Your job is not to deliver every transformation at full speed. It is to turn many uncoordinated demands into one paced plan your team can absorb, and to make the trade-offs visible to the leaders who own them.
Paul leads a research laboratory in a large over-the-counter (OTC) pharmaceutical company organised into three divisions. For several consecutive half-years, his team has had to handle requests from all three divisions at the same time. Team members began to complain of work overload, and the latest social climate survey showed poor engagement scores. When Paul approached each division to smooth out the workload, every division head insisted that their own projects were an absolute top priority.
When every senior leader calls their programme "top priority", it is a clear mark that the organisation has not prioritised, and the cost lands on middle managers and their teams. Bruch and Menges (2010) call this the acceleration trap: too many initiatives at once, constant shifts in direction, no recovery periods.
A manager can act on three levers.
1. Make the load visible and send the trade-offs back to their owners
Discussions on workload with “internal customers” often turn to a very emotional subject. Your “customer” is expecting you to deliver with no consideration of what it can cost you. In return, you push back to protect your team from a too heavy workload. This happens largely because we don’t have facts and figures that help the protagonist to engage in a more mature conversation. To solve this issue 4 initiatives can help build a better visibility on problems. They can serve as a mediation map in the conversations you have with the business:
• Map the portfolio. List every programme with its sponsor, outcome, deadline and effort per person; a heat map (initiatives × people × quarters) helps you visualize the overload in one picture.
• Quantify capacity. If demand adds up to 40% of team time and capacity after the run business is 25%, the conversation moves from attitude to arithmetic.
• Frame options. “Taking on additional innovation projects in Q1 means another development initiative slips to Q3, or we accept a reduced scope, for example developing three SKUs instead of five.” One approach we have seen in the OTC case is to allocate a fixed share of the lab’s total capacity to each division. When one of these internal “customers” requests an additional project, the lab leader asks the division head to decide which of their own projects to deprioritise, which sends the trade-off back to its owner.
• Visualize what sequencing can do for you: if no agreement can be found through the trade-off method, a visualizing one-page view of the workload often prompts the sequencing they never discussed.
2. Integrate and sequence the work at team level
It is often said that a good leader imports stress and exports serenity. The addition of new initiatives to an already heavy workload should not be passed to the team without a little bit of organizing.
• Translate before you transmit: when you receive new unplanned requests, integrate them in an existing purpose, strategic frame and road map. This may require turning several programme narratives into one team story of what changes, in what order, and why.
• Bundle and sequence: the search for efficiency is a healthy hygiene. One can try to identify which assets could serve several projects at the same time: shared training, one data clean-up serving two programmes, a single cadence; stagger peak efforts, and nowadays, use of A.I. …
• Build a stop-doing list: beyond all efficiencies, we must accept that capacity can be a real challenge. Externalization is still an option. And a last lever is certainly to consider that every new routine replaces and stops an old one (legacy reports, duplicate meetings, workarounds, …).
• Protect the run business: pushing new innovations is key to the business but this cannot be achieved at the expense of mandatory projects on which no compromise can be accepted. We must agree which projects or service levels must not degrade.
3. Equip and protect the people
Managing multiple transformations and work overload is not just a planning or an efficiency exercise. People are at stake. The management of their energy is critical if you want to avoid transformation fatigue, a euphemism used to describe transformation rejection. Two observations in that respect:
• Manage the transition as a full component of your change program: following Bridges (2016), portfolio management must be accompanied by change management initiatives. Naming what is ending, supporting people through the uncertain neutral zone, and not treating scepticism as by default resistance are a few critical practices.
• Create rhythm and recovery: every human being can accept a very high level of delivery, when high recovery is planned carefully. This mechanism also applies to workload management. It makes sense to alternate delivery and consolidation phases; Pitstops in formula 1 can be a catalyst for performance immediately after the stop. Human beings can engage fully when they know where the finish line is. In the absence of this visibility, they tend to keep their energy in reserve. Therefore, a good practice consists in supporting teams to visualize the finish line and to celebrate completions as real endings.
Get on the balcony
Heifetz and Linsky (20O2) contrast the "dance floor" of daily delivery with the "balcony" view of the whole system. From the balcony, competing transformations are an adaptive problem of executive alignment, not a productivity problem of the team. The posture that works is loyal but explicit: committed to making the transformations succeed, and clear about what success requires.
References
1. Bruch, H. & Menges, J. I. (2010). "The Acceleration Trap." Harvard Business Review, April 2010.
2. Bridges, W. & Bridges, S. (2016). Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, 4th ed. Da Capo / Nicholas Brealey.
3. Heifetz, R. A. & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading. Harvard Business School Press.