Navigating your work style’s blind spots

In today’s Harvard Business Review blog, Tony Schwartz has a great post about “No is the new Yes: Four practices to reprioritize your life.” In it, he describes a typical executive workday filled with meetings, email and hair-on-fire requests that keep their wheels spinning endlessly.

The tyranny of the urgent over the important seems like an unchangeable force, as if we are constantly running on a hamster wheel. But doing so will leave us tired — or fired — unless we can find a way to hop off the wheel.

I observe that for some executives, the hamster wheel bleeds into relationships with colleagues and subordinates: they never seem to be present for the people they are leading. That’s why I wanted to offer five lessons I’ve learned about managing time, work, people and priorities that embraces Schwartz’s fundamental argument about saying no more often … but does so with finesse based on the styles of people you’re working with.

You might be familiar with a work style framework from DiSC, Meyers-Briggs, Kolbe, or others—my personal favorite is Market Force, taught by the folks at Market Force Global. I’ll explain each type of style and their blind spots related to saying no.

Lesson one: Balance time discussing what you’re working on with a healthy debate on why

With one former boss, the “I’m-so-busy” mentality resulted in what I called “drive-by meetings,” where there was only an endless update on projects, never enough time to sit back and think strategically about whether the tasks we were doing were the right things, or to think more critically about the why behind the what.

This was a blind spot for that boss, who was (in Market Force terms) a Control—a visionary, big-picture thinker, strategic planner. But under stress, she became an intense micro-manager (as is often the case for Controls). Her meetings became clouded with details, and the best way to pull out of it was to return to where she worked naturally—the vision for what we intended to accomplish.

I started with the question, “What will make the biggest impact in our business?” or “How can we put the most points on the board in this project” and let her answers to these questions dictate our next steps.

Lesson two: People are more important than projects. Be sure they know it

I constantly marvel at my CEO’s capacity [Colliers International president & CEO Doug Frye] to rise above the busybusybusy and treat people as if there was plenty of time to do what mattered. He takes the time to ask about family, ask about your weekend, and ask the why questions about what we’re working to accomplish.

For the Market Force style Influence, a concern for relationships is key. This can frustrate some people in meetings, who feel that Influences are wasting time by talking about last night’s game. So, for Influences, it is a delicate balancing act between giving people a personal approach and a sense that they, too, are on the ball and busy.

Another pitfall for Influences (and I’m one of them) is the willingness to over-promise in an effort to support the relationship. We hate to let people down. And this over-promising often leads us to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of the relationship, which might manifest itself in pulling an all-nighter or pushing other critical projects to the back burner.

One way to handle this is to remind the person, when you’re tempted to over-promise, that doing so can compromise your success in other projects. They may retract their request even before you’re forced to say no.

Another strategy is to temper your personal conversation (“How was your weekend?”) with a promise to make progress: “While we let everyone get settled for the next minute or two, how was your weekend?” Instantly, those who want to just get to the task at hand can relax knowing that their agenda will be brought up within a couple of minutes.

I’m out of time for now, but not out of work styles and suggestions on how to best say no. See you next time with more.