Why a Culture of Busyness is Killing your Growth and Three ways to Defeat it

Claire Quigley

Every business aspires to attract, develop and keep great people so that they can continue to grow, and enjoy doing it together.

Then busyness comes along and ruins the party.

Instead of being in a state of ‘flow’ where individuals and teams organise around doing great work that holds a clear purpose, they suddenly find themselves in the myre of daily routines, poorly prioritised or unfocussed tasks, jumping from one thing to another with limited valuable output. We lose connection with ourselves and others - how many times have you forgone a coffee because you had to get an email out?! Yes, it’s great in the short term – you got the job done but people don’t remember that do they? They remember hearing about your weekend and connecting with you as a human. Busyness distracts us from creating meaningful relationships and meaningful work.

Why do we get caught up in busyness?

It’s addictive being busy….

• Being busy makes us feel valuable and important. “I’ve so many meetings to attend etc etc’

• Being busy keeps us on track for the short term KPIs...we feel like we are achieving ‘stuff’ – the month end report, the mandatory town hall, the proposal we are submitting even though it’s not for our ideal customer.

• At an organisational level, busyness shows up in grand strategies, new initiative announcements, new product/service launches and a whole raft of activities that keeps the machine moving forward. The intention is great, however the busyness we create in the execution phase can create some nice big roadblocks to results.

For example, how often have you heard ‘I’d love to be more innovative but I just don’t have time’…or ‘I’d love to create more ideas but I need to focus on BAU for now’….or ‘I know it takes 3 days to complete this report but we have always done it this way and I just don’t have time to figure out how to streamline it’…or ‘I know there is an overarching business plan but we just focus on what we need to achieve as a team’…

Or simply every single time you sit at the meeting table the first sentence seems to be a competition for who says ‘I’m so busy’ first!

So as leaders, the question then becomes – is unproductive busyness trapping our potential and performance?

The three ‘R’s to Radical Productivity: Rethink. Recharge. Reclaim

Understandably, in a VUCA world we get comfortable repeating stuff and fall into trap of sticking with doing what we know rather than sticking with learning what we need to know.

Sumantra Ghoshal and Heike Bruch, authors of A Bias for Action, concluded that managers who take effective action rely on a combination of two traits: focus and energy. “Energy is the emotional tenacity that releases immense inner resources, allowing the hardest job to be done.” Focus is described as “concentrated attention – the ability to zero in on a goal and see the task through to completion.”

Rethink:

With this in mind, grab your team and ask the questions:

Where is the organisation operating from today in terms of focus and energy through the lens of strategy, culture and systems:

Where are the blind spots: the unseen blockers to our potential and performance? If we don’t know, how can we find these out?

How long term are we in terms of thinking? Your innovation portfolio is a great indicator here – how far ahead is your BAU, H1, H2 and H3 or (as we often describe it) your  ‘hop, skip and jump’ planned? How might we get consistent results that are aligned to our strategic goals?

Recharge:

Clear out the clutter – pick the top three priorities of the organisation and align everything (every team, every function, every performance metric) to these. Too often I see too many priorities take the steering wheel when it comes to strategy, creating the dreaded busyness culture, compounded by a need to control via reporting.

Create a connecting thread – be very intentional in what the measures of success are for your organisation and communicate this clearly and consistently throughout the organisation, repeatedly. For example, the measure could be to build a strong(er) presence in a new market – we are seeing a lot of this activity in engineering firms applying their expertise and resource to the renewables space. Or it could be to find a way to innovate your way out of a ‘red ocean’.

To beat the busyness culture, you have to keep reminding people of why they are there, and communications is so very important to this.

Reclaim

To reclaim meaningful, focussed and outcome driven work don’t just encourage – empower.

Announcing that everyone has to stop being busy, or find better ways to report will not create the momentum you need. It will be a short-term fad. You are ultimately aiming to replace a culture where unproductive busyness is acceptable, to a culture where problem solving, testing and action thrives.

An effective way I have seen this work is to create ways for collaboration to happen across functions, teams and regions. For example, at Neu21 we’ve supported numerous businesses to create generator programs or Design Sprints. These help people  focus on ways to solve a specific problem, test it, action it and close it out (what this looks like depends on the goal). Two  important things to remember: 1) start small – involve people across the business, learn what works best and then expand the impact of the program once there is a level of comfort and rhythm. 2) put a time stamp on it. If you give something 2 weeks or 2 years – it will take exactly that. My suggestion is to put in place a timeframe that gives space to learn and grow, but with speed and intention.  

In summary, it’s time to reclaim meaningful work. Solve problems in new ways. Make adaptive and agile working your default. And if you need help, take the bias for action and ask 😊. 

At Neu21 we help to create unstoppable organisations that consistently exceed expectations through agility, innovation, leadership, change management, and organisational design. We do this in a human-centred way that creates great places to work.

We’ve helped hundreds of great organisations build incredible cultures and results to boot. Get in touch.