Understanding Your PLC

We are now full on into our seventh month (October 2020) of leading life in and through a COVID-19 reality.  If you are like me, this has meant juggling as a leader, business, and family like never before.  What I know and have experienced, and what my clients have expressed to me, is that everything we do seems like it requires a great deal more intentionality than ever before.  Nothing just happens as a matter of course.  And that means we are expending more effort and energy than ever before.  It is testing our PLC - Personal Leadership Capacity.

This post comes courtesy of the intersection of a number of parallel but distinct events and experiences over the past week.  Often times as individual leaders and organizations we feel overwhelmed by the opportunities and challenges before us.  This reality hit me particularly hard this week - in more ways than one.  I heard flavors of it from a couple of my coaching clients, in individual coaching and group planning sessions I facilitated, and from my own personal and business perspective.

From several of my coaching clients this week I heard the lament of too much on my plate, how do I get this all done, how do I prioritize and/or how do I get others to appreciate that my plate is already full.  If we flip the coin on this lament we can hear some other common themes that are all too often a part of our work these days - stress and fatigue on the part of our colleagues and staff, even complete absence or disconnection at times, and points of conflict that seem to come out of nowhere or on issues that seem relatively minor.  Sometimes these results are being borne out because of or in parallel to the perception or reality of lack of resources.  "How do we keep going with this remote working reality?  How do I juggle this home office with my kids doing their school work (or not) at that same I'm trying to manage this meeting?  Where do I find the time - or the commitment from others - to deliver on our plans?" The examples and the list go on and on.  Time, energy, and money - and more - don't seem to be on our side more than ever these days.  

Just as challenging it would seem for some leaders or organizations is the willingness to say no or to otherwise prioritize the requests and workloads coming at them.  This is further compounded by the fact that our boundaries between work and home are incredibly blurred, if they even exist at all right now.  In some of these cases, as described by my clients, there appears to be an organizational willingness and imperative to say "yes" to everything that comes across the table.  If we don't say YES, perhaps that is THE decision that puts us over the brink into irrelevance!  Conversely, it may be that there is an organizational unwillingness to say "no" to anything that comes across the table.  This predicament is probably enhanced in the kind of reality that we are experiencing right now.  Saying no to a request might be perceived as tantamount to asking for your own termination notice.  Unfortunately, too many organizations have not been willing to truly establish the key guideposts by which they would evaluate any initiative that comes before them.  The result is predictable - yes is the answer to every initiative regardless of current workload or resources.  The long-term sustainability of such a response is hardly considered.  Just don't say no now.

Therefore, for me, it was refreshing to recently hear a CEO of a large organization espouse to his executive team and governing board the need to understand - and respect - their personal and organizational capacities.  Rather than demand more and more - as is the wont of many hard-driving executives - he was holding the feet of his people to a different fire.  Understand your capacity.  Understand that there are limits to the time available to you in a day, week, and month.  Understand that there are limits to your ability to handle multiple priorities.  Understand that there are limits to your energy reserves. Don't tell me you are going to add another initiative to your plate and keep to every other milestone you have already set.  Chose wisely and execute well.  It was a powerful message and one that clearly was being understood and accepted, even if slowly, over time.

The message of this forward-thinking CEO, an individual that I would no way characterize as soft, stands in sharp contrast to others I have experienced or worked with during this time. One of the most iconic examples is of a CEO who tried to alter his staff's perspective on prioritization by use of the somewhat infamous "Big Rocks in the Bucket First" exercise.  A decent enough exercise, but it presumes that all managers and staff have the ability - or are allowed - to pick their own big rocks.  In the case of the forward-thinking CEO already noted, this appeared to be the case (outside of regulated or legislated initiatives).  But for other leaders, who most often define what the big rocks are, there is a lack of appreciation of how many big rocks can be rolled down the hill or the potential consequences of ignoring some of the little rocks that others in the organization need to work with.

In fact, perhaps it's time to update the Big Rocks exercise, particularly now.  Perhaps there has to be an understanding of what size of bucket we are actually working with.  What's our actual Personal Leadership Capacity?  Perhaps as leaders we need to undertake a bit more of an internal environmental scan before launching the next big rock down the hill and understand how that fits with - or displaces - other rocks we launched yesterday or the week before.

The final hitting home point for me on capacity has come on my own business and personal side.  The past month has been one of the busiest and most challenging for me on a number of fronts. Altered reality has been challenging my capacity and, more particularly, made me feel that I have been less of the quality family man and coach than I should be and aspire to be.   Others - most notably my wife - are also in that same boat.  Our stress levels are up.  Our capacity is down.  While potentially manageable in the short-term, the stress tolerances of continually exceeding one's capacity has inevitable and predictable consequences.

The lesson of capacity is one that I'm trying to learn (or learn again) in my personal and business life and I trust that you can be more forward-thinking, insightful and discerning as you contemplate launching your next big rock into your leadership or organizational bucket.
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Greg Hadubiak, MHSA, FACHE, CEC, PCC

President & Founder - BreakPoint Solutions

gregh@breakpoint.solutions 

www.breakpoint.solutions 

780-250-2543

Helping leaders realize their strengths and enabling organizations to achieve their potential through the application of my leadership experience and coaching skills. I act as a point of leverage for my clients. I AM their Force Multiplier.