Making progress by standing still

As we work towards our goals, our habits and systems often take over, driving us towards success. However, our natural tendency is to keep pushing, to increase the pace of our improvement. This can lead to dropping all the way back to zero.

To illustrate this, I recall a leadership conference where a speaker asked someone to juggle multiple balls. As more balls were added, the participant dropped all of them. This is a reminder that when we add more responsibilities or push for more, we risk dropping everything.

The systems and habits approach to improvement focuses on recurring actions that turn individual accomplishments into lasting changes. We can solidify what we have achieved by turning it into a new system, rather than constantly adding more.

Standing still and ensuring our progress is secure may feel counterintuitive, but it can prevent us from losing everything we've gained. By developing the right systems and leveraging habits, we can turn success and happiness into automatic behaviors.

But countless times I have witnessed the balls getting dropped. We often find an employee with potential and start to give them more responsibility. This additional work initially comes out with high quality.

But over time, we keep deciding to add more until the individual crumbles. They don’t want to let leadership down, so they try their best.

There are 3 potential outcomes here and 2 are terrible.

One option is that they continue to tackle all the extra work and find a way to remain efficient and effective while maintaining high quality. This is ideal but not common.

Option 2 is that they drop all the balls. You give them more than they can handle, and they try to split their time between them. None of them get the attention they deserve and require. So, they slowly move towards failure.

Option 3 is that they get overwhelmed and quit. They might share their concerns over their workload. Usually, it is through side comments or stressful expressions during your interactions.

But not always. Sometimes they hold it in and do everything in their power to remove themselves from the situation. They often come into your office and turn in their notice leaving you without any options to correct the situation.

Learning that progress can still be made without adding more is valuable. You will start to understand true progress and regression. It will unlock the ability to keep moving forward when others fail due to option 2 and 3. You will be astute, searching for signs of over pushing so you can ease up. You can balance the workload to see their limits, without blowing right past them in an attempt to squeeze more out of them.