027 Curing Overwhelm • PODCAST

Hello. I’m Tony Mayo, the Business Owner’s Executive Coach … with one quick idea you can use in your business today. Have you noticed the epidemic we're in? It's a widespread infection called “overwhelm.” You may have caught it yourself. I know I've had it a few times. Today, I'm going to tell you the fundamental cause of overwhelm. This insight will give you the key to avoiding overwhelm. Still, I should warn you, …you're not going to like the answer. Let’s do it in “Bad News / Good News” format. The bad news is: the cause of overwhelm is insincerity. Yes, your overwhelm is caused by you not telling the truth. And, if you are a business leader or owner, the cause of your staff’s persistent sense of overwhelm is caused by you fostering a culture of insincerity, an environment where it is not safe or sensible to tell the hard truths. Please don’t be insulted; you and I both do it because we are both human. But…WHY? We get into overwhelm by making promises —either to ourselves or to people around us— promises that we know we cannot or will not keep, by saying that we will accomplish certain things _knowing_ that we can't. Or, …won't. Or, …are unlikely to. When we say it, we may mean it, but at some point, it becomes clear we just can't handle it, we haven't got the time, the skills, the interest. This happens to the best of us, of course. …What makes it troublesome is, once we know we will not deliver, is our failure to renegotiate our promise with the people affected. The good news is that this insincerity is not usually caused by a personal moral failing but by a flaw in the company culture. That’s good news because you are a leader who influences your company culture. ... I’ll speak more on future podcasts about creating safety and encouraging integrity inside companies. For now, one more story about resolving overwhelm. My friend, the great coach Bob Dunham, was also in systems development before becoming an executive coach. He was an engineer writing programs for NASA’s Hubble space telescope but the project was years behind schedule. Three years in and not one finished module had been delivered. The turnaround started when Bob noticed his colleagues continually agreed to impossible deadlines. One of the things that made them impossible was that the components one group needed to start their work were late being delivered by another group or too buggy to use. Thus, problems in a few groups cascaded throughout the company. BTW, this software did not cause the serious problems you may have heard about; those were the result of an incorrectly ground telescope mirror. Hardware …not software. As a lowly software engineer, Bob made one simple change that broke the logjam. He started giving sincere delivery estimates. To do that, he insisted on accurate, reliable estimates from the groups developing the upstream modules he depended upon to do his work. Soon, executive management noticed that his was the only group delivering finished modules, so they made him the team lead. His honest estimating spread and so did the quality of deliverables. He was promoted again and the pattern repeated on a larger scale. Within a couple of years, he was the Vice President of System Development for Motorola Computer Systems. —and the Hubble software went into service. By practicing and demanding sincerity, by not accepting overwhelm as inevitable, Bob advanced his own career and put a major research tool into space. To hear more about the special flavor of overwhelm specific to business owners, which I call Ownerwhelm, head over to my public speaking page at tiny.cc/keynotes Thanks for listening to this podcast Please… Enjoy it, apply it, and share it. Much more at: http://www.TonyMayo.com ---------------------------------------------- Thanks to MusicOpen for providing public domain recordings of Beethoven.