they all live in fear of their instant message window saying “unavailable” for a second.  It’s fascinating that no one holds it against anyone else, but each person feels this huge pressure to always be available.

I know people who work at home who are afraid to go to the bathroom because they think their company will think they are not working if they don’t answer IM’s instantly.  This is crazy.

Why not put your IM status for an hour or two as “working on a deadline” or “on a call” or “be back at 2pm”?

If you tell people to expect that you will be away from IM working on strategic projects a few times a week, no one will hold it against you.

Being over-available

If instead you stay infinitely available, but never do anything strategic, you will fail to do your job well.

I hear upper managers talking about their workhorses… “Oh yeah, we can throw anything at him,  he’ll work round the clock, he’ll travel anywhere, we can always count on him… “

Notice they are not saying, “he is someone we should promote.”

If you work tirelessly 24×7 to accomplish a goal or meet a deadline once in awhile that is OK, and sometimes necessary.  But if you work tireless 24×7 for 5 years you will be stuck.

If you never give yourself time to think about how to work better or more strategically, and just keep doing all the work as it comes at you, you will never be as successful as if you figure out how to rise above it.

It might not come out right

…so I better jump in and make sure
it is going OK or just do it myself.

Who’s at fault?

It it doesn’t come out right, the uncomfortable question this raises is -
did this person fail to do a good job because:

1. They are not good enough at the job? or
2. I am not good enough at delegating?

It’s not about getting comfortable with worry

The real secret of successful delegating is not to learn how to deal with the emotional discomfort of letting go, and learning to live with being worried about the outcome, or accepting bad outcomes…

It’s about preventing reasons to worry

Your job is to delegate, let go, NOT micromanage… AND create structure, support and processes so you ensure that it is going to get done right.

You don’t deal with the worrying, you ensure it’s not necessary.

Ways to build comfort and insurance into the project
without micro-managing

1. Let the person create the timeline, define the deliverables and how you will measure them.  The encouragement and trust goes a long way, and you either get the pleasant surprise of a better plan than you would have come up with, or you get an early warning that this person needs more support.

2. Tighten the Outcomes.  If you are concerned that the person is not capable enough to run with the project, Instead of a 6 month outcome, discuss outcomes that occur every two weeks.

3. Focus on the outcome, not the activity. No two humans will do a task exactly the same way.  If they deliver the outcome, it shouldn’t matter how they do it.  Let them worry about how and what.  You worry about WHY, and what needs to be true when it is done.

4. Create an actual process and tracking system for long term or repetitive tasks – a software development lifecycle with checkpoints is a good example.  But why not define a project lifecycle with checkpoints for a quarterly analyst presentation, a press release, or a marketing campaign?

5. Third party reviews. Get yourself out of the position of always being the one to judge whether a deliverable is good enough or not.  Get the actual consumers of the deliverable to review and provide feedback.  Your employees will learn far more this way.

6. Don’t forget to inspect and measure things along the way.  If you set up a timeline with review steps along the way, you must follow up.  A great deal of your comfort comes from the fact that people take you seriously and actually do the committed work.  A long time mentor of mine always put it “You get what you INspect, not what you EXpect”.

7. Teach. When you are delegating things you are personally good at, always think of delegating as a teaching opportunity. If you need to sometimes jump down and do the work yourself, make sure someone is watching and learning.
See also Let People Fail.

Bottom line…

You need to delegate effectively if you want to get anything significant done, get anywhere in your career, and save yourself from an un-doable workload.

If you are either doing the work yourself, or worried about the work not getting done, you need to change your strategy.

You can delegate and feel comfortable that the work is getting done as long as you do the higher level work of setting up the systems, processes and measures that ensure the right things are happening along the way.

Note to the micromanaged…

I will write another post on this because many people suffer from this.

But the short answer is, you need make your boss comfortable that he will get what he wants in some way other than by micromanaging.   Some of the techniques above can be useful with your boss too.

Category Note: I filed this post under “CONNECT Better” because it is critical to always be building a broad base of support. Getting your team and others to accomplish work that you need done is a critical element of business effectiveness and career success.

Would you do more email? Would you go to more meetings? Would you do even more of what you are already doing?

Or would you do something different? And Better?

Is being over-busy Valuable?

Think about being over-busy is a low-value way of working.

In fact you could even think of staying over-busy as a form of laziness — not getting the real job done, because you have failed to apply the hard, strategic thinking to prioritize your workload for the highest impact.

But why is it so hard to do this?  Why do we get stuck?  Why can’t we let stuff go?

You might feel like you’re dropping the ball, letting someone down, risking your job.  You might be one of those people that feels good when you are constantly busy, and you get recognition for working hard. 

Consider a Values change. 

You  need to see getting less busy as more valuable than having your time consumed by your work. 

You need to recognize that the more strategic work you could be doing instead of the endless activity, would deliver more value to your team and your company.

Make the Container Smaller

It’s like the Ideal Gas Law:  A gas will expand to fill the size of its container – no matter how big the container.  Likewise, the amount of activity in any job will always expand to fill your time – no matter what the job, and no matter how much time you allow.

It’s up to you to contain it – make your container of time for your current activites smaller. 

Here’s how to get started:

1. Give yourself permission
2. Realize you are not merely allowed to be less busy, it’s a requirement of your job, especially if you want to create value and stand out.
3. Then take some time back. 

Just take it.  For a start, schedule 2 hours per week and HIDE.  The hiding part is important.  It won’t work otherwise — the activity knows where to find you…

This time is just for you – to think, to plan, to focus on what’s most critical, re-prioritize, delegate, create processes.  Remember: It’s not stealing from the company.  It’s not dropping the ball.  It’s not getting less done. 

It’s getting more of the right things done better — it’s creating value.

I’ve written several articles with ideas about what you can be doing with your new-found high value time that you can refer to for more ideas: Leading vs. Managing, Addiction to Detail, and Building Capacity. But it’s up to you to take back the time.

You’ll find that you can make even more Time.

For example, if you take two hours to improve a process or clarify an outcome or a delegated task, you could gain another five hours in saved time.

Then you use those five hours to communicate more effectively, and re-assess priorities and outcomes for your team. When those efforts then take hold you have created even more time. And so on…

It is a core trait of the most successful people to rise above being over-busy.  And it’s important to remember that the most successful people are not the ones who were less busy along the way.  They are the ones who dealt with it. 

If there are any secrets to what really successful people do – this is one of them.  They make more time.

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