Get on Top of Collaboration Overload
Episode Stats
Summary
Now there is seemingly more collaboration going on in the workplace than ever before. People are working and talking across teams and within teams using a wide array of communication channels. As a result, employees, managers, and CEOs alike can feel pulled in a ton of different directions by a huge number of different requests, and find their productivity shot to pieces as a result. My guests figured there had to be a better way for folks to work together, and interviewed the most efficient collaborators to find out what they did differently to get back up to a quarter of their collaborative time.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now there is
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seemingly more collaboration going on in the workplace than ever before. People are working
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and talking across teams and within teams using a wide array of communication channels. As a result,
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employees, managers, and CEOs alike can feel pulled in a ton of different directions by a ton
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of different requests and find their actual productivity shot to pieces as a result. My
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guests figured there had to be a better way for folks to work together and interviewed the most
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efficient collaborators to find out what they did differently to get back up to a quarter of their
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collaborative time. His name is Rob Cross. He's a professor of leadership, a business consultant,
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and the author of Collaboration Overload. Rob and I begin our conversation with a big picture
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overview of the organizational and individual factors that are driving the problem of
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collaboration overload. We then shift to talking about the concrete tactics he learned from
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efficient collaborators that can help others avoid getting pulled into every conversation and
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project. We discuss how to limit the productivity sapping power of meetings by scheduling reflective
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time and ways to put more buffer between you and those who ask you to collaborate, including
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creating a transparent clearinghouse of priorities. We then discuss how to reduce collaboration overload
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and communication, manage people's expectations for response times, and identify the microcessors that
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may be contributing to your burnout. After the show's over, check out our show notes at
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aom.is slash collaboration. Rob Cross, welcome to the show.
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All right. Thank you so much for having me here, Brad.
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So you got a book out called Beyond Collaboration Overload, How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore
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Your Well-Being. So you are a network scientist, but you spend a lot of time studying the effects of
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collaboration at work on not only our productivity, but also our quality of life outside of work.
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How did that happen? How did network scientists end up studying collaboration?
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Yeah, great question. It started about 23, 24 years ago. Actually, I was running a research group,
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and we were focused on how do you help organizations better share knowledge and expertise? And of course,
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a lot of people were treating it as a database issue. But what I got really interested in is nobody
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used the technologies that much. Most people, when they had problems or opportunities or
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decisions they needed to get done, they would reach out into their network to various others to get a
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sense of what information could help or things like that. And so we started mapping patterns of
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collaboration in large groups to understand how these groups were getting things done. And then what we
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started to see over the course of the past really decade and a half is all the restructurings that
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organizations are going through right now are putting more and more collaborative demands on
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employees. We've been through de-layerings. We've been through agile work. We've adopted all sorts of
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these collaboration technologies like Slack or email or video channels or things like that that help us
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instantaneously connect. And they all sound great in isolation. They're all appealing, right? That we want
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to be one firm or we want to be able to reach out and get to others instantaneously. But incrementally,
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over about a 10 or 15 year period, we could see that the collaborative demands placed on people today
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were rising 50, 60% in that timeframe. And nobody was paying any attention to it, right? We have this
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big kind of invisible component of work that had really driven up and required people to be working
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earlier into the morning, deeper into the night. It was affecting quality of work life, yet nobody was
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really seeing it and thinking about kind of how do you help people survive today? So that was really the
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the starting point of it. Yeah. Not only were people weren't seeing it, they were just encouraging
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more collaborations. Like, well, we got to have an open office. We're going to flatten our hierarchy.
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And it just made it worse. So, I mean, when you... And if you go into a place and you ask leaders,
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you're thinking about de-layering or open space or a new technology. If you look them in the eye and say,
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well, do you really want another email meeting or phone call in your life? And the answer is never yes.
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Yeah. But, you know, it's very quick to kind of foist all these things on other people without really
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recognizing, you know, the effect of that, as you're saying.
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So when you're studying an organization, you're looking for collaboration overload. Are there signs that an
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organization or a leader might be suffering from too much collaboration?
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Yeah. So what we see, we use the network analytics to understand kind of how many people,
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how frequently the amount of time that's being consumed in collaborative work. And so, of course,
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I'm all for the kind of collaboration that we all want, right? Those kind of four, six,
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eight, 10-person teams that are integrating, bringing diverse perspectives, you know, and
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producing a new innovation, right? That's what you're trying to preserve time for.
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What we're worried about is all the other stuff, you know, the amount of time on the team collaborative
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spaces, the Slack, the IM, the emails that are drifting earlier into the morning, deeper into the
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night. And what we've seen in here that's troubling are the signals that I tend to look for
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in leaders is the degree to which their calendar, you know, is completely overloaded through the day.
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And they're finding their interactions drifting earlier into the morning, deeper into the night,
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deeper into the weekend. And they're just solving the problem by trying to schedule or jam more
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meetings in rather than saying, how do I collaborate differently? So as an example of that,
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pre-pandemic, people would come to me and they'd complain that, oh my gosh, I have eight one-hour
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meetings and I can't get, you know, anything done until the end of the day.
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Right. And then somebody through the pandemic had the great idea that let's jam shorter meetings
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in, right? And so now most people have 16 30-minute meetings instead of eight one-hour meetings.
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And it's exhausting, right? We, you know, we're more intense in those 30 minutes. We're switching
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across those meetings, which is cognitively draining. And then we end the day with a to-do list based on
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16 meetings, not eight. And it's just no wonder, right? We've seen the spike in collaboration
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through the pandemic go up five to eight hours. And again, people are working earlier and later,
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right. Each night, just trying to keep up. So it sounds like a collaboration or too much
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collaboration causes a decrease in productivity, which is interesting because we think collaborating
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will, will, will be able to get more done. That's why you do like two heads are better than one,
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but it sounds like the way that people typically collaborate is it actually causes a decrease
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in what they get done. Right. When they fall into reactive postures, you know, and that's,
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I think one of the biggest challenges that I found out of this is that, you know, we could,
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we could use the analytics to see that there were some people that were providing the greatest
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collaborative impact in their organizations and far more efficient than others, you know,
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and they, they tended to be about 18 to 24% more efficient than their peers. And so they were buying
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back almost a day, a week of time. And that's who we really studied initially for the book to
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understand how they do it. And, you know, at the heart of it, one of the really core notions is that
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they're, they're not giving up control. Like, I think one of the fantastic things about today is
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we have more ability to choose who we work with and what we're doing than ever before in history.
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It's when we give up the control of the situation and allow all the emails to flood in on us and feel
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like we have to answer them all, you know, or we become somebody else's idea of fun and all the
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demands. That's, that's where we, we tend to get in trouble.
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So why does collaboration overload happen? Like what, what, what is, what sort of decisions are
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leaders making or mindsets that leaders have that allow that to take place or take root into an
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organization or in their own lives? You know, what we can see is collaboration overload is driven
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really in two very different ways. One is as the collaborative intensity of work has risen,
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we have very little ability to understand the collaborative footprint of the asks that,
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that leaders are making of other people. So super simple example, you know, task A and task B may
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look the same, but if task A requires you to coordinate with six people that are in the same
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geography and working for the same leader, that's an entirely different effort than task B. You know,
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if you're required to work across two time zones with two groups that have misaligned incentives and
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two leaders that don't like each other, you know, that's weeks of time in terms of the collaborative
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effort that's required. And yet we have no real way to see that anymore. You know, people haven't
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invested in understanding how we're actually collaborating to get work done, which is crazy
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to me. People are spending about 85% of their week in collaborative activities. And yet we don't
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have the ability to understand kind of what we're asking of people when we think about just work
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allocation, how we're designing roles, how we're taking layers out of the hierarchy. And so that's
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got to be one thing that changes. And I think it'll evolve. You know, we can track meal expense
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receipts down to two decimal places today. And I think, you know, these network analytics will come
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in, in ways that, that start to help inform decisions right on that basis. But then the
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second thing that really surprised me as I went through all these interviews was the degree to
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which we are our own worst enemy in this game. Like I came in thinking, gosh, you know, collaborative
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overload is, is external, right? It's the emails, meetings, nasty clients, demanding bosses,
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right? Those are the things that are killing us all. And it's kind of out of our control.
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And as I went through all the interviews, what I found is that we tend to be about 50% of the
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problem in the way that we tend to jump in. So we all hold these kind of beliefs or what I call
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triggers that lead us to jump into situations sometimes when we shouldn't. So for some, it's
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a servant-based mindset, right? So that they see leadership and being a good colleague is helping
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others quickly. And that's a great thing. But if you do it in a certain way and you do too much of it,
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you get overrun today, right? You become the path of least resistance and everybody comes back to you
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and it becomes overwhelming. Or for me, the trigger is accomplishment, right? If I see a five-minute
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window, I'm going to always try to jam 60 minutes of stuff in that and then ignore the two to three
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hours of coordination I have to do to get other people on board, to coordinate different contributions.
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And, you know, four or six weeks in, I'll be grumbling about why am I overloaded again?
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Right. And I'm the one that started it, right? With that initial kind of jump in that five-minute
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window. And so a really important piece that we see in this is people have different triggers,
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right? For some, it's a desire to help. For some, it's accomplishment, status, fear of what colleagues
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think, fear of missing out, inability to live with ambiguity. I mean, there's different triggers
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that lead people to jump in. But one of the most important things is becoming aware of,
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you know, when you're doing it to yourself and kind of guarding against, right? So if it's a
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desire to help, what I would hear in some of my interviews is people would say the life-changing
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moment for them came when they started to kind of have this rubric in their mind that saying yes
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means saying no, right? Every time I jump in with this well-intentioned desire to help,
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it's taking me away from other things. And that that really matters, right? To be able to kind of
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break the grip of overload. Yeah, I can see that. I've seen that happen in my own life. It's like,
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I just want to be helpful. I want to be the helpful guy. Yeah. And it comes from a good place,
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but then you create a pattern where people just keep coming to you for things that they could
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probably solve on their own. They don't need to come to you all the time. Yeah, it's crazy.
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When we run the analytics, you know, and I go back into organizations and I say, gosh, you know,
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it's this seven, eight, 9% of your population that's absorbing 40% of the collaborative demands,
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right? They're overwhelmed and that's going to hurt you from an innovation standpoint,
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a burnout standpoint, you know, et cetera. The knee-jerk reaction everybody has is,
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oh, they're controlling, right? They need to delegate more. And that's actually very rarely
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the case. I mean, people today get into these positions for really good intents, right? A desire
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to help is a great thing, right? But it's in the excess that it causes problems. And it's really
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insidious in that, you know, if you're fulfilling that desire to help or me with accomplishment,
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it feels good right up until it doesn't, you know, you're in the thick of things, you're helping
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people in ways that you think are important right up until, you know, you hit this threshold and your
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significant other says no more, or, you know, you lose a key employee because you haven't been able
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to focus on them as much. So it's a real kind of insidious kind of game really today.
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Yeah. And the other trigger too, is that fear of being seen as like not a team player or not
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necessary, right? You just, you go to the meetings. So you're just, your presence is known that you're
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like, okay, I'm here. I, my job is important because I'm here. And that might not be the case.
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Like you don't need to be there, but you have this belief that you need to be there in order to
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show you still have value at the office. Right. Right. And that's hard, right? The culture of
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inclusion. And, and again, this is a little bit of what we were talking about earlier is there's not a
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single company out there that I'm bumping into that doesn't say they want to be one firm,
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right. Or you're kind of one enterprise and delivering the very best of that enterprise to
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the market, right. Or all these shifts towards agile ways of working. And it all sounds good,
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you know, in theory, but it starts to create that belief that, gosh, I've got to be involved in
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everything. You know, I've got to be there. I've got to be present that people have to find ways to
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kind of separate from. So I can't tell you the number of people that I talked to through all these
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interviews that said, you know, I just stopped going to the meeting and half the time, nobody even
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noticed. Right. And they didn't hear anything about it. And only if they got two or three emails,
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did they kind of come back to say, okay, here's the way I can participate in this meeting or possibly
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the person I need to send to this meeting for me to be able to manage today. But that's one of the
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real key things to be thinking about is, is how to fight that belief. Right. Well, how do you do
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that? Any, any tips that you've seen that work? That's those triggers can be really ingrained in you
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from, you know, a decade or two of work. How do you overcome that? Those model.
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Yeah. I think for me, what I would see about, you know, what I studied with beyond collaboration
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overload or what I call the successful people, right? So they were the high performers, but they
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were also scoring high on measures of kind of life satisfaction, thriving, you know, career
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happiness, things like that. So the idea is, were they successful and were they also sustainable,
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right? And, and how they were doing it. And one of the really core ideas I could see is they
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had far greater clarity on aspirations. So I'll call, I call them North star aspirations,
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but they were more grounded than a typical, just high level idea of, okay, I want to be
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in this role in five years or in this neighborhood, right. And in eight years,
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they were really precise and able to say, okay, here's the capabilities I want to be using in the
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next three to five years, right? The way that I want to build analytical skills, market awareness,
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you know, leadership capabilities. They're real precise on that, right? What it was that they wanted
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to be using or known for in their work. And then they were also really precise on what values do
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I want to be experiencing, right? Is it, is it mentoring and helping others? Is it creativity,
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right? That I want to build into my work more. And with that clarity, then people were much better
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at structuring their worlds toward it. You know, the more efficient collaborators tend to strategically
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calendar Friday night or Sunday night with a one week and typically about a three month interval in
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mind. And they're plotting, you know, as they do that interactions that kind of pull them
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in directions that, that they thrive in, right. And start to build a reputation around and they do
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better over time. What I find with the people that struggle to say no, is that they don't have those
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anchors in their mind, right? They don't have clarity around what's really important to me. And so they get
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swept up in other people's ideas of fun and on the margin, they, they give their time away. So one thing at a
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very high level is just to be really clear on kind of what path are you trying to chart and then have,
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you know, the courage to kind of pass on some things, right. And not kind of get, you know,
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boiled up into everything. And then there are also tactics, right? So one of my favorite interviews was
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a very fiery young lady that, that said, I have a crazy boss, right? He comes to me with all this
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ridiculous stuff. And at the time he doesn't even know what he's asking. And, and, you know, I was just
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bringing it back into the team and I was overloading the team because I was just saying yes
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constantly. And so, you know, for her, what she started doing was this grid. She would create
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this little impact to effort grid where one axis was, okay, here's the impact of this ask you have
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of me. And another axis was, here's the effort it's going to take, right. To get it done. And she'd
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plot this crazy leader's ask on that grid. And if it was low impact, high effort, they would talk
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about, do they really need to do it, right. Or could they combine it with something else?
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And she said, you know, number one, that helped, you know, stop some of the work that was coming
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in or the things that she felt she had to say yes to the meetings, the work and other things like
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that. But most importantly, she said within a couple of weeks, her crazy boss knew that he was going to
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face the impact to effort grid whenever he came with an ask, right. And so suddenly he was more
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thoughtful about kind of what, you know, am I actually going to actually go and face the impact
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effort grid on. And so there's all these little devices like that. When I say that people give up
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control of the situation, what I would see in this work is people that were really successful at it,
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they fought for the time on the margin and they used all sorts of things like that, right. To,
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to create the ability to say no in a situation, right. Or to restructure the work in a way that
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made it more doable. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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Okay. So big picture, it's important to have clarity on what you call your North Star
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aspirations, you know, be grounded and clear on what your big priorities are. So you can set your
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schedule according to them and avoid getting pulled into collaborative work that just, you
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know, totally sucks up your bandwidth. But then there's also concrete tactics that you can use to
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avoid collaboration overload. And I want to talk more about those. An area where people spend a lot of
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time collaborating, like we talked at the very beginning is meetings. Meetings have long been
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a problem. It's, they're the bane of people's existence. They're a time suck. And as you
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mentioned, since the pandemic started, the problem has just gotten worse. It's worse than ever.
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So what are some tactics for reducing the amount of time you have to spend in meetings?
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And then also making sure meetings don't totally sabotage your focus and your ability to work on
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Yeah. I mean, one is to question, right, to have people post, you know, the objective or what the
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agenda is, or specifically what your role is in it. I hear a lot of people, you know, make the decision
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that, okay, if I can't see the specific need or how I'm contributing, I'm not going to go. Another is
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that that's really important. And it's not directly around the meetings. But one thing we know that the
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more successful people do is they block reflective time really well, or really, to me, they manage to a
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rhythm of work that's optimal to them. So, you know, why that matters is we know that, and everybody
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will say, yes, I block time in my calendar. And we know statistically, the ideal interval is typically
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about 90 minutes, 90 minutes to two hours, depending on which study you're looking for, but just space to
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be able to get work done from that onslaught of 16, 30 minute meetings. And sometimes people even have
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to hide it, right? They hide it under other meetings if their calendar is open. But the reason that
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matters is we know that from the cognitive psychologists, that the act of just looking
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down at a text and back up can be as much as a 64 second recovery mentally, right? You try to get
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yourself back on track with where you were. If the disruption that you have is so great that you
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lose your train of thought, that what they call a schema, right? You go back and forth on Slack channel
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enough so that you've forgotten what you were just doing, for example, then that can be as much as a
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20, 23 minute recovery to kind of get fully back up to speed. Now, we don't experience it.
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We kind of tell ourselves a story that we're just catching back up and kind of getting our head where
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it was before. But you take it any given day and how you're allowing those disruptions to happen,
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right? You know, 60 of the small ones and maybe two of the big ones. And again, it's no wonder we're
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working deeper into the night and earlier into the morning. So, you know, being intentional about
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blocking time is seems like a small thing, but it's a really big deal to buy back time, but also
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kind of have the creative space in there. And I would hear people do it in really different ways.
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You know, some people would say the first thing I do in the morning is email. And then I, you know,
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have reflective time later. And that's how I structure my day. The next person I talked to,
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you know, if I suggested that they would say, are you crazy? If I start with email, I'll never get off
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email. And so for them, it would be to start with a reflective time and they would block email in kind
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of maybe three 30 minute intervals through the day. They'd communicate to others when they would
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expect to hear from them. But that structure, again, gave them the space and allowed them to
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work at a rhythm that kind of matched up with their own productivity. And that's probably the biggest
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lever that almost anybody can pull is to really be thinking about how am I putting structure into the
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calendar that way. Right. So treat your own personal reflection time as a meeting.
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And right. And then I got the other tactic too, with reducing meetings I liked was just
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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.
00:21:35.060
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
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
00:35:02.020
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
00:35:34.180
Fantastic. Well, Rob Cross, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
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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