Is your team overcommitted?
Design better ways for your team to avoid being overcommitted. Photo by Aviv Rachmadian on Unsplash
One thing that I am noticing is that a lot of teams are overcommitted. It happens easily and often. In a busy, complex and fast-paced world we are being asked to achieve more – with less resources, less time and less clarity. In short, this increasing speed of operation combined with decreasing predictability (both inside and outside of our organisations) is increasing the complexity of the environments that we are working in.
Overcommitment is married to underestimation.
They don't always hang out together, but Overcommitment and Underestimation are committed life partners. Overcommitment is usually the product of underestimating one or more of these things:
The time, complexity or size of the task to be done
Our capacity to complete the task
What we are already committed to
Complex answers rarely have simple solutions. Here are three ideas that can help overcommitted teams.
Get better at noticing
My favourite phrase working with teams at the moment is..."what are you noticing?". It's so useful in so many ways. Awareness allows us to make choices and take action.
As teams get better at noticing, they can become better at making choices and taking actions that avoid overcommitment. Your team can have overt conversations and talk about:
the signs of overcommitment (How does it feel? How do we respond?)
the causes of overcommitment (How did we get here? Try not to judge, this is about learning)
the actual time, resources and capacity of tasks (What does it really take to get this done? Is what we are trying to do achievable and sustainable?)
Pay more attention to these things and you can move towards better estimating what the team can confidently and realistically commit to.
Do what is Essential
A few years back, my word for the year was Essential. It came after I read the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown. That year, when I was faced with choices of what to do, I would often ask myself "is this essential?". By essential, I meant does this help me make progress on something of significance to me. It helped me reduce commitments in my life as I realised that I had spread myself way too thin and been mediocre at many things. I still need to remind myself of this often - weekly if not daily.
The same thing happens in our teams. We are overwhelmed by requests (probably more like demands) from many different stakeholders. Teams can easily find themselves overcommitted as a result. One thing that helps is to be clear on the purpose of your team (and not simply inherit other people's priorities). When our team is faced with decisions on what to do, it is very difficult for us to say no to something if we aren't clear on what our purpose is. We end up saying yes and getting overcommitted.
Getting clear on your team's purpose helps teams to make decisions and take the actions that are essential.
Have better systems, not bigger goals
I find myself consistently quoting James Clear and his book, Atomic Habits. One favourite quote that I share with the teams I work with often is this:
"You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems."
I interpret this as another estimation error. We overestimate the impact of our willpower and good intentions. At the same time, we underestimate what we are currently committed to and the influence of environmental factors.
When I was part of an in-house learning team, my mate Max used to talk about us having a "bookshelf" in reference to our capacity. Each project that we were requested was a book in his analogy. Max would say that "if someone wants us to put a book on the shelf and it's already full, then we'll need to take one off." He was right. Our ability to realistically assess our capacity and have visibility of that as a team allowed us to have better conversations with stakeholders who wanted everything yesterday and better helped us deliver good work on or before time and on or under budget.
If you can design a better way that your team commits to work and has visibility of capacity, you will be able to reduce the anxiety and underperformance caused by over commitment and underestimation.
Here are some questions for you to consider this week:
What are you noticing about your team's overcommitment?
Are you and your team clear on what is essential?
What is one thing that would help your team have a better system for committing to tasks as they arrive?