Understanding Your Personal Leadership Capacity

This post comes courtesy of the intersection of a number of parallel but distinct events and experiences over the past week.  Often times as individual leaders and organizations we feel overwhelmed by the opportunities and challenges before us.  This reality hit me particularly hard - in more ways than one - this week.  I heard flavors of it from a couple of my coaching clients, in a strategic planning session I facilitated and from my own personal and business perspective.

From several of my coaching clients this week I heard the lament of too much on my plate, how do I get this all done, how do I prioritize and/or how do I get others to appreciate that my plate is already full.  If we flip the coin on this lament we can hear some other common themes that are all too often a part of our work these days - diminishing levels of employee engagement and challenges to work/life balance.  Sometimes these results are being borne out because of or in parallel to the perception or reality of lack of resources.  "If I only had more budget, more staff, more supplies...all this would be more manageable."  I suspect, however, that more resources is not the solution.  More resources may just mean higher expectations rather than management of existing workloads.  In some cases it might not matter how many resources were thrown at any one division or leader - the stress level might end up being exactly the same.

Just as challenging it would seem for some leaders or organizations is the willingness to say no or to otherwise prioritize the requests and workloads coming at them.  In some of these cases, as described by my clients, there appears to be an organizational willingness to say "yes" to everything that comes across the table.  Conversely, it may be that there is an organizational unwillingness to say "no" to anything that comes across the table.  This predicament is probably enhanced in the kind of economic downturn that my province is experiencing right now.  Saying no to a request might be perceived as tantamount to asking for your own termination notice.  Unfortunately, too many organizations have not been willing to truly establish the key guideposts by which they would evaluate any initiative that comes before them.  The result is predictable - yes is the answer to every initiative regardless of current workload or resources.  The long-term sustainability of such a response is hardly considered.  Just don't say no now.

Therefore, for me, it was refreshing to recently hear a CEO of a large organization espouse to his executive team and governing board the need to understand - and respect - their personal and organizational capacities.  Rather than demand more and more - as is the wont of many hard-driving executives - he was holding the feet of his people to a different fire.  Understand your capacity.  Understand that there are limits to the time available to you in a day, week, and month.  Understand that there are limits to your ability to handle multiple priorities.  Don't tell me you are going to add another initiative to your plate and keep to every other milestone you have already set.  Chose wisely and execute well.  It was a powerful message and one that clearly was being understood and accepted, even if slowly, over time.

The message of this forward-thinking CEO, an individual that I would no way characterize as soft, stands in sharp contrast to others I have experienced or worked with.  One of the most iconic examples is of a CEO who tried to alter his staff's perspective on prioritization by use of the somewhat infamous "Big Rocks in the Bucket First" exercise.  A decent enough exercise but it presumes that all managers and staff have the ability - or are allowed - to pick their own big rocks.  In the case of the forward-thinking CEO already noted this appeared to be the case (outside of regulated or legislated initiatives).  But for other CEO's, who most often define what the "big rocks" are, there is a lack of appreciation of how many big rocks can be rolled down the hill or the potential consequences of ignoring some of the "little rocks" that others in the organization need to work with.

In fact, perhaps it's time to update the Big Rocks exercise.  Perhaps there has to be an understanding of what size of bucket we are actually working with.  What's our actual capacity?  Perhaps as leaders we need to undertake a bit more of an internal environmental scan before launching the next big rock down the hill and understand how that fits with - or displaces - other rocks we have already launched yesterday or the week before.

The final hitting home point for me on capacity has come on my own business and personal side.  These past two months have been busier than at any other time in my current career and despite the economic downturn we are currently facing.  That fact alone has already challenged my "capacity" and more particularly made me feel that I have been less of the quality family man then I should be ans aspire to be.   Others - most notably my wife - has taken up more of my personal "overflow" than is acceptable.  While potentially manageable in the short-term the stress tolerances of continually exceeding one's capacity has inevitable and predictable consequences.

The lesson of capacity is one that I'm trying to learn (or learn again) in my personal and business life and I trust that you can be more forward-thinking, insightful and discerning as you contemplate launching your next big rock into your leadership or organizational bucket.
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Greg Hadubiak, MHSA, FACHE, CEC, PCC
Director - WMC
TEC Canada Chair/Executive Coach/Senior Consultant
hadubiak@wmc.ca

Helping leaders realize their strengths and enabling organizations to achieve their potential through the application of my leadership experience and coaching skills. I act as a point of leverage for my clients. I AM their Force Multiplier.