When Our Work Trade-Offs Become Far Too Personal
August 22, 2022
"Don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life."
(Dolly Parton)
My last post touched on the concept of trade-offs. The idea of trade-offs seems so obvious and simple that one can easily miss out on just how powerful it can be. A trade-off is basically a choice. Whenever we say yes to something, we are saying no to other things. When we say yes to purchasing one thing, we are saying no to all the other things we could buy with that same dollar amount. When we say yes to spending time with some people, we are saying no to time with others. When we say yes to working on one task or attending one meeting, we are saying no to other tasks or meetings. Again, it's really quite simple.
And yet, more often than not, we do not make these choices consciously. We aren't thoughtful or intentional about them. We don't take a handful of seconds or minutes to look at the options in front of us and choose. Rather, we move through our days leaving these decisions either to our unconscious habits (e.g. keeping our email window open to allow for constant distraction or blindly accepting every meeting invite that finds its way to us), or to other people and what they think is most important for us to be doing at any given moment in time.
Now, if you have chosen a role in management or leadership, there's a whole other aspect to trade-offs that, while often unspoken, is also expected and understood: that of personal trade-offs. I don't know anyone who has chosen a management or leadership role who doesn't expect to make some personal trade-offs for work. For me, I call these the 3 P's of personal trade-offs: Personal Time, Personal Relationships and Personal Health/Wellness.
Agreeing to say no to one of the 3 P’s in order to say yes to a work commitment is not a problem overall. We've all done it many times. I've done it many times.
The problem is when our default is personal - when our default trade-off to get our work done is either personal time, personal relationships or personal health/wellness. This is when things become problematic. And I believe it happens all too often. I believe it has become the default trade-off for far too many managers and leaders in too many organizations.
When the default trade-off is consistently one of the 3 P's, it means our organizations and our leaders are not having certain critical conversations in the workplace. It means we aren't having conversations about what our most important or essential work is, what our priorities are and how they are shifting in real time, or what work needs to be paused or stopped. It also means that we may not giving our managers and leaders the autonomy or personal authority to determine which work is most important for them to focus on, and therefore the permission to pause or say no to other work (meetings included!).
When organizations and senior leaders don't make a point of either being clear on what is truly a priority, or create a culture where managers and leaders are able to determine what is and is not a priority for them, then few choices remain.
We are either unconsciously creating a culture where priorities are unclear and therefore required decisions about trade-offs are unclear, or we are creating a culture where it is expected that the majority of trade-offs will be of a personal nature in order to avoid such difficult discussions and decisions about work trade-offs.
To state the obvious, neither of the above are great.
Once again, this is not to say that there aren't times when we all need to say no to one of the 3 P's - personal time, personal relationship, personal health/wellness - in order to stay on top of our professional responsibilities. But when our default trade-off is personal, that tells us that there are conversations we need to be having in the workplace. Conversations about priorities and what is truly most important for us to accomplish; conversations about hierarchy and how we place our most important work at the centre of our focus; and conversations about autonomy and the ability to choose.
Summer’s end will soon be upon us. As fall approaches and our work schedules become a bit more consistent once again, perhaps the coming weeks will be an ideal time to initiate such conversations.
“The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.”
(Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)