Too Busy to Improve?

Are your coaching clients too busy to improve? This is certainly a common state of affairs in professional office environments, I’m finding. 

Some leaders I know put in 12-hour days and frequently are working on weekends as well. They are perpetually swimming against a tide of emails and meetings related to budgets, strategic planning, staffing issues, performance dashboards, decision-making, governance, stakeholder diplomacy, and, of course, those pesky, recurring operational problems. These leaders are so busy with their day-to-day commitments and the fire-fighting of problems that they do not have any time to think deeply about what is causing them, nor to experiment with some thoughtful countermeasures.

While “not enough time” can be code for “not a priority”, frequently I find this is not the case. They would dearly love to find a solution to their and their teams’ capacity problems. But they just don’t see any obvious, easy way to get off the hamster wheel. Where on Earth are they going to find the time? They feel they are simply too busy to improve.

Given this state of affairs, it should hardly surprise those of us in the coaching business that we find few takers when we approach leaders and pitch to them, “How would you like to engage in root-cause problem solving so that you will have fewer meetings in the future? It’ll be great! Sure, it requires you to fill out this template here, gather some data there, conduct a good dose of observation and analysis…but don’t worry, I’ll help you with it! All you have to do is meet with me daily for 20 minutes and I’ll coach you through it! And, oh, yeah, did I mention there’ll be homework?”

When leaders are working 60+ hours a week, asking for an additional one or two hours of their time is akin to asking them to smother themselves in honey and tie themselves to a tree in the middle of a bear-ridden forest. Even worse, try asking them to dedicate 5-6 of their people to a 3-5 day improvement event!

There are at least two ways that coaches can effectively help break this deadlock. The first is to help leaders admit and accept that there will always be more demand on their time than there will be supply of it. Help them clarify their medium- and long-term goals and encourage them think about what activities they could do right now that will contribute more towards achieving these goals and which will contribute less. Once the goal is clear, choosing what to do next is easier.

Secondly, start with asking for small time commitments. Very small. Aim for a half hour, max. Get them to pick one meeting where, if they were not to attend, the world would continue to turn in the same direction (and they would still be employed). Perhaps they can send a delegate and make missing the meeting into an opportunity for someone else. But the most important thing is how they use their newly “gained” time.  

Paradoxically, what you want them to do with this precious time is to see more—yes, more-- problems.  They already know most of the major problems, of course, but they know them only conceptually. They need to know from first-hand experience so that they become real to them. The best way to do this is to get them to go see if frontline employees are working in a way that is consistent with the goals you just helped them clarify. Get them to commit to spending 15-20 minutes with a frontline team member or two. How are they adding value to customers? What’s getting in the way? What is causing delays? What information, if it were both accurate and on-time, would allow them to work better? Are their priorities clear and aligned with those of leadership? Who consumes their work and why?

There are many great questions a leader could ask at the frontlines of the business, but it is often an uncomfortable and unconventional activity for leaders, so guidance from a coach is valuable.

With a bit of luck, the leader will come to feel that solving the tangible, frontline problems that impact customers directly is more important than attending some of those other meetings devoted to abstract problems that the customer does not care about. And this is when you, as coach, ask, “Perhaps next week we could find a bit more time to plan what we’re going to do about all these problems you’ve observed?”

Time, the old saying goes, is money. And, like money, if well-invested, it can grow through the power of compounding interest. If 30 minutes spent improving a process at the frontlines saves the leader 30 minutes of avoided fire-fighting later on, then they now have an hour to find and eliminate another hour of preventable work, and then another two hours, and so on. Pretty soon they’ll be wanting to get five or six people in a room to do a week-long improvement event!