It’s that time of year again. The last quarter, holiday season, whatever you call it, it’s when things get crazy at work. We’re all scrambling to meet end-of-year quotas, spend the last of our budgets, and turn in good numbers before the holiday bonuses are calculated. It’s a frantic, sometimes even chaotic time.
Especially if your organization has recently faced layoffs, the work is probably coming faster and faster, so fast in fact that there’s no way you can keep up. It can feel like an assembly line gone rogue.
It’s easy in these times when we are stressed and looking for easy answers, to blame our people. “If they’d just put in a little effort,” we might think, or “Where is their sense of urgency” or even “Why doesn’t anyone want to work anymore?”
But the real answer tends to be far more complex and almost always is found embedded in your systems, processes, and procedures. Because human beings are not machines and our environments are not nearly as straightforward as we would like to believe. Chances are high that the reasons (yes there are likely multiple reasons) that your teams are struggling during this difficult time has nothing to do with their desire to work and everything to do with the system within which they are attempting to do so.
So the next time you are tempted to blame process break down on your employees, take a step back and observe the system around them. What do you see that might be inhibiting your employees’ potential?
If your workplace feels like the candy assembly line where Lucy and Ethel worked, I can help. I work hand-in-hand with you and your teams to uncover the bottlenecks, smooth out the kinks, and return the flow of value to your processes. Let’s build something better. Let’s do it together.
Watch Lucy and Ethel work the candy assembly line here: https://youtu.be/HnbNcQlzV-4?si=xWbu9Pwj-T785WE9
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