Businesses where people do the minimum at work are more stable and productive. When the org culture expects everyone to be a hero, you get:
- a ton of wasted work/time
- difficulty distinguishing between work for outcomes & work for visibility
- single-point-of-failure people
- a ton of wasted work/time
- difficulty distinguishing between work for outcomes & work for visibility
- single-point-of-failure people
"I made 10 variations of this cool mockup" - premature design decisions, stakeholder confusion, probably going to burn out.
"I did this one sketch" - facilitating the right conversations more quickly, level of effort is sustainable indefinitely.
"I did this one sketch" - facilitating the right conversations more quickly, level of effort is sustainable indefinitely.
When the expectation is "you should be doing a lot" it's very difficult to see that you are doing the *wrong things* and you end up spending exponentially more time on prioritization, planning, coordinating things that do not matter.
This complexity creates enormous cognitive load for anyone working in the organization to just do their jobs. Critical business functions end up being performed as, effectively, somebody's hobby - unrewarded and competing for "air time" with 10 other things.
So when that person is tired of 80-hour weeks and quits (or "quiet quits" aka does their job) everything breaks down, nobody can tell why, and nobody has the context to pick up the pieces.
Setting heroic expectations as the baseline is lazy management:
- we don't know what's important
- we don't know how much effort it takes
- we don't know how to measure productivity
- so we'll make it YOUR problem instead, good luck
- we don't know what's important
- we don't know how much effort it takes
- we don't know how to measure productivity
- so we'll make it YOUR problem instead, good luck
Meanwhile it's much harder to figure out:
- what is the goal
- what is the most efficient path to meet it
- how much effort is required
- whether people have the support they need to move forward
but it's actually management's literal job to be doing these things
- what is the goal
- what is the most efficient path to meet it
- how much effort is required
- whether people have the support they need to move forward
but it's actually management's literal job to be doing these things
The irony is that "people can just step up & take on more work" as your resilience strategy is actually far, FAR more brittle. By normalizing it, you set expectations that everyone should be working at >100% capacity...so when you actually need to flex, you have no flexibility.
Meanwhile in a minimal work culture, everyone is guaranteed to have excess capacity. So when you really have to, you can ask someone to take that work on…
…temporarily
…with reward for doing extra
…only by people who self-assess as willing & able to do it
That's resilience.
…temporarily
…with reward for doing extra
…only by people who self-assess as willing & able to do it
That's resilience.
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