297: Creating Space for Talent to Thrive

Aoife O’Brien [00:00:01]:

You hired smart, capable people, but most of their time is spent in meetings and emails, reporting and status updates. This is the Happier at Work podcast. I’m your host Aoife O’Brien, and in this mini-series all about my book Thriving Talent, which is coming out on the 30th of March, I have already covered workplace culture, toxic workplaces, drivers or motivators at work, and in the most recent solo episode, I I talked about our capabilities at work. Today I’m focusing on those things that get in the way of us being able to use our capabilities at work. Those are things like email and meetings and all of those things that really get in the way of us being able to do our best work, of us being able to get into a state of flow and deep work. These are all things that I cover in the book. You very likely hired people for their commercial judgment, for their ability to build relationships, for their creative creativity and problem solving, and yet a lot of their time is spent being responsive and available. And at the same time, the work has been designed for responsiveness, availability, meeting attendance, and that elusive inbox zero.

Aoife O’Brien [00:01:16]:

So we’re, we’re essentially rewarding people to not use their full capabilities at work because of how work has been designed. Let’s take each one of those areas in particular. So let’s talk about meetings first. How much time are you spending in meetings on a week-to-week basis? And how much time is your team spending? And how useful are those meetings? Now, I’ve recently started listening to a book on audio called Your Best Meeting Ever by Rebecca Hines. I do recommend you go and check that out. I’m really enjoying it. I haven’t finished it yet. And it is a shame that I didn’t— read it or didn’t get access to it before I started writing my own book or before I finished my own book.

Aoife O’Brien [00:01:59]:

However, it has some really great insights around meetings and how we should be designing meetings and how we should be rethinking about meetings. The kinds of things I talk about in the book are really having a look at, well, what kinds of meetings are you having and what purpose do they have and how can you design them better so that they effectively live up to the purpose that they’re supposed to serve. And essentially, meetings should be designed to move work forward, when most of the time— I think you’ll agree with me here— when we attend a meeting, we sort of feel a bit drained afterwards if it’s not run properly. And we also feel like we’ve just added a whole load more tasks onto our plate without actually making any decisions, without actually moving the work forward that we currently have on our plate. So it’s really important to think about these kinds of things when we’re designing how we actually get our work done. There’s another great book all about meetings called Momentum by Mimi Kanfer Stewart, and I think between both of those, my two key takeaways for building better meetings or making most effective use of our time and also reducing the amount of meetings that we have— number one is having a very clear purpose for the meeting, and that goes beyond because my my predecessor set up that meeting, because we’ve always done it this way, because other teams are meeting on a weekly basis. It’s having a purpose that is going to really serve moving the work forward. And the second one is the agenda items.

Aoife O’Brien [00:03:34]:

How many meetings have you attended— and I’m thinking of all of the meetings that I’ve ever attended— how many meetings have you attended where there was no clear agenda, or you only got the agenda when you joined the meeting and you saw it for the first time then. And beyond just having an agenda in the first place, the agenda was quite generic. So discussion of something. One of the things I love about both of those books is the description of how to create a really clear agenda. So it’s having a, a verb and a noun. So rather than discuss the budget, it could be finalize or decide on the budget for Q1, for example. And so having that really clear agenda items has to link back the purpose, but it also makes it much easier to explain to people and to understand who really needs to be in the room. So some practical things that you can do yourself is to have a look at the meetings that you’ve done in the past, whether you’re the organizer or whether you’re an attendee.

Aoife O’Brien [00:04:33]:

Do you really need to attend that meeting if you’re an attendee? Do you really need to have that meeting if you’re the organizer? And look at the meetings that you have into the future and start changing— I’ve started putting in those changes already with the meetings that I have, and so it’s starting to make a real difference for me. So being really purposeful about the meetings and having a clear idea of how is this meeting going to move the work forward? Do we need to decide something? Do we need to align on something? Do we need to have specific people in the room, but not necessarily everyone? And here’s another thought that I don’t think we really think about that much when we’re at work. We feel like we should invite everyone to meetings, but actually, what if some people were just informed about what was discussed at the meeting? So get the information afterwards in a summary. The second one I want to talk about is emails. And very coincidentally, I’m also reading a book. I tend to read a lot. I’m reading a book called A World Without Email by Cal Newport. And again, it’s really opening my eyes to, uh, I love the research aspect of it and, and the evolution of how email came about.

Aoife O’Brien [00:05:46]:

And if I think back to the very first email I sent, and I remember it well, it was in 1996, and I was doing, uh, like a work experience as part of school. And, uh, the place that I was working, my uncle also worked there, but in a different office. And I sent an email to him. I was very excited. You know, it was, it was, uh, offered as this, like, this is the alternative to sending something in the post, you know, even internal post within organizations. Obviously it might take at least a few hours, if not a day or two to get to someone else in the organization. This was like revolutionary because he can receive that message straight away. The way it’s designed or how it came about was to solve a very specific problem, but what it’s actually done is create a whole host of other problems.

Aoife O’Brien [00:06:33]:

And I suppose it’s thinking about how do we strategically use email. And one of the things that has really stood out to me in the book so far is we’ve replaced some of that synchronous communication. So that means in real time. So we’re having an actual conversation with asynchronous communication, which is email, when in fact a lot of the time it would be much easier just to pick up the phone to try and solve an issue or make a decision rather than emailing back and forth and relying on other people’s schedules to move work along. So if a decision needs to be made, why not pick up the phone instead? I thought that was quite an interesting idea because I think we rely so much on email. He also talks about moving beyond this idea of we should only check emails at certain times. I’m— I kind of like that idea, but but it is hard to put into practice. It is hard to resist opening emails to check, especially if you’re waiting on something specific.

Aoife O’Brien [00:07:32]:

So, you know, find what works for you, but don’t always rely on emails and don’t let it take over your time. I think we also have this tendency to fall into— whether it’s in between meetings or we’re not sure what to work on next, we can go and check our inbox, which becomes a little bit more like relying on someone else’s to-do list. So someone has asked you to do something, and so that’s what you’re focusing on, rather than taking a step back and thinking strategically, what should I be focusing my time on next? Because it’s hard to do that, and it’s hard to build in that reflection time into our weeks. Much easier to default to what we’ve always been doing— attending the same meetings, catching up on emails, that kind of thing. Another big blocker is unclear expectations, and this is something I’m sure I’ve covered on the podcast before and something I like to talk about a lot because expectations can be broken down in a few different ways. So we have our expectations of ourselves. So I’m the kind of person who— insert the blank for whatever that means for you. It could be, I’m the kind of person who never drops the ball.

Aoife O’Brien [00:08:39]:

It could be, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t need help or doesn’t seek help. And these kinds of things can get in the way of us being able to do our best work because of this identity that we’ve given ourselves, so we don’t seek out help, or, you know, whatever that means for you. I know certainly those particularly for me really resonate. So I’m the kind of person who doesn’t need to ask for help. I’m the kind of person who can do things on my own, and that gets in the way of me being able to move some of my work forward because there are places where people can really support me, and I might feel that, you know, it’s a shift in identity, isn’t it, if I need to go and ask for support or ask for help in those areas. And so that’s the expectations of ourselves, and they can get the way, then we have expectations that are placed upon us, but maybe we’re not 100% clear on what those expectations are. And the problem here is that we’re afraid to ask. So if I have to ask for clarification, does that mean that I can’t do my job or that I don’t know what I’m talking about? And so we place these blockers on ourselves and we assume that we know what it is that is expected of us, even if we’re slightly unsure.

Aoife O’Brien [00:09:46]:

This can cause a huge amount of more work than is actually necessary. And so When we have expectations placed on us, it’s so important to be really 100% crystal clear on what it is that is expected of us. Then we have the expectations that we place on other people. So as leaders, we are giving people expectations or we’re setting tasks or we’re delegating, but have we explained in a way that they understand the— what is really, really expected of them? What the outcome is, the amount of time that they need to spend doing some something, I think it’s really, really important. And when I talk about expectations, I like to think about time and quality— two dimensions that we can kind of split expectations out. You can say, well, this should take an hour, this should take 20 minutes, uh, setting deadlines. So I would expect this back within two weeks. I think really defining the amount of time that something will physically take someone to do will help them to manage their workload, will help them to manage their own expectations, So then that they’re not spending 10 hours doing something that should take 2 hours, for example.

Aoife O’Brien [00:10:56]:

And then around the quality, it’s having a clear definition of what should this actually look like? What is the outcome that we’re trying to achieve? Who is this for? Who’s receiving this? Is it the CEO? Is it a client? In which case the, the standard needs to be much higher than if it was something internally. It doesn’t matter if there’s typos internally, people will understand. It’s not a huge deal. So thinking about the level of quality, and if you have an example of something that was done previously, an example to share with someone, to give them an idea of something. I share some personal examples in the book as well of where I’ve got this wrong or where people have placed expectations on me or the expectations were unclear. And I think this causes a huge amount of overwork when we’re, when we’re trying to get our, our day-to-day jobs done. So something to consider, something else to consider there. The other area I wanted to talk about was this idea of deep work and flow.

Aoife O’Brien [00:11:50]:

And again, we talk about this a lot, but we don’t necessarily know how to get into that state of flow so that we can get that deep work done. And deep work is really that strategic, you know, requires strong cognitive abilities. It’s not that day-to-day business. It’s not the admin that everyone needs to do in their roles. It’s that deeper level where we need— a high level of concentration, and we also need to be leveraging our capabilities. So it needs to be something that we can achieve, but that stretches us slightly, that we need to actually properly use our brains to be able to move that work forward. It’s such an interesting concept. I go into it in a bit more detail in the book, but the important thing here is to carve out that time in our weeks to have that deep work.

Aoife O’Brien [00:12:42]:

So that means taking 2 or 4 hours and just blocking out time—no meeting time, not checking emails—and get into that state where you can do creative problem-solving work, work that’s really meaty that needs to be done but needs that concentration time. One of the last things I want to leave you with from, you know, from my own thoughts perspective is is if we create this extra time, what are we actually going to do with it? And I think genuinely that’s a big fear that people have. So if I have this extra 2 hours, if I have this extra day in my week, how am I actually going to spend that time? And we can default to thinking, you know, I’ll just go back and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll keep on doing the work that I’ve been doing and I’ll plow on. And now I have more time to do the work. Again, something I touch on in the book, this idea of Parkinson’s Law, where the amount of work you have to do expands by the amount of time that it takes to do it. So if you have given yourself more time to do something, then you’re going to spend more time doing that work rather than, again, going back to this idea of expectations, spending that shorter amount of time and doing it in a, in a burst instead. Now, other people might think that this is a strange idea that, you know, of course I have so much work on, of course I’m going to know what I need to do next. But have you taken the time to step back and think strategically for my own objectives, for the objectives of the team, for my own career development, what is the most important work? What are the things that I really need to focus on to move my work forward? And again, something I talk about in the book is this idea of prioritization and how the evolution of the word priority was— came in singular first, and it was only not too long ago that we started using it in the plural when actually it should be singular.

Aoife O’Brien [00:14:31]:

It should be one priority that you have, but thinking about what we have on our plate and in what order to do them and taking time for reflection and learning and development and really focusing crystal clear on what work is the work that’s going to move things forward for us, whether that is, like I said, our own personal objectives, our career objectives, what’s going to move the team, what’s going to move the dial for the entire department, for the organization, how does that all link together? So taking a bit of time out to focus on that without getting stuck in the busyness— this is what I have on my list and I’m just going to do whatever I have left on my list, or whatever I have next on my list is what I’m going to focus on— so just taking that time I think makes a huge difference. So when we do carve out that extra time in our week, we know very clearly what it is that we should be working on. So if I could summarize what I’ve talked about in today’s episode, it’s all about designing work better and creating the conditions for your team to really thrive at work. If you want to know more about this, if you want to dive in a little bit more detail, you can always check out my book, Thriving Talent. Thrivingtalentbook.com is where you’ll find more information and places to buy as well. I really hope you enjoyed today’s episode, and I would genuinely love to know what’s one thing that you’re going to do differently After listening to today’s episode, you can let me know on podcast@happieratwork.ie or get involved in the conversation on social media. I’m most active on LinkedIn, so you can find me there and join in the conversation.