Is Your Company Suffering from Initiative Overload?

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0:21Michael Watkins:Welcome to HBR on Leadership. I'm HBR Executive Editor, Alison Beard. On this show, we share case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts,

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0:55Michael Watkins:Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.

1:07Michael Watkins:Launching a new initiative is one way a manager can make their mark in a new job or show their value at a company they've been at for years. So it makes sense that more and more managers across industries might be piling on more and more new projects. The downside, though, is that more and more work gets saddled on middle managers and frontline employees. Workers are getting overwhelmed.

1:28Rose Hollister:When you have large organizations and lots of different people wanting to make things happen, the ripple effect all the way down is where it simply becomes almost impossible to keep up. And with all good intentions, people want to support these initiatives. They're great ideas. There's simply too many to be able to support to the right level. That's Rose Hollister. She and Michael Watkins

1:53Michael Watkins:looked at how companies like a Fortune 500 retailer ultimately suffer from overloading their employees like this. They're the co-authors of the HBR article, Too Many Projects, and both consultants at Genesis Advisors. Rosa and Michael, thank you for joining us today. Great to be here. Thank you. Happy to be here.

2:17Michael Watkins:So has initiative overload always been a problem or are initiatives more popular? now?

2:24Rose Hollister:We think that initiative overload is becoming more of a problem. We think it's been a problem, but we think it's escalating. And we think it's escalating for a few reasons. One, organizations over the last five to 10 years have gotten leaner. And so they cut costs. Usually one of the main ways to do that is by cutting headcount. And then usually what doesn't happen is that they don't change the work or cut the work to fit the cut in people. The other thing is that if you think about it, year after year, a department or a function wants to do something better, they want to launch something, so they start something new this year, something else next year and the following year.

3:04Rose Hollister:And large departments might launch many initiatives. And that happens over an entire organization. And then there are legacy initiatives that have been in place for a long time that maybe should be stopped but haven't been. Is this just kind of like every executive

3:21Michael Watkins:has to have his initiatives that he's running or she's running? This is a part of the problem, and it's not uncommon. A leader only has a couple of years in a role. They want to make a mark. One way to make a mark is to launch a signature initiative, right? And this is also a great example of what we call the magnifier effect, right, which is you may have executives individually launching a few initiatives, but then there's some critical level at the organization, in this case the store managers, where it all comes to a focal point. and people literally get burned out by everything that's kind of coming down towards them.

3:56Michael Watkins:It's interesting because there's like, you know, mathematical equations that support that too, right? It's like, if you look at a road, traffic's flowing smoothly, and then all of a sudden you just get a couple more cars on that road and the road can bear, you have a traffic jam. Exactly. Sounds like the same thing. Very similar. But I think also just to understand that those executives that you mentioned earlier that are launching those signature initiatives, that's happening in all the departments, right? And they're all trickling down. But where implementation needs to happen often is at focal points where it all kind of comes together.

4:31Michael Watkins:And so a couple of initiatives from each department can translate into a dozen at the level of something like the store manager. So I just want to ask why simple sort of prioritizing techniques don't seem to work here, because this is something where, you know, I know in my own career when I felt overwhelmed, my boss has said, well, I don't expect you to keep every ball in the air, just the most important ones. And some things will drop and that's fine. And these are your priorities and just do them. Why doesn't that kind of conversation help?

5:01Rose Hollister:I think the problem is, as Michael said, there are so many different functions or departments, all with signature important initiatives. So if marketing has their initiatives for the year, if IT has theirs, if HR has theirs, if operations has theirs, and I could go on and on. In big organizations, they might be doing multiple big initiatives. Well, they usually prioritize in silos, and they say, we're going to do these five or these 10 or these 20. Well, that happens in every single function. And what usually does not happen is a senior leadership team saying, let's look at all of these. Let's look across the enterprise, what Michael and I would call a balcony view.

5:46Rose Hollister:Let's get on the balcony. Let's look. Let's not just look at the dollars this will take. Let's look at what the hours it will take for people to either learn this, support this, execute on this, sustain this. That kind of inventory usually is not done. And somebody can juggle, but there are so many things coming at them that prioritizing isn't enough at the team leader or employee level. that prioritizing has to happen, should be happening at the senior team level.

6:17Michael Watkins:I love your example because you had a boss and you had a reasonable boss. And I want you to imagine you had three bosses, none of whom were reasonable, all shooting things at you, maybe with conflicting priorities, all asserting that it's really important that you do this work today. Oh, that sounds like a nightmare. Right, and that's what really does it. It's both the number of channels that things are coming at people through combined with a really a lack of attentiveness to what people reasonably can accomplish.

6:48Rose Hollister:Well, and just to build on what Michael said, that reasonably accomplished, depending on the culture, it might not be culturally okay to say we're at our limits. And people fear saying, I can't do more, or they've tried it and they haven't gotten heard. And so I think there's also a, we can do this, let's work harder, not more. And well, that only works when there's a reasonable amount of things on the plate. So if senior executives are somewhat clueless to what

7:17Michael Watkins:to what the havoc that they're wreaking and people are either afraid to speak up or aren't heard, then how do companies know if they're creating this problem? Well, I think that's a really big problem, which is often they don't. Right. This is something we call impact blindness. That basically, you know, senior management does not have sufficient visibility into the cumulative impact that the executive team is having on people at lower levels. Maybe they're not paying attention. Maybe they don't want to pay attention. Maybe they've got their own agendas they're pursuing. But the net impact is they do not really have visibility into what they're doing to the organization.

7:53Michael Watkins:And the organization will survive doing this for a while. And then the cracks will begin to start showing. When those cracks start to show, what do they look like? Is it decreased engagement?

8:05Rose Hollister:Is it turnover, what is it? It's decreased engagement. It's turnover. It's people leaving for other jobs. There was a SVP that we were in an interview with, and he was a leader at a human resource consulting firm. And he said, I love this organization. I love the work. I love the team. The pace is unsustainable. If I stay here, I will have a heart attack. And he left and he found another role. I was just talking to one of my clients and they had gotten in their engagement survey, they had gotten scores about that work-life balance wasn't where they wanted it to be. And as they unpacked that and said why, it wasn't that managers weren't flexible and weren't saying, yes, take care of your home life, your children, those things.

8:51Rose Hollister:It was that there were simply too many initiatives going on for people to be able to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

8:59Michael Watkins:Yeah, I would add that this sort of thing can work okay when unemployment is high, right? And there's, there's people are worried about their jobs and they're worried about saying things. But when you start to get to a full employment situation and people have lots of opportunities, the real risk is you're going to lose your best talent. And is that because the good people have more options or because the good people are the ones who tend to be the most overloaded with a million initiatives? Yes, to both, right? I think it's both things, right? One is that they tend to bear the brunt, right? Your high performer, you know, tends to get more loaded on them, right?

9:34Michael Watkins:Which of course can generate some resentment because other players are not doing the job and they have options, right? And so they look for places that are going to appreciate them and modulate the workload better than where they are. How do companies usually try to solve this problem and does that work? Well, typically, first of all, they say, by function, let's go prioritize.

9:58Rose Hollister:And so the marketing department says, OK, here's what's top for us. Here's what we're doing. Let us lead on our initiatives. And that happens across every other function, whether that's finance, whether that's IT. That typically doesn't work because there's not an understanding of the impact. Now, there was someone that we know that looked at his organization and realized this was an issue. And he asked every senior leader of this organization, the C-suite, to come to a three-day meeting. And as their homework, they had to bring every initiative that was happening under their oversight. What was the business case for it?

10:43Rose Hollister:What was it taking in people time? and then how did it meet two screens? One, to support the building of the business, the growth of the business, and second, to support customer satisfaction. Now that C-suite took three days. They looked at every single initiative and as a group, they said, we won't do this, we won't do this, we won't do this. Then they reallocated resources from the things that they weren't doing to the key initiatives. But at the end of the day, they significantly decreased the number of initiatives across the enterprise. When someone does that, the whole organization wins.

11:26Rose Hollister:And the business results gave proof to this because looking down the road, customer service scores did go up. The business did grow. And people looked back on that three-day retreat as a turning point in the organization.

11:42Michael Watkins:I would add a couple of things to that too, right? That's potentially a highly conflictual process. That's a really difficult process of making trade-offs between people that really want to drive certain things in their organizations. Second thing is you've got to be very careful about interdependencies between things. You can stop this, and it turns out it really impacts that. And so you've got to be willing to think through those interdependencies. And then once you've decided to kill something, you actually have to kill it. right? I mean, we see these zombie initiatives, right? That they sort of rise from the dead because they've got an agenda associated with them and people find little hidden pockets of resource or think they do to try and pursue them.

12:20Michael Watkins:So usually when projects don't die or stay dead, leaders get blamed by employees and kind of, you know, employees who feel kind of disgruntled and kind of like, oh, like, you know, management never kills any of these projects. But I know that from talking to leaders, leaders feel like employees won't stop doing the work. I mean, and they're because it's sort of each side kind of blames the other camp. Yeah, I've been doing some work with a big pharma company, R &D, right? And I think I've seen this very much happen because people get very identified with projects, right? They begin to think their employment may depend on certain projects being pursued.

13:00Michael Watkins:or they really strongly believe that this particular drug is going to change the world. And so there's resistance to this notion that we're actually going to kill something. Prioritization, really prioritizing and really making it stick, that's really hard. So as a leader, how can you deliver that message convincingly and compassionately?

13:21Rose Hollister:I think part of this, and one of the things that we find, is there needs to be better dialogue going both ways. There needs to be an understanding from the people who are being asked to execute on this initiative. What's the true impact? Or if we're stopping it, are there pieces of this that are related somewhere else? Because in big organizations, as Michael said, there are so many interdependencies that stopping something, maybe you can stop 85 percent, but maybe another department is depending on this 15 percent. And so part of this is more robust conversations about what will it mean to stop and what's the plan to stop it.

14:03Michael Watkins:You need to recognize that really doing this kind of prioritization and winnowing across an organization is a kind of change management exercise. And change management exercises tend to work best when you start with the why. Why are we doing this? What are the benefits, right? Rather than just jumping straight to the what or the how. So clearly it would be better to prevent this problem from occurring. What are some of the questions that leaders should be asking before launching initiatives to avoid this kind of thing?

14:33Rose Hollister:I think the example for me would be if I just say I'm going to buy a car and I budgeted for my car. Well, I'll go and buy that car. But if I can't afford the gas, if I can't afford the maintenance and the insurance, I can't really afford the car. Well, I think for a lot of initiatives, we get the initial funding, but we don't understand all the peripheral things that are needed in order to support it for the long term. So it's understanding, will this initiative truly solve the problem? Did we do enough homework to understand whether this isn't just a Band-Aid, but it's actually the right answer?

15:11Rose Hollister:And then if it is the right answer, have we truly looked at the costs? and does it make sense with all the other things in the organization, is this truly one of the priorities? One of the quotes we really like is from Steve Jobs that says that we all need to get better at saying no to hundreds of really good ideas.

15:32Michael Watkins:What about the sort of, I think of it as the closet cleaning approach, where for every new piece of clothing you buy, you have to donate an old piece of clothing or give it away. I mean, can you take the same approach with initiatives or is that just too rigid?

15:45Rose Hollister:It might be like, let's say that I buy a wool coat, but I give away a pair of socks. So they're not quite equal.

15:54Michael Watkins:Like you can see into my closet.

15:57Rose Hollister:So I think that where it's a nice idea to add an initiative, take one away, I think it's about what will it take for the organization to support this initiative. I used to, when I was running the team at McDonald's, I used to ask my team about once a quarter, what are we doing that we could stop doing and no one would notice? We also one year took the time to say for everything that we're delivering, what does it take in time to deliver it? And we got a really amazing sense of if we were doing a high potential officer program, what did it take us in hours to support that? And we did that across every single program we ran.

16:39Rose Hollister:And then when we sat down to plan for the following year, I had all these great ideas. I wanted to start this. I wanted to start this. I wanted to do this. And my team who had been working with me tracking it said, we have 15 % free time. That's all. So if you want to start these things, are we going to get other resources? Are we going to stop doing some other things? We had done our homework to truly know what it took to deliver. Most times we're all just working so hard, we don't really know what it takes to make something happen.