Pile It On

In the average company, work piles up like the laundry and dishes pile up in our homes. The clients keep calling and calling and the deadlines continue to march down upon us. It doesn't matter how many people you spoke to or how many problems you have resolved, there's always another person and a new problem. Um, not to compare clients to dirty dishes and smelly clothes but you get the point. It's a never-ending flow of work.

So what does the average company and the average manager do? Piles it on. These are all things that have to get done, and someone has to do them, so it might as well be...you!

Sure, we know that you're crazy busy and it's a miracle that you're keeping up with everything so far. That's a testament to your talent and how good you are. And logically, since you're keeping up with everything now, and you're so good at what you do, you should be able to handle just a bit more. Right?

So we add to the workload of our best employees, while we let the lesser employees stay as they are because we can't quite trust them with these new tasks. And we assign the jobs that nobody wants to the employees that won't complain, and those just happen to be our best employees, too. And we see how good our best employees are, so we want to reward them and use them to oversee the lesser employees, so we give them the grunt work of daily supervision and reporting as well.

And eventually, our best employees leave. One after another after another. And we stand amazed that people of such talent and dedication and desire couldn't cut it. Apparently they weren't quite as good as we thought, otherwise they would never have complained and they would never leave.

As an employee, we need to understand the limits of what we can do. We need to have a clear idea about how much is too much. We need to stand up and defend our time, to challenge the idea that we can cram three days into one. We need to assert ourselves, lay out everything that we have on our schedule, and get those priorities straight or get some work reassigned to someone else. Staying late regularly to finish that last project and meet that last deadline is a fool's errand and it will never end.

As a manager, we need to be the strongest defender of our employee resources. We need to be the ones that analyze the workload. We need to see that it's too much for any one person to handle, and we need to see overwhelming work coming ahead of time. We need to add extra staff, reassign extra work or defer some of the tasks. We need to take on the grunt work of reports and time consuming meetings so that our employees spend their time efficiently on the important things. And we need to decide what the important things are, since so much of what a business does every day amounts to so very little. Clear away the needless stuff, remove all of the obstacles and let our employees do what they do best.

The work isn't going to go away. We can keep on working hard and long, like a dog digging a hole, or we can find a better way to bury that bone.