290: How to Prioritise and Deliver Value at Work with James Louttit

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:01]:

If you are busy, and dare I say that’s pretty much all of us these days, then this podcast episode is absolutely for you. I’m your host, Aoife o’, Brien, the career and culture strategist for global leaders and teams. And you’re listening or watching the Happier at Work podcast, which is the award winning career and culture podcast. And in today’s episode, we’re talking about busyness and overwhelm and some very practical strategies you can look at and apply to your own work tomorrow to make sure that you’re having more of an impact with less of an effort. If that sounds like something that you could get behind, then absolutely check this episode out. Don’t forget to leave a comment or a rating or a review on your favorite podcast platform, or get involved in the conversation over on LinkedIn. James, you’re so welcome to the HackerWork podcast. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:54]:

I know we had the opportunity to meet in person at the Tech Summit and I’ve had the opportunity to read your book as well. So I would love to know for listeners a little bit about your background and how you got into doing what you’re doing today.

James Louttit [00:01:08]:

Thanks, Aoife, and thanks so much for having me on. Yeah, we had a good chat by the stand at the Tech Summit. But yeah, my background was I was a project manager, running bigger and bigger projects and programs through what you would call kind of consulting and in financial services. And in 2016, I had a pretty extreme experience. I ended up very, very ill in hospital because I was managing with what I would call effort rather than impact. I was following the processes and I was working incredibly hard, but it broke me. And off the back of that, I learned a lot about myself, but also started to learn things about, you know, actually the theories behind project management and all of the other related areas like facilitation and design thinking and behavior, behavioral psychology and all these other really interesting areas that you have to do when you’re managing any kind of team or project. Turns out when I really got my head down and learned that stuff, my career took off and I started to figure out these ways of explaining things and implementing things that helped a lot of people.

James Louttit [00:02:15]:

I was CIO at CPL for about 3 1/2 years and we did a lot of these kinds of activities there. And now what I do is I finished up with CPL about 3 years ago. I wrote, wrote my book, my first book, I’ve got two, and turns out that lots and lots of people are dealing with this problem of stress and pressure and a lot of organizations don’t have great structures in place to support them. And so that’s what I do now is help large and small organizations across Ireland and starting to go globally as well with putting things in place, training in particular, but also some structures in place around teams to help them deliver. Yeah. Happier at work, I suppose is a good way to put it.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:55]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:02:55]:

Through things like prioritization and transparency.

Aoife O’Brien [00:02:58]:

Yeah. And I think like, so that’s like what I took from your book as a non project manager was it’s a skill that’s really important to learn because even if you’re not called a project manager, we’re constantly managing projects ourselves, whether it’s product projects or whether it’s tasks that are feeding into a project that need to get done and we’re kind of managing ourselves. Do you find that that’s kind of a common belief?

James Louttit [00:03:27]:

Yeah, oh definitely. And actually I wouldn’t call it a skill. I’d call it a thousand skills.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:32]:

Okay.

James Louttit [00:03:32]:

It’s a toolbox of ideas and approaches that you need to be able to pull together. And I think one of the problems when people think of project management is that they think it’s one thing or one way of doing things.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:45]:

And a lot of the time like I just did.

James Louttit [00:03:48]:

Yeah. And that’s quite a natural thing because things like Prince 2 or scaled agile Framework, they feel like you have to do all of the things in order to be a project manager. And actually when you step back from that, there’s loads and loads of things in any of those methodologies that you shouldn’t be doing. They’re not necessarily value additive to your organization. They might be in someone else’s organization. And I think that’s the, that’s the thing, thing that I like to embed and engage is understand lots and lots of different useful things. Some of which are called project management, some of which are called change management, some of which are called people management, some of which are all about your own time and how you engage with, with people and your own behaviors. And actually that’s where I like to play in, in very tactical things that people can do tomorrow without having to go and study for six months to call themselves a project manager.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:39]:

Yeah, I really love that approach and I love the idea that it’s like this is something that you can do tomorrow. What would you say is the biggest thing that gets in the way of people doing? Let’s call it effective work.

James Louttit [00:04:52]:

Yeah, I think a lot of people are very, very busy. One of the things I’ve started doing. I was thinking about this over the summer. Some of my clients. Oh, we’re so busy, James. Okay. So I, I. Do you remember Jerry Maguire?

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:04]:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Show me the money.

James Louttit [00:05:06]:

Show me the money. One of my clients started using this phrase, show me the busy. And I think that’s the big thing. Actually. I now run a workshop helping people to find out why they’re so busy. But actually, that busyness problem we’ve all got. You might not have enough time. We don’t have enough time to do something.

James Louttit [00:05:24]:

Well, that’s not true. We’ve all got the same amount of time. The question is, are you prioritizing things? And for me, that’s actually fundamentally the biggest skill for a lot of people is to prioritize, but in the right ways that your organization can actually understand and get behind. Some people when they get overwhelmed and they get too busy, they sort of get. They grow this sort of confidence to turn around and say, I’m going to start saying no to things. And I actually think that’s not a great word. Right word, the word no. I think a better word is why.

James Louttit [00:05:59]:

And I think if you put it in a structure around a prioritized list, this is number one, this is number two, this is number three, this is number four. And don’t allow there to be any equals, then that unlocks a huge number of really good behaviors with your boss, with your team, with the rest of your organization that allow us to, To. To transparently prioritize what we work on.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:19]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:06:19]:

So I think the biggest challenge a lot of people are facing is busyness. And I think the biggest thing they can do about it is prioritize.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:25]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:06:25]:

And that’s what I help people with.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:26]:

Yeah. So I think you’re. You’re so right. We’re so busy. But you mentioned something there, that some people respond in a way that they’re like, I get really overwhelmed, and now it’s time to put in some bound and say no. I would have assumed that that’s everyone, but let’s maybe explore that, that some people like yourself, in a past life was like, I’m just going to keep saying yes and yes and yes until I reach a stage where I can’t actually do anything anymore. And I’m completely overwhelmed and I’m burning out. And I know you’ve shared some examples from teams that you.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:58]:

You led as well. So some people just don’t say no. They keep saying yes, yes, yes. Other people are trying to get really strict and Rigid around boundaries and not maybe not allowing for prioritization. They’re allowing for this is the time that this came in. So this came in first, therefore I’m doing it first, as opposed to this is more important, therefore I’m doing it first. And maybe there’s some other behaviors that we have as well when we get overwhelmed that we’re just going into ourselves or we’re just not coping, we’re not managing whatever it might be. Do you think that’s fair to say different people are responding differently to busyness even though we’re all busy?

James Louttit [00:07:35]:

Yeah. And what I would say is in the, in the book, I have two characters, John and Jill. And John is this kind of stressed out manager who’s trying to deal with everything himself. And Jill is much more capable to sort of stand back, think about things, have a difficult conversation and prioritize things. She’s that she’s what I would call the impactful project manager. And I think sometimes for all of us, the behavior becomes this kind of vicious circle of the more stressed and pressured you are, the, the more likely you are to become this kind of command and control. I’ll just do it myself, kind of project manager or manager.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:10]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:08:11]:

And then that makes a lot of things worse. So. Worse. So there’s, there’s this kind of this switch that if you can get back on the other side of. Well, actually, how do I train and coach my team to be better at things and, and help them to take up some of this stuff and use the capacity that we have there? Or how do I have a really tough conversation with someone about a prioritization decision that needs to be made? Or how do I flag a risk that’s really a significant one that’s coming down the line that we need to do something about now, those things, I think, create a huge, huge amount more impact than just being really, really busy and fighting the fire that’s in front of us at the moment.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:46]:

This is it, I think for a lot of us, and you know, myself included at times as well, is you’re so busy that you don’t take that step back and really think and be like, why am I busy? What is the first thing that needs to be done? And I suppose for me, when you were talking about show me the money, I thought it was going to be more literal and the manager was going to say, show me the money. What’s the value of this task that you’re working on? Or what’s the impact that it’s going to have versus Another task. And therefore, we need to reprioritize based on the money. But, yeah, I’d love to explore that a little bit.

James Louttit [00:09:17]:

And actually, I do describe that in the book, show me the. I wouldn’t say money, but show me the value. And actually, in money is the best way to do it, because then you can compare it to the cost or the effort of what’s being done and actually make good decisions about whether you should be doing these things at all. And one of the things I do do with a lot of teams is actually show them how to articulate that value of the things they’re working on. And interestingly enough, when I do that, we did this in my last company when I asked people to show me why the value of the things they were asking us to do as an IT team, approximately 50 of the work, it disappeared because it wasn’t valuable, right?

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:58]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:09:59]:

And when you ask people to show you the value, you know, oh, if we do this form in a slightly different way, it’s going to save me, you know, two hours every month. And you’re like, okay, well, that’s one person, two hours every month. And it’s going to take my team of six people, you know, a month to build it. Yeah, it’s not worth doing.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:15]:

No.

James Louttit [00:10:16]:

Versus something that has a much bigger value. Maybe it impacts a thousand people and it saves them four hours every day. And actually my team can then get on and do something valuable there. So I do think there’s this comparator between value and effort that I think is really useful for people to think about.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:34]:

Yeah, that was something that I really took and I would love to come back to that in a second. I want to revisit this idea of the no to why. So one of my previous guests, Lisa Bodell, talked about, when you have a lot on, it’s not about no, it’s about yes, if so. So, yes, if this other thing can be reprioritized. Yes, if we can extend the deadline on this other thing that I’m working on. So you don’t have to say no, but you do need to put a condition on the yes, I can only take this on if whatever. But I would love to explore this. No.

Aoife O’Brien [00:11:09]:

Why? Like, why are we doing these things? And what’s the justification, I suppose, of the different things that we’re doing when it comes to busyness?

James Louttit [00:11:18]:

So I really like what you’re saying there and what your previous guest said, because for me, when my wife and I got married, we agreed that I’m in Charge of everything. All of the things I’m in charge of, apart from decisions, obviously, she’s in charge of decisions. Everything else I’m in charge of.

Aoife O’Brien [00:11:34]:

You’re in charge of execution. Is that what that means? She says what to do and you do it.

James Louttit [00:11:39]:

That’s it. And I think there’s a strength to that as a way, which is if you just say yes, you’re not forcing a decision. If you say no, you’re making the decision yourself. And actually, the best way to do it is. Is exactly like you’re saying yes, if. Right. Where does this fit? What are the consequences of deciding to do this thing? What are the things that aren’t going to be done? What are the. What are the things that are going to have to be pushed out? And then you can actually have a better conversation that allows people to.

James Louttit [00:12:09]:

Because senior people make these decisions all the time and they have no idea of the consequences of what they’re saying, oh, we must prioritize this. Do this thing. And they don’t realize that that’s derailing a whole load of work that somebody else has already been doing for the last six months and is really valuable. So that transparency that some of the project management techniques can bring is incredibly powerful to helping people make better decisions about what work we do and what work we don’t do.

Aoife O’Brien [00:12:35]:

Yeah, yeah. Touching on this idea of the senior people making decisions. I can so relate to that. And you’re kind of going away, crying, going, I worked on that for six months and I thought it was really important. And now it’s been completely and utterly sidelined. Can you talk to me a little bit more about how to handle situations like that, either as a leader or as the team who’s working on the project that’s kind of like, oh, something’s, something’s not. You know, this has been deprioritized or whatever it might be.

James Louttit [00:13:01]:

Yeah. I think the transparency of something like a status report or a prioritized list is incredibly powerful. Where you say to someone, like, one of the things I get is. So there’s a great thing in project management called the iron triangle. You can have it good, you can have it quick, you can have it cheap.

Aoife O’Brien [00:13:18]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:13:19]:

Pick two. Right?

Aoife O’Brien [00:13:20]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:13:20]:

If you want it to be good and quick, you need to give me some more money. Right. If you want it to be quick and cheap, then you need to give me more time. And if you want it to be good and quick, then the quality is going to be, you know, is going to suffer. Right. And. But but actually using that to drive a decision. So when you go back to your governance structure, whatever that is, whether it’s just a straight one to one with your boss or whether you’ve actually got maybe a formal committee or something in place, you can go in there and say this is option A, this is option B, this is option C, and here are the pros and cons of each one.

James Louttit [00:13:51]:

And I think that little bit of discipline doesn’t take a lot to actually put that down on a page. But then you can guide the decisions that you think need to be made and you can give a recommendation. And I think senior people need that because we think that they know everything and actually they don’t. They are trying to make decisions with very limited information and our job has to be to give them the better levels of information, show them the consequences of those decisions.

Aoife O’Brien [00:14:18]:

Yeah, I think there’s an assumption that they know everything that’s going on, they have access to the information we have plus additional information. When actually the reality is people at the coal face have access to the most information because they’re dealing with clients or you know, they’re doing the day to day work, they’re working on the projects or whatever it might be. And so the senior people don’t have access to the same level of information.

James Louttit [00:14:43]:

Different information.

Aoife O’Brien [00:14:44]:

Right, different.

James Louttit [00:14:44]:

They’ve often got context, we’ve often got detail and you need both of those things. And actually that’s where a better discussion is. And the great thing about putting something in something like a status report or putting it on a post it note is that it takes it away from you. It’s not just your thing, it’s now a thing. It’s, it’s a risk or it’s a decision that needs to be made. And that makes it much less you against me and much more you and me against the problem.

Aoife O’Brien [00:15:12]:

Yes.

James Louttit [00:15:12]:

This is the problem we’re trying to solve. How are you and me going to discuss it and solve it together?

Aoife O’Brien [00:15:17]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:15:17]:

And I think that’s one of the dynamics I love to build into teams that I’m working with. Yeah, we bring that stuff away and put it in a, in a place, a transparent place that we can point at that on its own.

Aoife O’Brien [00:15:29]:

Yes, I love that. And it’s the same in relationships, like personal relationships as well, isn’t it? It’s you and me against the problem as opposed to it’s me versus you on a personal level because this was my idea or I identified this risk and I, I think we need to do something about it.

James Louttit [00:15:45]:

That’s right. And when and when relationships break down, it’s often because it became you against me as opposed to you and me against the problem. And that’s a very, a very sad scenario. But actually if you can, if you can, even in a personal space, if you can think about it in that context, you know, okay, well, how are we going to solve this? That kind of language helps.

Aoife O’Brien [00:16:06]:

Can we come back to this idea of busy work? So if everyone is so busy and a lot of the work that we’re doing is projects, it might be tasks that are part of projects, but there’s also lots of stuff that maybe it’s not that valuable. It’s busy work, it’s emails or it’s meetings or you know what, and I’m not going to ask you for like a percentage of what you think, how much of our work should be those things or is that stuff creeping in? But how do we identify what the really important stuff is versus the stuff that is maybe expanded? Because we have a lot of time to do it and we’re perfecting things versus doing, you know, there’s other stuff that, like we’re doing admin on something that’s not really adding that much value to the end user or whatever it might be. So do you want to kind of talk a little bit about that?

James Louttit [00:16:52]:

Yeah. So when I was thinking about this over the summer, the, this idea came to me. I’ve been talking a lot about two types of project management, you know, planned and proactive, which is kind of agile and waterfall. Waterfall agile. But actually a lot of the work that we do do is reactive. Right. It’s, it’s whatever turns up. The top thing that binged in our, in our notification or the top email that’s just arrived in our inbox.

Aoife O’Brien [00:17:16]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:17:17]:

And actually understanding those three types of work, reactive, proactive and planned work is really important. And the workshop that I’ve started doing with teams is like, well, write down all of the work, like sit down, silent writing on a post. It note is powerful technique to get, you know, give people five or seven minutes to actually write down all of the things that they do on a weekly or daily basis, get them down and then you can cluster them using a design thinking technique called affinity clustering. You can see the whole team’s work up on a board. And then the new thing that I’ve started doing is going around that work and saying, well, what should be reactive, what should be planned and what should be proactive? And therefore how much capacity do we have for the proactive stuff, which is our to do list. So actually it’s really interesting when you start to do that because then you can deal with these things in different ways. So for example, for reactive work, I think it’s really important to put edges on it.

Aoife O’Brien [00:18:14]:

Right.

James Louttit [00:18:14]:

To say I’m going to time box my time with my email from 9 till 10 and then maybe half an hour at lunchtime and then maybe you know, four till five in the evening and then that’s it. Like I’m not looking at emails the rest of the time because it’ll just suck you in. It’ll draw you in otherwise.

Aoife O’Brien [00:18:30]:

Especially if I’ve turned, I turned off notifications a few years ago, but especially if you have notifications and the sound and the ding and the dopamine hit that you get and.

James Louttit [00:18:39]:

Yeah, yeah it is. And, and I think there’s a tendency. There is, you’re right. It’s a psychological almost primeval thing that you get your dopamine hit.

Aoife O’Brien [00:18:48]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:18:48]:

From, from you know, replying to an email and that firefighting stuff. But I think if you can do something like that where you see and you box things and you’re really clear in your time how it’s being spent, then you can start to have this better conversation about prioritization and not wasting times or which things should be delegated or which things should just be not done. And, and being a little bit more formal about that can make a big difference to the, to the outputs and the quality of the outcomes that people generate but also to the stress levels that they feel.

Aoife O’Brien [00:19:20]:

Yeah, people do. Like you get stressed and maybe you’re spending way too much time in this reactive mode. And I think a lot of people are, that they’re not spending their time, their good chunk of time in the pre planned, proactive stuff. You know that, that, the, that like you say, that’s my to do list. When’s the last time I looked at my to do list? Am I just responding to what’s coming into my inbox? Which let’s be honest, is easier sometimes to do because we don’t have to do the thinking. It’s, you know, a lot of the stuff can be mindless, whereas the others might require a chunk of time to actually move something forward on it.

James Louttit [00:19:58]:

Yeah. But if you can do it, you know, it’s the long term value is. Is there. One of the things I love doing is going out for a walk and actually thinking through that bigger problem. Okay, how do I move that thing forward time? Give your brain some space to do it. And that’s okay. That’s work. It is okay to go for a walk and think about work.

Aoife O’Brien [00:20:22]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:20:22]:

Like you’re allowed. And I think often we feel like we have to sit at our desk and just do we’re working if we’re doing our emails. A friend of mine runs a really interesting company, and he’s the CEO and the chairman kind of pokes him every now and then. He’s like, are you getting doodling time? Are you getting time to actually let your brain do things? Because if you’re not, you’re too busy and you need to be giving that space because you’ll miss things.

Aoife O’Brien [00:20:50]:

Yeah. I worked in an organization before where we said, as a leadership team, we don’t have enough time for thinking, while at the same time, if you’re not typing at your laptop, you’re perceived as you’re not actually working. So there was kind of mixed messages there. But I love how you’ve given listeners permission for that thinking time, whether that is to go out for a walk. I think you had mentioned in the book that maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to put a bathtub into the office, but to give people that space and that thinking time, that that’s how problems are solved. Like they’re not solved by saying, I’m having an hour now to. To sit down and to. To try and work out this problem and try and be creative.

Aoife O’Brien [00:21:37]:

It comes from stepping away from your normal day to day.

James Louttit [00:21:41]:

Well, it’s both of those things. It’s all of that. Right. You’re allowed to go for a walk. You can also sit with a pen and paper and try and figure it out. And you can bring a team together and use a technique, design, thinking, type technique, like how might we. As a way of triggering things. They’re all tools in the toolbox.

James Louttit [00:22:01]:

And I suppose that’s the point. Back to what we were talking about at the beginning is this idea of building these skills and ideas and approaches that you can just go, do you know what? I haven’t actually thought deeply about this thing. I need to go for a walk. Or maybe I’m back from a walk. And the way to solve this is to get my team together and do a songwriting discussion. Having the ability and understanding a few of these different techniques I think is very, very powerful.

Aoife O’Brien [00:22:25]:

Yeah. We touched on the idea of prioritization earlier, and I want to come back to that now because I think you had some really interesting insights in the book that I hadn’t seen. Before, you mentioned about the Eisenhower matrix, which I couldn’t really get behind. I just couldn’t use it as a tool. And I think what you said makes sense for why I can’t really get behind it. So do you want, without dissing necessarily, the Eisenhower matrix, do you want to talk about the approach that you use instead? Which I think is really insightful.

James Louttit [00:22:57]:

Yeah. So in Stephen Covey’s book the Seven Habits, he talks about Dwight Eisenhower’s Eisenhower matrix. And the idea is urgent and important are the two matrices in the matrix. So what he says is if something is urgent and important, you should do it, do it now. If something is important but not urgent, you should plan when you’re going to do it. If something is not urgent or important, you should delete it. It’s not urgent or important. And if something is urgent but not important, then you should delegate it.

James Louttit [00:23:27]:

And I disagree with three quarters of the Eisenhower matrix. It’s actually a bit easier when I. When you read it in the book, because you can see the thing.

Aoife O’Brien [00:23:33]:

You can see it. Yeah.

James Louttit [00:23:34]:

When I’m just describing it. But for me, if something is urgent and important, my first thought is, can I delegate it? Right. I’m a manager, I’ve got a team of people. If I can delegate it, hooray, I’m giving them an important thing to do. This is good. Now, if I don’t have someone on my team who can do that thing, I’m going to do it. It’s urgent and important. But I’m also going to take a note.

James Louttit [00:23:57]:

How do I build some capability in my team so that next time this kind of thing happens, I’ve got someone who I can delegate it to. If I get something that’s important but not urgent, same thing, but this time it’s different. This time I’ve got time. It’s not urgent. So actually, in that moment when an important thing comes, I want to use that as a teaching opportunity. How do I get someone on my team, show them how to do this important thing that we’re going to have more of in the future so that next time again, I can delegate to them if something is not important or urgent again, I actually agree with this part of Kobi’s work that we shouldn’t be doing it. But the thing that really gets my goat is why is Dwight Eisenhower or Stephen Covey telling us to delegate unimportant rubbish to our team? It’s not important whether it’s urgent or not. Don’t do it.

James Louttit [00:24:48]:

And unfortunately, I think that bit of The Eisenhower matrix is where so much of this bad decision making and lack of prioritization happens in organizations. They find something that’s urgent and they just delegate it instead of really going and having a proper conversation at all. Yeah, exactly. Right. And asking why is very powerful way of doing that. Because you go and ask why, you might find out that it’s important and urgent, and therefore it’s okay to delegate it or do it. Right. But if you don’t know why it’s important, then actually that’s a very good question to ask.

James Louttit [00:25:24]:

And that allows you to then start to bring this stuff together and transparently prioritize it.

Aoife O’Brien [00:25:30]:

I love that you mentioned earlier, and this is in the same context of the prioritization. Is it the effort versus the value? Is that the matrix that you have created?

James Louttit [00:25:41]:

Yeah. So I like this idea of prioritization based on value and effort. So if we go back to my sort of favorite, my best project management guru, I think, is actually Balu, the bear from the Jungle Book.

Aoife O’Brien [00:25:52]:

Yes. Yeah.

James Louttit [00:25:53]:

In his song the Bare Necessities, he says, when you pick a paw paw or a prickly pear, if you pick a raw paw, well, next time, beware, don’t pick the prickly pear with a paw. When you pick a pair, try to use a claw, but you don’t need to use a claw. When you pick a pair of the big paw paw. And he’s talking about value and effort. Right. A paw paw is a papaya. It’s a big, juicy, yummy thing. Pick it off the tree, break it open, eat it.

James Louttit [00:26:18]:

High value, low effort. Hooray. Prickly pear, much smaller, much spikier, not very much value in it. Much harder to use or to do. Low value, high effort. And if you’re looking at those things, if you’re using that to look at all the work you’re doing, all of a sudden the clarity starts to be easier about working on the high value, low effort things. And here’s the interesting thing about stress and bringing it back to the title of the podcast, Being Happier at Work. For me, the gap between the value of what you’re delivering and the effort that it takes is where happiness or stress lies, Right.

James Louttit [00:26:54]:

If you can deliver huge amounts of value with very little effort, then you’re going to be low stress, high success. If you’re delivering medium amounts of value with medium amounts of effort, you’re probably being normally stressed and probably right in the cusp of things. And if you’re delivering low value and high effort, you’re going to Be very, very stressed because the organization won’t give you the resources you need and at the end of it, you’re not delivering anything that’s particularly valuable. And I think that’s where a lot of us end up with stress. So for me, using that to try and find high value, low effort things that me and my team can work on is really a big part of being happier at work.

Aoife O’Brien [00:27:35]:

Yeah, I love that. And like, we could argue in terms of the effort requires that different people with different strengths will require different efforts, which I suppose, you know, completely separate conversation of who needs to be doing which roles within. Within a team or within a. Within a project. But coming back to this idea of value and understanding the value of what it is that you’re working on. If someone is a leader of a team, but they’re not really clear on what the overall value is or the expectation is. Any. Any thoughts on how to uncover the value of what the team is working on?

James Louttit [00:28:14]:

Yeah, so it’s that big word, why? Like, if you ask up the chain, why are we doing this? And you get a good answer, then great, you’ll understand it and you can explain it down to your team members. If you don’t get a good answer, I think we have to have the confidence to keep prodding.

Aoife O’Brien [00:28:30]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:28:30]:

And say, well, hang on a second, I’m pretty sure I’m not an idiot. Give me a bit more detail on that. I want to understand why.

Aoife O’Brien [00:28:37]:

Right.

James Louttit [00:28:38]:

Don’t necessarily use the idiot word, but like, but I think it’s okay to poke a little bit at things.

Aoife O’Brien [00:28:43]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:28:43]:

Because when you do that, people might realize themselves that this isn’t a valuable.

Aoife O’Brien [00:28:48]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:28:49]:

And the other thing, just to go back to what you said at the beginning of this section, is about. About the team and who can do what. I think very often we have this view of somebody can do something and somebody else can’t. And that’s a very point in time view. And for me, I think actually in 2025, we can learn a hell of a lot in a relatively short period of time. Right. If we have a growth mindset, if I. If we teach people things and we learn things ourselves, going and watching a YouTube video about how to do something, asking the AI what’s involved in the thing, or going on a training course and learning how to do something, those are all things that can shift the needle in terms of our capability.

James Louttit [00:29:33]:

And I think if we are too short term in our thinking and very often we end up boxing people and saying, well, they’ll never be able to do that. And I think that’s actually quite rare that people can’t learn how to do things.

Aoife O’Brien [00:29:47]:

Yeah. It was more so from my own model. When I talk about capabilities, it’s about leveraging people’s strengths. And so if I have a natural strength for being methodical and analytical, maybe I don’t have the skill yet of coding, but it’s something that I could learn quite easily because of my predisposition. My natural strengths that I have and leveraging those strengths in that team environment so that the effort, the individual effort required to get the work done is lowered than if I’m someone who’s quite creative and I’m being put into doing something that’s quite administrative. And it’s. It’s kind of restrictive for me, and it’s a high effort because I’m. I don’t have the required strengths.

James Louttit [00:30:31]:

I think. I think you’re right to a certain extent. But rather than strengths, I’d say interest, actually, because I think if they are interested in doing something, then they can learn it more easily. And if they’re not, then they probably won’t.

Aoife O’Brien [00:30:46]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:30:46]:

So rather than. Because strength kind of implies that I’ve already done the learning and I’ve already got the capability, and I think that’s sometimes is a little bit closed off. And I think actually we can. We can demonstrate interest. Like, I. I’m not naturally empathetic. My wife is incredibly naturally empathetic. But I know that it’s important for me as a project manager or a manager that I understand the world from the perspective of my team.

James Louttit [00:31:11]:

So I use tactics and ideas, and I have done for 20 years to help me pretend to be more empathetic to start with. And actually now it’s very, very natural to me. And I do have those kind of feelings as well. But that’s a learned behavior for me. Yeah, that’s not necessarily a learned behavior for some other people. Yeah, I think. I think that’s the idea of growth mindset is you see a gap or an area that you see you need to get better at.

Aoife O’Brien [00:31:37]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:31:38]:

And then you work at it getting better at that thing, and the.

Aoife O’Brien [00:31:41]:

The effort required comes down then. So maybe when you first started showing empathy, it was like, this is actually hard because it’s not a natural ability that I have. But now that I’ve learned it, actually the effort required has come down quite a bit and the value is still high.

James Louttit [00:32:00]:

Exactly right. So. So, for example, you might see me, I might sit like this with my finger over My mouth. Right. That’s me knowing that it’s your turn to speak and it’s really important that you speak and I need to listen to what you’re saying and essentially quieting that voice in my mind that says, James, you’ve got good idea, quick tell everybody. You’ve got a good idea, quick tell everybody. Right. And I think just doing that sometimes for me, even now, 25 years into my career, I still do that because I do know how important that is.

Aoife O’Brien [00:32:31]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:32:31]:

For me as someone who is full of ideas, whether they’re good or no is another question. But full of ideas is, you know, giving, giving other people that chance.

Aoife O’Brien [00:32:41]:

Yeah, yeah.

James Louttit [00:32:41]:

So I think, and I think those, those can be learned behaviors.

Aoife O’Brien [00:32:44]:

Yeah. The physical act of putting a finger on your mouth while you’re speaking to someone so that you don’t actually open your mouth. I love it. Brilliant tactics.

James Louttit [00:32:56]:

Very tactical stuff that you can just do tomorrow.

Aoife O’Brien [00:32:59]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any, any other tactics that maybe we haven’t touched on during the conversation. I’m sure you have like a thousand. But anything that’s sort of pressing, that’s coming up a lot recently actually A.

James Louttit [00:33:11]:

Good, A good one actually that we’ve started using, I don’t cover in the book but is a nice one, is kind of a build on a lot of the workshops that I run is you do the workshop and you kind of. I use silent writing and affinity clustering some of these techniques to get good ideas. But there’s a brilliant three word phrase that I picked up from the world of design thinking how might we. And once I’ve kind of gone and listened to people and got loads of post it notes together and actually got a list of things that we can. That we need to look at. That phrase how might we xxx, whatever the XXX is is a very powerful way discussion that’s positive, proactive and inclusive. And I think just using again language I think is really important. So yeah, I’d start using that phrase how might we more often.

Aoife O’Brien [00:34:00]:

It’s very forward thinking as well. I think, you know, I’m thinking to errors and you know, if a mistake happens or if a project has been derailed or something like that. The how might we is much better than what did you do wrong? Or the kind of the blame game. Yeah, yeah. It’s focusing, you know, what system needs to change or what do we need to do differently going forward.

James Louttit [00:34:24]:

Yeah. And it’s inclusive. It’s asking your opinion.

Aoife O’Brien [00:34:28]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:34:28]:

Like the other person’s and the other. Or the other people’s opinion very often. And again, I’m. I’m a devil for this. Like, I think I can do all of the things, I think I can come up with all the ideas, but that doesn’t bring people along on the journey. Yeah, we need actually to go on that journey together because I will need your help and we all need my help and we’re going to do this together. So I think that’s. That.

James Louttit [00:34:49]:

That kind of language in teams makes a big difference.

Aoife O’Brien [00:34:52]:

Yeah. Yeah. It goes back, I think, to your. To your earlier point of not putting people in a box as a personal responsibility. You’re not taking everything on yourself and thinking, I have to do everything myself or I want to do everything myself, or if I get help, then the praise I get is not deserved because I’ve had help to achieve it. Whatever is going on in your head. But then from the other perspective, when you’re bringing people along the journey and you’re getting people’s involvement, they’re much more likely to buy in to what it is that you’re doing. You get the benefit of having other perspectives and collaborators as well, and you can support them with other areas.

Aoife O’Brien [00:35:32]:

And you might be open to something that you weren’t necessarily aware of before because you’ve got a different perspective.

James Louttit [00:35:39]:

It takes quite a lot of confidence for a lot of us to give other people the mic.

Aoife O’Brien [00:35:44]:

Right.

James Louttit [00:35:45]:

To give other people the opportunity to speak. But what I’ve seen is when you do that, you’re freed up to go and do different and more interesting things. You’re good at empowering your team and getting them to be better. Your job should disappear into your team, and that means you can look up and look out and do other things.

Aoife O’Brien [00:36:05]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:36:06]:

And maybe you get that promotion that you’re interested in, or maybe you get to go and do that other interesting project and your team will kind of look after the stuff. I think too often we feel like, well, I know how to do this, so I’m going to keep doing it.

Aoife O’Brien [00:36:19]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:36:20]:

And that’s okay. If you’re at a stage in your life where you don’t want to progress, you know, you want to put edges on it, work 9 to 5, whatever. I think those come in waves. I think different. Different times in our lives. Some of us are more ambitious, or. I’m certainly more ambitious now than I was when I was back in, you know, 2018, when I was kind of recovering from, from, from all of that stuff. So for me, I think there’s these waves that pass and I think if we can delegate and give ourselves opportunity to look around, that takes confidence, but it does create opportunity as well.

James Louttit [00:36:55]:

I mean, for me, the, and I suppose the reason that I wrote the book and one of the things that I really love doing, which kind of comes back to this question about being happier at work, is this idea of building a capable team and taking the team that we already have and using their, you know, encouraging them, giving them opportunities, giving them coaching and training and mentoring and letting them make some mistakes, but then guiding them as well. That thing around building capability in a team I think is probably the mindset that I’d love to get across to more and more people.

Aoife O’Brien [00:37:32]:

Yeah, I think it’s such a valid point. I’ve seen so many people are leaving an organization and they’re like, I’ve been here for like 20 years and I’ve had the opportunity to build teams and you know, and like, I’ve seen a lot of them where they’re like, and the building teams and building teams. I would argue that most people don’t get to build their own team. They inherit a team that already exists. Maybe they have the opportunity to hire someone into that team or bring someone in from a different team to join the team. But for the most part we’re not kind of building a team from scratch. And sometimes that’s good and sometimes it’s not so good. And so having this mindset of now, how do I elevate the capability in the team that I already have rather than thinking, oh, what am I going to do with this team? I can’t do anything.

James Louttit [00:38:21]:

Difference between starting from scratch and, you know, continuously improving the difference between waterfall and agile. Right. The agile stuff is just making it a bit better every day as opposed to having a long term plan for how this team is, is going to build. I might be, I might be stretching a metaphor a little bit there, but I do think there is something in how do I, how do I help people to be a bit better tomorrow than they were today? Less stressed, more impactful and, and creating better outcomes. Yeah, because that’s going to have good impact on them as well as me.

Aoife O’Brien [00:38:52]:

Yeah, love that approach. James, the question I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, what does being happier at work mean to you?

James Louttit [00:38:59]:

For me, I want to be working on high value things, ideally low effort things, but certainly high value things that, that have an impact, that make, that have outcomes. And for me, a huge amount of my happiness is tied into that. I would get very frustrated if I was working every day and really not making an impact. And I think for me, there’s this idea of progress towards a very clear goal, a very clear why. I think that’s where we can focus a lot of our efforts for being happier. And a lot of that is how you work with people to achieve things.

Aoife O’Brien [00:39:36]:

Yeah, I love that. And something I often talk about as well is, is the role of leaders in communicating the impact that people are having. So making a link between the effort that you’re putting in every day, the results that you as an individual are achieving, the results that the team and the department is achieving, and the impact that that’s having on the end user, the end customer, whoever it might be.

James Louttit [00:40:02]:

And sometimes facing into the fact that there isn’t value there, and therefore we’ve got a difficult decision that needs to be made. Right. We need to change direction or do something.

Aoife O’Brien [00:40:12]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:40:13]:

That can be hard for people.

Aoife O’Brien [00:40:14]:

Yeah.

James Louttit [00:40:15]:

So the transparency of making that into a much more explicit thing at an organizational level is powerful. And I think it’s all tied up with motivation and empowerment and all of these wonderful things that we talk about. But the tactical approach of just having a prioritized list with an estimated value against each thing is incredibly powerful.

Aoife O’Brien [00:40:37]:

And if people want to reach out, if they want to find out more about your work, what’s the best way they can do that?

James Louttit [00:40:43]:

Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. That’s my main social media, although we’re going on to the other ones and we’re starting to do some videos and things elsewhere as well. But, yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. And yeah, the book’s called Leading Impactful Teams Achieving Low Stress Success in Project Management. And it’s for anybody who’s managing any kind of project. You don’t have to be a professional.

Aoife O’Brien [00:41:04]:

I would agree with that, that, you know, it’s. It’s for project managers, but as a person who’s not a project manager, but who manages projects, I took so much from it as well. Like, I learned, I learned so much. So definitely check it out. Thank you so much for your time. I really, really enjoyed this conversation and we definitely could have gone on for another few hours.

James Louttit [00:41:24]:

Thanks, Aoife. It’s been a lot of fun.

Aoife O’Brien [00:41:26]:

That was James Lutet talking all about what to do when we’re so busy and overwhelmed at work with some really practical strategies that you can implement straight away. If you enjoy today’s episode, don’t forget to leave a rating or review on your favorite favorite platform. Get involved in the conversation over on LinkedIn. Let me know what you thought of today’s episode if you want to get the behind the scenes. So my take on our conversation, my takeaways, my key action points, then don’t forget to sign up for the free private feed at Happier Work, ie Private dash feed.