It All Rolls Downhill

​“Leadership is not about being in charge.
​It’s about caring for those you are in charge of.”
– Simon Sinek

Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash

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New Path Productivity LLC · New Path Perspective Blog: It All Rolls Downhill

Are you a people manager? In a previous post, we talked about the impact overwhelm has on your cognitive function. In today's post, we'll talk about the effect your overwhelm has on your team.
 
At a time when more than half of employees surveyed in North America plan to look for a new job this year, it's a critical and timely topic.

Without sugar-coating it, you, as a stressed boss, create a stressed team. You don't mean to, but you can inhibit your team's productivity.
 
If you can't effectively manage people, tasks, and projects, it creates "emergencies" that roll downhill to your team. It prevents them from effectively utilizing their time and can cause burnout and frustration.
 
As an overwhelmed manager, you're often desperate for assistance, and you reach out to anyone who might have a spare minute to help you with a task. In the future, when you need help and can't remember who assisted in the past, other team members will waste valuable time recreating what was previously done by someone else.
 
While this may not appear significant, please allow me to illustrate with an example.

• To help you advance a project, you ask Andrew to create an extensive Excel file and a corresponding graph. Andrew spends more than two hours on the task.
• Months later, you see a picture of that graph in a presentation deck and decide you want an updated version for this quarter's report. Forgetting you had Andrew prepare it last time, you ask Kay to create it this time.
• Kay spends over two hours re-creating the Excel file and graph.
• In reality, what took Kay another two hours should have taken two minutes.
  • One minute - Kay sends updated statistics to Andrew.
  • One minute - Andrew enters the new data into his already existing Excel file. The graph is automatically updated.

 
In the grand scheme of what you ask of your team, this is one example of one task. Extrapolate this to multiple projects and multiple team members. The wasted effort compounds dramatically.
 
So what can you do?

• Permit yourself to get your own house in order. Set yourself (and your team) up for success by implementing tools to track projects and tasks effectively.
• Prepare and maintain detailed documentation of recurring processes. When team members need to jump in or new team members start, everything they need to know will be readily available.
• Utilize shared digital file storage to prevent duplicated effort. Determine appropriate file structure and naming conventions, and train your team members on how it works, so they understand how to find work completed previously.

 
The reality is this - when you feel out of control, you're just surviving, and the chaos rolls downhill to your team. You (and your team) deserve a calm, collaborative, and productive environment.
 
The time you spend to improve your circumstances will provide an exponential return on investment for everyone.
 
If you feel overwhelmed and are looking for help, visit newpathpro.com/scorecard to learn your Productive Environment Score.