The Art of Manliness - Get on Top of Collaboration Overload

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now there is

00:00:11.500 seemingly more collaboration going on in the workplace than ever before. People are working

00:00:15.760 and talking across teams and within teams using a wide array of communication channels. As a result,

00:00:20.780 employees, managers, and CEOs alike can feel pulled in a ton of different directions by a ton

00:00:25.660 of different requests and find their actual productivity shot to pieces as a result. My

00:00:29.820 guests figured there had to be a better way for folks to work together and interviewed the most

00:00:33.240 efficient collaborators to find out what they did differently to get back up to a quarter of their

00:00:37.460 collaborative time. His name is Rob Cross. He's a professor of leadership, a business consultant,

00:00:41.840 and the author of Collaboration Overload. Rob and I begin our conversation with a big picture

00:00:45.940 overview of the organizational and individual factors that are driving the problem of

00:00:49.720 collaboration overload. We then shift to talking about the concrete tactics he learned from

00:00:53.460 efficient collaborators that can help others avoid getting pulled into every conversation and

00:00:57.160 project. We discuss how to limit the productivity sapping power of meetings by scheduling reflective

00:01:00.940 time and ways to put more buffer between you and those who ask you to collaborate, including

00:01:04.820 creating a transparent clearinghouse of priorities. We then discuss how to reduce collaboration overload

00:01:09.100 and communication, manage people's expectations for response times, and identify the microcessors that

00:01:13.860 may be contributing to your burnout. After the show's over, check out our show notes at

00:01:17.020 aom.is slash collaboration. Rob Cross, welcome to the show.

00:01:32.780 All right. Thank you so much for having me here, Brad.

00:01:34.460 So you got a book out called Beyond Collaboration Overload, How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore

00:01:39.520 Your Well-Being. So you are a network scientist, but you spend a lot of time studying the effects of

00:01:46.340 collaboration at work on not only our productivity, but also our quality of life outside of work.

00:01:52.740 How did that happen? How did network scientists end up studying collaboration?

00:01:56.860 Yeah, great question. It started about 23, 24 years ago. Actually, I was running a research group,

00:02:02.540 and we were focused on how do you help organizations better share knowledge and expertise? And of course,

00:02:08.040 a lot of people were treating it as a database issue. But what I got really interested in is nobody

00:02:12.840 used the technologies that much. Most people, when they had problems or opportunities or

00:02:18.600 decisions they needed to get done, they would reach out into their network to various others to get a

00:02:24.280 sense of what information could help or things like that. And so we started mapping patterns of

00:02:29.380 collaboration in large groups to understand how these groups were getting things done. And then what we

00:02:35.760 started to see over the course of the past really decade and a half is all the restructurings that

00:02:41.800 organizations are going through right now are putting more and more collaborative demands on

00:02:47.580 employees. We've been through de-layerings. We've been through agile work. We've adopted all sorts of

00:02:52.960 these collaboration technologies like Slack or email or video channels or things like that that help us

00:02:58.760 instantaneously connect. And they all sound great in isolation. They're all appealing, right? That we want

00:03:03.760 to be one firm or we want to be able to reach out and get to others instantaneously. But incrementally,

00:03:09.880 over about a 10 or 15 year period, we could see that the collaborative demands placed on people today

00:03:15.600 were rising 50, 60% in that timeframe. And nobody was paying any attention to it, right? We have this

00:03:22.260 big kind of invisible component of work that had really driven up and required people to be working

00:03:27.760 earlier into the morning, deeper into the night. It was affecting quality of work life, yet nobody was

00:03:32.880 really seeing it and thinking about kind of how do you help people survive today? So that was really the

00:03:38.700 the starting point of it. Yeah. Not only were people weren't seeing it, they were just encouraging

00:03:42.000 more collaborations. Like, well, we got to have an open office. We're going to flatten our hierarchy.

00:03:47.260 And it just made it worse. So, I mean, when you... And if you go into a place and you ask leaders,

00:03:52.680 you're thinking about de-layering or open space or a new technology. If you look them in the eye and say,

00:03:58.060 well, do you really want another email meeting or phone call in your life? And the answer is never yes.

00:04:03.020 Yeah. But, you know, it's very quick to kind of foist all these things on other people without really

00:04:08.560 recognizing, you know, the effect of that, as you're saying.

00:04:11.200 So when you're studying an organization, you're looking for collaboration overload. Are there signs that an

00:04:16.780 organization or a leader might be suffering from too much collaboration?

00:04:20.940 Yeah. So what we see, we use the network analytics to understand kind of how many people,

00:04:26.780 how frequently the amount of time that's being consumed in collaborative work. And so, of course,

00:04:31.040 I'm all for the kind of collaboration that we all want, right? Those kind of four, six,

00:04:36.080 eight, 10-person teams that are integrating, bringing diverse perspectives, you know, and

00:04:40.040 producing a new innovation, right? That's what you're trying to preserve time for.

00:04:43.860 What we're worried about is all the other stuff, you know, the amount of time on the team collaborative

00:04:48.480 spaces, the Slack, the IM, the emails that are drifting earlier into the morning, deeper into the

00:04:53.500 night. And what we've seen in here that's troubling are the signals that I tend to look for

00:04:58.620 in leaders is the degree to which their calendar, you know, is completely overloaded through the day.

00:05:05.040 And they're finding their interactions drifting earlier into the morning, deeper into the night,

00:05:09.620 deeper into the weekend. And they're just solving the problem by trying to schedule or jam more

00:05:14.540 meetings in rather than saying, how do I collaborate differently? So as an example of that,

00:05:19.140 pre-pandemic, people would come to me and they'd complain that, oh my gosh, I have eight one-hour

00:05:23.340 meetings and I can't get, you know, anything done until the end of the day.

00:05:26.460 Right. And then somebody through the pandemic had the great idea that let's jam shorter meetings

00:05:30.960 in, right? And so now most people have 16 30-minute meetings instead of eight one-hour meetings.

00:05:35.960 And it's exhausting, right? We, you know, we're more intense in those 30 minutes. We're switching

00:05:40.600 across those meetings, which is cognitively draining. And then we end the day with a to-do list based on

00:05:45.720 16 meetings, not eight. And it's just no wonder, right? We've seen the spike in collaboration

00:05:50.360 through the pandemic go up five to eight hours. And again, people are working earlier and later,

00:05:55.040 right. Each night, just trying to keep up. So it sounds like a collaboration or too much

00:05:59.360 collaboration causes a decrease in productivity, which is interesting because we think collaborating

00:06:04.900 will, will, will be able to get more done. That's why you do like two heads are better than one,

00:06:08.320 but it sounds like the way that people typically collaborate is it actually causes a decrease

00:06:13.320 in what they get done. Right. When they fall into reactive postures, you know, and that's,

00:06:18.980 I think one of the biggest challenges that I found out of this is that, you know, we could,

00:06:24.040 we could use the analytics to see that there were some people that were providing the greatest

00:06:29.300 collaborative impact in their organizations and far more efficient than others, you know,

00:06:33.840 and they, they tended to be about 18 to 24% more efficient than their peers. And so they were buying

00:06:39.740 back almost a day, a week of time. And that's who we really studied initially for the book to

00:06:44.360 understand how they do it. And, you know, at the heart of it, one of the really core notions is that

00:06:49.340 they're, they're not giving up control. Like, I think one of the fantastic things about today is

00:06:53.760 we have more ability to choose who we work with and what we're doing than ever before in history.

00:06:59.820 It's when we give up the control of the situation and allow all the emails to flood in on us and feel

00:07:05.860 like we have to answer them all, you know, or we become somebody else's idea of fun and all the

00:07:10.560 demands. That's, that's where we, we tend to get in trouble.

00:07:13.440 So why does collaboration overload happen? Like what, what, what is, what sort of decisions are

00:07:19.540 leaders making or mindsets that leaders have that allow that to take place or take root into an

00:07:25.540 organization or in their own lives? You know, what we can see is collaboration overload is driven

00:07:29.900 really in two very different ways. One is as the collaborative intensity of work has risen,

00:07:35.720 we have very little ability to understand the collaborative footprint of the asks that,

00:07:41.100 that leaders are making of other people. So super simple example, you know, task A and task B may

00:07:46.480 look the same, but if task A requires you to coordinate with six people that are in the same

00:07:51.080 geography and working for the same leader, that's an entirely different effort than task B. You know,

00:07:56.220 if you're required to work across two time zones with two groups that have misaligned incentives and

00:08:00.860 two leaders that don't like each other, you know, that's weeks of time in terms of the collaborative

00:08:04.840 effort that's required. And yet we have no real way to see that anymore. You know, people haven't

00:08:10.200 invested in understanding how we're actually collaborating to get work done, which is crazy

00:08:14.700 to me. People are spending about 85% of their week in collaborative activities. And yet we don't

00:08:20.200 have the ability to understand kind of what we're asking of people when we think about just work

00:08:25.360 allocation, how we're designing roles, how we're taking layers out of the hierarchy. And so that's

00:08:30.420 got to be one thing that changes. And I think it'll evolve. You know, we can track meal expense

00:08:35.220 receipts down to two decimal places today. And I think, you know, these network analytics will come

00:08:40.160 in, in ways that, that start to help inform decisions right on that basis. But then the

00:08:45.860 second thing that really surprised me as I went through all these interviews was the degree to

00:08:50.640 which we are our own worst enemy in this game. Like I came in thinking, gosh, you know, collaborative

00:08:55.840 overload is, is external, right? It's the emails, meetings, nasty clients, demanding bosses,

00:09:01.560 right? Those are the things that are killing us all. And it's kind of out of our control.

00:09:04.520 And as I went through all the interviews, what I found is that we tend to be about 50% of the

00:09:10.920 problem in the way that we tend to jump in. So we all hold these kind of beliefs or what I call

00:09:16.160 triggers that lead us to jump into situations sometimes when we shouldn't. So for some, it's

00:09:21.180 a servant-based mindset, right? So that they see leadership and being a good colleague is helping

00:09:26.100 others quickly. And that's a great thing. But if you do it in a certain way and you do too much of it,

00:09:31.600 you get overrun today, right? You become the path of least resistance and everybody comes back to you

00:09:36.580 and it becomes overwhelming. Or for me, the trigger is accomplishment, right? If I see a five-minute

00:09:41.560 window, I'm going to always try to jam 60 minutes of stuff in that and then ignore the two to three

00:09:47.560 hours of coordination I have to do to get other people on board, to coordinate different contributions.

00:09:53.420 And, you know, four or six weeks in, I'll be grumbling about why am I overloaded again?

00:09:56.900 Right. And I'm the one that started it, right? With that initial kind of jump in that five-minute

00:10:01.560 window. And so a really important piece that we see in this is people have different triggers,

00:10:06.920 right? For some, it's a desire to help. For some, it's accomplishment, status, fear of what colleagues

00:10:12.520 think, fear of missing out, inability to live with ambiguity. I mean, there's different triggers

00:10:17.460 that lead people to jump in. But one of the most important things is becoming aware of,

00:10:22.780 you know, when you're doing it to yourself and kind of guarding against, right? So if it's a

00:10:27.720 desire to help, what I would hear in some of my interviews is people would say the life-changing

00:10:32.140 moment for them came when they started to kind of have this rubric in their mind that saying yes

00:10:36.580 means saying no, right? Every time I jump in with this well-intentioned desire to help,

00:10:40.820 it's taking me away from other things. And that that really matters, right? To be able to kind of

00:10:46.360 break the grip of overload. Yeah, I can see that. I've seen that happen in my own life. It's like,

00:10:50.520 I just want to be helpful. I want to be the helpful guy. Yeah. And it comes from a good place,

00:10:54.760 but then you create a pattern where people just keep coming to you for things that they could

00:10:59.880 probably solve on their own. They don't need to come to you all the time. Yeah, it's crazy.

00:11:03.400 When we run the analytics, you know, and I go back into organizations and I say, gosh, you know,

00:11:08.220 it's this seven, eight, 9% of your population that's absorbing 40% of the collaborative demands,

00:11:13.260 right? They're overwhelmed and that's going to hurt you from an innovation standpoint,

00:11:16.740 a burnout standpoint, you know, et cetera. The knee-jerk reaction everybody has is,

00:11:21.780 oh, they're controlling, right? They need to delegate more. And that's actually very rarely

00:11:26.200 the case. I mean, people today get into these positions for really good intents, right? A desire

00:11:32.120 to help is a great thing, right? But it's in the excess that it causes problems. And it's really

00:11:38.440 insidious in that, you know, if you're fulfilling that desire to help or me with accomplishment,

00:11:43.620 it feels good right up until it doesn't, you know, you're in the thick of things, you're helping

00:11:49.140 people in ways that you think are important right up until, you know, you hit this threshold and your

00:11:54.880 significant other says no more, or, you know, you lose a key employee because you haven't been able

00:11:58.820 to focus on them as much. So it's a real kind of insidious kind of game really today.

00:12:05.300 Yeah. And the other trigger too, is that fear of being seen as like not a team player or not

00:12:11.700 necessary, right? You just, you go to the meetings. So you're just, your presence is known that you're

00:12:16.780 like, okay, I'm here. I, my job is important because I'm here. And that might not be the case.

00:12:22.120 Like you don't need to be there, but you have this belief that you need to be there in order to

00:12:25.800 show you still have value at the office. Right. Right. And that's hard, right? The culture of

00:12:31.420 inclusion. And, and again, this is a little bit of what we were talking about earlier is there's not a

00:12:35.880 single company out there that I'm bumping into that doesn't say they want to be one firm,

00:12:39.900 right. Or you're kind of one enterprise and delivering the very best of that enterprise to

00:12:44.360 the market, right. Or all these shifts towards agile ways of working. And it all sounds good,

00:12:50.100 you know, in theory, but it starts to create that belief that, gosh, I've got to be involved in

00:12:56.380 everything. You know, I've got to be there. I've got to be present that people have to find ways to

00:13:00.760 kind of separate from. So I can't tell you the number of people that I talked to through all these

00:13:05.140 interviews that said, you know, I just stopped going to the meeting and half the time, nobody even

00:13:09.280 noticed. Right. And they didn't hear anything about it. And only if they got two or three emails,

00:13:13.840 did they kind of come back to say, okay, here's the way I can participate in this meeting or possibly

00:13:19.420 the person I need to send to this meeting for me to be able to manage today. But that's one of the

00:13:25.280 real key things to be thinking about is, is how to fight that belief. Right. Well, how do you do

00:13:30.640 that? Any, any tips that you've seen that work? That's those triggers can be really ingrained in you

00:13:34.600 from, you know, a decade or two of work. How do you overcome that? Those model.

00:13:38.960 Yeah. I think for me, what I would see about, you know, what I studied with beyond collaboration

00:13:43.120 overload or what I call the successful people, right? So they were the high performers, but they

00:13:48.020 were also scoring high on measures of kind of life satisfaction, thriving, you know, career

00:13:53.500 happiness, things like that. So the idea is, were they successful and were they also sustainable,

00:13:58.460 right? And, and how they were doing it. And one of the really core ideas I could see is they

00:14:03.840 had far greater clarity on aspirations. So I'll call, I call them North star aspirations,

00:14:08.800 but they were more grounded than a typical, just high level idea of, okay, I want to be

00:14:13.860 in this role in five years or in this neighborhood, right. And in eight years,

00:14:17.940 they were really precise and able to say, okay, here's the capabilities I want to be using in the

00:14:23.160 next three to five years, right? The way that I want to build analytical skills, market awareness,

00:14:28.460 you know, leadership capabilities. They're real precise on that, right? What it was that they wanted

00:14:32.940 to be using or known for in their work. And then they were also really precise on what values do

00:14:37.860 I want to be experiencing, right? Is it, is it mentoring and helping others? Is it creativity,

00:14:42.760 right? That I want to build into my work more. And with that clarity, then people were much better

00:14:48.740 at structuring their worlds toward it. You know, the more efficient collaborators tend to strategically

00:14:53.460 calendar Friday night or Sunday night with a one week and typically about a three month interval in

00:14:58.260 mind. And they're plotting, you know, as they do that interactions that kind of pull them

00:15:02.860 in directions that, that they thrive in, right. And start to build a reputation around and they do

00:15:09.000 better over time. What I find with the people that struggle to say no, is that they don't have those

00:15:14.880 anchors in their mind, right? They don't have clarity around what's really important to me. And so they get

00:15:20.480 swept up in other people's ideas of fun and on the margin, they, they give their time away. So one thing at a

00:15:27.100 very high level is just to be really clear on kind of what path are you trying to chart and then have,

00:15:34.580 you know, the courage to kind of pass on some things, right. And not kind of get, you know,

00:15:38.640 boiled up into everything. And then there are also tactics, right? So one of my favorite interviews was

00:15:43.420 a very fiery young lady that, that said, I have a crazy boss, right? He comes to me with all this 1.00

00:15:48.500 ridiculous stuff. And at the time he doesn't even know what he's asking. And, and, you know, I was just 0.95

00:15:53.320 bringing it back into the team and I was overloading the team because I was just saying yes

00:15:57.500 constantly. And so, you know, for her, what she started doing was this grid. She would create

00:16:02.660 this little impact to effort grid where one axis was, okay, here's the impact of this ask you have

00:16:07.800 of me. And another axis was, here's the effort it's going to take, right. To get it done. And she'd

00:16:13.600 plot this crazy leader's ask on that grid. And if it was low impact, high effort, they would talk

00:16:18.700 about, do they really need to do it, right. Or could they combine it with something else?

00:16:22.740 And she said, you know, number one, that helped, you know, stop some of the work that was coming

00:16:26.680 in or the things that she felt she had to say yes to the meetings, the work and other things like

00:16:30.540 that. But most importantly, she said within a couple of weeks, her crazy boss knew that he was going to

00:16:35.860 face the impact to effort grid whenever he came with an ask, right. And so suddenly he was more

00:16:40.480 thoughtful about kind of what, you know, am I actually going to actually go and face the impact

00:16:45.260 effort grid on. And so there's all these little devices like that. When I say that people give up

00:16:50.160 control of the situation, what I would see in this work is people that were really successful at it,

00:16:55.640 they fought for the time on the margin and they used all sorts of things like that, right. To,

00:17:00.340 to create the ability to say no in a situation, right. Or to restructure the work in a way that

00:17:06.480 made it more doable. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:17:10.880 And now back to the show.

00:17:15.580 Okay. So big picture, it's important to have clarity on what you call your North Star

00:17:19.580 aspirations, you know, be grounded and clear on what your big priorities are. So you can set your

00:17:25.180 schedule according to them and avoid getting pulled into collaborative work that just, you

00:17:29.840 know, totally sucks up your bandwidth. But then there's also concrete tactics that you can use to

00:17:34.920 avoid collaboration overload. And I want to talk more about those. An area where people spend a lot of

00:17:40.500 time collaborating, like we talked at the very beginning is meetings. Meetings have long been

00:17:45.560 a problem. It's, they're the bane of people's existence. They're a time suck. And as you

00:17:49.660 mentioned, since the pandemic started, the problem has just gotten worse. It's worse than ever.

00:17:54.280 So what are some tactics for reducing the amount of time you have to spend in meetings?

00:17:58.280 And then also making sure meetings don't totally sabotage your focus and your ability to work on

00:18:04.080 important stuff.

00:18:04.780 Yeah. I mean, one is to question, right, to have people post, you know, the objective or what the

00:18:10.360 agenda is, or specifically what your role is in it. I hear a lot of people, you know, make the decision

00:18:15.680 that, okay, if I can't see the specific need or how I'm contributing, I'm not going to go. Another is

00:18:22.160 that that's really important. And it's not directly around the meetings. But one thing we know that the

00:18:27.320 more successful people do is they block reflective time really well, or really, to me, they manage to a

00:18:32.720 rhythm of work that's optimal to them. So, you know, why that matters is we know that, and everybody

00:18:38.720 will say, yes, I block time in my calendar. And we know statistically, the ideal interval is typically

00:18:44.720 about 90 minutes, 90 minutes to two hours, depending on which study you're looking for, but just space to

00:18:49.600 be able to get work done from that onslaught of 16, 30 minute meetings. And sometimes people even have

00:18:54.640 to hide it, right? They hide it under other meetings if their calendar is open. But the reason that

00:19:00.360 matters is we know that from the cognitive psychologists, that the act of just looking

00:19:05.260 down at a text and back up can be as much as a 64 second recovery mentally, right? You try to get

00:19:11.320 yourself back on track with where you were. If the disruption that you have is so great that you

00:19:17.360 lose your train of thought, that what they call a schema, right? You go back and forth on Slack channel

00:19:22.580 enough so that you've forgotten what you were just doing, for example, then that can be as much as a

00:19:26.480 20, 23 minute recovery to kind of get fully back up to speed. Now, we don't experience it.

00:19:31.260 We kind of tell ourselves a story that we're just catching back up and kind of getting our head where

00:19:34.840 it was before. But you take it any given day and how you're allowing those disruptions to happen,

00:19:41.740 right? You know, 60 of the small ones and maybe two of the big ones. And again, it's no wonder we're

00:19:47.360 working deeper into the night and earlier into the morning. So, you know, being intentional about

00:19:52.080 blocking time is seems like a small thing, but it's a really big deal to buy back time, but also

00:19:58.200 kind of have the creative space in there. And I would hear people do it in really different ways.

00:20:03.800 You know, some people would say the first thing I do in the morning is email. And then I, you know,

00:20:07.820 have reflective time later. And that's how I structure my day. The next person I talked to,

00:20:13.040 you know, if I suggested that they would say, are you crazy? If I start with email, I'll never get off

00:20:17.360 email. And so for them, it would be to start with a reflective time and they would block email in kind

00:20:22.940 of maybe three 30 minute intervals through the day. They'd communicate to others when they would

00:20:27.560 expect to hear from them. But that structure, again, gave them the space and allowed them to

00:20:33.160 work at a rhythm that kind of matched up with their own productivity. And that's probably the biggest

00:20:39.480 lever that almost anybody can pull is to really be thinking about how am I putting structure into the

00:20:44.360 calendar that way. Right. So treat your own personal reflection time as a meeting.

00:20:51.080 And right. And then I got the other tactic too, with reducing meetings I liked was just

00:20:55.300 stop going to meetings and see what happens. Right. Yeah. It's amazing how much of life,

00:21:00.940 you know, evolves finer when people apply this idea of, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to do email

00:21:05.480 on 30 minute intervals, three times a day. And they communicated to others. I can't tell you the

00:21:09.820 number of people that come back to me and said, wow, you know, all I had to do was tell others when to

00:21:14.280 expect from me. And suddenly I wasn't getting bombarded and feeling the urgency and the stress,

00:21:19.500 right. Of needing to answer immediately. But we fall into these patterns when we're not putting

00:21:24.500 structure into the situation where we're just responding to everybody else. And that's, that's

00:21:28.960 when people, you know, get overrun and get in trouble. Yeah. Benign neglect can go a long way.

00:21:33.960 Right, right, right.

00:21:35.060 So you talk about another thing too, you mentioned earlier is adding buffer. And I like the tactic that

00:21:40.120 one lady used with the chart. So anytime the boss came with an ask, she made him go through this

00:21:46.040 chart. And that was a way, it was pretty, it was a pretty slick way to add some buffer and cause the 0.96

00:21:52.160 boss to reconsider his collaboration ask. But any other tactics you found like that to add some buffer

00:21:58.060 between you and other individuals asking for your collaboration?

00:22:02.160 Yeah. And now Lance, I'll give you two, you know, one is a very similar kind of thing where

00:22:07.140 the leaders, you know, the people would agree to kind of rate this next ask on the scale of one to

00:22:12.420 10. Right. And, and not just treat the ask in isolation, but have a little slide rule on their

00:22:17.760 phone that shows all the asks that have been made and they're kind of moving things around. It was a

00:22:22.140 really cool little app that they'd created so that there would be a visibility to, okay, here's the

00:22:27.980 competing asks. Right. And then how do we place this one in the context of the others very, very quickly.

00:22:32.880 Right. And so that stops both sometimes the leaders from asking, but also it's the individuals

00:22:37.980 from jumping in. Right. Because most of us want to do good work. Right. And our tendency a lot of

00:22:42.860 times is to jump without understanding that collaborative footprint that I was alluding

00:22:47.220 to earlier. And that's what gets us into a lot of trouble. You know, when we get into something that's

00:22:51.900 far bigger than we realized, because in the moment we were, we were trying to do that. So anything like

00:22:57.480 that, that starts to create transparency with competing demands so that, you know, somebody

00:23:03.140 coming to you with an ask and say, okay, I'm not the only one, but there's six of these things.

00:23:07.360 And I'd forgotten about three of them that I'd asked about earlier. And you start moving away from

00:23:12.220 what I would hear from a lot of people was saying that the day they figured out that the word no,

00:23:16.960 didn't have to be binary. Right. It didn't have to be yes or no, but it could be, you know, let me,

00:23:21.460 let me communicate to you what I have on my plate. How do we figure this out in the context of all that

00:23:26.600 work? Right. How much of it needs to get done? Can we shift the timing? Those conversations then

00:23:31.340 suddenly start to happen more fluidly and, you know, people don't feel pressured, right. To take

00:23:36.240 on too much. The second thing is, and it's a bigger problem today than I've ever seen before.

00:23:42.700 It's when you have too many different kinds of stakeholders coming to you with, with too many

00:23:49.640 demands. Right. And so that's when I call it priority overload, right. But where these disparate

00:23:54.440 stakeholders are coming in and saying, my thing's important, my thing's important, my thing's

00:23:58.140 important. And they're not, you know, recognizing the aggregate burden that they're placing on people.

00:24:03.180 And it's happening a tremendous amount in agile work. And so what I'd heard in different variants

00:24:09.040 of this, but one that seemed to work really well is the people would just say, they would schedule

00:24:13.340 a meeting, you know, 30, 60 minutes, either face-to-face or online. And they would have four

00:24:18.440 stakeholders come in that are overloading the team. And they would say, okay, stakeholder one,

00:24:22.560 here's the five asks you have of me and put them in post-it notes or a flip card. If it's virtual

00:24:26.940 underneath there and stakeholder two, here's what you've asked of us and stakeholder three,

00:24:30.680 et cetera. And then they would draw a line, you know, around here's the capacity of the team,

00:24:34.900 right. Through the middle of those cards or post-it notes and say, how do we solve this? Right. And so

00:24:40.520 suddenly again, it's putting the conversation back to the stakeholders to say, gosh, my need isn't as

00:24:46.880 important as I thought, or actually my need pairs up with stakeholder three's needs. And we can coordinate

00:24:51.560 and actually get a lot more done, right. And take less effort. So that kind of idea of creating a

00:24:58.520 clearinghouse is something that's worked, you know, really well for a lot of people just tactically to

00:25:03.620 help buffer a little bit. So where a lot of people spin their wheels with collaboration overload is

00:25:09.960 communication, digital communication, specifically email, Slack, instant message, et cetera. Any tactics

00:25:16.640 that you found high level performers use to structure their communication channels? So they,

00:25:21.560 it reduced the amount of collaboration overload. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, for me, what I see in this

00:25:27.180 game is it's not the technologies that are killing us. Typically it's the norms of use that we fall

00:25:32.600 into. So real simple, you know, tactic with your team is to sit down and, and say, okay, you know,

00:25:38.900 what, what I would see with the more efficient collaborators is most people would look at email to your

00:25:44.180 point and say, gosh, I can't control all email. So I'm not even going to try. Right. Whereas the

00:25:48.200 efficient collaborators would have a tendency to come in and say, you know, my team generates

00:25:51.980 40% of it. Right. And, and I can control that and actually probably make their lives better too,

00:25:57.220 if we just establish some ways that we're using it. So, you know, very simple activity is to take

00:26:03.680 a blank piece of paper and put two lines down it. So you have three columns or, you know, do it on a,

00:26:08.720 on a virtual piece if you're doing this virtually. And in the first column,

00:26:12.380 you list out all the modalities that you're using to collaborate with a team. And it's usually more

00:26:16.740 than people think, you know, it's obviously meetings, video calls, phone, email, but then

00:26:22.120 you start slow, you know, throwing in, I am Slack, the team collaborative space, maybe a gratitude

00:26:26.640 application. You know, most, most teams start to realize they have six or seven ways that they're

00:26:31.720 collaborating in just immediately. And, and so list them out. And then the second column for each of

00:26:37.860 those ways of modalities say, here's three things we want to start doing. Right. So if it's email,

00:26:42.400 for example, we're going to start using bullets and we're going to state what we want in the subject

00:26:46.740 line. And we're not going to try to write 10 paragraph emails and hide what we want in the

00:26:50.840 night. Right. So the people are overwhelmed. Right. But you just kind of agree on three or

00:26:54.660 four norms of use on kind of positively what, what, what we want to start doing. And then on the last

00:27:00.620 column, it's three or four norms of use of what do we want to stop? Right. So as an example,

00:27:04.020 for me, it's, if you have to do email at 10 o'clock at night, because that's the only time

00:27:08.400 you have, don't send it then, right? Send it on a delay the next morning. So you're not starting

00:27:13.040 this always on culture of 10.02 response, 10.05, et cetera. You'd be amazed how just kind of listing

00:27:18.880 the ways you're collaborating, then establishing three or four norms that you want to follow for

00:27:23.280 each three or four that you want to stop doing for each takes no more than an hour team meeting,

00:27:28.000 but it buys back tremendous amount of time for people, you know, not just the individual,

00:27:32.380 but for the whole team, just by kind of getting consistent on kind of norms, if you will,

00:27:37.680 around that. So that would be probably my highest leverage recommendation for people listening.

00:27:43.240 Yeah. I like that. So the first one, say what you're not going to do, say you're not going to

00:27:46.680 send emails past a certain amount of time, certain times at 10 o'clock, or it can even be earlier

00:27:51.120 than that. And what's interesting, we've, they, we talked about other guests who brought up research

00:27:55.840 where companies have instituted, you know, basically they shut off email after work. So after 6 PM,

00:28:01.580 and they end up getting, be more productive than the companies who can email at all hours.

00:28:07.660 Right. So if there's, if there's that fear, like, Oh, I'm going to be less productive. I can't answer

00:28:11.240 that email at nine o'clock at night. It's like, well, probably not. You'll be just as productive

00:28:14.460 or even more productive. Right. Right. Right. Right. It's an interesting question. And the,

00:28:19.240 one of the other interesting things for me to see is people will call me up and say, gosh, we got,

00:28:24.320 you know, our email volumes going down and, you know, because they've, you know, focused on the book or

00:28:29.660 whatever, but then you'll ask them a few questions and you'll find that they're killing people with

00:28:34.300 Slack channels. Yeah. You know, they're, they're like, they've kind of shifted the burden basically.

00:28:39.400 Right. And Slack is a great thing, right. I'm not picking on Slack or any of the IMs. They're great

00:28:43.620 things, right. To connect instantaneously, but those switching costs that I was just talking about,

00:28:48.440 right. You know, where you're constantly on, you're switching across that number of channels

00:28:52.040 that carries a cost too. Right. And so to me, the, the question is always,

00:28:57.180 does the benefit outweigh the cost, right. And are you, are you, are we kind of reflecting on this

00:29:02.020 is in the right way versus just assuming collaboration is always good.

00:29:06.680 Any insights there on how you can structure Slack communications so that it's more effective?

00:29:12.140 To me, it's more around the usage. You know what I mean? The way people feel that they have to

00:29:16.940 respond, how they respond and kind of the timing of that, where I see places get in trouble with

00:29:22.160 those kinds of technologies is when there's an expectation of instantaneous response or other

00:29:29.040 things like that. So to me, again, it all, it, it more often than not comes back to the norms

00:29:33.740 that, that have the greatest impact. Gotcha. Any, any special norms or effective norms you've seen?

00:29:39.420 So just basically there's, you just create the expectation. Like if you even, if you put something

00:29:43.560 out there on Slack, it doesn't mean you get a response right away. So don't expect that.

00:29:46.960 Yeah. Okay. Right. And, and, and doesn't create an expectation for others to feel like they have

00:29:51.040 to respond, you know, immediately. That's, that's typically more of what I see.

00:29:56.140 So let's say you start doing the stuff. I imagine some people are going to be put off by it. They're

00:30:02.580 like, what, who, what, what's Rob? Rob thinks he's really cool. He can just not answer my email.

00:30:07.340 How do you manage people's expectations? Yeah. It's just a game. And cause I think this is where a lot

00:30:12.920 of people have struggled in the past with time management ideas, right? You know, is that they're,

00:30:18.200 especially today in the hyper-connected world, it's not just that I can make a decision that I'm going

00:30:23.780 to act in certain ways, because like you say, right, it, you know, starts to upset other people,

00:30:28.700 right? If I'm not responding in the right timeliness or, you know, at the right quality

00:30:32.240 or level or things like that. But I've been amazed the number, and I have tons of stories of this,

00:30:37.460 where people, you know, went out to their teams and just said, look, for me to, to be able to do what

00:30:41.700 I need to do and to help us as a team, I need to do this idea of blocking email into 30 minute

00:30:47.740 chunks, right? And they communicated it to their team. They set the notice on their email so that

00:30:53.020 it indicated when they were going to be responding to emails through the day. And people respected

00:30:58.180 that, right? Once they know kind of what and why you're trying to work differently, they tend to kind

00:31:03.100 of adapt to what you're up to. Another great story for me is somebody, super high performer that I

00:31:09.220 bumped into that, you know, he sat down with his team and said, well, how much of my time do you

00:31:12.960 need, right, to be in these meetings and answering emails and responding to you and, you know, being

00:31:17.800 helpful to you. And he actually had the foresight to survey them, right? And the team came back on

00:31:24.260 average, it was like 81%. And we need 81% of your time internally with our team. And he looked at it and

00:31:30.860 he said, there's no way I can do what I need to do for this group, you know, in terms of managing

00:31:36.200 the ecosystem in which it sits, right? To get the resources, the projects, to get, you know,

00:31:40.960 everything he had to do to create, you know, sponsorship for the team. And he told him, he

00:31:45.400 said, I think the best I can do is 35% in a meeting. And they all kind of then agreed, right?

00:31:52.580 And said, you know what, you're right. We hadn't been thinking about all these other things you

00:31:55.100 have to do. And here's how we can, you know, consume your time differently, right? Kind of

00:31:59.000 consume, structure our asks of you, right? Or time that you have. So to me, that's kind of the

00:32:05.040 approach, right? As you do the best job to communicate what you're up to and why and what

00:32:09.800 you can contribute and what you can't contribute, right? And that tends to work out in the long run.

00:32:17.040 So managing expectations, communicating expectations is one way to mitigate the burnout of collaboration

00:32:22.840 overload. You also talk about shielding yourself from other microstressors. What are microstressors

00:32:28.900 and how can you get a handle on them? Yeah. So the microstress idea is one that

00:32:34.780 we've been really leaning into over the last couple of years. And for me, as I went through

00:32:40.080 these interviews, it just became apparent to me that people are struggling with a form of stress

00:32:44.320 that we're not really conventionally thinking about, right? So it's not the real nasty boss or

00:32:50.460 client. Those can exist for sure. But it's the fact that we're getting hit with all these small

00:32:56.440 stressful moments through the day, right? So we get an email from a colleague and we can sense we're

00:33:02.240 out of alignment with what we need to get done on a project. And you're wondering, well, how am I

00:33:05.960 going to pull this back together? How am I going to find the time even to coordinate? And we get

00:33:09.860 another email that shows us that we need to coach a team member for the second or third time. And you

00:33:14.700 start wondering about, well, how am I going to do that and preserve their engagement and not worry

00:33:18.480 about them leaving, right? Or you get a text from a child where it's something that they're just

00:33:23.580 ranting about for five minutes and they get over five minutes later and you worry about it for three

00:33:28.920 hours. But it's this interconnected world that we live in where we get hit with these things.

00:33:34.520 All of them seem easy, right? In a small moment, things we just work through, but we're getting

00:33:39.680 hit with 20, 25, or 30, right? Through the day. And we go home exhausted and we can't quite put our

00:33:44.740 finger on what happened anymore. And it's not just bad news, right? It's not just kind of the news

00:33:51.800 feeds we see and being primarily negative. It's magnified by the fact that most of these people

00:33:56.980 we care about, right? So if you get one of these things from somebody you don't like, it carries

00:34:01.460 a big effect. But if you get one of these things from somebody you do like and you're worried about

00:34:05.460 them, it carries a big effect. So what we focus on in the book is this grid that just has people go

00:34:12.400 through 12 of these things, right? That help us understand kind of where these stressors,

00:34:16.540 how have they become a bigger deal than I realized? Because I'm fighting through day to day and I

00:34:20.860 haven't really thought about which one of these are more systemic, right? And things I should be

00:34:24.900 addressing. And then where are they coming from, right? Isolating out is it, you know, things that

00:34:29.780 are kind of driven by colleagues, by a boss or other things. And we find that handling those well,

00:34:35.860 people tend to be able to usually isolate three or four places that these microstresses are coming

00:34:40.620 from that they can adjust the interaction, right? They either reframe how they're working with those

00:34:44.400 people that communicate and reset expectations on how to collaborate, et cetera. And then a second,

00:34:50.040 you know, approach in it is also focused on how do you just kind of rise above it

00:34:53.960 and not, you know, get too far down into the minutiae.

00:34:57.840 Well, Rob, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book

00:35:00.940 and your work?

00:35:02.020 Yeah, great. Thank you. One initial place would be to look at my website. It's robcross.org. And

00:35:07.220 it's got, you know, not just the book, but a whole suite of resources that we've built through

00:35:11.980 the commons and the consortia that I work on with other people. The second place I'd recommend is

00:35:16.760 looking at a site called the Connected Commons. And that's going to a group of about 150 organizations

00:35:22.160 that sponsor different forms of research in this area. But it really kind of is a wonderful community

00:35:27.760 of organizations helping each other out and kind of talking about how they're applying these ideas

00:35:32.760 in different ways.

00:35:34.180 Fantastic. Well, Rob Cross, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:35:36.480 Yeah, awesome. Thank you, Brett.

00:35:38.380 My guest there is Rob Cross. He's the author of the book, Beyond Collaboration Overload. It's available

00:35:42.260 on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website,

00:35:46.060 robcross.org. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash collaboration,

00:35:50.660 where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:36:00.360 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website

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00:36:35.700 Remind you not to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

00:36:38.980 Thank you.

00:36:39.980 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - January 26, 2022

Get on Top of Collaboration Overload

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