How much time do you spend each week working through the important, deep, and future-building work? How much time could have been spent on the significant, strategic change work that often gets lost โ either in routines or in the swirl of urgent items that seem to appear out of nowhere?
Take a minute to look back at your schedule over the last few weeks if you really want to get a clear picture.
Chances are youโve been caught up in a strategic-routine-urgent logjam.ย
If youโre seeing this play out on your schedule, consider the compound effect of this playing out across your team โ those four to eight people you spend 80% of your working time with.
When you look at teamwork, youโll find that collaboration mostly falls into one of three buckets:ย
Strategic work: work that is longer term and catalytic for an important objective or issue
Routine work: tasks that pop up regularly, such as weekly reports
Urgent work: time-sensitive and important tasks
We canโt control the urgent things that come up, and hopefully the routines we have in place are set up to support those moments when they arise. Where things tend to get slippery though is how we spend the time we have (or think we have) for that important, future-building strategic work.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the โfather of flow,โ once wrote about how, if you look at your schedule from two weeks ago, unless you make specific, instrumental changes during your week, your schedule two weeks from now is probably going to look the same.ย
We have this myth in our brains that two weeks from now is wide open. That we donโt have to worry about it now because in the future weโll have the time.
Exceptโฆ itโs not really that open, not when you think about it.ย
At the team level, youโre rolling in routine stuff, things you know are just gonna happen, but they still take up time to do. And thereโs probably going to be something thatโs urgent, right?
And thatโs not even counting meetings, which usually fall into the routine bucket, but require urgency every so often.ย
So how much time do you actually have for the future building work? Time to:
When Iโm consulting on strategic planning with a client, one of the first things Iโll come in and say is, โWhatโs our actual capacity for change here?โย
Iโm not talking about the emotional capacity, which is also important, but what is the actual capacity on schedules?ย
This is where the disconnect often comes in on teams. Managers and leaders expect a lot more of the strategic future building work to happen. Thatโs natural โ we (hopefully) take pride in our roles and company vision, aiming to elevate what we stand for, and push our boundaries beyond the limits of success.
However, most managers and leaders donโt have a firm grasp of how the routine tasks and the urgent stuff dominates the team structure.
If the routine tasks and urgent work items are taking up 110% of peopleโs time, we have to do something different.
We canโt just assume that weโre going to put more units of stuff in a bag thatโs already overfilled.ย
I was recently talking to a CEO who was frustrated that an important project didnโt seem to be getting the attention it deserved. I pointed out that prioritizing the project meant there is work that will need to live on someoneโs schedule.ย
Which led me to ask โIs there any room for this to go on their schedule?โย
And followed by:
Are there enough focus blocks to move this strategic work forward?
And if not, what are we gonna do about that?ย
This is where on the individual side, the five projects rule is super helpful. Itโs the sort of thing that itโs really a gauge for what you can fit in and what your capacity really equals out to be. Projects have to move out before new ones can be moved in.ย
And at a team level, itโs especially important for managers and leaders, but itโs really all of us at a certain point. You have to honor that youโre not going to get everything done, and that something either has to be dropped or pushed forward in an imperfect state.ย
Understanding your capacity for change starts with understanding how much room in your (your teamโs) schedule there is to take on strategic work. If itโs just filled with urgent and recurring work, take a look at all the routine tasks and projects and ask yourself the following:ย
From here, youโll be able to build in space for strategic thinking that will expand you, your company, your team and more, to the next level of success โ without compromising the essence of what makes you flow.
Team Habitsย is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller. And if youโre curious about identifying your teamโs strength areas, growth areas, and challenge areas, take ourย Team Habits Quiz, a free, customized report to help you understand how your team works best together and how together your team does its best work.
The post Change Work Is Strategic Work appeared first on Productive Flourishing.