Better to Forgive than to Forget

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Some recent research found that forgiveness affects perception of difficulty even during physical performance. Jay and I have been discussing how forgiveness might also affect the workplace.

The research found that just thinking about a time you didn’t forgive someone increased the perception of a hill’s steepness and decreased your ability to jump. At first glance neither seems related to any advantage for forgiveness in work or personal relationships. But let us suggest some possibilities.

Imagine your reaction if a team member, one more time, doesn’t follow through on an assignment or avoids thinking for themself and asks you a series of obvious and frustrating questions. You’ve been here before and your irritation level spikes. If you’re jumping ahead and thinking that we’re going to ask you to forgive the team member, well that may help, but actually the idea we’ve been thinking about may be even more important to you.

In the situation above, your response may not have been very measured and thus probably doesn’t decrease the odds you will do any better next time. Let’s face it, you blew it and now that you’ve calmed down you’re blaming yourself. Our question is, would it help to forgive yourself?

Many of our executive clients admonish themselves for “stupid” mistakes or misjudgments. They’ve read lots of advice to “put it behind you” or “let it go” but it’s possible that you might create better future solutions and stronger working relationships if you forgive rather than to try to forget. The perception of the magnitude of the effort it would take to train team members and build more effective management approaches—the hill you have to climb—might seem less daunting if you started with a bit more understanding i.e. forgiving yourself.

Once self-recrimination is tempered by or resolved with self-forgiveness, it seems reasonable to expect that we might free up our focus, creativity and energy. Tasks, including repairing our mentoring role with team members, may look less formidable.

Have you practiced a process that acknowledges, forgives and lets you get on with the task? This is where the mental game comes to the front. How quickly can you forgive your own missteps and begin to work on a different solution and repair the relationship you injured?

One hint is to focus forward with coaching prompts like :

“Well I won’t do that again!”
“That was a learning experience.”
“I lost my focus on that move.”
“What would I do differently next time?”

All of which lead to better future results than blaming and staying stuck regretting the experience.

Superior management skills and results come from practicing emotional control and getting more proficient at the basics of support and influence.

Never Enough Time

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If you’re in the middle of growing your business or your career, you likely have more work than you have time for, and just putting your head down and doing isn’t a sustainable situation. Yet it can become a chronic and ultimately troubling one. What’s to be done?

When we have too little work, it is an emergency. Too little work means a significant push is called for — advertising, networking, PR, media. Not enough work offers clear pathways to solutions; although some are more and some less effective-find work, don’t stop until you’ve sufficiently filled the calendar. Every startup initially faces this, and many people get so comfortable dealing with this pressure that they don’t see the tide turning and beginning to overfill their work blocks. They just keep saying yes.

There are also those blissful moments when we have just the right amount of work, Goldilocks moments–our calendars aren’t too cold or too hot. We are making reasonable revenue but we can get home for supper on time. The problem is that “just enough” will often quickly fall back into not enough. Your pipeline has air bubbles in it; expansion, R&D or payroll will soon demand more resources, even though there isn’t current capacity for it. If you have just enough and you’re in growth stage, productivity figures flatten out. If you’re slipping from a previous glut of work, productivity figures fall.

And then there is the experience that most of us are familiar with– you have more than you can reasonably do, particularly if you value balance in your life. Your best employees are swamped, your days are stretched, and the satisfaction of completing a job is replaced with the stress of seeing your list of responsibilities grow while you’re trying desperately to finish up the last project. Emails alone can feel like a floodtide that has no end until it drowns you.

Here are three things to try that can change how you think about, feel about and handle too much work:

1. Organize it. Until you have a complete list of all your projects and tasks, it is hard to know whether you’re looking at      inadequate time and project management, inappropriate delegation of tasks (to you or others), poor discrimination on your part when accepting responsibility, or a true need to build additional capacity in your team. And without a complete list you are in a weak position to lobby senior leaders to either prune your responsibilities or add positions.

2. Reframe it. Stop catastrophizing the situation with labels that mischaracterize an overabundance of work as “Too much!”, “Drowning!”, “Swamped!” or “Buried!” Your actions, emotions and thinking will tend to follow the views you espouse, so talk to yourself and others using specific, realistic descriptions and solution based statements–“I need to get control of my workflow.” The reality is that you do have an abundance of possible tasks, and they put pressure on you to better manage your work flow and selection.

3. Choose Wisely. Whether you choose your projects or they’re chosen for you the key is to choose wisely.

If someone is pressuring you to take on additional tasks, when you can’t get done what you have on your list and you’re sure that you are already working pretty efficiently, involve the delegator in helping to choose your priorities. Be certain that you both agree on what can get done during your work time.

If you choose your own clients or projects, slow down and choose who and what are going to be the most important in the long run. This is a time to not let urgency-today’s interests or crisis–take precedence over your long-term goals. Having too many projects allows you to raise the quality of your clients, take on the most productive or lucrative ventures and prune out low-return undertakings.

We simply have the time we have. We can invest it in complaining and ineffective processes or we can focus on strategic choices and thoughtful organization. Be clear about what responsibilities you’ve accepted; think and talk about them in realistic, positive terms; and make a commitment to cautiously choose what you add to your plate.

We can help you learn the skills necessary to manage your workflow and to relentlessly implement those skills when the pressure is on.

Strategies to Tackle Tasks You’re Avoiding

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I regularly find myself avoiding some tasks I have taken responsibility to finish. Inertia, distraction, low energy, some aspect of the task I’m inexperienced or weak in, continually forgetting and so many other obstructions regularly get in my way. Of course one of the most frustrating of the tasks I forget to do is to schedule time to do that specific task.

Here are a few of many ideas we use with our clients to get more of their “Can’t Get Started” tasks done.

  • If you haven’t gotten to a particular task, then the odds are pretty good you’re avoiding it. You need to plan a specific way to get started.
  • It can help to identify why you’re avoiding that specific task.
    • Is it unclear? Then clarify it now.
    • Is it actually a multiple step process involving many tasks? Call it a project and then identify a discrete “Next Action”
      and put that on your task list. Do that one thing and identify the next “Next Action.”
    • It may have a deadline, but have you assigned a start date? Start dates are one way to kick your own butt into gear. On the start date do something. Do not skip it. Take a small step.
    • Have you put a time in your calendar to work on the task? Never cancel or skip without rescheduling beforehand.
    • Do you frequently have items that are languishing on your task list? Create a regularly scheduled time to work on “Can’t Get Started” items. This can be as little as 10 minutes every day, maybe first thing in the morning or right after lunch? Or twice a week for 30 minutes to an hour. When the time arrives, pick the hardest item on your list and just start it. If you get it done start the next until the time is up.
    • Do you have an up to date and complete task list? If not, you’re missing the most powerful tool to move tasks from recognition to completion. Only attempt to hold tasks in your head if you don’t value reliability, integrity, high level of performance, creativity, low stress, and other quality of work and life performance measures i.e., write them down!

The most important step you can take is to start the task, even if you only do a very simple step. Then just do the next simple step. Eventually you will gain the momentum you need.

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Organizing and productivity steps are simple to understand, but they are hard to implement. Having support and an experienced problem solver in your corner can make the difference between just wishing and actually accomplishing. Birke Consulting understands people and knows how to help you implement. Give us a call.