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Hello and welcome along to another episode of Walking to your Next Grade. I hope you've got your keys and shoes and things. I've got mine. And the birds are out in full song today, so hopefully they won't cause too much audio disruption in today's episode.
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I want to pull the next thread, as it were, in the knot that we've been exploring, exploring around the common themes that clients experience when they come to work with me, particularly around career development and leadership development.
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So last time, well, two times ago, two episodes ago, we talked about time to think, making the shift from a heavier burden of responsibility to a sliding scale where we're taking on more accountability and thinking about what that looks like in terms of the mechanics that go into enabling that shift from responsibility to accountability and how the nature of the slice under the line that is within responsibility changes.
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So, as you become more senior, you are letting go of some of the action and the doing in the detail that is your own area of work, delegating a lot of that, but now what you.
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So you're accountable for the stuff you've delegated. What you're responsible for, increasingly, is ensuring and stewarding the conditions for the team to be able to do the work that you've delegated to them.
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And then last episode we talked about the boundary threshold. So this is moving out of that repeating conversation loop that you might be going around with someone in the team, realising that actually you're in your responsibility for stewarding the conditions for the team to be successful.
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That includes moving this conversation on, so you're not staying in that supportive loop of conversation where you're trying to encourage this person to do better or fix whatever the behaviour issue is or the performance issue is that they're struggling with. And moving into that firm, but fair place where you're addressing the conversation differently.
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So in today's episode, we're going to continue pulling on the next thread in the knot and today's about overworking to protect the team and this happens through such noble intentions where the manager sees that the team is at full capacity.
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Maybe that's because they a small team, always have been. Maybe that's because you've recently gone through some budget cuts, and you've got roles that haven't been replaced. Maybe it's because of that repeating conversation loop that we talked about last time and you've got some underperformance in the team, which is sapping the capacity from an area of the team.
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Maybe you've got new people in the team and so they're just a bit slower and still on that steep learning curve and so they're taking more time than a fully fledged person in role might take. Maybe it's that you've got really excessive demands coming down the line from senior leaders and stakeholders who are asking of you more than you and your team have capacity for.
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What this leads to though is the manager or my client stepping in to protect the team by doing more themselves and so it's a real pattern. If it's a long term issue, it does not have a short term boundary on it.
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This can become a real pattern of overworking. The manager sees that the team is really stretched and instead of delegating or pushing back on various things, they keep working, they keep work for themselves that they should be delegating.
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They hold on to stuff. If team members are struggling, they might take things back from them even. And the team are frustrated because they see there's a lack of development and they're like, oh I'm doing loads of boring menial stuff.
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I'm not having those stretch opportunities that would let me develop my skills and experience so that I'm ready for the next step whenever that opportunity comes up in my career. The manager is stressed and so this is looping back around to that first episode in the series where they, you know, you don't have time to think because you're being over responsible at a task level.
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And the senior manager, so my clients' managers at this level are not delegating exciting or promotion worthy work either because they see that the manager or my client is at full capacity.
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And so they are also frustrated because they're trying to do this. They're doing exactly the same pattern. They looking at that middle manager and thinking, oh, they seem really at capacity. There's a lot of drama going on in the team, I better protect them. And so they don't delegate the exciting stuff.
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Even if there have been conversations about how the manager, the middle manager or client level manager is ready for more, they're really excited to take on more. Might have had conversations at appraisal and so on about how, you know, they're ready for more, but the senior manager is not delegating to them because of an instinct that they need to protect them.
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So what's really happening here? Everybody's frustrated, nobody's really delegating. Fun stuff. Everybody's working slightly below the grade that they're being paid for. And lots of people are annoyed and frustrated and nobody's getting the development that they want.
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Sound familiar? So, it might be that the manager is tolerating low capacity in the team, like I said. So there might be a skill gap. Maybe there's something new that your team has taken on that not everybody's up to speed on. I've heard from a few clients lately where they've got things, technological solutions in the team to speed up and streamline work processes, but they maybe have some team members who are very resistant to that type of change.
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They might have. A performance gap. So it might be that somebody is not performing their job fully, as we talked about before. The repeating conversation loop and so they've got depleted capacity. There might be a behaviour issue causing that gap where somebody's.
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I don't know, maybe they're, like, off sick quite a lot, or maybe they're not responding well to feedback in those repeating conversation loops and so each time you raise the issue with them, they then are going to take a few days off sick. And here I think that managers in a conflict is the juxtaposition of their value around compassion.
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So, same as we talked about last time, they're really compassionate. They want to protect the team. They also probably have a desire to keep control. And so they find it very familiar to be in the detail of stuff because it feels.
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More comfortable and more controllable for them to stay in the detail of some of the things that are going on. And there might be some avoidance of the complexity that's required to resolve the deeper level issues.
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And that, complexity avoidance is coming up through procrastination, sort of productive procrastination, by being involved in the detail of the team's work. And this pattern can persist because of managers being excessively responsible for tasks.
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So making sure the task output is high through conscientiousness we talked about last time, it's really conscientious. They want that everything that's within their area to be working smoothly. There's usually a very low tolerance for failure or you know, really high expectations around standards.
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Often these clients will say, oh, you know, I'm my worst. My own worst enemy. I know that. My standards are really high. So we've got that, excessive responsibility for task versus what we really want to be shifting towards is that accountability for delegating or accountability generated through delegating and responsibility shifting from task output towards team conditions.
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And, you know, that feeds all the way back to that repeating conversation loop and making sure that you're having those conversations, conversations either with team members where there are problems in the team and moving those issues forward. That might involve some.
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Shortish term upset and additional work in terms of, you know, if this, if this issue then has to move into a formal performance management process, you're going to be involved in documenting every conversation that's had, making sure that the objectives that are being set are measurable, having additional conversations with HR and stuff, but really living through, through that accountability.
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And, the responsibility for the conditions of the team, and that might include then having conversations to push back to senior colleagues and stakeholders to reprioritize what it is that the team is working on because if you're absorbing work continuously and you personally are stepping in to fill that gap, that's not sustainable long term, is it?
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It's really, really not. And I know it's driven from such a loyal, such a devoted place where you just don't want anything to fail, so you're stepping in to take up the slack, but it's not sustainable. So something needs to shift. The threshold here, I think, often comes from one of two things.
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So it might be a feature, of that time to think threshold we talked about in the first episode, where you realise that you just literally don't have time to think because you're so busy in the detail of stuff. And I hear about that from clients a lot where they're like, I don't have time to, even think about what I'm meant to be doing, because every time I put time in my calendar for space and time to think, it just a wash of emails and other priorities come in.
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It might also be that there's some sort of career limitations. So, like I said, there might be some feedback from a senior manager about how actually they can't give you responsibility for any extra stuff until some of those other things in the team are resolved and say that.
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That can be the sort of, the threshold moment where you go, oh actually, maybe I can't move into more of a senior leadership position until some of this stuff gets sorted out. And creating that capacity for yourself is a real big motivator then as to have this moment of shift.
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And, what the shift looks like, as I said, is delegating responsibility for tasks, having people do things that maybe are a stretch and being able to find that space for yourself about what are the standards that you would do things to?
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What are good enough standards and what are minimum standards so that you can have a measure for yourself when you're assessing work that's coming back from the team? Have a measure for yourself, but okay, well, maybe this wasn't done the way I would do it, but it was good enough. Or actually, no, it wasn't good enough.
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You have to go back and redo it, or go back and do another round of edits or whatever that looks like. There also, there might be something here about, like I said, those conversations upwards and this one leads into another episode that will be coming up in a few weeks time about managing upwards and being able to have those conversations with senior leaders and stakeholders about priorities, about what you need from them, about how you're advocating for yourself and your team and understanding that advocating for yourself is often the same, but different but the same as advocating for the work, for the customers, clients, stakeholders.
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However, you categorise the people that the work is serving. So we'll talk about that more in a future episode. But ultimately what happens and what I really want to land is that through this kind of coaching and as my clients approach this threshold and go, oh actually, overworking to protect the team doesn't help anybody because it's burning me out.
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They're not getting the development they want. I'm not getting the career progression. I want. Senior managers frustrated. Actually, all hinges on your ability to delegate really well. When you start doing that delegation really well, paired with the managing up bit that we'll talk about in a future episode, then you're building respect.
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So like I said from last time, you get known as being firm but fair. You're holding issues really well in the team. The team trusts that you are going to move things forward in a really constructive way. Senior managers are going to see that there's less drama in your team because you're just, you know, having those conversations early and efficiently resolving issues quickly.
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They are going to see that you're creating that calm atmosphere, in the team. They're going to see that you are somebody who has a good handle on what's going on because when you delegate, you give somebody responsibility and authority for decision making within a certain boundary.
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And you set up that future accountability conversation where you say you can make decisions up to this point. If anything starts to go wrong, I need you to let me know by XYZ time so that we can resolve that before this becomes a disaster.
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And at the end of the piece of work, I will need you to tell me how it went, what worked well, what didn't work well, what will we do more of, what will we keep for next time, what do we want to change? All of that stuff, which often gets skipped over because we don't, you know, we're really good at plan and do.
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We're not very good at review, but actually it's a really critical piece of the puzzle. You might need to go through that resolve process that we talked about, about the repeating conversation loop and if you want my support with that, let me know. I'm absolutely here to help.
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And then ultimately it releases your time to think. So you start getting that mental leadership bandwidth and capacity back because the drama goes down in the team you feel more sure that you know what's going on, but you're not having to do everything yourself.
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You don't have your to do list running in the back of your mind all the time. Come along to a strategy hour and sign up for strategy hour if you want help with that. So this is a free one hour session on Monday mornings at 9:30 during term time where I'm going to help with working through your to do list and prioritisation for the week to make sure that you're hitting the week with a load of momentum and through all of those different pieces you start having more capacity for yourself and you are renegotiating how much you can achieve in your own work but also with your team and then probably you'll start getting that more exciting work delegated to you by senior managers or if that doesn't happen you're able to have a really good conversation with them about what that looks like, what your next steps are in terms of your career and we'll talk about that in a future episode where we talk about the managing upwards threshold.
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Alright, that was a bit of a whistle stop tour, but hopefully it's given you an insight into how overworking to protect the team ultimately isn't a good strategy long term. I think it's something that most of us, and I include myself in this, I've definitely done it at times, we fall into accidentally, because we're really diligent and conscientious and we want to make sure that everything gets done.
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But it's really problematic as a long term strategy because, like I said, it just saps your capacity to take on more interesting stuff and it's not helping anybody to move forward. If that all sounds interesting and you'd like my support, you know where to find me.
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I'll put links to my website in the show notes. Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn if you want to chat about any of this and I will see you next time for the next episode. Thanks for tuning in. Bye.
