1st week of Jan:
‘My diary looks gloriously free at the moment’
‘Christmas is the only holiday where my team don’t push meetings into my diary’
3rd week of Jan:
“My diary is rammed, can we catch up mid/late Feb”
And in a flash, 2025 hit hard with new larger targets to hit, the tally re-set to zero and for many fewer resources and a smaller team that in 2024.
Everyone Manager, MD, CEO and Head of People I’m speaking to seems to agree that 2024 was turbulent and that 2025 id going to be a challenge.
They are also simultaneously, cautiously optimistic though. Regardless of their personal politics, the uncertainty around who’s going to lead the country over here and across the pond, slowed down decision making.
Now that we know who is steering the ship in a (hopefully) positive direction, we can finish plotting our own courses and set sail*….
*that it for nautical analogy…
Without doubt, we’re all going to have to work hard this year and ask our teams to do the same.
For those that didn’t find a way to hit 2024 numbers, some will have had to say goodbye to some team members as their businesses changed shape.
Speaking from personal experience on both sides of the desk, redundancy is no fun at all for anyone. My post describing being a recipient resonated pretty hard and had >1.4m impressions - View the post here
The new team structure is almost certainly being asked to deliver more with less this year and one of the solutions will doubtless be for people to have work harder which probably translates into doing more.
More meetings, more calls, more projects, more hours.
In other words, focus on their work ethic.
Simplistically, those under about 30 are less likely to have children so can more easily apply some balance by playing harder.
Those with dependents already find it tough to make time for themselves so play harder won’t feel like a choice they can make.
Back to the office mandates aren’t helping.
For years I subscribed to the work hard/play hard model and sought to alleviate work stress with more exercise and boozy social time.
Both fed my adrenaline and dopamine dependency as I looked for more ways to compensate for my ever increasing cortisol levels.
Most leaders I work with can easily proudly describe their work ethic and play ethic.
Very few can describe their rest ethic either at all or with any proportional balance to the other 2.
One such leader described their rest ethic largely as what they do when they periodically crash, ill. Curative in other words, not at all preventative.
To perform sustainably well, you have to first be and stay well.
Wellbeing has doubtless fallen out of fashion on the boardroom priority list. In my opinion, people are bored of talking about it and bored of hearing about it. It’s become white noise.
It’s become a bit too nebulous in the face of increased pressure to deliver profitability.
So let’s bring it back in focus…
You’re distributing your annual target among you team. You’re asking them to push and work harder than last year.
You know that your best performers deliver 80% of your revenue and that they represent 20% of your team. If one of them falls, your year could fall to bits but they ‘look’ ok so your plan is to leave them to it.
How do we value the gaps between meetings?
How can we allocate time for thinking and doing, how do we defend those gaps?
When do we prepare for meetings or action items arising from them in a back to back world?
Why do we so easily give away the gaps?
A professional athlete knows that rest and recovery are an essential part of their ability to perform at a high level and they build time into their performance plan.
We intellectual athletes aught to do the same…
Imagine if a performance review scored and rewarded appropriate management of time to include breaks for thinking, resting, recovery, processing complex tasks… We’d all good get pretty damn at it, pretty damn fast and I wonder how much more effectively time would then be spent…
Take care,
James
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