The Power of Activation

OK. By now, you know I have a crush on this idea of Activation – the process of finding and implementing simple strategies to help our teams deliver great work, develop new skills, connect with their team, purpose, and customer – and to thrive – to feel well, recognized, and balanced.

The call for help: Addressing a 911 situation

So when Edward – a senior leader in a professional services firm – called a few months ago asking for help with a “911 situation,” I was pretty sure Activation would find its way into the conversation.

Spoiler – it did. Edward was feeling real concern for the reality at work. His teams seemed straight-up overwhelmed – they were all running around frantically, in and out of meetings, dropping balls, missing deadlines, arguing, and generally just failing to smile.

“Results, culture, it’s all feeling bad right now. And I know our team leaders mean well. But they, too, are overwhelmed, and frankly, not really sure what to do. We’ve got to turn this ship around.”

Kicking off the activation bootcamp

So, we came in and ran an Activation boot camp for a cohort of team leaders. And some kind of awesome things happened.

If you or your organization is struggling with overwhelm, let’s see if any of these outcomes have some intel to offer you…in service of finding some relief!

The boot camp begins with the basics. Leaders have to understand the four pillars and why they matter. These help formulate more meaningful questions and conversation with their teams.

When we kicked off this boot camp, leaders were skeptical.

“Yeah, our teams are overwhelmed. But we don’t have any control over the volume of work and priorities being pushed down to us.”

And that’s where I convinced them otherwise.

From insight to action

Through our conversation together, these leaders devised a set of questions they asked their teams. They collected problem spots, opportunities big and small, and we turned insight into action and experiments and learning as we went.

Here are a few of the challenges that we tackled, and the actions they ended up taking.

Challenge 1: Reducing meeting overload

This is, of course, one of the most common complaints in so many workplaces these days. Employees are drowning in so many meetings, they have no time to actually do the work being discussed in all those meetings. So yes – balls drop and smiles vanish.

Implementing meeting management strategies

Now, while leaders may not be able to control how much work is being handed down to them from above, they did discover some changes they could make. And they did. As a cohort, they agreed to…

• Define what constitutes a meeting: Leaders got more disciplined about what really needs a meeting. If it can be an email or a quick chat, it doesn’t get a meeting slot.
• Prioritize objectives vs. agenda: Instead of a detailed agenda, they started using meeting objectives. This shift helped ensure every meeting had a clear purpose and actionable outcomes. And if the objective was achieved 14 minutes into a 60-minute meeting? Guess who got 46 minutes back!
• Refine participant lists: By requiring the meeting organizer to be really intentional about whom they invited and for what purpose, it led to fewer “invite all” situations – only one member of a team was typically required.

Challenge 2: Clarifying priorities

Employees were saying, “We’re not sure what’s most important. Everything feels urgent.” And as they say, when everything’s important, nothing is.

Setting and adjusting priorities effectively

So what were leaders able to do here?

• Peer prioritization: These leaders realized that even without being able to control the inflow of priorities from above, they could certainly work together to better understand and agree on what most needed to happen immediately, what could be postponed for a beat, and what might be simplified so it required less time and attention to get to completion.
• Monthly meetups: They also agreed to maintain a consistent cadence. They started a monthly meetup to review and adjust their priorities. This way, they didn’t fall back into the same overwhelm.

Challenge 3: Streamlining processes

When processes are slow and decision-making is bottlenecked, it impacts results but also creates a lot of frustration. So where could leaders help ease the burden here?

Facilitating efficient decision-making

Here are some choices they made together:

• Push down decisions: Leaders identified certain decisions they could delegate to their teams to avoid bottlenecks.
• Real-time decisions in meetings: Instead of having meetings and then needing follow-ups for decisions, they started making more real-time decisions during meetings.
• Simplify painful processes: They pinpointed the most painfully slow processes and invited their teams to suggest simple ways to streamline them without adding risk.

Challenge 4: Enhancing career development opportunities

Seems counter-intuitive that overwhelmed employees would want to focus on career development. But it turned out some of their overwhelm was coming from boredom – a sense of “I’m doing the same thing over and over but getting nowhere.”

Encouraging growth and learning

So leaders responded with a few new ideas:

• Skill-building Fridays: Without a budget for formal development programs, leaders introduced “Skill-building Fridays,” where every other Friday, an employee would lead a training or conversation on a particular topic of expertise. This gave the week’s “expert” an opportunity to shine while their peers were given the gift of a learning moment.
• Personal development plans: Each team member was invited to craft their own personal development plan. This gave leaders insight into what each employee was hoping to learn and achieve, while also making employees take some accountability for defining their own development journeys. A bit of a win-win.

Conclusion: The ongoing journey of activation

An activation boot camp isn’t just about quick fixes. It’s about giving leaders the tools and strategies to infuse ease into the system. It’s about creating accountability to ensure these changes stick. And it’s about connecting leaders with their cohort peers and their teams, encouraging more regular and open dialogue.

Change doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the small, consistent steps that make the difference. By listening to their teams and taking action, these leaders are creating a better, more sustainable work environment. One tweak at a time.