What are your priorities?
When an organization fails to prioritize, it’s failing to make decisions. And that is one of the fastest ways to burn out your whole team.
What are your priorities? Simple question, right?
Maybe in theory, but not in real life. Prioritizing means saying “no” (or at least “not now”) and that can be difficult. Earlier in my career, I was asked to join the board of directors for a nonprofit organization whose mission I believed in. Not long after that, I was asked to join another board. And then another. And another. I said yes way more than I said no. After all, if you can help make a positive impact, how can you say no? Before long it became clear that by saying yes to so many of the organizations I cared about, I was not putting myself in the best position to help them. It’s possible I was even hurting them. That’s because the more you say yes, the less time, attention, and focus you have to give to any one endeavor.
Related: 3 tips to overcome burnout and achieve work-life balance
I learned the hard way when I did the math: if I’m on four nonprofit boards, on top of everything else going on at work and at home, how many focused hours am I able to dedicate to each board? Math has a way of not lying. And not lying (or at least not magically thinking) about how many hours there are in a day should be a lot easier than it is.
Why is it so hard to say no?
One reason it’s hard is that we like to be busy. People expect us to be busy. It can seem obvious: the longer we work, the more we get done. Being busy, though, is not at all the same as achieving an outcome. Being busy is often just being hyper-focused on checking tasks off our to-do lists without pausing to consider if there’s a better way to get work done, or if we’re even focused on the right things. (When my child asks me to play, I often catch myself saying, “Not now, I’m too busy” and instead force myself to admit, “I don’t have time right now to play, because I didn’t prioritize it.”)
In many organizations, a culture builds up around the idea of being “crazy busy” all the time. A culture like that might never allow for tough conversations about what work matters now and what work can wait. And when an organization fails to prioritize, what’s really happening is it’s failing to make decisions. And not making decisions is one of the surest and fastest ways to burn out your whole team. An indecisive culture is a burnout culture.
That’s not to minimize how difficult it can be for teams to make decisions. But the good news is that humans are great at adapting. We can deal with a decision we didn’t agree with or a scenario that doesn’t go our way; we can even adapt to a priority we don’t fully align with. Where we flounder is in the gray area, the space where everything’s a priority and everything makes a claim on our limited time and attention.
A focus on priorities naturally leads to a focus on outcomes
For me, one way out of the gray is to keep the focus on outcomes instead of tasks. On an individual level, that means working more insightfully, finding the most productive four tasks to invest time and energy into rather than checking 10 off the list because that’s the way we were trained. Being outcome-focused is about being productive and strategic in pursuit of a clearly defined end state.
At an organizational level, it can be scary to shift from tasks to outcomes. But there’s nothing like a pandemic to accelerate change and innovation. In the last few years, we’re seeing organizations of all sizes step up and experiment on everything from how to deliver better health outcomes for their employee populations to how to address systemic inequalities. Some experiments will fail, but we’re moving in the right direction. And along the way, we’re recognizing and learning the skills we’ll need to work in a less “busy,” more outcomes-driven way.
Here’s just one example: we’re beginning to see the whole person who comes to work, not just the “employee.” That leads to a cascade of positive effects, like a more humane and creative conception of flextime, paid sick leave, wellness benefits, and other innovative programs that, prior to the pandemic, might have only happened at a much slower pace. I believe an increased focus on the whole person and a greater sensitivity and awareness of the social supports we all need will naturally lead to a healthier and more outcome-driven approach to work (and life).
If you check only one thing off your list today…
The shift from task-minded to outcome-minded can be transformational. Once I began to rethink my commitment to nonprofit boards from the perspective of how best to achieve an outcome, the solution became obvious. Rather than instinctively saying yes, I started recommending other people for the role. It turned out that I could always find someone to refer who could do the job as well as me and, in many cases, I referred people who could (and did) do the job better. All it took was a brief interruption to the hamster wheel of checking off tasks and a new and better way became clear.
If your organization is on the right track, good for you—celebrate your success and let it encourage you to move forward. If not, just remember: the 1,000-mile journey begins with a single step. And for those of us who need our tasks in list form, here’s step #1: ask yourself, “To achieve the most meaningful outcomes in my work and in my life, what are my priorities today?”
Paaras Parker is CHRO with Paycor.
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