Photo by Atlantic Ambience.
“We have a lot of people out on leave right now. This all started a few months ago when one person went on leave because they’d had a baby. Which was ok, that one was expected. So I temporarily took on their team even though it wasn’t my background or my expertise. Honestly, it was kind of fun, you know? I got a bunch of exposure to this other part of the business, got to grow my skills. But then another two people went out on leave and it’s not that it wasn’t fun, it was just that once I was covering for multiple people, it became a lot all at once.”
We heard a variation of the “everyone is out on leave” story from six different bosses this week. In six different orgs. Across six different time zones. Workplace trends in a single labour market, ok, that’s interesting. Workplace trends across several oceans? Downright fascinating.
If you line up Europe, UK, US, and Canadian workers and ask them about their relationship to vacation, parental leave, working hours, rest, relaxation, sick leave, and stress leave, you will get wildly different answers. Let’s take parental leave as an example. We’re up in Canada where it’s 12-18 months. Our neighbours to the south are typically looking at 12 weeks. Their colleagues in the UK are coming in at roughly a year. And their colleagues in Germany and France often have up to three years. Whatever you think about these approaches, we can agree that they are not the same.
Yet nearly all of the stories we heard started the same way, with planned or expected leaves. Maybe a long-term employee going on a scheduled sabbatical. Parents heading off to care for a new baby or family member. And while the length of time for the leaves varied by org and by geo, the stories all followed a similar pattern.
Everyone has a plan until…
Let’s say we start with two leaders, each with a team of five. One leader heads out for planned and expected reasons. The other leader agrees to fill in for a time. They add an ampersand or a comma or an asterisk to their title and with the magic of punctuation, bingo bango, they’re now managing cross-discipline.
(this is the first domino)
Our multi-hyphenate leader now has a team of 10 and is on the hook for management and leadership responsibilities across a large team, with dissimilar work. Because the boss doesn’t know the new domain, that new team is asked to step up. To help the temporary-boss understand the projects underway. To represent their team in meetings and cross-functional discussions their now-on-leave-boss used to attend. The existing team is also asked to step up. To help their boss carry the bigger mandate. To move their 1:1s and team call from weekly to biweekly. All of these people are working hard. They are all stretched. Every single one of them is pulling longer hours. They are all trying to make it work but it’s a lot.
A few months in, one of the new direct reports puts a hand up and asks to understand the org’s leave policy. They have been working unsustainably long hours and are starting to feel the impacts in their health and in their personal life. The specifics depend a lot on the labour market and the employer, but let’s say they get approval for a short-term leave of absence.
(this is the second domino)
The leave is set for two weeks and as the second person heads out, the multi-hyphenate leader asks the remaining nine people to hang tight and continue to deliver the same amount of work. This team is not thriving. They are frustrated with the boss who doesn’t understand their work, is unavailable for large portions of the day, and they are quickly losing the trust of the other departments.
Once disconnected from work, the person realizes they need more than a two-week leave to regroup. They request, and are granted, an extension.
It’s now nearly time for the first person on the planned leave to come back. They go for coffee with a colleague from a different part of the org and ask how it’s been going. Not good. The department is a mess. In-fighting. Stress. Missed deadlines. And very crispy co-workers. The first person takes this in, wondering if they are ready to jump back into a role that was already pretty full before they left and has only gotten more overloaded in the time that they’ve been away.
(uh oh)
Things are about to get more expensive
An unfortunate reality about most organizations is that the least stable state is “moderately overloaded.” Your org can be one that runs pretty smoothly and can stay that way for a good long time, years at least, maybe decades. Your org can be a rolling disaster and stay that way for just as long. But your org is not going to stay moderately overloaded indefinitely. No org stays moderately overloaded for a decade. It gets better or it gets worse.
A lot of bosses have an intuitive sense of this even if they aren’t ready to spell it out. When the first domino falls, yeah, you re-arrange things and try to adapt to get back to smooth. Well, smooth-ish anyway. But when another one falls? And another? If you’re a boss who’s paying attention, you can often start to feel it just below your stomach. Or maybe your face flushes when you see the email come in announcing another domino falling. That low-blood-sugar, trapped-animal dread. That feeling that things are starting to spiral out of control and you need, irrational nuance-free lizard-brain need, to stop it.
And so you start to say no.
You say no to your team. No, I can’t do a quick chat right now. No, I can’t make that 1:1 even after we rescheduled it. But also no, I can’t afford to have someone else go out on leave right now, we’re already short-staffed. Yes, I hear that you’re working too hard right now but no I can’t have you take next week off.
It doesn’t stop there, you start saying no to other teams as well. No we can’t help with that. No, I can’t train your people on that system. No we can’t take on that dependency. Yes we do still want approval before the thing goes live but no I don’t have someone who can review it this week.
These are bad decisions and they’re gonna make all your problems worse. In many markets, the leaves you’re saying no to (or obliquely nudging towards no-or-at-least-not-now) are legally protected. The work requests from other teams might genuinely be more important than the existing workload you’re prioritizing. We can have empathy for the scarcity mindset that got us here, and still. A manager’s job is to make their team more effective and help them thrive. A team cut off from the priorities of the organization, and also unable to get proper support from their manager, is neither.
This is what management burnout sounds like. We know, no one’s talking about burnout any more, it’s so 2021. Call it whatever you want, if we don’t do something soon you’ll be the one taking a leave.
Unless
Management is a lot of things — communication, strategy, project management, facilitation, coaching, mentorship, decision-making, personal reflection — but sometimes it’s just math. And when everyone on your team is running red-hot at 150% of their healthy capacity for weeks or months on end, the math is straightforward: you aren’t gonna get it all done.
You and your team are deeply over-committed, and the mathematical reality is that about half the stuff on your team’s plate isn’t gonna make it. Things the org needs from your team, things you need from each other. Your most important act as a manager in this moment is to decide which things to take off the plate. If you refuse to do that, several things will still fail, you just forfeit any ability to decide which ones.
And no, sadly, you can’t dig yourself out of this kind of thing with incrementalism. It’s not about dropping one item and cruising along at 146% for a while to see if that’s any better. Talk it through with your own boss if you’re having trouble prioritizing. Remember that the test is not “is this important work?” The test is, “would I drop something else on the list instead?”
Now, you’ll be tempted to fight it. To say all kinds of foolish, defensive things that we’ve definitely said in our own careers as managers. “But it’s all important. There’s nothing I can cut.” That’s every overloaded manager’s first response. It might feel validating to underscore just how fucked you are, but it’s also an excuse to not decide, which isn’t actually helpful, here. You might also try, “We just need to get through this crunch.” And, like, maybe, sure. If it’s only been a week, we’ll buy that. If several dominoes are about to stand themselves back up on Monday? Maybe.
If you don’t like those options, the other way to drop that 150% number down to something healthier is to spread the work among more people. Even if you can’t hire, other teams might have capacity. So might an external agency. Or even a software tool that picks up some of the tedium. Once you start to treat it as a problem to solve instead of a hardship to endure, you might find you have more creative energy for it.
We know, believe us we know. No one wants to be the leader saying we need to push out the schedule, or lower our targets, or drop some planned work. But we promise that however bad it feels to say those things, it feels worse to say them in the past tense: we slipped our schedule, missed our targets, dropped the ball. It’s a gift to move early enough that your team can still put up wins on the stuff that actually does matter most.
— Melissa & Johnathan
