I was recently talking to one of my team members about his role and he was discussing the current levels of stress he's feeling on a new project and asked me how I deal with stress myself. I thought it would make a good article, but I should say that I do not consider myself an expert on all things stress, but I have successfully managed to reduce my levels of stress over the years through my choices, my work habits and ability to reflect and move on from stressful situations.

Stress really affects people in different ways, and we all have differing "stress profiles" based on our personality, experience, training and everything else going on around us at that moment.

Stress is a factor in many health-related issues and should be taken seriously, an article at webmd.com lists; heart disease, worsening asthma, obesity, and diabetes among their 10 serious stress-related health problems. Ultimately, you need to take personal responsibility for making decisions to reduce or remove stressful situations from your day-to-day life. Sometimes those decisions can be the hardest types but will lead to a more harmonious and fulfilled life for you and your family.

But before I get into this topic, I get that developing a business idea and growing your organisation to success is hard work, but over the past few years I have witnessed the work ethic of business owners and especially the past few weeks I have engaged with a number of organisational leaders within the startup space, and it is amazing how many of them talk about working 16-20 hours a day in one breath and then talk about being rundown, hospitalised or generally unwell the next and fail to recognise the direct relationship between these two topics.

In fact, I have met in the past two months, three startup founders who have worked their way into a hospital bed recently (I won’t name & shame, you know who you are!) and I can assure you, their businesses did not grow whilst they were laid up in bed recovering from working inhuman hours the weeks before.

Even myself, about a week ago I had a terrible nights sleep and it got me thinking at the time about work vs life balance and the influence it has on not only your effectiveness as an organisational leader but also on your own health. See my post below;

When I hear people “bragging” about how many hours they have worked I always think to myself, “what are you happy about here? Do you think that working longer hours says something positive about you?” and in my recent interactions with startup leaders I have challenged people with questions about how scalable the current scenario is for their business and their personal lives.

How much growth can you expect in your business when you, as the CEO or manager, are having to work so many hours? What are you, as a leader, doing to resolve these clearly inefficient and ineffective business practices?

I’m sure there’s a certain element of leaders feeling that it makes them feel needed and important to those around them, but in truth, it is a curse on the organisation. It says we do not need to innovate, we do not need to think outside of the box and get better, and probably it says that personal health and life balance is not important to the leadership within the organisation. Now can you imagine what your team members would think of this? What kind of organisation culture are you developing?

I get it, I get it, I can almost hear the eye rolling as some of you read this, really, I get it! Sometimes you need to get in, get your hands dirty and handle tough situations to ensure the best outcomes for your customers and staff BUT again is this approach scalable on an ongoing basis? I have pulled all-nighters because something horrible went wrong with a project. I have gotten into the trenches with my teams to help however I could. But these are absolutely exceptions to the rule, and I can assure you that as a team we would reflect and agree on how to correct the decisions, behaviours and actions that led to the problem.

So I am happy that you’ve stuck with me this long, at this point, I challenge you, as leaders in your organisations, to ask the tough questions of yourself and your team (but it absolutely starts with you!), to ensure that you are working effectively and have a personal life at the same time, because in the end if you work your life away, doing long hours and I am sure, achieving some measure of success, but never actually LIVE YOUR LIFE, then what is the point really?

What do you think?

Observe, measure & keep measuring

Observation & measurement are both important aspects of leadership. You should be observing team behaviours, body language and other factors such as attendance. These are likely to be indicators of team health and satisfaction, and where issues are identified you should take the initiative to engage and seek feedback from your team members.

SMART Objectives

Smart objectives or targets with “smart criteria” are important because they are proven to improve personal and team performance because they are easier to understand and to know when they have been done. The acronym represents targets & objectives that are;

• Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
• Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
• Assignable – specify who will do it.
• Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
• Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.

Be consistent

Creating and maintaining highly effective teams is not a short-term, once off initiative. You need to define your approaches and be consistent across your organisation. Nobody should be exempt from your initiative and organisational values, from CEO down, every body should be held to the same standards and nobody is excluded from being called out for failure to adhere with agreed organisational norms, nobody!

Identify if it is a team or individual team members issue

The first step is to identify where the issue really is in the business and we can do that by asking some pretty simple questions;

• Is the issue related to the team, their dynamics or group norms?
• Are the results from the team overall below your stated expectations?
• Do the group norms not align with your organisational values?

If you answer yes to any of the above then the issue is related to the team itself, and you must then reflect further on your own leadership (re-read my previous post?) and look to implement initiatives that are designed to change the team culture… read on!

So it is a team issue?

Break the cycle

Sometimes the answer is a simple one, quite often it is a matter of understanding why they are not motivated or how they feel about themselves, the team and the organisation. An open conversation about these types of things may give you the insights you need to positively shift the teams’ attention and focus to be aligned with your expectations. Further, it may give you honest feedback about how realistic your expectations actually are.

Some suggestions include;

• Team discussions – present expectations vs actual outcomes and ask them, in a constructive way what you can do as their leader to help them succeed
• Thorough, constructive retrospectives – again this comes down to the presentation of results to the team and open discussions about how to improve
• Restate expectations clearly – sometimes a reset, as in, forget the past, let us start again based on new rules of engagement is important
• Individual discussions – pull each team member aside in an informal setting (over coffee?) and talk to them about the team and their own performance, again the emphasis here should be what they need from you to succeed

Implement change

If after trying to break the cycle your team is still not delivering, it is time to force a shift by implementing change. At this stage, we’re still talking about team or organisational level change though as it is not yet clear that it is an individual team member issue.

You can implement change in too many ways for me to cover in this article but some examples include;

• Trigger a reset the stages of team or group development – add a team member (who you know to be a positive, energetic and influential person within the organisation (or hire specifically for this purpose)
• Review and implement process changes – look at how people are working to determine if a change would influence the team positively e.g. implement agile or 360° feedback
• Make your SMART objective reporting public – look to show scorecards and leaderboards to promote positive behaviours and working habits
• Provide additional training – consider soft-skill training like Leadership or Productivity Hacks (both of which I offer through my engagements)

At this point, if the team is still not performing and you truly believe you have set them up to succeed it is time to start considering that it is an issue with individual team members (and their potential effects on those around them).

So it is an individual team members issue?

Is their role right?

The first thing you should check when starting to evaluate an individuals impact on team performance is whether they are actually doing the role that they agreed to when joining the team. Just because there is a need for a shift in role for an individual to meet business requirements, does not mean that every team member will be happy with that change. In fact the best team members are those who will work with you on these types of needs, however, everybody has their limits.

When I conduct exit interviews there are two common themes, especially with technical roles;

• I want to use newer (read: higher value) technology and/or methodologies
• I want to take on new challenges

While it is not always possible for every team member to be hired for and use the newest products, technologies or methodologies, I see many organisations hiring for the newest, but actually having their teams using the oldest.

If you are in the process of transitioning from an old tech/methodology then communicate that upfront and ensure there is a roadmap to get there that individuals will be involved in. If you are hiring for maintenance of a legacy product, state that upfront so there are no nasty surprises.

If you identify team members in this position, try to identify more appropriate projects or teams for them to be a part of. Otherwise, be direct about the future of their role and let them make the choice about their continued involvement in the team.

Encourage higher volumes of feedback

Feedback is the key to learning and development and as such, it is important to build a culture that encourages feedback across teams and the organisation. An annual performance review is the most common form of feedback but it lacks the context and frequency to drive continuous improvement across your organisation.

Some approaches to explore for your team include;

• Development planning – all resources should have some form of a development plan in place. These should contain; future career direction, educational/training requirements, key performance indicators and goals
• Monthly informal catch-ups – grab a coffee with your team members and ask them how they’re going. Come prepared with information and statistics about their individual performance but this should not necessarily be the focus of these discussions. Take the time to understand what other factors may be impacting their performance; their personal lives, their personal goals and ambitions, their health and fitness. Don’t do it in a creepy way of course but these are all factors that will influence them and their working life. You should also take this time to review how they are going with their development plan and what help they may require from you to ensure they succeed
• Implement 360° feedback – this approach is particularly useful because the core principle is that performance data is captured by those closest to the person being evaluated. That is that each team member is evaluated against common metrics by their manager, their team members and importantly themselves. This type of feedback method has great value but can take significant time to set up and implement.

Still not working?

If after all of this your team is not performing then, as a leader, it is time to start making hard decisions. You need to recognise that your responsibility is ultimately to the organisation and the teams, not the individuals. If there are toxic personalities and team members, then it is your responsibility to manage them out of the business.

I see many executives maintain relationships with team members who are not performing to expectations because of a sense of responsibility to “do right by them”, and while that is admirable, I would always challenge them to focus that energy on those who are “doing right by the organisation”.

This is obviously a really hard topic but if you have gone through the steps in my previous post and then this one too, and you have team members who are still not performing, then I believe you can hand on heart state that you have really set them up to succeed and tried multiple approaches to correct their behaviour and performance, and it is probably best for all parties to move on from the engagement.

Do not forget that “often the hardest decisions are the most important to the success of your organisation”, unfortunately, leadership is not all fun and games, kicking goals or realising your vision for your team and organisation.

When I talk about team compositions, you must recognise that any significant change to a team changes that teams composition and the dynamics. That includes, for example;

• Adding a new team member
• Removing a team member
• Promoting a team member
• Demoting a team member
• Other factors that may shift the balance of power

These factors can reset the stages of team or group development as described by Tuckman.

So if you’re ready to reflect on your own leadership and team management now, here are a handful of factors to consider!

Set clear expectations

This sounds like an obvious thing to say, but from my experience, many leaders expect a high level of “common sense” – but as you have probably heard before; common sense, is unfortunately not particularly common.

I am in no way suggesting you outline every possible scenario or situation, you need to have trust your teams talent, experience and knowledge while having a level of assertiveness to ask questions when it is needed, however, you need to ensure that they understand various aspects of your organisation and the task they are performing.

Organisational values – how to behave

Organisational values provide your team(s) a baseline and focus on making the appropriate decisions in scenarios that they find themselves in.

Policies and procedures – how to work

Policies and procedures give your team a framework from which to work from and refer to at times when organisational values are not enough.

Further, you should put emphasis on self-documentation of common scenarios and processes so that there is consistency across your organisation and team members.

Task detail – how to deliver

Getting into the specifics of the task details, such as understanding stakeholders, timeline expectations, expected quality, challenges and risks are important. Often, however, the most critical aspect often neglected is context. What does this task, you are asking them to deliver, affect your customers and your business?

The first two are relatively self-explanatory but task detail is one aspect I would like to talk about in more detail, especially the context.

If your team understands the importance of their work in relation to your customers and your business, they are more likely to make better decisions. This context that I speak of could and should include answering the below questions for your team members;

• How will it improve or change your customer’s experience with you and their satisfaction in their job?
• How much revenue is this task likely to generate or money is it like to save?
• What is the impact and cost of missing the agreed timeline?

A team member who has been provided with the above information is going to; have the appropriate mindset and values to make effective, appropriate decisions, and the context for why this task is important and what it means to all stakeholders for it to be delivered on time, on budget and to expected standards and quality. That is a great start to set your team member up for success.

A simple to understand example of this is where delivery of work that will add a monthly amount of revenue to your organisation. Delays in delivery not only has an affect on revenue and cashflow, but there is an opportunity loss, where your resources could have been working on other paid work.

Give your team the tools to succeed

Tools can be considered a broad definition within the context of setting your team up for success. The above-mentioned values and knowledge could be considered the first “tools” for your team members. However, we should expand on this to include a number of other “tools” including;

• Critical knowledge and training – for hard-skills this is common of course, you wouldn’t ask a plumber to fly and plane and you wouldn’t ask a pilot to perform surgery. I strongly suggest you do not neglect soft-skills too when considering your professional development toolkit. Think about soft-skills such as productivity & leadership as examples of education/training that could have a significant impact on your teams’ success.
• Visibility and relevant data – give your team visibility to the highest level of business data possible, including where appropriate financials. Allow them to easily see how a project’s progress and momentum and how their tasks will impact on that.
• Actual tools – consider if your team have the right tools or software to work effectively to meet your expectations. Do they have a way to manage their tasks and collaborate with their fellow team members?

Support your team throughout

Again, I am not suggesting and micro-management or hand-holding here, but you as a leader should be on the lookout for both internal and external factors that may be impacting your team members and either be actively shielding them from them or resetting your expectations based on these unexpected influences.

A great example of this within the context of a software development team is when there is an active project ongoing and there is a critical issue that pulls resources off the project temporarily. You, as their leader, need to understand that this impact will affect delivery. If you can deflect those interruptions to other resources without impacting the customers’ experience then you absolutely should do so. If that is not an option, why not take the initiative to communicate your understanding that this interruption may impact on the project.

If you haven’t already introduced effective feedback loops into your teams, you should absolutely do this. This is a great way to express your support and encourages you to implement changes to your teams work life, many of which cost little and have huge impacts on job satisfaction and productivity!

Ask them regularly how they are going (I prefer to do this via monthly coffee chats) and ask if there is anything that they need your help with whether it be related to the expectations and tools we mentioned above, or anything else.

Take this opportunity to also restate or set additional expectations for your group and team members, so that they are always clear and fresh for everybody involved.

Let me know what you think below in the comments!

It is unfortunately a fact that if we don’t take control of our own habits, attitudes and processes we all can have them; bad days, or weeks, or even months, when it feels that no matter how hard we work, we just can’t break a negative cycle or get on top of the sheer amount of work we have. It is events such as this that coined quotes such as “expect the best, plan for the worst”.

Commit time to work breakdown

One of the most intimidating factors, when you have a pile of work, is looking at the sheer size of the work involved. It’s important to spend time, upfront, to break that work down to manageable pieces that can be delivered on a daily basis. Meaning you should not have tasks that are going to overlap days, each piece of work should be achievable in a reasonable period of time because the productivity impact of not achieving anything meaningful on a day is huge.

Breaking down work is a principle of project management (known as WBS or work breakdown) and can help you to not only better understand the time that a task will take, but also to better plan your future task commitments. Let us consider that you have been tasked with producing a brand, spanking new sales presentation. This is not going to be a simple, 1hr change, so we should break down the work into more manageable pieces and plan for them, as such;

• New Sales Presentation
  • Define scope, stakeholders and expected outcomes
  • Define presentation structure & sections
  • Develop the presentation
    • Introduction
    • Section 1 (TBA)
    • Section 2 (TBA)
    • Section 3 (TBA)
    • Thank you

Using each bullet point as a unique task you will be able to;

1. Understand the total effort required to greater accuracy and as such not add additional pressure to other tasks and their timelines
2. Plan pieces and successfully deliver work each day/work period

Research indicates that successfully completing work or tasks improves motivation and productivity, meaning you will get more work done and achieve better results overall.

Ensure you balance the types of tasks you are prioritising

Balancing the types of tasks you are prioritising is also another way to achieve better productivity and improve motivation. This involves ensuring that you are prioritising a balance of tasks that you enjoy or inspire you vs those tasks that you may not look forward to as much but still need to get done. The ratio of such balance needs to be reflective of organisational priorities of course but you should, at a minimum, allocate an hour a day to tasks that will make you feel good about what you’re doing. You will find that by taking this approach, the “others” won’t feel like such a burden or point of frustration.

Reflect, learn and move on

Take time, as you progress through your balanced, manageable tasks to reflect on each item as you progress towards relieving the business pressures you’re facing to ensure that you are doing everything you can to avoid such a situation again. What could you have done differently to avoid this pressure? Did you fail to plan effectively? Did you fail to identify, mitigate and avoid a risk?

I always say to those people I’m working with, “I have no issue with anybody making a mistake, I have a huge problem if they make the same mistake multiple times” and you should take the same attitude.

Another consideration is that you should try not to dwell on events that you can no longer control.

Reflect, absolutely, dwell and revisit the frustrations, what is the point?

Consider external assistance – even if it is short-term

If it really feels that you are lacking support, consider reaching out to an external resource for assistance. Somebody to help put things into perspective, potentially help you break down your work, plan and execute it effectively. An external resource, such as myself, can also help you to develop more effective processes for planning and risk management to help your entire organisation in the future.

I also offer educational sessions that expand on some of the above approaches to implement productivity hacks and effective strategic planning and execution processes for your organisation.

I read questions like “Is it worth doing an MBA?”, “Should I get a degree?” and “Do you need an MBA to succeed in business?” and I see responses that range from “worth every cent” (usually graduates) to “what a waste of money!”.

Other than the vagueness of such questions in relation to individual situations, I feel that a lot of people get confused about the difference between “education” and “learning”.

Does everybody need an MBA? No
Could everybody gain knowledge and/or skills from an MBA? Absolutely!

You see, good leaders, great CEOs and world-class innovators display some common personality traits, one that always stands out to me is a desire or even a personal need to continually learn.

The below is a summary of some of the types of learning that you should be considering for your personal and professional development.

Academic Education / Higher Learning

Education is (rightly or wrongly) associated with universities and professional qualifications (PMI, CPA, CA etc), and provide a means of learning a solid baseline, sometimes very theoretical or academic, set of knowledge and skills. For me, my MBA not only taught me many new things in relation to leadership, business strategies, marketing, financial management and much much more. Further, it validated much of my existing approaches and ideas about business, strategy and team building, even if I didn’t know the name of the principle or theory I was applying.

In the end though, academic education is just one type of tool to learn. Without an ability to apply this knowledge it is not going to help your organisation or you develop as a professional.

Reading

Reading is one of the most common ways for people to learn; reading about other peoples successes and failures, reading about new approaches to business and personal problems, and reading about the everyday lives of those that may be your current or future customers and reflect on how this new insight or knowledge could be applied to improve your own organisation or job.

The insights you gain through reading can truly help you to challenge yourself about your approaches and mindset and leads to better decisions in your own business and personal life.

Tutorials, YouTube and Online Training

The web has a vast source of information available of course, many of these can be found via a simple google search, and even better, you should be able to get the basics of a new set of knowledge for free on sites like YouTube. Even advanced courses are usually available but there are resources available through paid online training services like TED & Udemy. There are also free online training packages via Alison where you get a certificate and all.

Personal & Organisational Reflection

Personal and organisational reflection is another tool that great leaders use to learn from a situation and make corrective actions or improvements each time they cycle through a process.

Is there a single type of “learning” that will make you a great business person or leader? Of course not!

The real question that people should be asking is “what combination of learning tools should I use to grow?”

Coming back to the question about the value of an MBA, it does not automatically make you an exceptional leader or great team member. It does not automatically increase your value to an organisation. It does however provide you with knowledge, tools and methods, that if executed effectively, will help you to become a better leader, a better team member and lead to more organisational success. I do however firmly believe that what will get you over the line professionally, is going to be applying a combitation of the methods discussed here.

I’ve met people with 3-4 degrees, who couldn’t run a project or execute on a strategy to save their lives. Conversely, I’ve met people who (like me prior to my MBA) had no degree or formal qualifications, but got things done, and got things done well.

For me, my MBA studies was an amazing experience and I have learned so much from not only the course material but those amazing people that I work with throughout my 18 months of study.

So do not get yourself confused between the need for formal education and the need for continuous learning. Since my MBA I have read countless articles, methodologies, books and engaged with many leaders at various organisations and communities that I engage with, and importantly I’ve learned from each and every one.

Strategy Planning vs Backlog Development

There are a number of different approaches to strategic planning, such as commonly used tools like SWOT analysis sessions, but for the most part, the outcome is a set of goals or actions that your organisation that the group have identified to; remain competitive, achieve competitive advantage. leverage from an identified strength, or mitigate the risks associated with an identified weakness.

Unfortunately, many times these strategically significant actions remain in notes, butchers paper, whiteboards and never get effectively executed.

So within the scope of an agile scrum, this is consistent with the backlog development. They are your “user stories” that will need to be broken down into manageable pieces of work that you, or another team member, will be responsible for delivering.

Praying for Results vs Strategy Sprints

Often during strategic planning sessions, ownership is delegated to the appropriate team members. This is often done without consideration of the effort involved, other priorities and I’ve even seen these actions quickly put into the “if I get time” basket.

But hang on, you just spent a half day or full day with your most valuable (and probably expensive) resources in a room and you all agreed that these actions were critical for the business! Why would this not be considered a priority to execute and realise the benefits of the defined actions?

By implementing “strategy sprints”, that would usually run in two-week “sprint periods”, you are encouraging your team to take the developed backlog, prioritise, plan and most importantly complete the work.

By breaking down the work into smaller, manageable pieces, you are going to increase your chances of success significantly.

This is achieved through common agile scrum processes;

• Backlog Grooming – breaking strategic targets down into actionable and manageable pieces of work and prioritising them
• Sprint Planning – taking into consideration other commitments and priorities that staff have, planning the work that will be completed over the agreed sprint period
• Scrums – regular reports on the progress of the tasks that have been planned. This is achieved through the answering of three questions; what did you do? what are you going to do? are there any impediments or blockers? 
• Sprint Retrospectives – this is possibly the most important aspect of adopting agile scrum for your strategic objectives, this gives your team the opportunity to reflect on the outcomes and provide inputs and suggestions that will lead to improvements

It should be noted that in agile scrum projects, scrums are usually daily as these projects usually have a much more aggressive burndown requirement. While you could do this for your strategy sprints as well, it tends to be too much for a normal leadership team on top of their usual responsibilities and begins to eat into the value of the process. I would usually suggest weekly or twice weekly scrums for these types of sprints.  

Significant Roles

Product Owner

Ultimately the product owner should be a senior leader, if not THE senior leader of the organisation. It is important though that they also have the ability and willingness to provide “user stories” and “needs” without solving problems.   That’s the responsibility of the scrum master and team members!   Additionally, the product owner needs to be realistic in terms of expectations and prioritisation, as I’ve often said to my teams, “if everything is a priority, then nothing is”.

Scrum Master

Especially when dealing with, what is very likely to be non-technical work, there is a need to separate the scrum master responsibilities from day-to-day operations. You need to identify a stakeholder who is going to be both empowered and willing to call other stakeholders out when they fail to meet expectations, regardless of their seniority, while offering support and guidance when required.

It is this role that I fulfil with my coaching engagements; it’s hands-on, much more than your average advisor or coach, with support and accountability for the entire team, both within the context of a scrum and throughout the sprint.

Team Members

As touched on above, one of the challenges with strategic planning and execution is balancing day-to-day tasks and operations with strategically important actions. Team members, who are likely to be within your leadership group, need to have a solid understanding of their work and what is realistic in terms of prioritising between the day-to-day and the strategic tasks.

Using the right tools

There are many approaches to managing your brand new strategy sprints, but you should be considering the following;

1. We need to maintain a high level of visibility without burdening our leadership group with additional administrative tasks
2. We need to be able to monitor progress and communicate challenges along the way
3. We need to be able to easily report and view the outcomes throughout the sprint period

Let me know what you think of this approach and if you would like to explore running strategy sprints with me!