Brendan Reid is an accomplished career coach, author and executive. He shares leadership lessons and career advice on his blog, www.brendanreid.com, and in his popular book, Stealing the Corner Office.
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You don’t have to work for long to feel the pressure of productivity. More, faster – every leader feels it. Our companies need to grow. Growth pays the bills, it enables investment, it allows us to employ more people and help more customers. Growth is good. It’s easy to trick yourself into believing growth and productivity are synonymous. In my experience, that is a trap.
As leaders, we too often chase productivity for its own sake. We burnout our teams in the process. And, to what end? Actual labour productivity in Canada has declined three years in a row, despite hours worked increasing, according to Statistics Canada. Our perpetual chase for productivity is misguided.
The “more is better” mentality simply doesn’t work. We take on too much. We push our teams to deliver more. We sacrifice quality for volume and pace. We knowingly focus on things that won’t deliver impact. We set arbitrary growth goals in January, and start chasing them down in October, whether we believe they will have impact or not. We trick ourselves into chasing the wrong things and we do it at the expense of our health, our teams and ultimately our success.
So, why do we obsess over productivity? Why do we worry if our team members are working hard enough, long enough? Why do we build plans to grow every metric we can think of? Why are we obsessed with volume when we should be focused on value?
Absolute productivity is almost never what defines your success and failure as a leader. Yet, it’s obsessed over by all of us. Instead of pushing our teams to deliver more, we should be pushing them to deliver better, and more creatively. Leaders should be obsessed with delivering big wins, not big volume. The big wins are what move the needle for a career, a team, a company. A small set of high-impact moments enable our growth and success and ultimately produce more value for our customers and employees.
Here are a set of leadership strategies to focus your team on winning while freeing them from the productivity trap:
1. Focus on building a better team, not just on delivering more
It’s increasingly difficult to think long-term when you work for a company. Tenures are shorter than ever; companies come and go. Organizations are measured on quarterly performance, if not monthly. Our performance reviews and promotion cycles are annual. The gravitational pull at work is to think short term. And so, we set arbitrary short-term growth goals. Ten-per-cent more this month, 15-per-cent growth next quarter. We do this across all our metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Dozens of them sometimes. And then we chase after them. We hope, somehow, that out of this cycle will pop some actual value. What we rarely do, what we should do, is spend more time focused on getting better.
If you zoom out for a moment, the real path to winning for your company is to build a stronger team than your competitors. With a stronger team, you will perform better. You will get more wins; you will be more productive – in the areas that count. But as leaders, we spend a disproportionately high amount of time fixated on delivering more, and a disproportionately low amount of time, on becoming a better team.
My advice to leaders is to be more discerning when setting goals. Set fewer goals. Only things that will help the team and company win. With fewer goals, you can allocate more resources and time to improving your team. More time spent recruiting top talent, more time on learning and development, more time improving your core processes, more time pursuing quality and creativity. Your team will love it and be stronger for it.
2. Inspire your team to the pursuit of big wins
In just about every performance review I ever had, I was always surprised at how few of my accomplishments my boss seemed to remember. She almost never recalled the work I did early in the year, or the exquisite pain I experienced fighting fires every day. When review time came, my success and failure seemed to amount to just a few big things. Big mistakes and big wins. Later in my career, when I was the one doing most of the performance reviews, I noticed the same trend. As much as I tried to acknowledge the routine grind of my team members, what I really cared about were the big things. We may have done 100 things as a team, but only 10 or 20 really made a measurable difference.
If the pareto principle applies to your team, imagine the efficiency to be gained by reducing focus on the low-impact 80 per cent? Imagine how freeing that would be for your team? How much more creative they could be with that time? Gross productivity might go down, but impact and value creation would skyrocket.
My advice to leaders is to become ruthless in prioritizing work and dedicated to high-impact win projects. Focus your goals on them. Allocate your resources to them. Focus your communication and rewards on them. Reorganize your team to pursue big wins and ignore the small stuff.
3. Reward impact not output
It’s not enough to talk about the pursuit of wins over gross productivity. We must amend our incentive system to align motivations. Way too many teams have 25 different KPIs, and a laundry list of projects. All of which, contribute to bonus eligibility, performance reviews and promotions. This is what sets the productivity trap in the first place. Once the goals are in place, our teams are forced to chase them or risk a negative review or missed bonus. Showing off 20 goals looks great in your plan at the beginning of the year, until you realize you need to deliver all this stuff.
My advice to leaders is to invest more time creating goals and reward structures that measure impact versus output. Sure, there are times when pure productivity matters. But almost certainly not when painted as a blanket 10-per-cent growth across 24 KPIs. That is a trap we set for ourselves by racing through the goal-setting exercise instead of having the patience to align our goals and rewards to the things that will actually make a difference.
One key lesson learned in my career is that your success as a leader won’t be defined by the gross productivity of your team – it will be defined by the value you created. Our role as leaders is to build the strongest teams, not the busiest. Let’s focus on impact over output, and build healthier, happier teams in the process.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.
