The past few weeks have been difficult at my day job. Many operational and management issues have hit at the same time and I find myself reacting and managing several large problems and unplanned deliveries simultaneously. The effect of these issues is that I'm not performing at a high level any longer. Without consciously realizing it, I've slipped into a mode of being reactive, and delivering things "just-in-time". In short, I'm surviving but not thriving.
This type of situation is dangerous for leaders because it is so difficult to notice the degradation while it is happening. For me, it was not a single problem that derailed my productive habits. If it had been I would've realized it immediately. Instead, it was the accumulation of many things over several days that ruined me.
Has this ever happened to you? I bet it has. With growing management expectations and the increasing organizational complexity of most operations today, my fear is that this type of reactionary behavior has become the default for most people.
Softuary.net is dedicated to helping leaders be the very best they can be. Daily high performance and continuous self improvement are the goals that we strive to achieve. But what happens when we don't achieve daily high performance? None of us are perfect leaders; we all get off track from time-to-time. Before we can recover our high performance habits, we must first know we are off-track. As I said earlier, the real danger is not being aware.
The Canary In the Coal Mine (Early Indicators)
Early coal mines were terribly unsafe and did not have the same safety measures that modern coal mines have. Proper ventilation was one important piece missing from these early coal mines. Without proper ventilation of fresh air, miners could quickly succumb to the build-up of odorless and colorless toxic gases such as methane and carbon monoxide. For the miners, this was a fatal problem.
How they mitigated this particular risk was ingenious. They used an early indicator to tell them when the air they were breathing was dangerous. Their early warning system was to bring a canary bird down into the mines with them. When the canary began to show signs of distress, the miners knew the conditions were unsafe. If the canary died, the miners knew to immediately evacuate.
So what can we learn from these clever miners of previous generations? For us, moving from a state of high performance leadership to a state of lower performance leadership is not a matter of life and death, but it can certainly impact our personal happiness, job satisfaction, and financial situation.
Find Yourself a Canary
We should all have an early warning system that show us when we are getting off track with our high performance habits. Personally, my morning routine is my early indicator. The first sign that I am not working optimally is that my morning routine gets compromised in order for me to "catch up" on a deliverable or other urgent task. Instead of harnessing the power of my morning for activities that require focus, awareness and deep thought, I use it as "yet another hour" in the day to get things done. To be even more self-critical, I'm using my sacred morning time to do things I should've done days before.
In this type of survival mode, it is nearly impossible to be proactive and produce the high quality work that your boss and employees expect.
“In ... survival mode, it is nearly impossible to ... produce the high quality work that your boss and employees expect.”
Luckily, because of my early warning system (my morning routine falling apart), I realized I was off track within a few days. A similar situation occurred earlier in my career and I didn't notice until I missed a major deliverable.
Prepare yourself. Understand what portion of your routine suffers when you become reactive. Perhaps it's your sleep, or your exercise? Maybe you keep a journal of your thoughts and that is the first habit you stop when you're off track. Whatever it is, take note and perform a daily self check.
After I catch myself slipping into a reactive survival mode, I follow four steps to get back into my usual routines. Typically this takes me a few days to accomplish because I'm simultaneously dealing with the urgent issues that derailed me in the first place.
Four Steps to Get Yourself Back On Track
1. Acceptance of the Situation
We've all been there at one time or another. Life happens, problems pop up and we get off track. Feeling guilty doesn't help fix anything. What does help? Accepting the situation and following the first law of holes (if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging).
2. Create Space
The next step is remove yourself from the reactive firefighting mode that you are in. The easiest way to do this is to get yourself out of the day-to-day chaos and allow yourself to think. The best way is to clear off a large section of your day. Likely, this will be difficult, especially if you are running from meeting to meeting, trying to stay on top of critical things.
If you are lucky enough to have an assistant, now is the time to enlist their help. Likely, they can use their "assistant magic" to shuffle appointments and meetings to create some uninterrupted time in your calendar.
Unfortunately, if you don't have an assistant or it's simply not possible to find the space during your regular workday, then the only other alternative is to create space in the morning or evening hours. Likely, this means that time spent with family, friends or on hobbies will be impacted.
Do not fall into the trap of impacting your sleep to "create more time". Remember the Four Pillars of Long Term Productivity. Reducing your sleep quality or quantity will typically worsen your situation. Impact other areas first.
3. Get It Out of Your Head
When our professional lives start to feel out of control and it takes every ounce of our energy to avert disaster, our bodies feel threatened at a primal level. There is a small lump at the base of our brains called the amygdala and it is sometimes referred to as our lizard brain. It is the necessary part of us that keeps us alive during dangerous situations. Unfortunately for us, the lizard brain can step in and take control, even when we are not in actual danger.
To wrestle away control from your lizard brain, we're going to use the more highly developed logical part of our brains. The easiest way to do this is to translate vague feelings of to-dos, concerns and risks into words. Once we put something into words, it is outside the reach of our lizard brains and allows us to operate on it with the rationale human part of our brains. Think about it, have you ever seen a lizard read or write?
You worked hard to create an open time slot in your calendar for this activity, so don't let your lizard brain delay you. No procrastinating. Grab a fresh sheet of paper or open a new text document on your computer and just start writing. Dump everything that is in your head out onto the paper (or screen). Even if the resulting list is very long, this should be a somewhat calming exercise.
Next, open up your task management system (whatever that system looks like for you). Likely, in the days since things became hectic, you neglected to keep your system up-to-date. Put everything that is in your brain dump into your task management system if it is not already there. At this point, don't worry too much about making perfect tasks or about creating duplicate tasks. The most important thing is to simply get the tasks in there.
4. Prioritize and Schedule
This next part is probably the most tricky and difficult. It's all about prioritizing your tasks and activities, and integrating them into your calendar.
If you really think about it, there are many things that you consider important but your business or operation will not stop if they are delayed by several days, weeks, or even more. Scrutinize each item's due dates. Think critically about the risks and implications of delaying each item. In many cases you can talk to your stakeholders and lower their expectations of your upcoming deliveries. This can enable you to deliver a portion of the deliverable with high quality instead of rushing and delivering a low quality version of the entire project.
By postponing many of your non-urgent activities, you can buy yourself time to re-focus on the non-urgent but very important items, in addition to the urgent and truly critical deliverables.
With your current hectic workload, don't allow yourself to work on tasks "when you have the time". Schedule these items into your workdays. If you can't find the time then you need to re-prioritize it or re-negotiate the delivery date. Keep working at it until you have all your urgent and critical items scheduled. Next, schedule the non-urgent critical items.
Congratulations
Congratulations! Now that you are armed with your new priority list, your up-to-date schedule, and a little more calmness, you should be able to get yourself back into your proactive high performance routines.
Remember to be patient. Getting back on track is not simply the reverse of getting off track. In my experience, it looks more like a 1:2 relationship. If I've been sliding off track for 5 days (one full work week) then it will likely take me 10 days (two full work weeks) to fully get back into my high performance groove.
So what about you? Do you ever find yourself being pulled off track? Do you have an early indicator identified so you know when you need to take actions to get back on track? Besides the four tips I've listed here, what are some strategies that you use to shift from firefighting mode to a more deliberate, productive mode?
Take care and I'll talk to you next time.
Image Credit: Photo used under CC0 Public Domain