Breaking the Burnout Cycle

I guess you could say I've had prioritization on the brain.

I recently designed a two-hour workshop on prioritization for a client of mine. Across their company, they showed all the classic signs of a flooded organization:

• Calendars booked to the brim with meetings

• Multitasking during calls

• Lists of "Priorities" a mile long (and unranked)

• Managers complaining that they don't feel like they know what's going on

• Workers complaining that they can't find time for things like learning, growth, or often, lunch.

Everyone in the company looks like this:

Is it fair to ask workers to make lemonade?

I've seen plenty of organizations like this, and clearly, so has Brandi Olson, whose book Real Flow: Break the Burnout Cycle and Unlock High Performance in the New World of Work, I just finished reading. She writes candidly and practically about these problems at the organizational level, and about the techniques leaders can leverage to solve them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Olson and I share many of the same core beliefs on what it takes to unflood a team and break the burnout cycle:

1. Make the work visible - You can't manage what you can't see. If you feel like requests are coming in from all sides or you're spending hours of your day doing things that don't contribute to progress, you need to stare your work in the face. This involves gathering all of it in one place and seeing what it is, where it comes from, and where it is going. This also means getting a clear picture of the process an idea goes through to become value in your organization.

   
   

2. Limit your work in progress - This extremely basic principle of Kanban is almost impossible to implement in a company with a culture of "more is more." (Olson provides a particularly good account of how our work cultures are cognitively dissonant with this principle). Can you accomplish 100 tasks? Sure, but not all at once. You are bound by the laws of physics and the limits of human evolution as much as the next person, and if you don't honor them...well, they will still impact you anyway.

   
   

3. Count like a kindergartener - Perhaps the hardest work of prioritizing is....actually doing it. Ultimately, if you don't rank order priorities for your team, they will be making those decisions on the fly all day long: "Should I take a meeting for project A or work on project B?" "Should I help someone with their priority or work on my own?" How can a team or an individual feel confident they're making the right choices if their leaders never make those choices either? You have to list your priorities in order and "count like a kindergartener"--that means 1, 2, 3 and not 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A.....

   
   

4. Collaboration is key - You may be able to prioritize your own tasks, but the moment you need other people to accomplish your goals, prioritization becomes a team sport. Our organizations are much more like ecosystems than machines, and any efforts you make to "solve" burnout in your org need to take into account the complexities of that ecosystem if you want lasting change without unintended consequences.

   
   

5. "Perfect" is the enemy of "good" - Making good choices and small, good progress today is vastly more important--and ultimately, more effective--than agonizing over the perfect priorities, plan of action, or organizational overhaul.

So, will my workshop solve my client's flooding problem and break the burnout cycle? Not on its own, of course. I'm so glad to have resources to share like Olson's book, and plenty of other great thinkers in our space sharing the same message. Ultimately, the work ahead of prioritization and limiting work in progress to create flow is a long, slow road, but it's a good (not perfect!) road to be on.