Is your team overwhelmed?

If Your Team Is Overwhelmed, What Can They Stop Doing?

Project overload is real. But as a leader, it can be hard to tell whether your team needs more resources or just could be working more efficiently. Start by asking people to identify their key activities and how much time they spend on them in a typical week. Use that data to assess workloads and priorities. Consider which tasks the team could stop doing and which might benefit from having their process rethought. Pay special attention to low-value projects that have to get done but that take up an inordinate amount of time. Are there ways to simplify the workflows to reduce the amount of time your team spends in these areas? And last but not least, look for tasks that simply can be done more quickly. If your team is still struggling after these steps, it might be time to hire more people.

(From HBR)

Learning Process

I came across this gem:

Keith Holyoak, a UCLA professor of psychology and one of the world’s leading thinkers on analogical reasoning, recommends people ask themselves the following two questions in order to hone their skills:

1. What does this remind me of?

2. Why does it remind me of it?

By constantly looking at objects in your environment and material you read and asking yourself these two questions, you build the muscles in your brain that help you make connections across traditional boundaries.

The above was in an articlethat sheds light on how Elon Musk is able to learn so many things in so many areas, that is a great read not just into processes practiced by Musk, but also to get an idea as to how one can accelerate learning.

It takes goodwill to be heard

It takes courage to speak up, but it takes goodwill to get heard. Before speaking truth to power, it helps to establish that (1) you excel at your job, (2) you're not selfish, and (3) you're invested in the organization.

Read the HBR article on strategies for cultivating every day courage  here (via @AdamMGrant - do follow him if you aren't yet).

Nuggets from Adam Grant

We need to invest time in getting at becoming better leaders (BBL). If we don’t we’d risk becoming irrelevant pretty soon as orgs do not wait endlessly for us to get better. There are many ways – observe, get mentored, read books, follow tweets, podcasts, blogs of celebrated pundits, listen to TED etc., As I’ve a goal to improve coaching and dev across RF (and struggling what it means to do so), I thought I’ll share few good gems (books, tweets, podcasts, TED talks etc). Here is the first one. I’ll put “BBL” in subject line to identify these. Encourage all of us to share interesting things you find.

Prof. Adam M Grant is a Wharton professor of psychology, author of successful books like Originals, Give and Take, Option B (with Shelly Sandberg) and a very strong communicator. His tweets are gems and I strongly recommend to follow him (@AdamMGrant). Some of his latest ones: