Writing Boots readers know I hate to offer anything useful here, because you’re not supposed to get something for nothing. But every once in awhile I cave in to my sympathetic nature.
Toward the end of a meeting of professional communicators recently I asked how everyone was doing, at work.
“I feel a high level of existential stress,” said one, noting that she has meetings from 7:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. all day, and “work starts at 5:00 p.m.”
“I feel always at risk of burnout,” said another, and rout was on.
“I’m too busy, and I farm out all the fun stuff. I don’t have the bandwidth to do the interesting stuff.”
“There’s no room for error in this work.”
“I could not take a day off without having to pay for it all weekend long.”
“We make it look so easy and we do it quickly and well—and then people think it’s easy work.”
“How do you manage the fatigue, malaise—and, not to use a bougie word, ennui?”
Someone bashfully, one of the participants asked if we’d thought about something called, “Start, Stop, Continue.”
Maybe one or two had—but the rest of us said, “Go on!”
It’s this simple, she explained:
With your boss, you set aside a moment to write down:
• Here’s what we want to do. (To better serve our organization and its mission.)
• Here’s what we do. (Usually a combination of strategically vital work and “legacy” programs” as they’re politely called in corporate circles.)
• What can we stop doing? (Again, to better serve our organization and its mission—maybe more sustainably, while we’re at it.)
Seems to me like a conversation that ought to take place annually if not quarterly in most corporate working groups.
And if you find that notion insultingly basic on one hand, or embarrassingly unrealistic on the other? Well, then I haven’t broken my rule against being useful after all.
Perfect title for this post. Actually, this is also the perfect title for any good operational strategy. Could not agree more with the ideas here. Smart planning and strategy means making the difficult choices on what to do, which also means making the difficult choices of what NOT to do. Can’t have it both ways. Muddled minds often layer strategy upon plan upon strategy to encompass everything, which in turn, preferences nothing and results in an unfocused mess.
Muddled minds—and fried minds, too, Sean. So many times I find myself asking corporate comms execs to describe their strategic plan and they wince. That’s the one thing they haven’t gotten to. They’re hoping to get around to it next January, when they do an offsite … Last week a guy on LinkedIn posted a day in the life of a comms exec. It was absurd—meeting to meeting to meeting to crisis to meeting, and not a moment to think. Every one of the many, many comments was a version of, “That’s me!”
It does make me wonder whether communications executives are hired for their experience, expertise and smart thinking or just their meeting stamina. Not surprisingly, many eventually succumb to this, wearing their meeting endurance like marathon medals. Meanwhile, the valuable work lays fallow.
I fell into that trap for part of my career, but now have tried to embrace a more disciplined approach, so that I use my time to showcase skills and create value versus my ability to behave in meetings for days on end. Always a struggle though. OK, off to the next meeting.
Well, Sean, it seems to me you might teach a session at our next Executive Communication Summit on how you got off the hamster wheel. We should talk.