INITIATIVE OVERLOAD

A TIME FOR  REFLECTION

How to work at a sustainable pace by Jayashantha Jayawardhana

Strategy guru Michael Porter wrote in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) that the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. This means the essence of execution is not doing it at all.

Though this makes horse sense in business, it’s still hard for some organisations to abandon existing initiatives even where they don’t dovetail into new strategies. Instead, leaders saddle the enterprise with initiatives that result in a severe overload at levels below the executive team.

While a leader’s imagination can be infinite, there’s only so much an organisation can pull off in a specified time frame with the available resources and operational priorities.

It’s true that this can still achieve marginal gains in overall productivity and efficiency through process improvements, training and upskilling employees, and by motivating and incentivising them. But no business can possibly take on every initiative its leaders envisage.

Sometimes, leaders are unaware of all the initiatives that are underway and their impact on the organisation. In other cases, obsolete initiatives are retained by design thanks to organisational politics.

Either way, initiative overload can ultimately lead to costly productivity, quality problems and employee burnout. With record low unemployment, organisations that fail to adjust their workloads are also at risk of losing valuable talent.

An article titled Too Many Projects was co-authored by Rose Hollister and Michael Watkins, and published in the HBR.

It quotes one leader who used to head talent consulting at a human capital firm, who said: “While I enjoyed and respected my team, and found the work motivating, the pace was unsustainable. I chose to leave before I had a heart attack.”

His remark underscores the gravity of what’s at hand. Having delved into the root of the problem, the authors identified seven causes behind initiative overload.

IMPACT BLINDNESS Executive teams can be oblivious to the number of initiatives underway and their cumulative impact on the organisation. Many businesses have few means to identify, measure and manage the demands that initiatives place on their staff who are expected to do the work.

MULTIPLIER EFFECT Although department heads may be aware of initiatives launched by their teams, they may not understand much of what’s happening outside their purview. This causes initiatives from multiple departments to proliferate and place a heavy strain on the front line managers who must oversee their execution.

PEER SUPPORT Many executives conspire to pursue their signature projects with implicit agreement from their colleagues to back theirs in return. When this happens in organisations, it often results in an accumulation of promises that need to be fulfilled at the expense of the business.

UNFUNDED GOALS In business as in the world of politics, executive teams often saddle their organisations with meeting important goals without providing managers and their teams with the necessary resources to accomplish their goals.

BAND AID FIXES When projects are launched to provide limited solutions to major problems, it often leads to a proliferation of initiatives that can’t deal with the root causes.

COST MYOPIA When leaders are fixated on cutting costs, they tend to opt for layoffs. Such downsizing without downscaling operations does reduce remuneration costs but on the flip side, it saddles the remaining staff with the workload previously shouldered by terminated employees. With employee burnout, performance strain and high turnover in the offing, it’s a heavy price to pay.

KILL SWITCH Enterprises often lack the means and the will to kill existing initiatives. Sometimes, it’s because they have no sunset process for determining when to call it a day. A project may have been vital for the business at one time but the rationale has ceased to exist. However, the funding and work continue.

So how can a company prevent initiative overload?

The first step is to honestly assess and acknowledge the problem. It’s critical to find out what project X is meant to fix, and gather data that indicates whether it will have the desired impact.

Kill what’s not working. And with what seems to work, businesses must assess the resource requirements, size up stakeholder support (and maybe even their resistance), and set limits with the sunset schedule and process.

While challenging, it’s possible to overcome initiative overload and concentrate organisational resources on strategically important projects.

Of course, the best way to avoid the problem is to disallow it in the first place. This means designing rigorous processes to impose discipline on when and how an organisation launches initiatives, and keep tabs on whose time and how much of it they consume.