Let’s all jump on the train to nowhere

I’ve always felt that teamwork was overrated.

Not unimportant, just overrated.

Most companies agree that it sounds meaningful from a cultural standpoint, and no organization is naive enough to build their employer brand around not working together.

But too much needless collaboration can have an adverse effect. If all people do is attend meetings and send instant messages to each other all day, it leaves them little time for all the important work they need to complete independently.

Dilbert once had a coworker approach him and asked if he needed help on his project. He said:

I try to avoid the scourge of teamwork whenever possible.

To which his coworker asks:

Isn’t there any way I can be of service?

Dilbert responds:

Maybe you could offer help to someone I hate.

The key word in that comic strip is scourge, a whip that people use to inflict pain or punishment.

That’s what teamwork can feel like at times. You’re so busy at work, there’s no time do your job.

Harvard’s researchers coined a helpful term for this trend. Collaborative overload. It’s when someone is too in demand. According their study across more than three hundred organizations, the distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided.

In most cases, one third of the value added collaborations come from only three to five percent of employees.

Meaning, as people become known for being both capable and willing to help, they are drawn into projects and roles of growing importance. Top talent ultimately bears the costs of too much demand for too little supply. And the sliver of time left for focused work simply isn’t ample.

People are so overtaxed that they’re no longer personally effective.

What’s a leader to do? How can they stem the tide of incoming requests?

Popular suggestions are to have fewer meetings, create a tighter filter on saying no to projects, set stronger boundaries around incoming information flow, and so on. All of which will work, but only to a point.

It’s possible that those solutions are treating the symptom and not the source.

But fear not, my overextended friends. Here are several of my wildly impractical and completely unactionable recommendations that most companies will never implement.

One, build enough trust so that meetings are no longer unnecessary.

Hire expensive, mature, independently minded people who don’t play well with others and have years of experience taking ownership to execute work on their own. People like this never complain and are so good at their jobs, they make it look easy.

Two, when managers complain that their entire day is consumed by meetings, messages and emails, and they don’t have time to do their actual job, lovingly remind them that they are doing their actual job.

That’s exactly what they signed up for. Managers are there to manage the execution, not execute. Embrace the suck, as my drill sergeant friend likes to say. Otherwise find a new job.

For my final recommendation, here are two service offerings your organization might consider investing in.

Complire intern staffing agency that supplies companies with friendly and attractive temp employees whose sole purpose is to walk around the office all week, giving team members compliments and boost morale. Complire true enough not to be a lie, and it might be the key to giving stressed employees an emotional pick me up.

Tell them you know me and you’ll get a sweet discount.

Next, if you’re looking for a more extreme solution, you might try this.

Every company leader wants to make sure employees are at least a little scared of them. But what if the big cheese is too nice of a person to create fear? Emboss is an exciting new executive coaching and acting service that calls company executives at random times during the week and prompts them with power language phrases and speech direction to uphold the illusion that they mean business and shouldn’t be fucked with. Emboss can strike fear into your own heart, and the hearts of coworkers, and maybe then they will finally stop whining about being overworked.

Sounds like another productivity crisis solved. You’re welcome.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a team meeting that starts in five minutes that I can’t miss.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Are you really overwhelmed with your job, or just inefficient with your time?