Executives create space for thinking by cutting through the crap at work.
Over and over again I am reminded that the growing challenge of Leadership is to ‘cut through the crap’ and create space for thinking.
Have you noticed how many people are immobilized by too much information? They are unable to do a good job but often working more than sixteen hours a day. This leads to duplication of effort, wrong decisions made through confusion and demotivation of employees.
Poor performance and lack of employee engagement is the result. Cutting down confusing and conflicting information is a vital part of the leadership role today. Twenty years ago the leadership challenge was to provide information to an otherwise poorly informed organisation. The advent of email, the internet, direct marketing and advanced mobile devices has changed that for ever. Any of us exposed to these technologies (most people who work on a computer and have a mobile phone) need help. We are bombarded with too much information and too many opportunities to buy things, network with vast numbers of others and work when away from the office.
There are two main culprits: Email, and general lack of focus and direction. What can leaders do? Here are some suggestions:
• Email
I regularly meet managers who receive over 100 emails a day. They are afraid to leave their computer / PDA unchecked fro more than a day because of the huge back-log. Email is one of the most useful and remarkable tools of the past 20 years- but it needs control.
Try having a ‘stop before you email’ agreement. If it can be dealt with by face to face or phone – do it. If not, be short and stop copying everyone. Tackle people who habitually send copies to everyone and ask them to stop. Have ‘Don’t email the world’ posters on walls and ask for reports on the problem at meetings. Ask for ideas about how to ‘cut the crap’ through excessive emails – you will get a lot of ideas and cooperation!
• Lack of Focus and Direction
This is an area where leaders can easily make a huge difference. Prioritising work is a leadership responsibility. Without it, people dissipate their energy on tackling too much with too little effect and where there are poorly defined accountabilities, they often duplicate the work of others.
Priorities set in isolation can be dangerous and lead to the creation of ‘silos’ at work. This is a common situation where each team/ division or department operates in isolation from the whole. This not only fails to optimize the joint potential of everyone, but can lead to internal competition which can cause damage to the ‘losing’ teams.
Obviously, the executive leadership team needs to set organisation priorities to prevent waste of time and effort by teams and individuals. Through setting organisation priorities, each division and team’s priorities can be integrated into the whole.
Naturally, the executive must be informed by these teams before deciding on organization priorities. This is a constant cycle of communication and feedback which is much easier to handle when there are standard systems in place to simplify the process. I call these HOTDBUL leadership systems- ‘Hands-on-top-down-bottom-up-leadership’ (pronounced hotdeebul).
It is a leader’s responsibility to ‘Cut the Crap’ for others in the organisation, the executive team has a particularly urgent need to model this behaviour.
Start today, it is the most important job you have.