Month: September 2020

It’s funny how the internet can give me shots of anxiety as I casually brush against it in my everyday life.

 

Sometimes these shots come from sources I’ve actively sought out, like the latest news. But anxiety can pop out from unexpected places, too.

 

A tweet, email, or message I read in what could be a moment of rest will instead stir up thoughts and fears, often in the form of old programs that run in my brain (what coach Jerry Colonna calls “ghosts in the machine”).

 

For me, “anxiety as a service” is one of the unintended consequences of the always-on technology of our lives.

 

This happened a few weeks back. I wrote an article about car troubles, asking whether my alternator failure was caused by parking under high-voltage power lines (my conclusion: I don’t think we’ll ever know).

 

As an experiment, I posted the question on Quora, and one poster (helpfully?) latched onto the cost I paid to have the alternator replaced: “I still think that you were taken advantage of at seven hundred bucks.”

 

Amidst the discussion of induced current and transient voltages, that comment triggered a reaction in me. It set off a long-standing part of me that fears being taken advantage of — a program that has probably been in my family for generations. Even now, writing, I feel a tightness in my chest (“What if it’s true? Everyone will take advantage of you! You’ll lose everything you’ve worked for and descend into total collapse [destitution, shame, judgement, failure, etc., etc., etc., etc.!!!]!”).

 

Phew.

 

The good news, though, is that in noticing my reaction I can start to work with it. This includes accepting that the fear of being taken advantage of will always be a part of me.

 

And that’s OK! It’s just trying to do its job of keeping me safe (and, empirically, it has kept my dad and those before me safe).

 

But I also want to stay in the driver’s seat. And I know that if I push this part of me away it will, paradoxically, get stronger and more insistent.

 

So, I sit with it. I don’t need it to go away, I just need to work with it skillfully.

 

Part of how I do that is by working with others. Coaching and facilitating — deeply relational work — both highlight these issues in a way that just sitting and thinking doesn’t.

 

I also share these stories with my team, my friends, and my readers.

 

I talk about them with a coach. I journal.

 

Combined, these practices help me develop the skill of reflective curiosity, which, in turn, helps me notice when one of the parts of me has gotten activated. It’s a beneficial cycle, an internal flywheel.

 

I’ll never be done with this work. But every moment of reflection helps me be conscious of what I’m reacting to in my life.

 

That awareness lets me move toward fear, lets me say “I don’t know, but let’s try this out,” and lets me be vulnerable because I know that I’ll be OK.

 

For example, I did something scary this week. I facilitated a diverse group of lawyers from different organizations who had come together to try and solve a very complex problem. It was, of course, all online and we used a variety of tools to collaborate.

 

I was open about my fear. “I don’t know if this is going to work. This could be really embarrassing. I’m taking a personal risk here.”

 

But I knew that it was going to be OK. How?

 

When you get down to it, I was sitting comfortably in my home office. I was fundamentally OK. My fear wasn’t about what was happening in that moment, it was about what has happened in the past. If I messed up, I wasn’t going to be excommunicated from the group and starve to death in the desert. I was just going to be a little embarrassed.

 

In my view, moving toward fear is the core skill needed to thrive in our modern world.

 

That’s because the modern world is one that’s largely devoid of answers. It is so complex, so interactive, that no one — neither experts nor leaders — knows “what to do.”

 

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t solutions. But solutions come from experimentation. They’re not known, they’re discovered. And that discovery starts by embracing the not knowing, discomfort and all.

 

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Here’s what you should do instead

 

Does your team feel empowered to speak up at work?

 

Are you sure?

 

One of the most exciting lines of research that we wrote about in Meltdown was what academics call “implicit voice theories”: people’s unspoken beliefs about when it is OK to speak up at work.

 

Researchers Amy Edmondson, Jim Detert, and others have looked at how people form theories about when it is safe to speak up (and when sharing something could be risky).

 

It can be a depressing picture. Many leaders don’t actually listen and doing so can lead to lots of bad outcomes for businesses, from inefficiencies to outright… meltdowns (to borrow a phrase).

 

To see how this works in practice, imagine a well-meaning business owner named Jonathan.

 

Jonathan has owned a construction engineering firm for about 12 years, and things are going well. The firm has recently grown to 33 people, and he finally feels like he has professionals in his leadership team that really know the business. Six months ago, he made a great hire in Karthik, his new director of operations.

 

Jonathan loves the engineering work, but he also loves learning about leadership and management. He’s part of a few professional networking organizations, regularly attends talks, and reads lots of management books (Good to Great is his favorite. He’s got a copy of Meltdown on his shelf, but he hasn’t read it yet…).

 

Jonathan talks a lot about his willingness to receive input, using phrases like “You all know that my door is always open.”

 

But, when team members share concerns with him, Jonathan’s response doesn’t always match that stated openness.

 

Take this example: Karthik sets up a quick Zoom to discuss a complex, cross-functional project (aren’t they all) between his group and the sales team.

 

Karthik: I don’t think we’re going about this project the right way. It’s becoming clear to me that the sales folks don’t know what they want; they’re asking us for numbers that don’t make sense to me.

 

Jonathan: Well, that’s what we decided. It would be too much of a hassle to change now, so let’s just go with it.

 

Karthik: OK, but it will be a lot of work and I don’t think that we’ll get the results we want.

 

Jonathan: That’s just the way it is. We can revisit this in October, after we’ve done our part of the work.

 

Do you see what happens here? Karthik raises a concern. Jonathan doesn’t argue with Karthik, punish him, or yell at him; he just dismisses his concern.

 

Ignored suggestions can poison a culture. Karthik now understands that his input isn’t really wanted, open-door policy or not.

 

So, what can we do as leaders to get better input? I’ll draw on three recent instances from my team as examples.

 

1. Publicly highlight the benefits of input

 

My executive assistant recently shared an observation about how other successful coaches she’s worked with generate business. Because she’s done a lot of freelance and marketing work, she’s seen the inside of lots of businesses. That gives her insight on what works in other places.

 

In a recent team meeting, I highlighted how valuable her observation was, described why it helped me, and asked her and the team to share more.

 

2. Speak last and act on input

 

My marketing strategist, Gabe, recently suggested that we delay the launch of our podcast, The Breakdown.

 

We had originally intended to have three episodes ready to drop right away, followed by a weekly drip. But, because of some production delays (and my commitments elsewhere), we were a bit behind schedule. I thought it would be OK to move forward with only one initial episode in our feed, something I mentioned in passing.

 

But Gabe pushed back. In a recent meeting, he talked about the research that he had done and described the benefits of launching with a block of episodes.

 

I solicited input from everybody on the team. We discussed the advantages of delaying and any complexities that it might cause. We then took a minute to come to a “launch/delay” decision independently. After our discussion, everyone, including me, thought that we should delay.

 

It would have been easy for me to double down and push forward—after all, it was our goal to launch this week. But there was actually no upside to that, and it made much more sense to listen.

 

3. Understand your own triggers (and give your team a map to navigate them)

 

After our conversation about delaying the launch of the podcast, I reiterated how valuable I find my team’s input.

 

And I also shared a specific way for them to get my attention, one that I drew from my experience as a pilot and immersion in flight safety literature.

 

When I get stressed, I drive more. I push forward, digging in and getting a bit stubborn. I can shift from a stance of curiosity to a desire to argue that I am right.

 

But I taught my team a secret power, a specific way of engaging with me to remind me to slow down:

 

“Hey Chris, this is important. I’d like you to take some time to think about this before we move forward.”

 

It’s the same way pilots are trained to get each other’s attention. It’s a cue that tells me that I’m moving too fast and need to tune in.

 

And it’s one of the ways that I’m trying to gather more input from the people who understand many of the challenges and opportunities in my business better than I do.

 

One final note to close. The idea of an implicit theory of when people can speak up is a twin to the concept of psychological safety: the willingness of teams to experiment and share beliefs, even uncomfortable ones. Amy Edmondson pioneered the ideas around and measurements of psych safety, as we call it “in the biz,” and has written about it for decades, most recently in her fabulous book The Fearless Organization.

 

What about you? What strategies do you use to get your team to share with you?

 

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I often get overwhelmed in the evening.

 

I’ll reflect on my workday and look at the list of all the things I didn’t accomplish, the calls I didn’t make, the emails I didn’t return (the newsletter posts that I haven’t written yet…).

 

I wrote about this last week: the ways overwhelm holds me back (and the strategies I use to work with it).

 

Overwhelm is a common problem for the entrepreneurs that I work with, often because they try to do everything themselves. Although that may work for a while, it is ultimately unsustainable.

 

Instead of doing everything themselves (and getting overwhelmed and burned-out in the process), entrepreneurs should consider scaling the system.

 

Here’s one definition of scale.

 

scale, verb: to quickly grow a business to unsustainable levels, often while losing lots of money. Principally used in Silicon Valley.

 

Of course, this definition is cheeky — but not too cheeky. Some major challenges in technology (hate speech and fake news on platforms like Facebook and YouTube, for instance) can be traced to unconstrained growth without adequate systems to support it.

 

But, as someone who runs a small-but-impactful business, I’m interested in a more practical definition of scale.

 

And so are my coaching clients, who are more likely to run medium-sized firms than they are to lead big tech companies.

 

For me, scale has a very simple definition: work gets done without me being involved.

 

Passive income from things like book royalties or the sale of online courses is a form of scale. Profit happens without people doing anything.

 

But even businesses that don’t generate passive income can scale. Here are three strategies that I help my coaching clients use.

 

Create systems and automation

 

Automate what can be easily automated. For dollars a month, you can use tools like Zapier to add customers to your CRM, add payments to QuickBooks, and just generally make your life better.

 

But automation is a double-edged sword.

 

I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes suffer from “automation fever,” whereby I spend an inordinate amount of time building complex automations for trivial tasks.

 

There are two cures (three, if you consider the placebo effect of more cowbell):

 

1. Develop clear criteria for when a task should be automated. Before you decided to automate something, understand how much cost a manual task actually takes. Is time the principal issue? Inaccuracy? Opportunity cost? Or does manually doing a task interrupt your creative flow?

2. Automate parts of a task. My executive assistant manages my calendar, but I also have a scheduling link that I send to people who are more likely to self-schedule than to respond to an email from her. The hybrid solution is better than being entirely automated or entirely people driven.

3. Remember that systems and automation don’t have to involve technology. For example, batching content creation is a powerful way to get more done in less time (incidentally, shifting to batching will be part of our work next quarter).

 

Hire great people and let them make mistakes

 

The next aspect of scale is hiring great people and letting them do great work. Plenty of business owners I know hire people and then proceed to micromanage them.

 

So much of micromanaging is about fear: fear that a detail will be missed, fear that the task won’t be done as well as you would do it (although “as well” often translates to “the exact same way”).

 

Let me let you in on a secret: the people you hire will make mistakes.

 

But that’s OK!

 

Don’t forget that you make mistakes, too. And, for 99% of tasks, mistakes are not catastrophic (or even particularly impactful).

 

The best people you hire will be better than you at their jobs. They’ll know marketing better than you. They’ll be more organized or more detail oriented than you. And, if you do it right, they’ll actually be less likely to make mistakes than you.

 

Part of the reason why hiring a good team is so effective is because it allows a leader to focus elsewhere. Your goal is to home in on your area of greatest impact: connecting with clients and delivering outstanding value to them.

 

Make sure you have a clear, actionable vision so people know what their best work is.

 

What’s better than hiring someone to support you in your job? I would argue that it’s hiring a team that works well together.

 

This doesn’t happen by accident. Sure, you need to hire people who aren’t jerks.

 

But you also need to define a clear, actionable vision. There are lots of ways to do this; last week I mentioned using the Objectives and Key Results approach (website, book) to define your strategy and let the appropriate supporting actions emerge.

 

When this is done in a collaborative way, you will have achieved something that few businesses do: distributing ownership. People will define what they are going to do, sometimes in areas that break new ground for your business, and they will do it better than you — all without your involvement.

 

In my business, we have a positive example of this. This quarter, my executive assistant, who I mentioned above, saw an opportunity to use paid traffic to promote my coaching business (to date, I’ve grown it through organic networking and relationships).

 

She’s done a fantastic job creating an entirely new way for us to engage with potential customers, all because we had the clear objective of expanding the coaching business and she had the skills to work with an outside partner to develop and execute our strategy.

 

That’s the true path to scale.

 

Before I end, I want to ask you something: did this article overwhelm you? I know that yet another article about what to do better can be really tough.

 

If so, not to worry. Remember: you are enough and you are doing enough right now.

 

The work of scaling isn’t just about systems, people, or an actionable vision. It’s about realizing where your own overwhelm sits, where your own fears sit, and learning to work with them skillfully.

 

Subscribe here and let’s keep the conversation going.

Why do I feel so overwhelmed?

 

Last week, I wrote about fear, how I sit with it, and the effect that it has on many of us.

 

This week I was going to switch gears and write about something a bit more tactical, about what it means to scale a business — not in the Silicon Valley sense of “Get a gajillion users” but in the sense of “Run your business more effectively with less involvement and stress.”

 

But, as I dug into that, I realized that many of the barriers to scale come back to one thing:

 

Overwhelm.

 

So many of the business owners who connect with me for coaching struggle with feeling overwhelmed. There’s probably an element of selection bias in that. But I think there’s also an element of universality.

 

I struggle with feeling overwhelmed, too.

 

For me, it often comes late in the day. I usually wake up excited to dive into work. I’ll work on what I need to, and I’ll get things done, have calls, move projects forward, and connect with my team.

 

But, if I don’t get everything done (which is basically everyday!), I often will start to feel anxious and overwhelmed.

 

Why?

 

For me, I think there are a couple of underlying reasons.

 

I’m a very “left brain” guy. My analytical ability and my capability to tease things apart is one of my superpowers, but the left brain also keeps track of all the unfinished things. In moments of overwhelm, it’s hard for me to zoom out and rest in the work I’ve accomplished that day. My survival instinct parses the world apart, looking for the threats and focusing on what’s not done.

 

There’s also a component of self-imposed upper limiting behavior here (in other words, I get in my own way because I have a hidden commitment that is holding me back). I’m a big fan of the work of Gay Hendricks (The Big Leap, among many other titles) for his perspective on how we can move beyond our limits. Even as I move toward achieving my goals through the work that I love, I hold myself back.

 

One thing I’ve learned is that overwhelm isn’t something that I can outthink. Working with it skillfully involves working with three different aspects: mind, hands, and heart.

 

Mind is the aspect that we’re perhaps most familiar with. Strategies like writing tasks down to get them out of our working memory is a prerequisite (the cornerstone of systems like David Allen’s Getting Things Done). SMART goals can help us organize our work (see this great Khan Academy video made for elementary school kids for some helpful tips). And my team and I use quarterly Objectives and Key Results (website, book) to focus on what’s important.

 

There’s another aspect of organizing the mind that helps, too: limiting work in progress (WIP). An excess of WIP means that people are constantly switching between tasks. Instead of starting three tasks and spreading them out over three weeks, start one and bring it to completion before you move on to the next. My team and I have been chatting about limiting WIP this week; it’s a version of the laundry basket problem that I’ve written about before.

 

Hand is the doing. Ironically, the most effective way to avoid overwhelm is by not doing something.

 

What are you able to let go of and still get things done? This involves setting up systems and hiring great people. It requires empowering your team by setting goals, allowing mistakes, and avoiding micromanaging. It also involves developing a clear strategy (whether you’re the CEO of a multimillion dollar firm or a new graduate who’s just starting out), so you internalize the cost of saying yes and recognize what to say no to.

 

Finally, the heart. By heart, I mean not only feelings but the fundamental complex core of the matter. For me and many people I work with, overwhelm is a felt experience. It shows up in the body. To work with it, we need to meet it in the body.

 

We need to feel what’s happening and tune into our sensations. This is hard work, particularly for those of us who have built our success on the practice of deep, analytical thinking. In the past few years, I’ve gotten a lot better at recognizing feelings as they arise — but it’s still difficult to stay with them.

 

But, like sitting with fear, it’s a skill we can develop. Different things work for different people.

 

When I run without the distraction of a podcast, audiobook, or music, I’m more likely to remember to settle into my body. Even a relaxing shower helps.

 

Or I can consciously shift my perspective, bringing my visual attention to the whole scene around me instead of building my awareness from the specific features around me. My theory is that this technique shifts me to the right hemisphere of my brain, which is much less bothered by my to-do list because it holds the broader arc of my work.

 

Finally, I also work with a coach, who uses curiosity to help me stay with my sensations, and with a skilled massage therapist, who engages my body and holds space for my feelings to move me out of my thinking mind. This kind of work can be transformative.

 

How do you work with your overwhelm?

 

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