What should you do when your boss keeps asking for things?
What should you do when demands pile up so high that you and your team are constantly over-booked and the work just keeps coming?
I always talk about how you need to rise above the tactical workload and be more strategic — but what do you do when it’s your boss that is causing the problem?
I have been the annoying boss in this story!
When I was running a $1B software organization, I was the one who was guilty of doing this to my staff.
The disconnect
There is a built-in disconnect that I find very interesting:
When you are working in the business, generally speaking, your job is get work done.
But when you are running a business, generally speaking, your job is to go out into the world, learn things about the customers, the competition, and the market and figure out new stuff to do.
Then you come back all excited about what you’ve learned, and share your ideas with your team about how to improve the business — and they are exasperated. You see it as great new ideas. They see it as more work, changing direction, or fire-dirlls.
There will always be a disconnect between what the boss thinks up and what the organization can deliver.
The secret
Here is the secret. Your boss wants you to push back. Your boss is expecting you to think through the business strategy and the workload an offer advice – not to just try and do everything.
“Oh, no. She’s back…”
I know that when I would come back from a trip, my staff would brace themselves and think “Oh, no, she’s back. Now what? What else is she going to want us to do? We are already too busy, why does she keep piling it on?”
As the boss, I wanted my team to listen and internalize what I had learned. But I did not want them to treat all ideas and requests equally and immediately.
I did not want my team to just try and take on all the work and have it kill them. I did not want or expect them to do everything.
What I wanted was for them to catch all the work, analyze it, make judgements about business priorities and come back to me and negotiate.
Advise your Executive
Big Idea: You need to catch all the work, but not do all the work.
I wanted them to stay focused on the strategic stuff we were working on, but be aware that key triggers were occurring in the market.
I wanted them to think it though and recommend to me how we could stage out all the work. How could we keep focused on the right strategic stuff, but then also come up with a way to prioritize the new ideas and take some of them on over time?
I wanted them to suggest ways of streamlining or stopping things to make room for something new.
I wanted them to debate with my about what is most important and why, and suggest how to re-work the plan to do the most important things first.
Who stands out?
The people who would come back to me with a thoughtful proposal for what to do, in what order, that would be good for the business, and do-able for the team were the ones that stood out as high performers.
The ones who didn’t just accept all my ideas and requests, and helped me think through the strategy and priority stood out as high performers.
The ones who tried to take on all the work and do everything, resulting in everything slipping were not so impressive.
The ones who simply ignored my inputs, kept their heads down, and did not step up to the strategic thinking and debate were not so impressive either.
How to negotiate the workload
- Keep a list of everything your boss asks for
- Keep a list of the top strategic priorities you are working on
- Have regular meetings with your boss where you take out these lists
- Make recommendations about what to prioritize based on the context of business and the content of these two lists.
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When you show your boss these lists several things happen.
- They get embarraseed not realizing they have aksed for so many things. When they see it spelled out right there in front of them, they can see it’s unreasonable.
- You win lots of credibility for keeping the list, catching everything, and not dropping anything. You make them comfortable that you’ve got it covered. They trust you.
- You can ask them “Is this still important”? You will find they have forgotten about several of the requests and have decided that others don’t matter anymore.
- You will realize that you are not beholden to everything on the list!
- You will be able to negotiate timelines and suggest priorities.
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Your boss forgets
There is a tendency to treate all requests from the boss equally.
You need to resist this because they don’t intend them all equally.
They can seem equally excited or serious about a wide range of ideas. Some are vitally important, others are just musings. It’s hard to tell. They will often forget things that asked for, or change their mind without telling you. You need to check.
They need you to help them with their thinking.
You are being paid to judge and decide, not just to do everying you are told.
Want to know more:
Attend my free webinar this week: Be Less Busy, Be More Strategic.
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