When Your People Say, “I Don’t Have Any Bandwidth!”
We pay for results, not activity. A number of years ago, I was the planning chair for an annual global leadership meeting. Change was in the air. We had recently merged with another company of equal size and getting the most out of the merger was foremost on the CEO’s mind. The CEO was bringing in the top 100 leaders from around the globe. The planning team had worked feverishly for months to pull off a successful event. A few days before the event was to be held, the CEO had me come in and review the agenda with the Executive Committee. As I was concluding, my boss at the time, jumped in and said “I just want to thank Tim and the planning team for all of their hard work to get us to this point.” The CEO looked up and just said, “I want to remind Tim that we pay for results and not activity.” At the time I felt a bit unappreciated and honestly was really taken aback by that statement. The meeting was awesome and the CEO got everything from it that he had wanted. Thank goodness!
What is the Time Signature of Your People? I have reflected on that experience many times and it taught me a great lesson. Sometimes we kid ourselves that all work leads to results. I can remember working with a sales organization that was not getting good results. In fact, they were losing market share at a fairly rapid pace. I was called in to see what the problem was. It became clear early on that they were not sure what sales activities actually led to closing business. They also had little understanding of the time signature of their sales people. We began to look at those sales people who were getting results and compared it to those getting average results. There were stark differences in how they spent their time. It reminded me of my first boss when I was in sales. He said, “Tim, the roads are littered with the dead bodies of sales reps who worked hard, but not smart.”
What do you do when your people say they have no bandwidth for change? I have worked with so many clients who are trying to create headroom for change. This can be in the form of budget, people or just time. I frequently find that there is tremendous bandwidth in having people focused on the right things. That is, activity with result. When I was running a global function, I had people tell me all the time they were too busy to do some new thing. I have a classic example of this. We had outsourced payroll to an external vendor. I was having a skip level call with some HR folks from several countries and they were discussing how busy they were. I just listened. It came up in the conversation that they were spending several days per payroll period double checking the vendors as they had made some mistakes. Now I too wanted people to get paid correctly, but the real issue was holding the vendor accountable, not doing their work for them. Sometimes our people just do not have the breadth and depth of experience to think these things through. They need help. It is important to articulate to your people those activities that “drive external customer success” and make sure they know you have a listening, helping ear about things that detract from it.
Here are some simple tips to ensure you have bandwidth for change:
- Clearly lay out the 3-4 things that are The Main Things
- Enforce the boundaries and walk the talk around the most important things
- Hold skip level listening meetings where you earnestly try to live a day in their life.
- Give people permission to say “no” to low priorities
- Identify low priority work that can be eliminated or moved to lower cost solutions