Okay, so we continue to have this conversation this week about why you always need to default to subtracting before you ever add anything in your team. And I wanted to bring it here to the podcast. So let's talk about why this happens. I want you to picture a closet. Like, if it's anything like my closet right now, maybe it is an absolute disaster.
Um, there's just stuff everywhere. You, it takes you like 15 minutes to get ready in the morning cause you're digging through all these drawers that don't really make sense. Um, trying to find things. It, even just walking by the closet door brings you stress and overwhelm cause you're just like, ugh. I know that's a disaster.
I know I need to get that under control, but like, I just can't even look at it. So what do you do? Well, you take the path of least resistance. You do the quote unquote fun part, if there's any fun part to organizing your closet, and that is you go out to Target and you start buying bins and organizers and shoe racks and all the things.
Because It makes you feel like you took a step. It makes you feel like you're being productive But what really happens is now In the middle of the closet with a bunch of clothes everywhere and chaos Now every morning you also have to walk around four different target bags full of closet organizers We've just added more complexity more chaos To the problem disguised as quote unquote productivity.
And a lot of us are doing that in our every day of how we're leading our teams. So for a lot of you guys, that closet is your team's workload. For a lot of you guys, that closet is your team's processes that, you know, are so freaking clunky and they're slowing your team down. For a lot of you guys, that closet is.
feeling like your team is out of control. Like you don't have control over what they're doing on a day to day basis. It's just managing the chaos and hoping for the best. So what do you do in order to take a step in providing control in the chaos? You default to something like, well, we just need, you know, a productivity tool.
Um, we just need SOPs. We just need races. We just need to download. Asana or monday. com or Trello or Even worse, we just need more people, more headcount, more tools. But in reality, when we're dealing with chaos, with overwhelm, adding new things to it that overwhelm is just adding more complexity. It's just adding another thing that you and your team has to manage.
Sure, spending six hours setting up your asana, and like, all the pretty colors, and getting the trackers ready, and everything uploaded, and everyone assigned, and all the thing, it feels productive, but at the end of the day, You just have a pretty system. We haven't actually taken any steps to getting the workload under control.
We've just pushed and shoved all of the chaos into a system. And let's be honest, we are going to now struggle to keep up with that system. If we don't abandon it all together in a few weeks, because we don't have time because we haven't actually created any capacity in our day to manage a tool like this.
So, it's going to become another thing that just ends up on a shelf somewhere. You actually have to do the work to stop, to subtract, before you ever get to adding a system. Like, going back to our closet example, we just got all of this organization materials, these b b baskets, these things, yet we don't even know?
what we need organized. We haven't even done the step to say, Hey, what do I need to get out of here? What are the different categories? How do I want this set up? That's going to make it simple for me to actually get in here every morning and get what I need quickly. Instead we just bought a bunch of organization materials and we're going to shove everything in that we have right now and sure it might look pretty on the outside, but it's not actually helping us.
Like, efficiently, to actually help us optimize, and that's the same thing that happens when you shove a bunch of work into a tool. When you shove a super complex, clunky, clunky process into an SOP, you actually have to start. By stopping, by subtracting before you ever add anything. So let's get tactical.
What are four ways that you need to be considering subtracting before you add? The first way is whenever you're looking at your work or your team's work. Before you ever take on any new task. We're always looking at what needs to come off our plate. Always, always, always. And if you haven't done this in a while, you need to do a spring closet clean out.
Once a quarter, you should be looking at your team's workload and saying, what is no longer serving us? Just like, you know, you have bought things. There's a sweater in your closet right now that you bought and you were like, this is it. And you never wore it once. And now you look at it and you're like, why did I even buy that?
There are tasks that your team is wasting time, energy, and capacity on just like that sweater. And every quarter we need to be looking and saying, what can we remove? So we can be focusing on what's actually moving the needle and do not default. To some overly complex Excel sheet where we're tracking every single minute of our team's time.
No. Keep it simple. Bring your team together. Give everyone a pad of sticky notes. You got two minutes. Write down what you're doing. One per task. One sticky note per task. On a week to week basis. Have them rapid fire. Boom, boom, boom. Here's all my sticky notes. Group them together. Look for common themes. And then say, what is the highest impact work?
And then where are there things that are guzzling up our team's time and energy, but they're really not impactful. And then let's have the conversation. How can we start getting this off our team's plate? It's that easy. Did you capture a hundred percent of your team's workload? No, you don't need to.
We're just looking for the big hitters. And that doesn't require us to track down every single minute of our team's time. Because honestly, those little any bitty things that you don't remember, they're not the problem. We're looking for the big meaty ones. So low value work. First thing that we need to be subtracting.
Second thing we need to be looking at is how are teams actually getting that work done? I can tell you in your processes right now, there is complexity and bureaucracy that is slowing your team down. Where can we be removing sign offs that we put in place because one person made one mistake three years ago and now we're slowing our team down day in and day out, getting the sign off because of one little thing that happened.
Where are there policies in place that are a decade old that make absolutely zero sense? Where are there tools in place that require our team to make 17 clicks before they can refund something? And again, this isn't go develop these giant process maps for every single process. This is just saying, what's the process that's slowing our team down the most?
If you don't know, go ask your team. I know they'll tell you in a heartbeat. And then let's focus there. How can we simplify? How can we remove sign offs? How can we remove steps? How can we remove checks and balances? Just removing two to three is going to make your life, your team's life a lot easier. And then I want you to be hesitant every time you put a new sign off, a new policy, a new tool in place, and recognize that that's adding complexity.
We are going to do that with caution and we are not, not, not developing SOPs for processes before we've done the work to say, is this process streamlined? There are too many of us out there who are documenting clunky, slow, miserable processes. Documenting is not the answer. It's that your process is too freaking complex that nobody can remember how the heck to do it.
So solve that problem before we document. The third thing that we need to do is focus on reducing collaboration. Yeah, there are areas right now where your team is over collaborating collaboration is a beautiful thing But a lot of us have erred on the side of over collaborating because of something I like to call CYA cover your booty We've got kids over here.
We are scared that we're gonna do something and it's gonna come back on us So what do we do? We have a million meetings. We invite everyone and their mother to the meeting, and then we CC everyone and their mother on the email after the meeting. Because if something happens, you were in the meeting, you saw the email.
In reality, none of us did because we're so overwhelmed with the amount of meetings and emails that we can't pay attention in anything. You need to be looking for areas where we can be one, reducing meetings or communications that are no longer serving our team, that don't actually have. An impact, a tangible outcome where we're all just getting together, staring at each other, or we're sending out meeting or emails that are more noise that no one's reading.
And then two, we need to reduce who those emails and those meetings are going out to. There are so many of us sitting in meetings with 20 different people, half of which are on their laptops checked out because really they don't need to be there. You know that they know that. And it's impossible to get anything done.
Try making a decision with 20 people in the room and 10 people are providing their opinions and really they have no stake in the game. So before you add meetings, before you send that email, before you add those 10 new people or forward that meeting invite to the next person, think, am I adding complexity?
Am I going to be slowing my team down, slowing down the effectiveness of this meeting? Because I'm adding more. Before you go and host a meeting about how complex everything is on your team, look at your current meetings and say, Where can we subtract? Where can we gain capacity back? And then the fourth way is actually looking at what your team is producing.
So let's say your team is a product based team. Maybe they're a, um, digital team who produces like features on an app, or maybe you're a service based team where you like are a business partner of some type, like a finance business partner, an HR business partner, a talent business partner. Um, how can you actually be reducing the amount that you are providing?
Um, Because here's the thing, if you guys have ever heard of Prado's principle, 20 percent of the value the impact your team provides, Sorry, I did that backwards. Um, 20 percent of what you do provides 80 percent of the value. Still drinking my coffee this morning. So 20 percent of what your team is doing is providing 80 percent of the value.
A good example of this is like my reporting based teams. Where you are generating a whole ton of reports because somebody asked for that report once and so you just started developing and sending it out to everyone on a weekly basis. It's actually distraction. It's a distraction for you, your team's time, your team's capacity, but it's also a distraction for who you're serving.
Because it's distracting them from the one report that actually matters. So how can we be limiting what our team provides? to what's actually making the biggest difference. Same thing happens with our customer service teams, our sales teams. Before we go start adding more calls, more, um, in person visits, things like that, you know, more roadshows.
How can we get really, really good at the things we're already doing? Or where do we need to remove things that we're already doing? Um, same thing goes for like being a business partner team. I hear this a lot. We want to be more strategic, more strategic influencers. Okay. Well, in order to start providing that higher level of service, where are those more tactical services that you are providing that are taking up your team's time that we need to remove?
Because as your team moves into that next growth horizon of being strategic influencers, we need to free up their capacity by first removing those more tactical tasks and outputs they're developing. Again, we always default to subtracting versus adding because too many of us are just stacking more complexity on top of more complexity.
We're stacking more work, more sign offs, more meetings, more products. And it's this right here is what's drowning our teams and making them more ineffective. Too many of you guys think you need a tool, more resources, more systems, more structure, when in reality, you just need to jump into that closet, roll up your sleeves and get rid of the junk.
You just need to do the work. You just need to have the hard conversations. And if you're ready to get out of the messy closet to be drowning in the chaos, you need to be in the liberated leader because this is exactly what we teach you is how to simplify and bring actual systems and structure to your team in a productive way that are actually manageable, not adding more complexity to your team.
We'll put the link in the show notes to that. But I want you guys to take one thing that you learned today One way you can stop and start subtracting from your team rather than adding it and go implement. Then I want you to go DM me and let me know how it went. Okay guys, see you next time.
