Hello, y'all. We are back in front of the mic. I took a week off for Christmas break and y'all, it was so good. Just, this is the first Christmas where my son, Sawyer, who's four is really into the Christmas spirit. Like before it was, he was kind of cool about it, but it was mostly just like, meh, I don't know what all this is about.
Like everyone stopped staring at me. But like he was fully in it this year. So we got to do so many fun traditions with him We got to go on a Christmas train and meet Santa. We're still not sure about the whole Santa thing But it was really fun to do that. We all were in our PJs We did some new traditions, around watching some Christmas movies and having a camp out in the living room, which was so much fun.
Just so many good memories and things that I know we'll look back on and cherish for years to come. But I'm going to be honest with y'all this year, like I'm a big Christmas person. I love Christmas. My husband bans me from putting on Hallmark Christmas movies until the start of December. It's something I look forward to each year, but this year was a year where I'm kind of ready for January.
Is anyone else like that? I think it's because 2024 was a big year for me. Big year for change for us. I left my corporate job to stay home. Um, I started liberating teams. Um, we moved a big move for our family closer to home and we have a house that we're trying to get settled in. It was just a big year of change of lot of living in the in between.
I'm excited for the energy that January is bringing of, you know, we're finally in this place. We've wanted, we're finally in this home. We've wanted, we're finally doing these big things. We've always dreamed about doing and like, let's live it. Like we are living our dream in 2025 and I'm just ready to get into it.
So with that. I'm bringing a little bit of a change to the podcast and that is the format. So we have been doing these shorter episodes, these quick takeaways, and we're going to be trying a little bit of a longer form episode. You guys know at liberating teams, we're all about testing and learning.
So we're going to be testing this out for a few weeks and I want to hear from you guys in the DMS, how you're liking this. If this new format is working for you. The other thing I wanted to do as we kick off January is really talk about this concept that a lot of leaders come to me. So in our program, liberated leader, it is an application program.
Where you have to fill out an application to, get into the program. And one of the things I see a lot on the application that leaders are struggling with is this concept around my team is always busy, but at the end of the day, if I really, really challenged myself, I'm not really sure what we've accomplished.
I can't tell you how many times I've had leaders come to me and they're like, I had such a busy week, like everything was on fire, like we were running all around. I never had a chance to sit down, but I really don't know what we achieved. Like we were really productive, we checked a lot of boxes, but what impact did we really have at the end of the day?
Did we move the needle on the goals? And the answer is not so much. So I want to really unpack this in what's going to be a multi part series around why this is so prevalent in corporate culture. And then what are those biggest factors that are keeping your team busy yet not productive, and how can we start addressing these?
I feel like at the start of the year, at January, We're all talking about productivity. We're all thinking about what we want the year ahead to look like. How can we, achieve more than last year? How can we make a bigger impact than last year? So I thought this was no better way to kick off the season than with diving into this topic.
And the first thing is We need to talk about is what productivity actually even means. And I feel like a lot of this we're constantly busy, but not productive comes from the core definition of what productivity means in corporate culture. So I want to dive into the three ways that we typically measure quote unquote productivity in corporate culture and how this is actually having a negative impact on our teams and leading to a lot of those teams being constantly busy but not productive.
So the first one is. Is that we measure productivity based on volume. Now this, like most things I talk about on this podcast is going to, go back to the industrial revolution where most of our workplace practices and leadership practices come from. So most of them are based off of assembly line workers and factories.
That's where most of our traditional ways of working and leadership styles come from. We have not updated many of them from then go back, look at them. You'll see what I'm talking about. Taylorism, Google Taylorism. So when it comes to the industrial revolution, you're thinking about factory workers on a machine.
Productivity for them is cranked, crank out as many widgets as humanly possible. Right? The more widgets we create, the more value we create because we can sell those widgets and we're getting money for them. So in order to create more widgets, we are trying to suck out as much, as many hours as we can from these individuals, because the more hours they put in, the more widgets they create, the more widgets they create, the more value we get as a company.
It made sense in a world where output was physical and measurable. But now let's fast forward to today's corporate world and where we're trying to apply the same mindset. However, the majority of us are not factory workers. The majority of us are knowledge based workers. You know, we're trying to produce something a machine cannot.
And it is very hard to measure that yet. We're still trying to apply the same mindset, which is how we find ourselves into this place of. More meetings, generating more projects and more initiatives, more emails. It's not like, how many times have you worked in an office and you walk up to the person next to you and you're like, how are you?
It's like, that's just the default answer. Everyone's always busy. Very rarely does somebody not. Answer with, I'm busy. And that is because of this need to measure productivity around volume around always being busy. But a lot of the times those activities that were quote unquote busy with.
They're just about generating more and not necessarily about driving a real impact. So it's generating more plans, generating more reports, spending more time developing more PowerPoints, spending more time in status meetings and giving updates. Sending more emails, sitting in more meetings that aren't actually producing any sort of outcome.
And it feels productive because we're busy. I'm running from meeting to meeting. And in between I'm responding to 50 emails. And in between that I'm generating seven more reports that maybe one person is going to look at. And so I feel busy because again, I'm producing more, more and more widgets. I am doing so in a world where widgets don't equal value.
Instead, I need to be focusing on impact, the impact that I am having. If we were constantly looking at everything we were doing on a day to day basis, the meetings that we were attending, the. Deliverables or reports that we're producing, the projects that we're supporting, um, the drive buys that we're having and measured it against the amount of impact it's having on us, achieving our team goals, our team vision versus the effort that we're putting in.
There's probably about half of those things that we could cut out, right then and there. And we could repurpose that time, that capacity, that energy to things that truly move the needle, that deeper work. But I think the reason why that often doesn't happen is because a lot of us don't have clear strategies.
We don't understand the unique purpose that our team brings to the organization that only our team can achieve. We don't understand that very specific purpose that we need to be hyper focused on delivering. We don't understand the specific impact, the tangible impact that we want our team to make on the company based off of that specific purpose this year.
And we haven't done the work to say, based off of the impact we want to make this year, what specifically do we need to focus on this quarter, trading off all other options in order to achieve that impact. And when you haven't done those three steps, that's essentially your strategy. It is very hard for you to measure the work you were doing day in and day out.
Based off of impact. And so what happens when we don't have a clear strategy, but we feel the need to validate what our team is doing on a day to day basis. We go towards this measuring productivity based off of volume. Oh, well look at all these reports I generated, all these projects we're doing this list of 15 initiatives.
I'm just constantly busy in meetings. Of course we're busy. Of course we're doing a lot. Because that is the only way we know how to justify our team and the work we're doing is by being busy because we cannot equate our team's work. To moving the needle towards a tangible impact. And we can't say, Oh yeah, it seems like things are a little bit slower right now.
That's because we're heads down doing the deep work to meet this long term goal that we have. We feel like day in and day out, we need to be constantly busy because it's like that short term gratification that we all live for in this day and age. We need to prove every single day that we're busy instead of taking the time to work to towards this long term goal that's going to have a much bigger impact.
Even if that means spending less days in meetings, generating reports, working on projects and more days heads down, at a desk doing the deep work. So this concept around volume equals productivity is fundamentally broken. It's not about how much. It's about how much of an impact, and we need to switch our focus from volume to impact.
Now the second way we often measure productivity in corporate culture is through visibility. Now I feel like this one is starting to come to the surface. More people are starting to become aware of this, especially with everything that just happened with the pandemic and moving to, you know, more work from home or hybrid work.
But we struggle. To understand how to measure productivity. If it doesn't have to do with us being able to visibly see our people doing the work. And again, this comes from that, you know, factory style way of working. In knowledge work, it's hard to see success. There's no neat pile of widgets at the end of the day for you to say, look what we did.
So, without clear metrics for impact, we fall back on what's easy to measure. How many butts are sitting in seats? How many hours were logged? How many tasks were checked off? And this creates a culture where being seen working matters more than actually driving results. You know, the corporate culture of Well, I just need to sit there and shake my mouse every, five, 10 minutes.
So my status is green. So people know that I'm working well, I'm in the office today. So I'm going to go walk around a few laps to make sure everyone sees me. So they know that I'm working or I'm going to send a bunch of emails. I'm going to generate a bunch of meetings. So there's more people aware of all the things that I'm doing, but the only thing that we're doing is generating more noise versus working because all of those times that we're pacing around the office, making sure we're being seen, we're also stopping in doing drive bys Creating one big giant distraction for everyone doing their work.
So this concept of visibility, it's all about optics and not outcomes. And this one, I feel like while a lot of people understand them fundamentally. That this concept is broken around visibility equals productivity, but it's perpetuated in like the little moments, the little things said, this is where I find this still is alive.
So it's in the things like praising the fact that, Jacqueline is always the first one into work and the last one to leave. Why are we praising that? I would love someone who can come in, get insane work done, and go home early. That's awesome. I love that. Why would we want to, encourage people to sit at their desks for eight hours, sit at their desks for eight hours, If they don't have any work to do or worse, sit at their desk for eight hours, generating more work, more projects, more questions, creating more work.
That's just a distraction for everyone else in the sake of quote unquote. Being visible and doing their job. We perpetuate it in things like, Ooh, I saw this one a lot. You know, some people may be able to get into the office earlier than others. I did this, I was a busy mom, so I would come in at, you know, 7 a.
m. before most people got in at nine, which meant I was going home before all of them. And as I'm walking out, people say, Oh, you're leaving already? What time is it? You're leaving already? Heck yeah, I am! I got here two hours before you did. But it's like in those little, you know, things that we say at the office, we say to people, Oh, I messaged that to you 45 minutes ago.
And you didn't respond. I saw that you were away for an hour. What was going on? You know, we expect people to be constantly available, constantly glued to their computer, but that doesn't mean productivity. In fact, we know that people getting up, moving, taking, a break at lunch to walk away from something, difficult meeting.
a difficult conversation. Maybe they just spent two hours heads down in deep work. Heck yeah, I want you to go take a walk outside for, 45 minutes, clear your head, fuel yourself, things like that. So while many of us know, if I say, butts in seats does not equal productivity. Most of us are going to shake our head.
Yes. And be like, yes, I'm with you. But Are you in those little behaviors that you may not even be aware of subconsciously promoting this fact that visibility equals productivity. Another way that I see leaders do this is like having status updates, on either, they're like chat. So teams or Slack or whatever you're using around like where you're at.
Like, Oh, I'm in a meeting, I'm taking a break, I'm doing this. Or even, shared calendars, constantly sharing calendars so we know where everyone's at all the time. You don't need that. Why are we keeping trackers on grown adults? If you don't trust your people to be productive with their time, if you don't trust that, you know, they need one week to take an hour to go to a doctor's appointment, and that's more than okay.
Because at the end of the day, they're still producing tangible impact and outcomes. Then why did we hire those people? We should trust and expect, like trust the best out of our people. And if you trust them, they usually live up to that versus us going in and expecting the worst out of them and treating them, you know, like, I mean, there's no better way to put like you are on arrest.
Like we have a tracker on you and we need to track your time 24 7. When we treat people like that. They're going to fall to that level versus giving them that inherent trust. And then if they take advantage of that, then let's address that situation. Okay. The third one that when it comes to productivity and the final one, I'm going to talk about is.
In corporate culture is ours worked. So this is hustle culture. And I feel like this is a big one that's come out through, you know, Social media, things like that, of, you know, preaching the grind, motivational speakers, talking about, you know, the 5 a.
m. morning routines, the get it all done videos, even things like 75 hard and like, there's all of these big, Big movements, motivational speakers, motivational books, challenges about how to be more and more productive, work more, work harder, get the most out of your day. Make every single second count.
It's a huge movement right now, but the problem is that as a knowledge workers, you can't hustle yourself into creativity. You can't hustle yourself into innovation. You can't hustle yourself into solving that complex problem. In fact, if you look at research of a lot of the greats in history who achieved amazing things, amazing discoveries, wrote amazing works of art.
They're the people who had very unique ways of managing their time, they would go deep into something for months, kind of disconnect themselves from the world. And then they would take a break for months on end and do no work at all. Why? Because this type of deep work that we are responsible for, traditionally as knowledge workers does not benefit from more hours worked.
It benefits from space. From time, from mental capacity to do that type of creative and problem solving work. Yet we shove ourselves into these spaces of constantly being busy, constantly not even having a moment to Freaking think with all of the emails and meetings and waking up at 5 a. m. and jumping straight into, you know, a 12 part morning routine and like maybe you have like a 10 minute meditation in there, which is like your quote unquote thinking time, but that's not enough.
Like so many of us. And I think this one's even harder just because of our world is that we are just inundated with distractions. I notice this a lot being a mom now of, you know, when we were growing up, There was lots of time to think because we were bored as heck and we had a lot of empty time that we had to fill.
So we got creative with that time, right? You know, we went outside and grabbed a cardboard box and found ways to entertain ourselves for hours on end because we had to. We didn't have devices. To entertain us 24 seven. So we had to get creative. We had to get innovative. We had to solve problems, but for many of us, we don't have to do that anymore.
If I'm like, I don't even have to think about it. I have an app on my phone right now that blocks me from opening my phone and looking at any sort of social media. And let me tell you, put the app on your phone. Y'all you think you don't subconsciously open your phone and click that app. You do. You do.
And having something like this, like it's just subconscious where we're scrolling or turning on the podcast or turning on the show or doing whatever. Our brain is just wired for more, more, more, more, more input. And so it's not just at work where we have constant meetings flying at us. We have constant emails flying at us.
We have constant pings flying at us. I'd be so interested to do a study at the amount. Of work that was done where we didn't have computers or email or, any sort of Slack or teams or things like that compared to the amount of work today. Cause I would bet that the sheer amount of work is not that different, but the amount of distractions we are facing in the office today.
And in the office, I mean, Both physically and, remotely. The amount of distractions we are facing is monumentally different. So it's not a game of, we need to achieve more work with less. I really think it's a game of trying to fight the corporate culture and the constant distractions to get the work done.
Like, do you guys know, I don't know if you would remember this, but back in the day, If you had to send something to another department, like you had a request, you would stick it in a envelope and on the envelope, there's a printed sheet that you would be like from HR to finance, and you would put it in the envelope and then you would hand it to the admin and then like once a day, they're going to go deliver it to the other departments.
And then that person's going to like put their response in the envelope and then it's going to like filter back to you with like your signed document. You can't just ping somebody and say, Hey, I have this question. You can't just send an email and CC 10 people because It takes five seconds to do it.
You can't create a meeting with 10 different people in it because you have a tool now that makes it easy for you to search those people's calendars real quick and find the perfect time to include all of them. Like, I think technology is great, but also it's almost hindered our productivity and that it's made it too easy.
To do these things. And while yes, great collaboration, we've fallen into a place of almost over collaboration to where it's become a negative. We're pinging people with questions because we're so used to being able to get a response at the snap of our fingers. That it's distracting. Yes, you may get the answer to that question, but you've just distracted that person who was in the middle of deep work, who now needs to go answer your question or dig up some document for you and it's distracted them.
Did the seven people you CC'd on that email actually need to be distracted with that email? Or are you just flooding another thing in their inbox? Were those additional five people that you added to that meeting simply because they were available at that time really need to be in that meeting? Or did we just add them?
Because we were able to search their calendar and see they were there, and it takes five seconds to type in their name. Like, I think we would benefit, almost, from some resistance in those areas. So I've taken us on a little bit of a tangent here, but the point is that I truly don't believe productivity requires more hours worked.
I truly believe that productively and being more effective requires less distractions, doing less smarter. And in fact, these three things create this trifecta, the need for volume for more, more, more, the need for visibility, the need for more hours worked and this hustle culture, they're breeding a behavior That we actually don't want in our teams.
We're breeding a behavior of doing the thing in like. The hardest way possible, making an impact, but doing so in a way that generates a ton of work where people constantly need to be on and they need to be like working harder than they've ever done. That's not what I want. I would love a team who's able to make an impact in less time with less effort.
Right? That's the goal. If my team can make the same impact, but only have to work, like I would like them working less than 40 hours a week because that creates time for, development for restoring, breaks, team development, or bringing our team together, working internally on our team.
So if they can make the same impact in less hours with less effort. Because work doesn't, contrary to popular belief, work does not need to be painful. We are conditioned to feel that something needs to be hard. We need to overcome the impossible for it to be quote unquote worthy. That is not true. So I would love for it to be effortless as possible, right?
People pay for things that are effortless. I would pay more for my coffee to get delivered to my door than have to go and drive and pick it up because that's effortless. So we should be preaching that same mentality in our teams, but instead we preach getting an impact.
But, oh, I want you to work more hours. I want you to be more visible and I want you to produce more volume because that's how I can feel and measure that you've been productive. Do you see how that's breeding the exact opposite behaviors that we want? It's breeding our team to find more ways to be quote unquote busy.
We need to operate as a company, the way we want our product or service.
To be delivered to customers. And so that is going to be, how can we create the most impact with the less effort and less time? And that is the mindset shift. I want you guys to make when it comes to productivity, productivity is not about volume, it's not about visibility. It's not about hustle culture, hours worked it being super, super hard or overcoming the impossible.
It's about the impact we make at the end of the day. It's about, did we get closer to creating some sort of tangible impact on our company? On our customer, on our industry. That's what's important. When that's what I want you guys to go do is have a conversation with your team around what productivity means on your team.
Now, in order to do this, you need to have some sort of loose strategy around what your team's unique purposes and the specific impact you want your team to make on your company, on your customer, on your industry in the next one to three And if you don't have that, You need to be inside activating strategy.
I'll link it in the show notes below. We go over exactly how to do that, because what I want you to do is put that on a whiteboard, your team's unique purpose and the specific impact you want your team to make in the next one to three years. And then ask your team, what does productivity? Look like for us, and I want you to do it through the lens of that strategy, because if we are not doing it through the lens of the strategy, we are falling back into productivity for the sake of productivity for busyness.
Productivity is about impact made. So in order to measure impact, we have to have something we're trying to achieve. Something specific. So bring your team together and have the conversation. And I love having this conversation. It's so difficult at first because they're going to go back to the things that they've put in condition to believe, Oh, it's the amount of deliverables.
We generate it. Oh, it's the amount of hours worked. Oh, it's, you know, us quote, getting it all done. All the, all the things, right. We need to get all the things done, but actually productivity is about doing less, doing less, but doing the right things.
And so have that conversation with your team and get down to like three to five, keynotes around what productivity means to them. And this is so helpful.
But I love having this conversation with the team because it's so much of it It's just level setting and it is so helpful for you as the leader and your team to be on the same page of what? Productivity means for you and a lot of the times it's able to address some of those fundamental beliefs that they have held around shaking their mouths or doing those walks around the office or whatever it is.
And like, this is your time to say, Hey, I don't care if you need to go take a 45 minute walk after doing deep work. That's great. As long as we achieve. These three to five things we just outlined and it just allows you to have this open dialogue with your team and Level set and you'd be surprised how many ahas will come out of it of like, oh, I thought it was about, you know Generating new work.
I thought it was me needing to be here, you know, nine to five So this is just such a beneficial conversation to have. So go do the work, have this conversation with your team and then DM me, let me know what came out of it. I'd love to hear from you guys.
