Beat Burnout - Ask Your Team to Do Less
"More businesses die from indigestion than starvation."
~ David Packard, Hewlett-Packard
Like you, I have been reading multiple articles about the increasing level of employee burnout, the "great resignation" and, the latest headline grabber, "quiet quitting".
So, how can you - as a leader who wants to do the right thing for your team and your organization - manage more effectively in this challenging time of remote work and hybrid office environments?
"Too many leaders think the key to success is to pile on staff, technology, meetings, training, rules and more. The opposite is true.", says Dr. Robert Sutton of Stanford University in his excellent Wall Street Journal article, Why Bosses Should Ask Employees to Do Less - Not More. The result: "Organizations become too complicated, their people get overwhelmed and exhausted, and their resources are spread so thin that all their work suffers."
Dr. Sutton offers great examples in this article of what leaders can do to rectify the situation. Below I highlight two and share my own suggestions for quick and easy steps you can take right now to re-engage and re-energize your team starting this week:
- Meetings A Harvard Business School research team found employees attended 13% more meetings after the pandemic. Solution: Conduct meeting audits to determine if recurring meetings are still valuable, align on the purpose of the meeting, and then evaluate what is working well and what can be improved. And for those clients of mine who use the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), we then redesign their meetings from a "Whole Brain" perspective to ensure everyone is engaged and finds value in the meeting.
- "The Subtraction Game" Dr. Sutton recommends you take 30 minutes to ask your team to individually list then share their ideas in response to this question - "What was once useful in our organization, but is now in the way?" Then pick a favorite target or two the team agrees to focus on improving over the coming 30 days. Track your progress, and if successful, repeat the process with a new target. I often take a similar approach by asking team members to confidentially share with me in advance of our session, "What makes your job harder than it needs to be?" I synthesize their responses into key themes that we then creatively problem-solve in the meeting.
If these challenges and ideas resonate with you, I welcome the opportunity to discuss how I can help you to resolve them through customized facilitated sessions. In addition, I have 90-minute virtual facilitated learning sessions on this and many other current topics that I would love to share with you.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Kimberly
P.S. If you find this information of value, I invite you to share this newsletter with your teammates and colleagues.
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