5 Ways for Executives and Managers to Combat Feeling Overwhelmed

During recent discussions with clients and former colleagues, the topic of feeling overwhelmed has frequently emerged. It seems that everyone is feeling the pressure of trying to put 10 pounds of work into an 8-pound bag. It makes sense for you to be overwhelmed. Economic uncertainty is driving many employers to pressure employees to be more productive. Companies are reducing staffing levels but demanding higher levels of service and revenue growth. If you want to combat feeling overwhelmed, you need a plan. This article will provide 5 steps you can take this week to reduce your stress and anxiety around your current workload.

Five tips for overcoming the feeling of being overwhelmed?

1. Embrace Change

2. Align on Expectations

3. Consult Peers

4. Develop a Methodology for Prioritizing

5. Going Beyond Urgent and Important

Are your feeling overwhelmed at work?

• Yes
• No
• Occasionally

Embrace Change

The first thing to do is accept that companies constantly seek ways to improve their productivity. You should be nervous if you have been doing the same thing at your job for the last three years, with very little change. Companies must change to stay competitive, and those that fail to change put themselves at risk of going out of business. Companies like Radio Shack, Blockbusters, Toys R Us, Palm, and Compaq could not change as quickly as their competition, resulting in once-strong companies virtually disappearing. Alan Deutschman famously wrote the book Change or Die, and changing has been the choice many companies made over the last 12 months. Your ability to embrace change will help you to find solutions to bandwidth challenges. Test out new technologies, and experiment with new processes. New hacks are developed daily to help you prioritize, simplify, and be more productive.

Align on Expectations

The second thing you need to do to manage your workload is align with your supervisor on expectations. Your manager likely does not understand everything you do. Even if they know all of the tasks you complete, they likely do not understand the time and energy required to do them. As your manager assign a new task, they probably assume you have the capacity to complete it, along with any other previously assigned tasks. You know this is when you are given a new task without being told to stop doing a different task. You are responsible for providing visibility to what you do, how much time it takes, and your ability to take on a new assignment. If you feel overwhelmed by your current workload, you should ask your supervisor to help you understand how to accomplish everything. During that conversation, you and your supervisor might be able to identify tasks you currently do that no longer need to be completed. Or the leader might be able to teach you quicker ways of doing existing work. Fear of being vulnerable may prevent you from having these types of conversations. This fear is likely rooted in previous experiences or stories you have heard. But it is important to remember that your performance is evaluated based on your leader's expectations. It is better to have a difficult discussion at the beginning of a project than to suffer in silence, only to have a difficult conversation later when you cannot perform to expectations or become burnout because you were working beyond what was reasonable.

Consult Peers

If others have a similar role as you, chat with them to see how they manage their workload. Often, your peers will devise innovative ways to simplify tasks or do things quicker. There might be a new app or other technology that you can employ to be better organized or execute tasks faster. Identifying best practices for improving efficiency is a great way to handle an increased workload better. They might also be able to guide you on managing expectations with your boss. Through your conversations, you can also identify tasks others have stopped doing. Divesting low-value activities can be another way to free up bandwidth.

Develop a Methodology for Prioritizing

There are a lot of best practices around prioritizing your time. One of the best is Franklin Covey's version of the Eisenhower Matrix, taught in their time management workshops. Another is Sally McGhee's approach to using Microsoft tools to plan and track work which is discussed in her book Take Back Your Life. Below is a system combining those two methods.

1. Do a brain dump: get out a sheet of paper or use an electronic device and begin to write down all the tasks that need to complete

2. Calendar Review: review the calendar, look at what needs to accomplish over the next 90 days, and add any incremental task to your list

3. Email review: review inbox messages, and identify if there are any tasks from critical stakeholders that are not already listed; if so, add them

4. Assign importance rank: give each task a value between 1 and 4. One meaning this task is of great importance, four meaning the task is insignificant

5. Assign urgency rank: give each task a value between 1 and 4. One means it needs to get this done today; four meaning is not necessary when this task gets done

6. Define tentative priorities: add the two numbers together and rank priorities with the slowest numbers at the top of the things-to-do list

7. Bucket things to do list: put the task into four buckets

   1. Do it now

   2. Plan to do it

   3. Delegate or Outsource

   4. Delete

8. Calendarize: begin to calendarize tasks so there is clarity as to when tasks will be completed. Make sure to include who will be responsible for completing the task.

This approach works because it lets you see everything that needs to be done. By slowing down to evaluate how important each task is, along with how urgently the task needs to be completed, you can determine which task needs to be completed first.

Going Beyond Urgent and Important

You will likely have items that carry the same prioritization score. When this happens, you must go a step further in deciding which task you will complete first. As a rule of thumb, go after low-hanging fruit first. Low-hanging fruit is a task that can be completed quickly and will give a good return. As you evaluate which tasks to tackle first, you should pick the ones from the "do it now" box that will take the smallest amount of time to complete. This will ensure that you deliver the most value possible quickly.

Another tactic for determining importance is considering the stakeholder that completing a task will impact. You should complete the tasks that best support the culture you want to build within your organization. Others look to you to help them define priorities. The functions you prioritize should send a message to others about what is most important. Review your company's mission, vision, and strategy to determine which task will provide the most long-term benefit to your company.

Summary

Being overwhelmed at work is becoming the new norm, but it does not have to be. In a recent HBR article, Executive Coach Rebecca Zucker shared these five tips for How to Deal with Constantly Feeling Overwhelmed

1. Pinpoint the primary source

2. Set Boundaries on your time and workload

3. Challenge your perfectionism

4. Outsource or delegate

5. Challenge your assumptions

Being less overwhelmed requires you to slow down, analyze your things-to-do list, prioritize, and take action. Company expectations are not going to change anytime soon. To succeed, you must continue to adapt, prioritize, build new skills, and seek ways to do more with less.

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Thank you for reading this blog

Dorian Cunion is an Executive Coach and Business Consultant with Your Path Coaching and Consulting. He is a former retail executive with over 20 years of experience in the retail industry. He is a Co-Active coach who focuses on helping professionals and small business owners overcome insecurities, knowledge gaps, and lack of direction. He does this by assisting clients to tap into their values, recognize their strengths, and develop actionable strategies for growth.

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Why work with an Executive Coach?

When I tell people that I am an executive coach, one of the first questions I hear is, what does an executive coach do? If you break down the words, executive means administrative or managing responsibilities, and coach means instructing or tutoring. At its most basic level, an executive coach helps individuals learn how to be better administrators and managers. But they really do so much more. An executive coach is an important partner that can help leaders reach their full potential by helping them to understand better who they are and who they want to be. Professional tennis players like Serena Williams who are looking to perform at their highest level work with a tennis coach. The same is true of top-tier singers like Beyonce, who frequently work with vocal coaches to help them expand their range, sing with more strength, and perform at a consistently high level. Professional athletes, vocal performers, and other professionals who work with specialized coaches know that no matter how good an individual is, there is an opportunity to be better and more consistent by working with a knowledgeable coach. Executive coaches can do for executives and managers what sports coaches do for athletes. Coaches help people to pause, reflect, learn, and continuously improve. One of the best-kept secrets of top-performing business executives and owners is that they work with executive coaches. Executive coaches are not discussed much but are essential to how talented executives and business owners reach their full potential.

My experience working with a coach

I worked with an executive coach when I was first promoted to Vice President of Operations. It was indeed a life-changing experience for me. The coach I worked with helped me to

• Clarify my professional goals

• Reflect on who I was a leader

• Define who I want to be

• Take on new perspectives

• Build new skills

• Be more strategic

The clarity I gained from working with a coach helped me feel more confident as I transitioned into a role that carried significantly more scope and responsibilities than any of my previous roles.

Clarify my professional goals

One aspect the coach helped me with was clarifying my professional goals. For most of my career, I focused on climbing to the next rung on the ladder. This served me in my career because it drove me to identify how I could excel in my current role. I knew I must first demonstrate mastery in my current role to advance. I would also take time to understand what skills, knowledge, and network were necessary to be successful in the next role, and I would spend time building toward those future needs. I felt like I had made it to the mountaintop for the first time in my career. I landed my ideal job of being an operations leader in geography close to my extended family. I could build an organizational culture, influence strategy, and run a multi-state business. With no next role to work towards, I had to re-evaluate how I would define success. My

coach helped me to explore my values, define my priorities and put words to what I wanted to accomplish going forward. For me, the goal was improving the quality of my employees' and Franchisees' lives. I knew that we had opportunities within our culture. Employees felt overworked and undervalued. Franchisees felt under-supported and unheard. I made it my mission to listen more than I spoke and to work on behalf of the employees and Franchisees within my zone to simplify operations, streamline priorities, and refocus our attention on serving customers and driving profitable growth.

Reflect on who I was as a leader.

After we explored what I wanted to do, we spent time researching how I would do it. As you move into higher levels of management, your role shifts from being

• an individual contributor responsible for managing yourself.

• to a manager of managers responsible for managing others

• to a functional manager accountable for segments of a business

• to a business manager responsible for the overall business

• to a group manager responsible for multiple businesses

• to an enterprise manager accountable for all operations

Each of these shifts requires developing new skills and changing how you spend your time. As you move up the ladder, you spend less time doing and more time leading. For example, one of the things that I greatly enjoy doing is building spreadsheets and analyzing data. This skill helped me stand out from my peers early in my career. I allocated hours weekly to building and analyzing data which enabled me to build my business acumen, improve my judgment and anticipate emerging trends. Now that I was in a senior executive role, spending time putting spreadsheets together was no longer the best use of my time. Every time that I built a spreadsheet myself, I was

• robbing someone junior to me the opportunity to build their data analysis skills

• reducing the amount of time, I had for other leadership activities

• not leveraging the skills and knowledge of others

My coach helped me understand that what got me into this role was not what would help me thrive. That I was more than a data analyst. I was a strategic thinker, a communicator, a developer of talent, and an inspirational leader. For me to excel as a Vice President, I would need to be comfortable wearing many different hats and be purposeful in not wearing the hat that I wanted to wear but the one that was required at any given moment.

Define who I want to be

With a sound foundation for who I was, we were able to begin to craft who I wanted to be. This was one of the most enlightening parts of my working with the executive coach. I defined my leadership philosophy while pursuing my MBA and during other leadership development training. I felt grounded in my leadership approach and felt like it served me well, especially since it afforded me three promotions in the prior four years. As I began working with my coach, it became clear I was the leader that others wanted me to be and not the leader I wanted to be. To get ahead, I developed masks I would wear when dealing with Senior Leaders because I thought being myself would not be accepted. I need to be an "executive," which I had interpreted as being reserved, stoic, agreeable when dealing with senior leaders, resolute, never wrong, and willing to do anything to get ahead.

Wearing these masks was fatiguing. I

• am not a stoic person

• enjoy speaking my mind

• admit when I am wrong

• do not believe in winning at all costs

• enjoy a good debate

• care deeply about people

• am playful

• am a big believer in the health debate.

These are all aspects of myself that I readily showed to my direct reports but cautiously shared with company leadership. I am at my best in an environment that encourages creativity, the exploration of new ideas, openness to failure, comfort with conflict, and two-way communication. For the most part, this is the culture I had built underneath me. Through discussions with my coach, he encouraged me to define better the leader I wanted to be and try to help influence cultural change at the organization. He helped me believe that I could help be the change I wanted to see within the organization. It just required me to be myself, post great results, and communicate to others how leading differently could lead to better results.

Take on new perspectives

One of the skills that supported me in removing my mask was the time we spent exploring the different perspectives. He helped me to understand that I did not need different masks when dealing with people but different intentionality. When I interacted with Senior Leaders, they did not want me to be a yes-man that went along with everything they said. Being a yes man would lead us to make bad decisions because there was information that I had that Senior Leaders needed to lead the organization effectively. They did not want me to undermine their authority by challenging them during inappropriate times. If I was concerned about a policy or direction, they wanted me to address it at the proper time and place. In general, they preferred that I voice my concerns before making a decision. If a decision had been made and there was a need for a course correction, Senior Leadership's preference was for me to bring it to them privately and then to bring it up in group meetings. By slowing down and better understanding my leader's perspective, I was able to influence better and be more effective. My coach would encourage me to observe my actions from different vantage points.

• How would my peers look at what I was doing?

• How would my supervisor look at what I was doing?

• How would my direct reports look at what I was doing?

• How would my indirect reports look at what I was doing?

A leader's responsibilities were not to anyone stakeholder. Leaders have various stakeholders that are all looking to them for leadership. A leader can only perform at their highest level once they consider all of these perspectives and make the best decision based on the information they have. Leaders also need to be willing to learn and course correct when mistakes are made. Learning how to take different perspectives will help leaders to make fewer mistakes.

Be more strategic

One of the most significant changes you must make as you move up the corporate ladder is improving your strategic thinking. At higher levels of an organization, leaders must learn how to deal with scale, leverage, and resource constraints. The first and most important word that a leader must know is no. Learning to say no is essential because saying no, enables your organization to focus on the most critical priorities. When I took over the VP role, the biggest complaint of the team was

• priorities changed too frequently

• it was not clear what was important

• that we were asking people to do too much

Too many priorities, lack of clarity, and inconsistent vision are common challenges for businesses. The world is pregnant with possibilities, but you only have so much time and resources. As a leader, you must set the direction and define what is important. Keeping the team focused on what is important puts your organization in the best position to generate sustainable results.

Build New Skill

As mentioned earlier, moving to higher organizational levels requires you to develop new skills. An executive coach will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses through the coaching process. Then they will assist you in developing plans for building upon your strengths and mitigating your weaknesses. One important skill for me to develop was scanning for opportunities. When I found them, I needed to do a deep dive into problems, communicating a need for action to the person responsible for the issue and then giving them room to work without my interference. Everyone within an organization has a role and a responsibility. The role of a business manager is to provide guidance and direction to their employees. It is up to the employees to determine the best way to address the opportunity. To excel as a leader, you must be comfortable delegating, trust others, ask tough questions, and allow employees to take action without micromanaging. Employees need the opportunity to try, learn, fail, and succeed on their terms. This is the only way that they reach their full potential. This requires leaders to better evaluate risk, define objectives, establish trust, and create open lines of communication. Employees need to understand their leader is there to support them in accomplishing their goals.

Summary

Working with an executive coach can help you perform at a higher level regardless of your professional development phase. A trained executive coach is taught to

• Listen to their client and help them with self-discovery

• Challenge their client to identify limiting thoughts

• Engage their clients in thinking more deeply and from different perspectives

• Understand the role that emotions play in interactions with others

• Recognize stress and the impact that it has on decision making

• Develop strategies to help facilitate personal growth

• Identify values and the role they play in motivation

Business leaders seek out coaches because coaches can help them grow. This growth can be related to a new job, a performance challenge, or any other growth opportunity. If you are looking to grow as a professional, you should work with a coach.

Create Performance Development Plans that Really Work

Developing people is one of the most critical responsibilities of a leader. Whether running a multi-billion-dollar retail company or a small local restaurant, a company's success is directly linked to its ability to help its employee acquire and master new skills. As the capabilities of employees increase, so do the organization's capabilities. When employees improve their technical and soft skills, they enhance their company's ability to generate revenue, cut costs and improve customer satisfaction. There is an old saying that a general goes to war with the army they have, not the army they want. While this is true, a leader's army tomorrow can be better than the army they have today if they invest time, focus, and attention in helping their employees develop.

Establish Trust

Trust must be in place to help your employee establish an effective personal development plan. Trust is essential because it enables you and your employees to be honest about short- and long-term goals and what is necessary for each of you to help others achieve their goals. The employee, boss relationship works best when it is mutually beneficial. When you take the time to show your employees that you care about them and that you are looking out for their best interest, they will be more likely to care for you and to look out for your best interest. Leaders build trust over time through small acts such as listening, showing concern, holding confidentiality, and providing support.

Commit to using the tool

Once leaders establish trust, they can work with their employees to create personal development plans. Personal Development Plans are a highly effective tool for defining the areas that an employee wants to focus on developing, along with what actions they are committing to take. Much like any tool, it is only effective if used as intended. Hours are wasted annually by employees and supervisors working on Personal

Development Plans that are talked about once and then put away and forgotten for a year. Developing Personal Development Plans and not using them is like purchasing a shovel to help you plant flowers and then keeping it in your shed for an entire year. At the end of the year, you will have a shovel but no flowers. For this reason, leaders should re employee's personal development plans need to be a living document that is reviewed monthly. During each meeting, the supervisor and the employee should discuss every year by

• What was the plan?

• What results were generated?

• What did you learn?

• What changes need to be made to the plan?

Developing the plan

As leaders develop a Personal Development Plan, it is important to clarify the goals of the plan. First, there must be clarity on what the employee needs to improve to best help their career and the company. Many times, there are areas of employee performance that leaders would like to see improvements in, that the employees are not aware of being an issue. Before a leader ventures into the developmental opportunities, start the conversation by talking about what the employee is currently doing well. This is an important step because it helps to build the employee's confidence. It will also help to put them into a positive state of mind. Studies show that people are more engaged and creative when they have a positive mindset.

Next, a leader needs to discuss the areas of development that would best help the employee reach their goals. As a rule of thumb, a leader should share three positive areas that an employee is doing well in, for every developmental area that is discussed. During this discussion, it is important to make the distinction between what development can help them to excel in their current role, in addition; to what could help them prepare for their next opportunity.

Note, some employees will communicate that they are not interested in career advancement. They may do this for various reasons including previous disappointment around not receiving promotions in the past, lack of confidence in their ability, or a host of other reasons. If a leader believes an individual has the potential for career advancement let them know you believe in their potential and encourage them to be open to taking on more responsibilities. A leader may see something in them, that they do not see in themselves. By the leader communicating belief, they can inspire the employee to consider possibilities that they previously could not imagine.

Once there is alignment around the areas of focus, it is important to make sure there is a shared understanding of the urgency that opportunities should be addressed. As a leader, it is important to be clear with employees about the areas of their performance that need urgent attention. If an employee has a critical deficiency that is negatively impacting the company, and potentially putting their employment at risk this should be clear to the employee. There should be no ambiguity when it comes to performance deficiencies, and those should be handled through performance management conversations. When it comes to Personal Development Planning, the urgency should be driven by the employee. A leader can frame up the benefits of them moving fast, for example, if a promotion opportunity is coming, and it is in the employee's best interest to learn a new skill to qualify for the opportunity. But in general, the employee should own the pace of implementation of the plan.

As you conduct the personal development plan conversation with an employee, it is always good to ask them what areas of development they would like to work on. Many times, employees will demonstrate more energy and in persistence working on items they have selected on their own. For this reason, consider swimming with the current, and leveraging their existing energy towards achieving a developmental goal. As a leader discusses with them the items they would like to work on, it is beneficial to help them to understand how working on those items will help their career. For example, if a leader has a salesperson that would like to work on building on presentation skills, they can discuss how developing these skills will help them in their current role, in addition to helping them in future roles. This will help to give more incentive to pursue developing those skills.

Once a leader understands what the employee believes they should be focusing on developing, it is time to share with them the developmental areas that they believe could add value to their career. As a leader does this, it is important to communicate to them the benefit that they believe this developmental action will have on them in both the short and the long term. Going back to the example of the salesperson, if this individual has the desire to be a manager in the future, then one of the skills that they will need to develop is coaching and training skills. As the leader is talking with them about potential areas for growth. They can tell them that training others is a key skill for leaders to develop. The leader can encourage them to reflect on what makes them good at selling and ask if they would be interested in developing training for new hires. In developing this training, they would have the opportunity to work on putting together presentations, in addition to gaining experience training others. In this way, you are killing two birds with one stone. The employees get an opportunity to work on developing their presentation skills, while also gaining new experience in training others.

As a leader conducts personal development conversation, it is beneficial to identify 4 potential areas of development. One aspect of human nature that is universal is a desire for control. By a leader working with an

employee to identify multiple areas of development to work on, they empower them to choose where they want to focus their attention. As a leader and employee discuss the 4 potential areas, they should rate each on two variables. The amount of effort believed necessary to build the new skill or behavior and the amount of value it will generate.

The effort here is a very broad term. Effort should be considered in proportion to the time, money, and resources required to make progress on the desired skill or behavior. For example, if the employee decides that they want to improve their coaching skills, they could consider doing this by becoming a certified coach. It would be important to understand that the process generally takes a year, can cost over $15,000, and requires around a 180-hour commitment. Clearly defining the amount of effort required can help the leader and the employee discuss any constraints that might get in the way of the employee reaching their goal. This will help both parties determine if the effort required is worth pursuing.

When it comes to value, it is important to discuss the predicted value that will be added to the individual and to the company through the development activity. Value can be determined in many ways, but revenue growth, time savings, and improvements to customer experience are great places to start. For

example, if an employee is already very competent in developing presentations, they might want to take a new course on building power points. This course might be fun and interesting for the employee but may provide little incremental value to the company. It is important to discuss with the employee what value will be generated by the employee pursuing the activity.

Once the leader and employee have discussed the amount of value and effort related to each potential area of development, they can now work with the employee to prioritize which development opportunity to pursue first. The prioritization activity should help to guide the employee to identify what focus area would benefit them the most. Since this is not a perfect science, the leader and employee should not get stuck feeling like they have to execute the items that are low effort and high return. Logic would say the employee should focus their energy on these items, but the reality is that humans are not logical beings. Emotions drive behaviors. If an employee is dead set on doing an activity that falls in one of the other quadrants, don’t fight it. The most important thing is that the employee is growing professionally. Leaders frequently get stuck trying to get employees to develop in areas that they have limited interest or motivation to work in. When this happens time and energy are wasted trying to influence change vs accepting the employee for who they are and leaning into their strengths and passions. Follow the natural energy the employee has towards the areas they want to develop. This will allow the leader to help the

employee develop, while also building additional trust. There will always be another opportunity to revisit other developmental opportunities.

As the leader and employee finalize the Personal Development Plan, it is important to discuss what activities will come off the plate. Leaders have the tendency of working with employees on identifying what new actions, behaviors, or skills they want to see a person develop but walking away prior to getting into a discussion around divesting activities. Employees only have so much room on their plates, and leaders provide a great service to them when they help to prioritize what they should and shouldn't be working on. Employees' things-to-do lists are like full plates at a cookout. There are a lot of good things on them, but before you can add more, you have to take something off. If an employee’s plate is full, a leader should help them to decide how to make some space. Space can be made in three ways. They can make room by eating some of the food, which means working on their current task. Once they end a current

project, they will have space to add another. They can give some food to someone else, by delegating some of their tasks. Or they can throw some food away, which means just walking away from a project. Depending on the importance of the task on their plate to them and to the company a leader can help to determine how best to make room.

Leaders give a great gift to employees when they help them with personal development. Employees trust their leaders with their careers. The better able a leader is to develop talent, the more successful they will be in attracting great leaders, and delivering against their own professional goals.

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