The Juggling Koan (Hall Of Fame Guidance)

0:00Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Sarah. And I'm Mark. Today's podcast, The Juggling Co-On, part one of one. As always, our content has been crafted by humans, and we are certified by Proudly Human. The questions this cast answers are, what do I do when I have more work than I can handle? How do I get other people to help with my workload? And what is the answer to The Juggling Co-On? If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Hey everyone, Allie Ozan here with the Manager Tools team. The conversation you keep avoiding has a cost that keeps growing. In trust, in performance, and in the relationship that deteriorates while you wait for the right moment.

0:49The effective communicator conference teaches you how to have hard conversations in the way that a person can hear, without damaging the relationship or softening the message until it disappears. For more information, visit manager-tools.com forward slash ECC. Well, folks, we have got a special day in store for you. We've got two big things happening on our show today. The first is we have got a guest on our podcast. Kreslov Babanian from Poland is here. Kreslov, say hello to everyone. Hello, folks. It's my first time on the Manager Tools, but I've been a listener for, I think, more than six years already.

1:35And I am very excited to be here today. Lovely. Thank you for joining us. He admits he's nervous. Yeah. Well, I mean... He should be. Less than 10 people have ever been on our cast, and certainly none like this. Exactly. Contributing in line in the cast rather than being interviewed or whatever. Yeah. I mean, moreover, actually, physically at our house. I mean, there's a lot of stuff happening. in this one today, folks. What I'd also say is you may have heard Kreslov's name before. He has graced our executive speaker series stage to talk to us about his people development system. Mark was an executive coach for Kreslov for a few months, and now he is here visiting us.

2:14So, thank you. Welcome, Kreslov. It's a great honor to be here. Thank you. And the other special thing that's happening on today's podcast is, you may have heard for our longtime Manager Tools listeners, the title of today's podcast, The Juggling Koan, which is one of those classic Manager Tools podcasts, I think dates back to 2007. Seems right. Yep. I wasn't around, Mark. But my understanding of this podcast was the impetus for The Juggling Koan was a blog post. It was a newsletter. It was maybe it was in the forums asking people to kind of write in and answer the challenge of today's cast. the answer to the juggling koan.

2:57Does that sound right? That sounds right. I think we got a bunch of emails. And we're not going to do that this time. We're not going to read. In the original juggling koan, we read every person's answer and attributed it to them. And they liked it because they got their name on the podcast. And it was quite long. I mean, we had over 100 responses, and some of them were quite long. And we had presented the koan, the question, the challenge, and then they wrote in with what they thought the answer was. And a few people, I would say maybe 10%, got it right. Many people got it very, very wrong and said, well, you just tell your boss, when you're really, really busy, you should just tell your boss no, which is literally the exact opposite of the right thing to do.

3:44But because of that, people still talk to me about that cast. Yeah, I believe it. I believe All right. So we keep talking about the question. So the question essentially is, you're at capacity and your boss walks in with one more big assignment. The instinct for all of us is to defend our plate, ask what can come off, quietly hope nobody notices what slips to the floor while we do this extra thing. Each of those hands the problem back to our manager. And today's cast gives us the short answer to the juggling co-on. Yeah, most of us were never taught what to do in the moment where a huge new initiative falls in our lap.

4:29We learned to do the work, but nobody really explained what to do when the work keeps growing. We have skills. We're in a job that our skills are aligned with the work output that's required, but nobody teaches, what do I do when suddenly there's more work? And actually, more work is usually a good thing because it means you're being trusted with more responsibility and or it means your organization is growing. So most of us, what we do is we improvise. And the improvising, as Sarah alluded to, often looks like self-protection. We object when our boss says we've got more to do, you know, I've got more for you to do.

5:06We request to reprioritize so that we're given authority to stop doing things and getting our boss to bless that so we don't get in trouble. And or we carefully list everything on our plate as if to suggest that the volume simply negates what our boss is asking us to do. You know, oh, I'm sorry, boss, you don't understand how busy I actually am. And once I explain it to you, you will go running back to your desk and be some other fool to take on this responsibility. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But the thing here is, folks, this is manager tools after all. You're a manager. And as a manager, the activities you engage in teach lessons to your directs and team members.

5:48Your own self-protection instincts do nothing more than make you look like you're not a leader and teach your team that they're better off protecting themselves from you as well. Yeah. If you're going to set the example and say, I'm going to tell my boss no, then don't expect any of your directs to say yes ever. Right? The standard has been set. The example has been set. And the right response is much simpler, guys. And it shows you're a leader. Never mind the fact that it also ensures that your team grows along with you, which is what leaders do. They bring people up with them as they rise. Those two things combined will do a lot more for your career and those are directs than self-protection ever will.

6:33All right, Kreslov, why don't you give our audience today the outline? So, there is a problem and there is a solution. But first, let's define the problem. In short, the problem is what we call the juggling cone. You're a manager and you've got a boss and a team. Let's assume for a moment that all of your responsibilities, your goals and objectives rolling up all your tasks can be represented by a bucket of balls. As in saying, juggling a lot of balls. You can also think about it as if your work week is a box that holds the balls. And you can't grow this box because you just have, as any other human being, a 24 hours in your day.

7:27so for discussion purposes let's just say that everybody you your boss and all 10 members of your team has 20 balls in their bucket you have five big balls the one your boss might well fire you for if you drop them and you have 15 smaller balls as well so 15 plus 5 makes a 20 These are also important, though not critical. Your 20 balls keep you very busy. Sometimes even 80-hour work weeks, though not that often. It is a lot. You're right. Not often, but it could happen. Yeah. Sometimes you even take less vacation that you are allowed and less than your spouse and kids would like you to. Got it?

8:23So I would like to add a little bit of color here. The juggling coin was originally called the delegation cascade, a speech I gave at Harvard Business School. And I was attempting to conceptualize the idea of bosses getting the company growing and the bosses getting more and more work. We've been saying buckets, but the way I draw it, and I think in the, our icon or our logo for delegation is actually a box. And we talk about carrying around your box with all the balls that you have to juggle all the time. and the way we drew the box in in the in the uh example or in the the the logo was the box was full there were 15 little small balls in there and then five big balls and i think we actually they were all kind of gray with a blue circle around them and then what happens in the uh what we did in the original first couple of effective manager conferences is we had some animation which we don't recommend in slides but in this case we had it of a big orange ball as big as the other five gray balls in there dropping down on top.

9:28But of course, there's no room for it and it doesn't fit. And the problem is you can't just say, I'm going to go from 60 hour weeks to 80 hour weeks for the next six months until I solve this problem. That's not sustainable. Kresloff mentioned your spouse and kids. And so the problem here is what do you do, right? One day your boss comes to you and presents another shiny ball. In the animation, it was orange. But I often tell people the big balls you carry that are in your box are glass because you don't, if you drop a big ball, it breaks when it hits the floor. Whereas the small balls are kind of rubber and you can drop them and they'll bounce and then you can reach back down and pick them up when you get in trouble again about them.

10:10And the question is really simple. What would an effective manager do? Would you refuse? That's pretty common among most managers. Would you ask your boss to decide for you which of the other five and 15 he would not have you do? Would you simply hope he wasn't going to notice that you're going to drop four or five of your small balls in order to fit time in for the big ball? And that's the challenge of the juggling co-on. What should an effective manager do? Now, Mark, I'm sorry to keep you right on the spot there, sir, but prior to going into the solution, we've not really talked to the audience today about what the koan means.

10:53Why the name juggling koan? You mentioned it used to be Delegation Cascade, but why the name change? Okay. So a koan is a thing that is used, it's a mental challenge that is given to Zen Buddhist monks who are trying to enhance their understanding of the world and their place in the world and to achieve significant inner peace and be useful in the world and ultimately achieving total consciousness by truly understanding the world around them. The classic example of a koan that I'm sure everyone who's listening has heard is the one that goes, if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

11:35Now, most people think of that as sort of a silly question where, well, of course it makes a sound because if a tree falls, it'll make it sound. Or, well, why are we even asking this? The point of a koan is for a person, a student, a Buddhist student, to think deeply about what the various components of the problem are and to try to understand what they mean and dig into the problem in a deep and careful way, much the way the Stoics would talk about how they solve problems in their day-to-day lives and what kind of lives they want to lead. And so what's interesting about it is that koan, most people think, well, there's no really right answer.

12:15No, there is a right answer. And the monks believe, and they teach, but they hope their student figures that out on their own, is the answer is the tree does not make a sound because sound has to be perceived. And if there is no one there to perceive it, then there is no sound. And that blows a lot of people's minds. And so to me, this problem of the manager dealing with more work than she can handle is a classic case of a mental challenge. What should I do? I need to think about this deeply, differently, in a unique way, maybe, to understand the situation I'm in. So when the new big ball drops on the manager, they essentially are getting what amounts to a koan.

13:00And we call it the juggling koan because, of course, we're all juggling balls every day. And not a month goes by, I don't get an email from someone saying, that's a really weirdly titled podcast. And I say, well, you should listen to it. You should listen to it because it's really, really instructive. It may be one of the 10 or 15 most important things I ever learned as a manager. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I definitely agree with that. And I find the box and balls analogy a very fitting to everyday life. Like, why balls? Why not cubes or pyramids? that's because our working week it's not efficiently filled with tasks when you stock your box with balls you have all of these gaps those are small inefficiencies you taking time to talk to someone go to the restroom or take a sleep and you are not able to fit extra work in these gaps so the solution is something else exactly all right that takes us then just right there to the solution.

14:00And folks, it can be broken down into one simple word, delegation. So in this situation, the effective manager accepts the responsibility and immediately begins delegating. The way an effective manager delegates is to look at all of her now 21 balls, determine what she herself must do and what she needs to push down a level or maybe even a level beyond that, for that matter. And the most likely starting place is not the ball she just received from her manager because it's a big ball. Never mind. She's never done it before. Exactly. Exactly. The most efficient solution is then also not one of the other five large balls, which to Mark's point a moment earlier were made of glass.

14:46And if they break, it's bad. Rather, the effective manager looks at her 15 small balls that she's juggling and gives away a reasonable number of those small balls to her subordinates. Now, look, guys, before we talk about how many she delegates and in our model, the way we originally presented this is a big ball took five times as much time because the box represents time constraints, as Kreslov mentioned. And so the box is built for, let's say 50 hours of work and the new ball is sitting on top of the box that's already full and you have to get rid of a number of balls so that new ball will now fit into your box, which is the amount of time you work so that you can still have a family and not burn yourself out and so on.

15:35And this may be the most important point in the cast. When a manager delegates a small ball, listen carefully, folks. When a manager delegates a small ball, it grows in size as it moves down the chain of authority. When you delegate one of your small balls that you've already worked on, that's part of your responsibilities and that you action on a weekly basis, when you delegate that to a direct, it becomes one of their big balls to juggle in most cases because they haven't done it before. In fact, go back to the start of this whole thing, the challenge of you got a new big ball. What you don't realize is your boss has just delegated to you one of her small balls and it became big to you.

16:19And imagine then if balls get bigger when they go down a level, what would happen to one of your directs if you delegated to them one of your big balls, one of the most important things you do, the things your boss counts on you the most for? It would crush them. It would be bigger than their entire box, I think. It would be 25 times the size. So what happens is you have to consider that your small balls are becoming bigger and that your response of delegating in order to make room for your boss's small ball, which now became big to you, that's the same thing that's going to happen. And that's why we call it the delegation cascade.

16:56Yes. And when you delegate a small ball to your direct and it becomes a big ball for them, this is something new, something challenging, something that they may have to be stuck on and they need somebody to ask for help. So whom are they going to ask? You, their manager. And how can you help if this has never been a small ball for you? If this is a new topic, something challenging for yourself, you wouldn't be able to. That is why it is only reasonable to delegate a small ball in most cases. And to take it a step further, folks, you have several people to delegate to. So in most cases, the burden is going to get spread out as well.

17:41You could give each of your directs one of your small balls. You theoretically could get rid of six, seven, eight small balls, and they could all get only just one more big ball each. And then, of course, I mean, to Mark's earlier naming convention, if you will say, it's a cascade. So they're going to have some decisions to make about their workload as well. Yeah. By the way, part of the delegation cascade, which leads to juggling co-on, is based on the principle that you always want to have more work in your organization than you have resources to solve. Now, you might think, well, no, it should be perfectly aligned, right?

18:19We should have exactly the right amount. Well, no, that's virtually impossible in large, and I would argue even in small organizations. But what organizations have learned is that the problems associated with people having too many balls to juggle are better to have than the problems you get when people have too few balls. When you have too few balls, and this is often shown in governmental organizations, which are incredibly inefficient compared to their corporate counterparts, when people don't have enough work to do, they engage in political self-dealing. And now we have political issues fogging the organization in a way that reduces its effectiveness and its efficiency.

18:58Yeah. We have a whole podcast about those things, those issues, right? I think it's called, wait, there's too much work to do. But folks, I'll make sure I link to that podcast at the bottom of the show so that you can kind of hear about the other problems associated with as well. And delegation just happens to be a very sharp example of the need for all of us, knowing we have more work to do than we can, to think carefully about prioritization. And think about it, folks, having more work that your team is able to work on is a good thing because pressure creates incentive. If you don't have pressure and incentive, you don't feel the need to optimize internal processes, to develop your skills, to develop your abilities.

19:44There is no growth. So a healthy amount of pressure is necessary to challenge you to grow. Yeah. It's pretty obvious how beautiful a situation this really is. You're going to have to assess what your workload is, right? How many and to whom you're going to delegate some of your smaller responsibilities. You've got to know your folks to do this. You've got to know their strengths and weaknesses. And by the way, managers who do one-on-ones are better at this than those who don't. But delegation is one of the four parts of the Manager Tools Trinity included along with one-on-ones, obviously. Further, they're going to be stretched, as Kreslav alluded to.

20:26So you're going to have more opportunities to give them feedback. And they have bigger chances for success, so more positive feedback as well. And more coaching. It's very normal for a manager to delegate someone who understands the delegation cascade and the juggling koan challenge. They understand that when they delegate a small ball, they may, in fact, choose something that will require them to coach their direct. Now, some of you are going, ooh, I don't know that I like that. I don't have time for that. Remember, if you use the Manager Tools Coaching Model, it only takes you five to 10 minutes a week to coach any one of your directs.

21:01So, coaching is not a heavy lift for managers. It's not. And they're going to be learning to do something they've never done before, and that helps their career. They become more useful. They suddenly become, somebody becomes aware that, oh, She's worked on that before. We need people who have worked on that before. We're going to put her on a special project team. And special project teams are one of the ways that people get career visibility inside their organizations. And it also, and it enhances your resume too. Absolutely. More responsibility exposes the beauty in the art of delegation. Everyone has to do more and our management muscles grow and develop.

21:44When the new responsibilities are caused by new business, opportunities for new business, it's the perfect picture of the modern major organization. Growth from internal strengths, leading to higher productivity and profitability. It's funny to us how everybody always complains about getting more work, but fails to realize that that's how most of us grow. more work and more complex work to say nothing of the fact that they profess to want a promotion which carries more work with it anyway if if you are waiting for the perfectly equitable exchange of more work for more pay don't hold your breath no don't yeah exactly yeah exactly there are some assumptions built into our juggling koan that are here not just for the purpose of us avoiding somebody pulling a Captain Kirk at the Kobayashi Maru, and they're valuable to keep in mind we want to go over them.

22:48And for those of you who don't know, Kresloff revealed that he didn't know, and Sarah admitted she didn't know what the Kobayashi Maru is, but it's a famous incident, a famous scene or event in the Star Trek history where Captain Kirk is known as the only starship captain to have beaten the Kobayashi Maru simulation. And the Kobayashi Maru simulation put a captain and a crew in a simulation where they had to decide whether to save a ship, which was an enemy territory, or to leave the ship to die because it was enemy territory. And both modes ended up in failure. If you didn't save the ship, well, then obviously you were callous and uncaring about your colleagues.

23:36If you tried to save the ship, you were killed by the enemy who is cloaked on the other side of the boundary. Well, Captain Kirk pulled what is known as a Kobayashi Maru, and he went into the software associated with the simulation and changed the simulation, the characteristics of simulation, so that he could beat it. Okay? So we just want to be clear. This may sound like a simulation, and we are simulating the workload and how it passes downwards in the chain of authority in your organization. But it's not one you can beat. You cannot change the rules. Maybe if you're the CEO, you could change the rules.

24:19But there are some things you have to understand about how work is done in organizations that That are immutable, that are not changeable just because you're good with software. Yeah, I like that. And folks, the first one of those assumptions is we must always assume that bosses have already considered our bandwidth and workload when they delegate. The fact is, folks, very few, like very few managers engage in predatory or unethical, unprofessional delegation. Those that have gone to a certain level generally know they can't push all of their work off on you and then eat bonbons at their desk or leave early every single day.

24:59So that's something we must assume going into it. Yes, I completely agree. Because generally what your boss does when he delegates to you, he delegates the execution, but he doesn't delegate accountability. He is still accountable for this part of work that his organization does, and he cares about your success. You should always assume positive intent. And I believe, Mark, we have a cast for that. Yes, we do. Yeah. A big part of the reason that we make this point is because you're always trying to evaluate whether this delegation, which is being handed to you, is just being dumped on you or whether it really is a good decision.

25:44Your manager knows that. Your ability to be enthusiastic is significantly attenuated by your attempt at analyzing your manager of some ill intent that you can't possibly know enough about, as in your boss got a direct order from her boss to take over this thing, and now your boss has to figure out what to do with her remaining deliverables. And so she's got to do it. She has no choice. And if you start assuming some ill intent in order to figure out a way out of it, you're going to fail. You're going to fail. And folks, if it's not clear, we strongly encourage enthusiastic responses to this big ball delegation.

26:25We could talk for hours about it, but here it is simply. What would you begin to feel if all of your directs started accepting new projects and new responsibilities with no interest, no curiosity, and no creativity? whatever you might think of your team is a good bet for what your boss would think of you. And you don't want that to be the appearance. And if you are thinking, well, this is the proof for the Slack theory, meaning that I should always leave a little of my schedule free to allow for these kinds of things. This is a backward thinking. It's economically terribly inefficient to grow out of Slack.

27:07It's infinitely superior to stretch into growth. Why would they pay you to sit around when they can find someone else to do the whole job and learn when they are challenged? And look, you could ask your boss to prioritize how the new ball fits into your workload. This isn't wrong, but it's worrisome. When your boss delegates to you, even if you don't know exactly what to do and how to do it, your boss probably won't insult you by telling you how to do your own work. It's your job to prioritize your work. Don't ask your boss. Do it yourself. Tell him what you did. And if he needs to adjust, he will.

27:53And you might even think, well, why don't we just go back to our bosses and say, I'm already busy. I can't do anymore. So which ball do you want me to drop? We would also urge you not to take this approach either, folks. Your boss may well say, well, who's your best guy? Because I want him to do your job. Meaning if you're not willing to accept delegation, which has been going on for a hundred plus years in large organizations, you don't get, if you'll pardon the expression, the smallness of your role in the overall organizational system that produces outputs for its customers. If you're not yet a manager and you're always thinking about how to avoid work, folks, please stay not being a manager.

28:37Managers expect and build for more responsibility. And the good ones don't build for more responsibility because they want a promotion. They build for more responsibility because that produces better results without investing in new resources like new hires from the organization. That makes the organization more profitable. It makes the organization have more opportunities for growth, and the manager knows the extra work has to come before the growth. That's a good sign in an organization. And it's entirely possible you're in an organization with a lot of managers really good who are thinking along these lines, but you may be working for a manager who isn't, and that's one of the reasons why we encourage you to have relationships across the organization so you can assess how your boss is doing.

29:23What your boss is doing right now is not a perfect representation of what the entire organization is doing. Some people don't even know that they work for the best boss they'll ever work for fairly early in their career until they get two or three or four more bosses. So if you're asked to be delegated to, as Kreslov and Sarah said, accept enthusiastically and take responsibility for it yourself to figure out how you're going to get it done. Now, folks, there's another option, I suppose. You might be thinking that you could work with your boss to figure out which of the big balls to delegate to a direct.

29:58I mean, that could be an option. And we can recommend it, but there are definitely some caveats. Generally, your big balls are those that your boss is really going to focus on. Delegating a big ball to a direct is best done only when that direct is clearly growth-ready, And this is a developmental project for their career. This cannot be done lightly. As we mentioned earlier, that thing is the size of the globe to them. And my friend, it is glass to you. You are developing your directs. But to your boss, it's likely that they're just someone who's not as good at you as getting the work done, especially that which is important to them.

30:43The visibility from your direct to your manager can absolutely be good, but caution is advised here. Of course, the way around this is to delegate small balls, which will become big to them, for them, anyway. And then there is the option of growing the team each time a new task is added. Folks, hiring staff is nothing to be proud of. Growing your team to a professional manager means having the same number of people be more effective by improving their skills. It's not budget growth. Budget growth is counter to your organization's success. No new hires just because you get a six big ball. And think about it.

31:37Growing your team vertically is the solution because it makes every layer more capable. Adding new resources will help you scale horizontally, but this is done after you already mastered the efficient vertical delegation. And you might be able to meet with your customers and figure out what needs to be done. Maybe consolidate things, look for opportunities to automate things. It's always good to look at consolidating and readjusting based on new priorities. That's good. You're constantly thinking about that. In a dynamic organization, people complain things are always changing around here. That's actually a really good sign.

32:17In some organizations, it's also a sign of dysfunction and really bad organizations. And sometimes people don't know whether they're in a good or bad organization. They just think a good organization was one that pays them. Sometimes, though, balls can come faster than automation will allow and so on. but this is a good idea. And maybe you considered that the answer is to do nothing and see what happens. If so, no. At this moment, we're reminded of the old joke, tell your boss the truth and the truth shall set you free. And folks, we just took a list of the things that we thought you might be thinking in the back of your mind as things to give you the true answer to.

33:01There are many more options out there that you may have, or you may have done yourself in terms of your consideration around this. But no, the answer is always the same. Delegate. People don't leave organizations, they leave managers, and the behaviors that make people stay are completely teachable. The Effective Manager Conference teaches you one-on-ones, feedback, coaching, and delegation. the four tools proven to build the kind of trust and engagement that keeps your best people around when they have other options. Register now at manager-tools.com forward slash EMC. All right, we're going to wrap it up.

33:47Press left. You got this? Yes. Every manager eventually gets handed more than they feels reasonable. And what do you do in that moment tells your boss what kind of manager you are. Pushing back, asking which ball to drop, or hoping nobody notices you are not working on it, these are not the effective options. Delegating your small balls and treating the new work as a chance to stretch your team, That is how organizations grow from internal strengths. Your boss isn't only judging whether the work gets done. They are also judging how you take on the responsibility and whether or not you are a true leader.

34:35Managers who respond with enthusiasm and a plan to share the load get handed bigger opportunities. Managers who protect their plate teach their boss that growth stops wisdom. Outstanding. Thanks, folks. That was fun. That was fun. I think this was a first. It was. It was absolutely a first. Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely. With Kreslov the Great. Exactly. That was awesome. You're honoring me, Mark. I'm a long-term listener, and this was an amazing opportunity for me. Good. We're glad. Thank you, Crest Love. And thank you, folks, for joining us. Join us again next week as we continue this topic. Now, help us help others and tell your friends.

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